The Beautiful Bureaucrat Read Online Free PDF Page B

she was fully inside. “Put on something.”
    “Something?” she said. Her mouth was sore. She would never again eat another lavender candy.
    “Festive,” he said. “Suggestive. Progressive.”
    She wanted to scoff at that. Everything was in storage except for the meek clothing she wore to work. But she did put on a pair of oversize red plastic earrings.
    They walked in the direction opposite the aboveground subway track and eventually came to the park. He led her around, searching for the perfect bench—near the lake, no gum gobs, not too close to an overflowing trash can. Several versions of the perfect bench were inhabited, so they settled for a less-than-perfect one, its paint peeling off in large patches. Still, they had a good view of the lake.
    He pulled celebratory foods—a baguette and Brie, figs and olives and sparkling water and dark chocolate—out of the paper bag.
    “What’s the occasion?” she said.
    “Life.”
    She tried to be delighted, but there was something peculiar about him. She bit into a fig, watched a pair of swans glide luminous in the transformative white light of sundown. One by one the pinkish lamps alongside the lake clicked on. The city was so generous sometimes. Here she could almost believe her windowless office in the gray building had ceased to exist. If no one is there to be mastered by the Database, is the Database still master?
    “Aren’t the swans nice?” she said.
    “You mean the swan?” he said.
    “There are two.”
    “One,” he countered.
    “Two!” she insisted.
    She blinked at the swans. As she blinked, the double necks resolved themselves into a single neck.
    “You’re right,” she admitted, irritated by her used-up eyes.
    Two kids rolled shrieking down the little incline behind the bench, their skin golden and grass-marked in the lamplight, while the father egged them on and the mother looked upward and outward, away from her family.
    “Crazy little zombie bambis,” Joseph said. Sharply she looked over at him. She couldn’t read his tone, irritated or charmed, weary or yearning.
    *   *   *
    Even after a night of figs and swans, her windowless office in AZ/ZA awaited her. But on Thursday morning she felt slightly calmer than usual, more open to speculation about the people represented by the files. A woman with a name like Esme Lafayette Gold had to have a more dramatic life than someone named Josephine Anne Newbury. She pictured metallic green eye shadow and satin dresses in gem hues and tragic loves, before chiding herself for falling into clichés; Esme could just as well be a first-grade teacher who always wore muted colors and went to bed at 8:30 p.m. Or maybe she was a first-grade teacher who wore metallic-green eye shadow. How about Jonathan Andrew Hall? Was he as bland and agreeable as his name suggested, or was he filled with rage? Did he go by JAH and listen to death metal? Had the very agreeableness of his name served as the seed of his rage?
    She yawned and stretched her arms and looked at the ceiling, which had fewer marks and gashes than the walls. When she turned her attention back down to JAH’s file, she screamed: The Person with Bad Breath was centimeters away from her desk.
    “Goodness gracious,” The Person with Bad Breath said, bringing hands to ears.
    “Sorry, sorry, sorry!” Josephine said.
    “Forgiven.” The smile was dry, yes, but not unfriendly. “I trust that you are thriving here?”
    She felt only somewhat deceitful as she nodded her agreement. The Person with Bad Breath didn’t move to leave but instead seemed to be waiting for Josephine’s next words.
    “The work suits you, does it not?” The Person with Bad Breath said.
    Emboldened by this note of kindness, by the slight vulnerability evident in the fact that her boss’s shirt collar had flipped up in the back and was not lying impeccably beneath the gray jacket, Josephine found herself confessing: “I wonder about them.”
    “About whom?” The Person