We're with Nobody by Alan Huffman

them down my pants?”
    One wonders, “Who steals education board minutes, anyway?” The implication was that anyone who wanted to review the actions of public officials was somehow a threat. It was about fear of the unknown. For all the administration knew, Michael might have been a schoolteacher, but because they didn’t know, they responded with hostility. By contrast, a records clerk he encountered during another race erroneously had the impression that he was some kind of federal agent working on behalf of an ongoing investigation, and cheerfully gave him everything he asked for, saying, “Oh, yes, sir, we can give you that immediately.” The clerk also provided him with a personal workspace and did not charge him for what turned out to be a voluminous number of copies.
    â€œWhen things are going that well, why say anything to the contrary?” Michael told me later.
    Because the arrival of an inquisitive, evasive stranger with a Southern accent may represent the most provocative episode of a small township’s official day, I give my current clerk credit for at least being sociable, though I’m aware that sociability often masks a hidden agenda.
    â€œYou sound like you’re a long way from home!” she’d said, brightly, when I arrived at her window with my records request. After a meaningful pause, during which I failed to offer a response, other than to nod and smile, she’d asked, “So what brings you here?”
    My answer—“research”—failed to satisfy. So she’d added, as if on cue, “And who are you with?”
    I glanced behind me at the empty office, as if checking to see if I was with anyone, and concluded, “Nobody!” Then I smiled and extended my arms in mock surrender. A tiny furrow formed in her brow. I later overheard her telling someone in the back that perhaps I was a journalist who was comparing the institutional procedures of various town councils around the country, which led me to wonder where such a review might find publication. The supposition that I might be someone who studied small-town council minutes for a living had the effect of making my task seem even duller than it already was.
    Opposition research can be exciting when you’re on to something, but much of the work is like studying for a minor exam. A big part of it involves evaluating voluminous records of meetings by government agencies and ad hoc tree-pruning committees. That said, there’s nothing like being bored to lower the threshold for what you find interesting. You may initially resist talking to the computer programmer in the seat beside you as your plane waits in line on the tarmac, but as the wait lengthens to hours, with no sign that you’re ever going to take off, it is possible, out of synaptic desperation, to find yourself developing a low-grade interest in the computer programmer’s life, including his recent foray into a master gardening class, held in a temporary building at a school currently undergoing sensitive renovation in a suburb of Milwaukee. When was the school built? What style is the architecture? The thumbnail sketch of his life may be a tour de force of forgettable scenes, but each painstaking detail instills in you a growing determination to find something, anything, to chew on.
    Michael and I are similarly inspired to take note of documented details we might otherwise have overlooked. A subtle shift in the tenor of the township council discussion about sidewalk repairs or a bored cop reading about deer becomes a source of minor fascination. It doesn’t have to be directly related to the task at hand, though that helps. The point is to keep the synapses firing. We search for anything or anyone of note, such as the escapee from The Twilight Zone whom Michael and I stumbled upon in an otherwise abandoned office building in Jersey City, where municipal public records were archived. He sat smoking,