She turned right, away from the office of The Person with Bad Breath, and knocked softly on each door as she went. All the doors remained closed, though once or twice she thought she heard the rustle of human activity beyond. She was startled when a door finally opened, eight back from where she stood; it had taken the room’s inhabitant several minutes to respond to her knock. Now the bureaucrat was sticking his head out into the hallway.
“Over here!” Josephine said, rushing toward him.
The bureaucrat turned to her and shook his head. He looked like Abraham Lincoln but without the conviction.
“Excuse me,” she said. “Pardon me,” she embellished, when she noted the anxiety tightening his forehead. “I’m wondering — I’m looking for — do you know — is there a cafeteria or break room or anything here?”
He continued the slow shake of his head. Determined, she looked into his eyes and smiled her kindest smile. She extended her hand to him, but he chose not to notice.
“I’m new,” she said. His anxiety was contagious. “So that’s why. I don’t know, you know, where things are.”
He was still shaking his head. Perhaps he was deaf.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Please forgive the disturbance.”
“Indeed” he may or may not have muttered as he closed his door.
It no longer felt like the right thing to do, to knock on each door she passed. But she refused to eat in her office. She remembered the strip of grass outside the building. She could sit there for five minutes, feel a little sun on her face. She hurried to the elevator and soon was pressing through the door labeled “Z,” into the generous light of September. If she sat cross-legged she could fit on the grass; her cheese sandwich was reborn from a pitiful meal into a pleasant one. She was about to eat the final bite when a lean, elegant bureaucrat exited the building and stood on the steps above her.
Victorious, bolstered by her new tactic for making the workday more bearable, Josephine beamed up at the woman.
“Nice day, right?” she said.
“Sure,” the woman said, “but we all eat at our desks.”
* * *
At least in the evenings there was always Joseph in the light of seven Virgin Mary candles. They managed to disguise the original sublet, its gloomy grime, overlaying it with a home of their own, never mind the mildew ever expanding in the shower stall (just shut your eyes, turn the water up to near-burning), never mind the grayish sheets (toss them into the corner, share the single blanket spared from storage). After that first night, he never asked about her job. She was grateful to him for this. And for maintaining the companionable silence of their shared morning commute. And for having the candles lit each night before she came in the door, though he usually beat her home by only ten or fifteen minutes. And for making fun of the irrepressible shudder that passed through her whenever the neighbor’s three-headed dog snarled in the hallway.
Yet even so, she carried the Database around inside her; it 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 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.