just allergies, and then one day you wake up clogged and froggy and foggy. Looking back, it felt gradual. I was late for work a few times one week, and again the next. I noticed that the muscles in my thighs were a little sore from bending at the knees to sneak by my colleagues’ cubicles. My calves felt stronger from taking the stairs more often to avoid running into my boss in the elevator. And then there was that feeling, more and more frequent, of having barely dodged a pothole or avoided a stray banana peel.
Luckily, I’d been at my job long enough to know the minimum amount of work I could do without raising concern. I hadn’t even noticed the extent of my distraction until the day that my friend Ricardo, our office’s hiring manager, found me in the supply closet.
“Are you okay?” he asked, after knocking on the door.
“Sure. Why?” I asked back, looking up from a box of pens.
“Uh, because you’ve been in here for, like, twenty minutes.”
“Oh please.”
“You have. I saw you go in and thought I’d wait, but you never came out. I thought maybe you were having a tryst.” He looked around the closet to see whether anyone else was hiding amid the office supplies. “What have you been doing?”
“Thinking, I guess.” I hadn’t realized it had been twenty minutes.
“Thinking? In here? About what?”
I decided to be honest about where my mind had been. “Legal pads are yellow, right? And the original highlighters were yellow, too.”
“Yeah, so?”
“So wouldn’t they have been useless on a legal pad? I think maybe that’s why highlighters ended up branching out into blue and green and pink, while legal pads remain yellow.”
“There are white legal pads,” Ricardo said. “I’ve seen them in all different colors.”
“Sure, but when you think ‘legal pad,’ you think ‘yellow,’ don’t you?”
“Honey, unless I’m bedding a handsome lawyer, I don’t think about legal pads.”
“And then there are these ledger books, which are always light green. My theory is that they’re green because they’re reminiscent of the dollar bill, since they’re intended to hold financial data. But that begs the question of whether ledger pads are also green in England. Because the British pound isn’t green, and that might imply a totally different color origin.”
“I don’t get it,” Ricardo said.
“You asked what I was thinking about.”
“I mean, why are you worrying about this? You’ve been in here for twenty minutes contemplating the history of office supplies? It’s August, sweetie. Every other auditor is complaining about the workload. I assume you’re snowed under, too. Is everything okay? You’re not in trouble, are you?”
“You think I’m not getting my work done?” I asked, careful to sound indignant.
“I’m just pointing out that maybe your investigative energy could be put to better use than in here.”
I made a show of taking a box of pens before returning to my cubicle. What he didn’t say—maybe he didn’t know—was that I wasn’t getting my work done. I hadn’t been for weeks.
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
