Before that August, I’d taken pride in my ability to plow through, audit after audit, without a drop in focus. But the morning after Kevin’s unceremonious leave-taking from the Escape Room, I’d begun to review a return, only to find myself eavesdropping on Cliff, the auditor who sat on the far side of my cubicle wall. Later that afternoon, I had spent twenty minutes trying to deduce which grocery chain would be carrying the best peaches—based on proximity of the largest stores to local trucking routes. Moments after, I’d found myself wondering why horses and cats and dogs have hair but rabbits have fur. Ricardo was right; I was in trouble.
In my double-wide cubicle at our Oakland district office, I stood up, jogged in place, did a few jumping jacks, then sat back down. I stared hard at the paperwork on my desk, hoping that the brief burp of exercise had forced blood into my brain. Ricardo had a point: the auditing season was in full swing. Stacks of folders had massed on my worktable, each file representing a return awaiting my analysis. I had to buckle down. I had to find some momentum or fake as much. I was a senior auditor, not a veterinarian, nor a fruit wholesaler, nor an office-supply historian. I was supposed to be setting an example.
Then the phone rang, and I imagined that it might be Kevin, feeling guilt over his graceless getaway from the aptly named Escape Room. Maybe he had memorized my phone number and was calling to apologize. Maybe he’d called the IRS switchboard and asked for an auditor named Sasha. It wasn’t outside the realm of possibility. Near the edge, maybe, but not beyond it.
“Sasha Gardner,” I answered, glad for the excuse to close the file in front of me.
“So S is for Sasha then,” a man said. It wasn’t Kevin.
“In my case, yes.” I wasn’t sure what he meant by the comment. “May I help you?”
“You’re not even a man,” he said. It sounded like an insult.
“That’s true,” I agreed. “Though, as you probably know, Sasha is a male name in parts of Eastern Europe. How can I help you, sir?” I always tried to be polite at work. During any audit, and in the necessary correspondence before and after, I strove to remain detached but formal. I called people sir and ma’am and addressed them by their salutation and last name, assuming I knew it. There were strict codes of behavior to be followed when interacting with the public, and I took a certain pride in adhering to them. People will grasp at any excuse to hate the IRS, and one of my jobs was to keep them empty-handed.
“My name’s Gordon, and I’m calling to tell you to stop what you’re doing. Just stop it! Cease and desist!”
I glanced at the pad of paper on my desk. Earlier, I’d been doodling. Pictures of sailboats and rough waters. Pictures of trees, uprooted, leaves piling and swirling around them. “What I’m doing?” I repeated.
“Pestering an honest, upstanding, hardworking man,” the man named Gordon said.
“Do I know you?” I asked. “Was I pestering you?”
Gordon harrumphed into the phone. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? You’d like to get your mitts on all of us. Well, you won’t. Not if I can help it,” he said.
“But—” I tried to cut in.
“You make trouble for the people who don’t deserve it and can least afford it. You dig and you pry, but for what?
“Sir—” I tried again.
“All you need to know is that I pay my taxes so I have as much right to say this as anyone.” Then he hung up.
I stared at the phone as if it could explain what had just happened. The IRS receives a slew of complaints every tax season, but they’re shunted to the consumer-affairs department, not to individual auditors. Had there been a complaint about my work? Had I audited Gordon in the past? It seemed to me that he would have said as much had it been true. And I thought I would have recognized his voice. I traced back through the current tax season. What had I done that was so awful? The truth was, I’d hardly managed to do much of anything.
“That is not a happy face.”
At the entrance to my cubicle stood Ricardo and Susan, an auditor a few years my junior.
“I just got the strangest phone call,” I said, trying to shake Gordon’s voice from my head. “What are you two up to?”
“We have a question,” Susan said.
“Susan didn’t believe that some people eat dirt when they’re pregnant,” Ricardo said.
“Dirt?” Susan asked me. “Come on.”
“Not just while pregnant,” I said, “but apparently it’s more common then. Pica disorder is what it’s called. If I’m remembering right, the official diagnosis requires eating non-nutritive substances for more than a month. You know, dirt, chalk, paper—”
“Paper?” Susan asked.
“Legal pads?” Ricardo added, with a smirk.
“And we’re talking about adults?” Susan went on.
I ignored Ricardo and answered Susan. “Pica is from the Latin for magpie,” I said. “I guess those birds will eat anything.”
Ricardo turned to Susan, a broad smile across his face. He held out his hand, palm up.
“Fine. You win,” she said.
“Win what?” I asked.
“I bet Susan that she could pick any topic and you would know some weird fact about it,” Ricardo said. “And I was right. You are our resident warehouse of useless information.”
“Pica’s not useless information,” I said. I had audited someone with the disorder a few years before. There’d been a question about whether the psychological treatment was deductible. There had also been a few chewed-up pages in the file. “No information is,” I said. “It just depends what you need it for.”
“I should have asked the one about code-breaking,” Susan muttered.
“Like the Enigma?” I asked, before I could stop myself.
Ricardo started to laugh.
I was irked. “I have to get back to work,” I said. I made a show of standing up, walking to my table and pulling a folder from my stack of upcoming audits.
“Sweetie, I meant it as a compliment,” Ricardo said. “We both did. Didn’t we, Susan?”
“Sure,” Susan said, only less believably.
I thought of Martina’s comment, about guys avoiding smart girls. Maybe she’d been wrong. Ricardo claimed to appreciate my magpie mind. Of course, I hadn’t realized that he’d been using it to earn money. And besides, Ricardo didn’t swing that way.
I made a show of glancing inside the file I’d taken from the table.
“I suppose we’ve all got work to do,” Susan said. I saw her glance at my stack of folders. “Some of us more than others.” They left me alone then.
“Resident warehouse,” I muttered.
“You say something, Sasha?” Cliff called through our mutual wall.
“Nothing,” I called back. I looked again at the file I’d pulled off the table, then closed it and dropped it back atop the pile. Every folder represented someone who had already been notified of his or her upcoming audit. They weren’t going to wait until my inertia was gone.
But then my phone rang again. Maybe it was Kevin.
“Sasha Gardner,” I answered.
“Sasha Gardner,” a woman repeated back. Her voice was wavery, watery, but her words were determined. “I’m calling to say that I think you