The Beautiful Bureaucrat Read Online Free PDF Page A

floated in her brain like a net for catching and killing any glistening idea that came along. Sitting on the blanket on the floor, looking deep into the heart of the cheap white wine in the plastic cup, she confessed to Joseph: “I’m becoming a bureaucrat.”
    “Drink some water,” he said. “Eat some vegetables.” He stood up and went to the kitchenette.
    “89805242381!” she whispered to herself. It felt almost good.
    “We still have those carrots I think.”
    “Doesn’t my voice sound like the voice of a bureaucrat?”
    “Actually they’re slimy now,” he said, slamming the door of the mini-fridge. He returned to the blanket and handed her a coffee-stained mug filled with water. “Drink up, bureau rat.”
    “What’s your Social Security number?” It scared her that she’d never learned this basic fact about him.
    “041-74-3400.”
    She repeated it until she’d memorized it.
    “Do you want to know mine?” she asked, almost coy.
    “I’ll just forget it,” he said.
    Still, she said it for him three times in a row, slowly.
    “Your Social Security number has real harmony,” she complimented him. Now her head was resting on his stomach, moving up and down as he breathed. “The zeroes. The fours. It suits you.” She was feeling happy again. An exchange of secrets always helped.
    *   *   *
    On the second Monday of her employment, she was darting out of the bathroom, scurrying back to her files, when she heard the welcome sound of laughter. The laughing bureaucrat was walking down the hallway in the opposite direction of Josephine’s office, but she couldn’t resist following.
    The woman turned in response to Josephine’s footsteps. A rhinestone gecko held her orange silk neckerchief in place.
    “Hey!” the woman said, waving a sheet of paper in the air. “Check this out!”
    Josephine hurried to her side.
    “Look!” The bureaucrat pointed at the paper.
    It was a memo about an upcoming processing deadline. A piece of bureaucratic paperwork like any other.
    “ Look ,” the bureaucrat commanded. “Use your eyes.”
    Whenever Josephine heard the word “eyes” these days, her eyes felt even drier.
    “Come on,” the bureaucrat said, growing impatient, pointing at the emboldened DEADLINE at the top of the page.
    But it read DEADLING rather than DEADLINE .
    Josephine released a small “ha,” relieved to be in on the joke. DEADLING . What an awful word: It sounded like dead babies.
    “A typo, I guess,” she said.
    “Yes.” The bureaucrat was displeased by the mildness of Josephine’s amusement. “But what a typo! What a typo !”
    The woman continued on down the hallway, laughing to herself. The sound of it haunted Josephine all the way back to 9997.
    *   *   *
    That evening, she arrived at the sublet to find the overhead lights on and the candles unlit. Joseph was standing by the single window, gazing out at the train track like a man in a novel.
    “Hey,” she said, hitting the light switch, killing the pale glare. Realizing, chillingly, how much she took it for granted that he would always buoy her. He was not the type to gaze wistfully out of windows.
    She was almost surprised when he said “Hey” in a normal voice, when he turned around and his face looked the same as ever, not bruised or blanched.
    “You okay?” she said. The room turned from yellow to red as the traffic light changed below.
    “Hey,” he said again. There was something different about his appearance—it was in his eyes. An extra gleam. Maybe a fever.
    “Are you sick?” She crossed over to him.
    “I’m fine!” he said. “I’m fine!” That was strange, the exclamation marks, the insistence; he never exclaimed. The rest of the night proceeded normally, though, and by the time they went to sleep, she had forgotten the uncanny first two minutes of their evening.
    *   *   *
    If not a cafeteria, then at least a vending machine. Josephine set out with a sense of resolve on Wednesday