Heather Cochran - The Return Of Jonah Gray

“Ricardo didn’t send me. I came up here on my own,” Jeff said, then he took an audible sniff. “Your cubicle smells cleaner than the other ones on this floor.” He looked around. “It is cleaner.”

“I try to keep things neat,” I said.

Jeff shook his head. “I don’t mean neat. That’s the tallest pile of file folders I’ve seen today,” he said, pointing to the stack of unfinished returns. “But cleaner. It smells lemony in here. Like a polish.”

I tried to act nonchalant. The fact was, maybe two days earlier, in a fit of procrastination, I had decided to reorder my shelf of tax statute books. In doing so, I realized how dusty they had become—and my filing cabinets and the tops of my bookshelves, too. Then I had made the mistake of taking a close look at the walls of my cubicle and found a host of strange stains—there and on the carpet—and ultimately, I had cornered a guy from the night cleaning crew and convinced him to lend me some carpet cleaner and an industrial wet-vac. The lemony furniture polish was my own, from home.

It had taken two days of working surreptitiously, but the fact was my cubicle was cleaner than the others on my floor. While I appreciated that Jeff had noticed—and right away—the history of the cleanliness was not something I wanted to explain. It would have been hard to explain it to anyone without sounding, well, obsessive.

“I think the lemon smell might be wafting over from that cubicle,” I said, my voice low. I pointed to the wall I shared with Cliff.

Jeff Hill nodded. “Listen, Ricardo and I are going to lunch today, over to a place he suggested. Mexicali’s? And I thought, if you had no other plans, you might join us.”

“I do love their enchiladas,” I said, although I’d heard that Mexicali’s had once been closed by the health department, and I said a little prayer each time I ate there. “What time are you going?”

“What time do you want to go?” he asked.

“I don’t know. What time did Ricardo say?”

“Uh, one?”

“One works. I’ve got an errand I need to run first. I’ll meet you there?”

“But you’re coming, right? I can put you down as an affirmative?”

“I’ll be there.”

“Is that a definite affirmative?”

“A definite affirmative?” I asked.

“Some people say they’ll show up and then don’t. This is California. People can be flaky.”

“You’re asking whether I would knowingly misrepresent myself?”

“Some people do.”

“Of course they do. My career is based on that assumption. But I said I’d be there, so I’ll be there.”

I thought I saw him smile a little, just a glimmer, before he went all serious again. “Then I’ll see you at one.” He nodded and turned on his heel. He was so tall, I could see his head bobbing above the cubicles as he made his way back down the hallway.

“Odd,” I found myself muttering, but I was also wondering what might get him to smile more.

I had a hard time finding parking, so it was five past one by the time I rushed into Mexicali’s. I looked around for Jeff and listened for Ricardo’s laugh (he had a whoop that could cut through a football game). But I didn’t see either of them.

I turned to the hostess. “I’m looking for a party of two that came in maybe five minutes ago?” I told her.

“Sasha?”

I spun around to see Jeff.

“See, I told you I’d be here. Am I early?” I asked. Even as I checked my watch, I knew that I wasn’t. I know that some people set their watches five or ten minutes ahead, in order to think that they’re late and then supposedly arrive on time. The only time I ever tried to fool myself like that, I remembered that I’d set my watch ahead, automatically did the math and still arrived when I was going to arrive. All I had done was add extra equations to my day, and I got more than enough subtraction practice on the job. I didn’t like to be late, but I always knew when I was and when I wasn’t.

“Five minutes falls just inside my margin of error for punctuality,” Jeff said. “I hope you’re hungry.”

“Should we wait for Ricardo?” I asked.

“No need. He had to cancel at the last minute.”

“So no definite affirmative from him.” I’d never known Ricardo to be too busy for lunch.

“Shall we sit?” Jeff asked.

I nodded. So it would be just the two of us, me and a somber near-stranger. “So, tell me something,” I said as we sat. I figured I might as well find out about the guy.

“Like what?”

“How you ended up at the IRS. Where are you from?”

With that, Jeff told me that he was originally from Fresno and that the rest of his family still lived there. He said that if he hadn’t become an archivist, he would have gone into entomology.

“Insects are fascinating. So highly detailed. Such precise movements,” he said.

He explained that he had moved to the Bay area four years before and that he lived in a big apartment complex down in Fremont. As he spoke, he adjusted the placement of his water glass, arranging it in the precise center of his napkin. He did the same with a second napkin and a bottle of picante sauce. Then he picked up the saltshaker.

He caught me watching. “You’re wondering what I’m doing,” he said.

“Sort of,” I admitted. Actually, I had been wondering whether he’d been aware of his actions. Apparently, he had been.

“I’ve got a touch of OCD,” he said. “Obsessive-compulsive—”

“Disorder,” I said, nodding. “I see.”

“It’s not anything dangerous,” he said.

“I didn’t think it was.”

“It’s better than being a slob,” he said. “It doesn’t intrude on my life.”

“I’m not bothered by it. Really.”

“I like to keep track of where things are. And I like precision,” he continued, “in almost everything.”

“I imagine that’s a useful trait in your line of work.”

“Where is precision not useful? You need it in your job, too,” he said. “But yes, in archiving, it’s absolutely essential.”

Jeff’s entire body seemed to lift up when he spoke of archiving. He was a big fan of the database system the IRS used. It was the same one he’d worked on in his prior position, in the archives of the Oakland Police Department. He spoke of an archival conference he made a point of attending each January.

“A lot of archivists have real wild sides to them. Every January, a lot of us attend this conference and those guys, they go a little crazy.”

“And you?”

“Do I go a little crazy?”

“Do you have a wild side?”

He paused for a moment. “Not really, no,” he said. “I used to want one, but now, well, I think I get more sleep this way. Do you?”

I thought about it. I thought about the big plans I’d once had and the house and job that kept me company these days. “Not lately,” I had to admit.

“No loss,” Jeff said. “Impulse control is an underappreciated trait these days. And I like to plan ahead. I like to know what the future might hold. There’s a real comfort in that.”

I noticed, as our meal went on, that Jeff began to look uneasy. I wondered if something was troubling him about the imprecise way I was eating my enchiladas. Or perhaps his burrito was causing heartburn. I didn’t ask. I barely knew the guy.

Finally, Jeff Hill took a deep breath. “I found something I think you’ll want to see,” he said.

“Oh God, where—in your burrito?” I looked into what remained of my enchiladas.

“My burrito is fine,” he said. Very deliberately, he slid his plate aside and wiped his place setting. Then he pulled a few sheets of paper from his back pocket and unfolded them, smoothing them against the table. He tilted them so that I could see.