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Without waiting for an invitation, Ricardo pulled up a chair and sat down. “I thought I would hide out over here for a few minutes, but this is chaos,” he said.
I watched a flake of ceiling tile drift like snow onto my desk.
“That can’t be healthy,” Ricardo said.
“Don’t you have work to do?” I asked. I liked Ricardo and his visits were usually a welcome break, but I was eager to find out more about Jonah Gray.
“I don’t actually. My archivist is hired and the next sexual harassment seminar isn’t for a month. What are you doing?”
“An audit.”
“The bean guy? It’s the bean guy, isn’t it? Ol’ Beanie Beanerson.”
“He’s a journalist,” I said. “He used to work at the Wall Street Journal, I’ll have you know.”
“Oh Lord, really?” Ricardo sounded put out.
“You don’t approve?”
“Journalists are so self-righteous,” Ricardo said. “It’s always, let me tell you what to think, let me tell you what to know. And financial types are the worst. Present company excluded, I mean.”
“Maybe the journalists you’ve met, but on his Web site, he actually invites debate. About plants, at least. And fertilizer.” Before I could say anything more, Ricardo held out his hand.
“What?” I asked.
“Give it. Give me the return.”
“I’m not really supposed to—”
“Oh, please child. Hand it over.”
I handed him the first page of Jonah Gray’s return, and Ricardo pretended to skim it.
“Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes,” he clucked.
I could tell that he wasn’t actually reading it. “What do you think being a journalist says about his personality?”
“Since when do you care about personality?” Ricardo asked, as a particularly loud crack from above sent a piece of ceiling onto his lap. He brushed it off in disgust. Ricardo had a point. I usually focused on what an occupation said about a taxpayer’s propensity for fraud. Some, like Kevin the contractor, had greater opportunities than others. With that, I realized that I hadn’t thought about Kevin all day. Gene, either. What a relief that was.
“He’s probably one of those earnest droners utterly devoid of humor,” Ricardo added.
“I know for a fact that’s not true,” I said.
“You’re defending the guy?”
I felt my cheeks redden. “What I mean is, on his Web site, someone was asking about a plant called ‘hen and chicks.’”
“Hen and chicks?”
“Apparently, it’s a succulent.”
“Succulent,” Ricardo said lasciviously.
I ignored him. “So he writes, did you hear about the city guy who went to the country and bought fifty chicks? The next week he buys a hundred, and the week after that, two hundred. Finally, the clerk at the country store says, ‘You must be doing really well with your chicks,’ and the city guy says, ‘No. I guess I’m either planting them too deep or too far apart.’” I laughed a little. It was a silly joke.
Ricardo didn’t crack a smile. “That’s disgusting.”
“Oh, come on. It didn’t actually happen.”
“Dead smothered chickens?”
“I was just trying to make the point that he’s not humorless. I was thinking that, being a journalist, he’s probably curious, too.”
Ricardo perked up. “Curious like bi?”
“No.”
“Like weird?”
“No, curious like…curious.”
“Like a monkey,” Ricardo said, nodding.
“If that helps you.”
I didn’t know what beat Jonah Gray covered for the Stockton Star, or what he’d focused on at the Journal, but on Gray’s Garden, the man seemed game for anything. One reader had recently returned from a trip to the Cook Islands and wrote of seeing a rare palm, related to the sago, only larger.
I’ve never even heard of such a beast! Jonah Gray had replied. You must tell us more. Do you have pictures? Can we see? Do you want me to post them? Then he admitted to having spent all afternoon researching sago palms and their closer relatives.
Someone like that was an explorer of sorts, I thought, interested in things beyond his own experience. I don’t mean that I’d deduced from a Web site on plant maintenance that the man sought to explore faraway countries or vast oceans. But I was willing to bet that he’d be game enough to try out the new Thai place in town.
Not everyone will. By the end of my six months with Gene, I’d noticed that he rarely agreed to try anything new. Gene worked as a mailman and loved that he could wear the same uniform and walk the same route every day. The guy knew what he knew, liked what he liked, and was content—even happy—to exist inside of such fences. He didn’t look beyond them, and he didn’t want to. Motivating him to go out was always a chore. He’d see movies, but preferred those with actors whose work he knew, and he would study the reviews and synopses beforehand, and even download the trailers. By the time we got to the theater, I felt as if I’d already seen the damn thing. Gene knew this about himself, and he explained that he found the rhythm of his methods comforting. I appreciated the guy’s self-awareness and I respected his consistency. He’d never lie and he’d never judge out of turn. All the same, in our time together, I’d grown to find his habits a little stifling.
Ricardo yawned. “Those journalist types are always getting their panties in a lather about freedom.”
“I think you just created a hostile work environment.”
“You know, freedom of information. Freedom of the press. Blah blah blah,” Ricardo said, waving the first page of Jonah Gray’s return around.
A loud bang sounded then, and Ricardo and I looked up in tandem. I could hear muffled swearing at the same moment that a drizzle of water began to seep through the ceiling at one end of my cubicle.
“Jesus on a bike!” Ricardo shrieked. He jumped from his seat and ran into the hallway. “Grab a bucket and call security if that gets worse. I’m going to see what gives. You want to bet this is an OSHA violation?” He ran off.
I pulled my trash can under the leak as the swearing from above grew louder. Then I hurried back to my desk. I wasn’t afraid of getting wet. The fact was, for the first time all month, I wanted to keep working. I wanted to know more about this Jonah Gray character.
But when I turned back to his file, I realized that Ricardo had been holding the first page of the return when he’d run upstairs. Immediately, I called Ricardo’s extension and left a message on his voice mail. Then I called his assistant and asked that Ricardo come see me as soon as he returned.
“He took something of mine and it’s crucial that I get it back immediately,” I told him.
“I’ll leave him the message,” Ricardo’s assistant said.
“Crucial,” I repeated.
“I promise I’ll tell him.”
Luckily, six years on the job had taught me plenty of ways to move ahead without page one. As the racket continued, some creaking now and continued shouts, I turned to Jonah Gray’s deductions.
I hated the standard deduction. I know—it takes less time and it’s a lot simpler to use. But to an auditor, it’s a black box. Standard deductions kept me at a distance. Itemized deductions were where the story of someone’s year would emerge. Itemized deductions could speak volumes about character and passion and luck and changes in circumstance. They humanized the numbers and offered a clearer glimpse into the life beyond.
Sometimes, I’d skim down the page and come away with a vivid sense, almost visceral actually, of someone who was at the top of their game. Luck had shone on them—maybe through gambling earnings or investment income or inheritance—and now it was time to give back. I’d see gifts to a variety of charities, amounts that had been capped at a hundred dollars in earlier years suddenly rising higher. Old cars donated away. Houses bought for relatives. It was heady to experience such generosity, even through the filter of a tax form.
Other times, I’d run across clear markers of financial distress. A home that burned, an insurance report, attempts to value cherished possessions, now ash. A family living at the edge of their means, getting by on advances from relatives and subsidies they never before had to accept. And me, realizing that my audit would be the nadir of what had already been a terrible year.
Jonah Gray’s deductions were a mixed bag, but my overwhelming impression was one of renunciation. He had unloaded a great deal in the year before. Old clothing to Goodwill, computer equipment to a teaching nonprofit, a bed and a couch to the local Veterans of Foreign Wars branch. Though any one of those deductions could have been prompted by a deep spring cleaning, taken as a whole they felt like someone saying goodbye to an entire life.
What had caused that? Had it coincided with the move to Stockton? Had he been ill? I noticed that he’d carried some significant out-of-pocket medical expenses. And why on earth had he paid for a membership in the AARP? The man was thirty-three years old.
Whatever it was, it had happened in July. That much I knew. It was July when he’d stopped working at the Journal, moved from Tiburon and given away so many of his belongings. It was in July that he’d filled out a loss report, detailing the destruction of a California black oak at 530 Horsehair Road. But were those things related? What had happened?
Knowing how much he cared for flora, I looked closely at the details of the tree loss. The black oak, estimated to have been sixty-five years old, had been plowed into by a truck and mortally wounded. You can’t replace a tree like that—even with my minuscule knowledge of greenery, that seemed obvious. But had he valued a tree more highly than his life in Tiburon? Did he move to Stockton as penance?
I turned back to his deductions and that’s when I saw it—the donation of a boat to charity. Not just any boat. He had given away a twenty-two-foot Catalina. Of all the boats on all the bays and oceans and lakes and estuaries, Jonah Gray had been sailing around in the one I’d wanted. He’d donated it to something called the American Aphasia Association. I didn’t know much about aphasia, only that it was a disorder that affected someone’s ability to use or understand words. If that was so important to him, he could have given the Catalina to me, I thought. I had no words for the coincidence.
My phone rang.
“Sasha Gardner.”
“He’s a good man,” a woman said.
“Jonah Gray?” I asked.
She didn’t seem surprised that I knew his name. “If you met him, you’d see that this is a wild-goose chase,” she said.
“Listen, it’s not personal. I’m just doing my job. It’s a compliance audit.”
“You think you’re so special?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“That young man, he gives. He gives to anyone who asks, and what does he want in return? Nothing. And after all he’s been through.”
“What has he been through? Why did he give up the boat and move to Stockton? Did it have to do with the oak tree?” I cringed a little, hearing what sounded like desperation in my voice. But it suddenly felt very important that I figure it out. I felt like I had to know the answers. This wasn’t my usual, measured approach. More often I made assumptions based on details in returns, then tested them against the evidence I collected. But I could not yet piece together the story of his past year. I found myself at a loss. And yet I wanted to know.
My caller was not inclined to help me. “Like you care,” she grunted.
“I do,” I said. “We’re both from Virginia. And we both sail. Well, I mean, I used to. And, I guess, he used to. Too.”
“Then try showing him a little heart. He wouldn’t do this to you.”
“How could he? He’s not an auditor,” I said. “And he did publicly post the notification.”
“You started it by sending that letter.”
“But that was computer generated.”
“A real personal touch. That’s the kind of thing he wouldn’t do. He’s a good person, which is more than I can say about you. You’re not even good enough to be rummaging through his financial records.” She hung up.
Not good enough? I thought. How the hell could she know that? Who the hell was she to judge? Not good enough? At least I didn’t prank call strangers. At least I didn’t harass honest government workers. I was plenty good enough, I told myself. And besides, shouldn’t that be Jonah Gray’s choice?
As soon as the question popped into my mind, I sat up with a start. What was I doing? How had I become so riled from an anonymous phone call? That woman didn’t know me. None of them knew me. And it wasn’t for any of them to judge whether or not I was good enough to audit Mr. Jonah Gray. Ultimately, it wasn’t even his choice. It was the IRS that had chosen. And apparently the Service, or its randomization algorithm, had chosen me.
I realized that I had stopped reviewing Jonah Gray’s return in my standard way. Instead of following my long-held protocols, I was wandering around this guy’s life like a lost soul, skimming forward and backward without any plan at all. Gone was my customary patience—I was acting as if I wanted to know everything all at once, which is exactly how I felt.
But that’s not how an auditor was supposed to approach a return. It was not the way I’d been trained to work. I was supposed to review all returns in the same manner, to give them equal, undifferentiated consideration.
I steeled myself and closed his file. Yes, this guy was unexpected, and I didn’t know what I would find next, and I wanted to know. But I wasn’t going to abandon my professionalism for the sake of some stranger. I would unravel Jonah Gray’s story in due time. But I would start over from the beginning, the standard way. That is, once I got the first page back from Ricardo.
When Ricardo finally reappeared, he was dripping from head to toe. The man couldn’t have weighed more than one hundred and twenty pounds soaking wet, which he was when he walked back into my cubicle.
“You left with my return. I need it,” I said.
“Look at me!” Ricardo shrieked, as the carpet below his feet grew sodden and dark. “They’re replacing old water pipes up on five,” he said. He flipped his hair back and liquid spattered across my desk. “One of them burst before they got the water turned off. I walked in and got hosed.”
“And my return?” I asked again.
“I could have been hurt!”
“But you’re not.”
“I should have gone to Susan for sympathy,” he said. He held out a matted, dripping clot of paper. IRS forms are essentially newsprint, and they don’t hold up under liquid.
“My God, Ricardo!” I said, grabbing the paper. It ripped as I took it from him. It began to come apart in my hands.
“I was holding it and then, well, couldn’t you hear? I had to protect myself.”
“With a piece of paper?” I spread the remains out on my desk. Half of the page had either been pulled off or had disintegrated. It was hard to tell which.
“Everyone knows that newsprint is just a weak mix of waste-paper pulps. You can’t expect it to maintain any tensile strength when wet. The fibers are way too short.”
Ricardo blinked at me, water still dripping off of him. “Not everyone knows that. Just geeks like you. Believe it or not, that isn’t what went through my mind when the pipe exploded.”
“Where’s the rest of it?” I asked.
“I’m not going back up there,” Ricardo said.
The soggy remains on my desk looked like the beginnings of an unpromising papier-mâché effort. And I had a sinking feeling that I was in possession of the healthiest remnant. “That was the original. I’m going to have to request a replacement.”
“So call Mr. Bean Man. Mr. Funny Dead Chickens.”
