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“What the hell is all this?” Ricardo was back, standing before my desk, his arms crossed. “I can hear it all the way over in my office. You can’t be getting any work done.” He looked toward the ceiling and shook his fist.
Only then did I notice the construction noise that drifted and clanged down from the fifth floor. When had that begun? I worked on four, and it was rare that sound would seep up or down from the surrounding levels. Usually, my floor’s sounds were white collar—the papery flutter of returns being slipped in and out of folders; the soft metallic click of a file cabinet closing; the clitter-tick of a calculator. But now, hammering, sawing, the clamor of pipes being hit and the whir of machinery clattered around my cubicle.
I hadn’t heard them until Ricardo came in. Had my concentration returned?
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