We're with Nobody by Alan Huffman Page A

alone, at his desk, and insisted he knew nothing whatsoever about where the records we were searching for were located, nor about the boxes of moldering documents stacked in the darkened hallways, nor about the whereabouts of anyone who did know or when they might return. Because Michael and I are not easily deterred, even by someone who comes across more as an apparition than a living, breathing government employee, we pressed him for answers. Eventually he exhaled a puff of smoke, waved a hand toward the hallway beyond the door and said, “Help yourself.”
    I looked at Michael, who had a quizzical expression. We proceeded to poke through the cardboard boxes stacked shoulder-high in the halls, but there was no order to anything. It was a futile endeavor. The archives of this particular government agency were like the memories of an elderly, demented brain. You could root around in there for as long as you wanted, but the odds were against your finding anything useful. Once we decided to give up, we returned to the office, but the employee/apparition had disappeared. I half expected the formerly busy streets to be eerily devoid of human life when we stepped back outside.
    In the real world, where there is relative order to the archiving of records (even if they’re under lock and key) the challenge is most often to avoid getting lost in a documentary trance after reviewing hundreds of pages of tedious recountings while in solitary confinement. The most important details are sometimes found on antiquated, wheezing microfilm, in boring tax records, or hidden in the coded language of obscure memos. You have to really, really care what people are saying, and Michael and I do. Even so, we still find ourselves wondering, “Is anything happening here?” If the council members do something meaningful, will I even recognize it through the fog of bureaucratic language? It’s like being a reporter on the police beat, sleeping with a police scanner on your night stand; after a while, the chatter lulls you to sleep, and you wonder if you’ll even notice if something important goes down. But you always do. There’s a sudden shift in tone—in the syntax and cadence of the voices—that tells you something consequential is happening, even though the words may be generic and the tone deceptively flat. So it is with the subtly suggestive minutes.
    Michael once researched a candidate whose seemingly minor legislative actions had had profound effects on his community. While serving on the city council, the candidate had voted against renewing a permit for a center that provided exercise classes for stroke victims, saying it was detrimental to the neighborhood in which it was located, despite being warned that denying the permit would violate the rights of the disabled. This, again, surfaced in the otherwise mundane minutes of the council meetings. The elected official’s response? “It looks like we’re playing favorites for some people.” Ignoring the needs of stroke victims may not seem like a significant transgression, unless you or one of your loved ones happens to be such a victim. Just because something seems uninteresting at first glance doesn’t mean it’s unimportant. Sensational stories dominate the headlines, but history also unfolds on page 3B.
    The New Jersey township and its mayor are uniformly bland, which puts me in good stead when it comes to forced fascination with the cop and the minute books, as well as with anyone else who might chance to walk through the door. The minutes are basically one long small-font testimonial to governmental minutiae that in all likelihood no other human being has ever read all the way through, and I alternate my bleary-eyed review with random surveys of my surroundings, which steadfastly refuse to produce anything of interest. I search, at regular intervals, for something remotely inviting to the eye, my gaze repeatedly landing on the