The Beautiful Bureaucrat Read Online Free PDF

afternoon. She had only knocked on a couple of doors when one of them opened abruptly.
    “Hello?” the bureaucrat said.
    Josephine’s initial surprise was followed immediately by shock. Because this bureaucrat reminded her so much of herself: the same sagging cardigan and sensible shoes, the same average height and average weight and unremarkable face, the same capillaries showing in the eyes, the same polite yet exhausted expression she knew she would wear if a stranger knocked on her door when she was deep in the files.
    “Hello?” the bureaucrat said again, her tone courteous and weary.
    It took Josephine a moment to locate the words: “Do you know where I might find a vending machine?”
    “I heard a rumor there was one on the sixth floor,” the bureaucrat replied. “I always just bring a cheese sandwich from home.”
    “Me too!” Josephine said, filled with hope.
    But the bureaucrat was preoccupied, in no state for camaraderie. “I’m sorry,” she said, gesturing inward at her office, beginning to close the door. “I have so much to do. Good luck, okay!”
    Overcome by nebulous longing, Josephine rode the elevator down to the sixth floor. The elevator doors remained shut. She pounded the DOOR OPEN button. Nothing happened. She accidentally pounded the 7. The elevator rose and deposited her on the seventh floor, which was identical to her own floor. She began knocking on doors. The third was opened by a relatively young female bureaucrat of average height and weight, with an ordinary face and a humble brown skirt.
    Josephine was astonished, uneasy.
    “Yes, can I help you?” the woman said with the clipped civility of a kind yet overwhelmed bureaucrat.
    Josephine asked her second doppelgänger about the vending machine.
    “Fifth floor,” the woman replied with confidence before excusing herself back into her office. “Enjoy!”
    Josephine distractedly wandered the empty hallway of the fifth floor twice before concluding that she had been misled.
    She hesitated a moment before knocking on a door on the fifth floor. This door was opened by a third bureaucrat: another polite young woman remarkable in her averageness. She assured Josephine that the vending machine was on the third floor. The skin around the woman’s eyes was flushed, as though she had recently been crying, or maybe just rubbing her eyes too hard.
    Josephine shivered several times as she reentered the elevator and descended to the third floor. Already the women’s faces and forms were fading. Perhaps they hadn’t resembled her so very much after all. But—hadn’t they?
    There she found it, at the far end of the hallway on the third floor. The vending machine was dusty with disuse. Most of the candy looked vintage, the bold colors and elaborate fonts of an earlier era. The rest of it looked brand-new, newer than new, candies she’d never heard of, futuristic white-and-silver packaging. She was grateful to recognize one item, the Mars bar—never her favorite but at least familiar. She slipped her quarters into the slot and punched the correct number. When she reached into the bin to retrieve the Mars bar, what she pulled out was a pack of lavender mints that looked like something her grandmother would have eaten as a child. She had no more quarters.
    “Screw you,” she whispered at the vending machine.
    On her way up to the ninth floor in the elevator, she unwrapped the lavender candies. By the time she arrived back at her office, she was addicted to their perfumed taste, the sharp edges of each pale-purple square.
    Halfway through the pack, her tongue started to bleed, cut by the candy as it disintegrated in her mouth, sharp as bird bones. But all afternoon she kept eating lavender candies, inputting data, eating lavender candies, inputting data.
    *   *   *
    When she returned from work that day, he was pacing around the room. No candles, no dinner, just a brown-paper shopping bag under his arm.
    “Let’s go,” he said before