He leaned back, stretching his cramped arms. Often he found his fingers heavy and dead as they roamed over the keyboard, the pins and needles painful as he rubbed his circulation back into life. He closed his eyes, thinking of the time not so long ago when all a man had to do was fill in some simple numbers in worn ledgers to know everything they needed to know about their enterprises: how much spent, how much earned or lost, the profit. While the bottom line wasn’t that much different today, the ways one got there were labyrinthine, cut up into arcane specializations that were being sliced ever finer: amortization, standard engagement revenue, transaction tax. He himself was involved in the audit division and focused on liabilities.

It was actually a bit depressing focusing on loans, unpaid utility bills, bank overdrafts, mortgages, expense accounts—each one a negative. He often thought he’d be happier in assets, or even equity. If his lifeblood and the hours of his day were to be sacrificed on the altar of such work, he wanted to feel himself at least part of a successful enterprise.

But this way, he knew so very little about each client. He hardly ever got to meet one of them in the flesh, these niceties being handled by gentiles in impeccable Brooks Brothers suits and handpicked silk ties. Often, he missed the humanity that would have turned the numbers in the ledger into a comprehensible human drama. Were all these hotel bills, for example, strictly necessary, or a cover-up for something nefarious? And the loans that had been taken out, were they a wise choice, harbingers of progress and expansion, or frivolous measures boding ruination? He would probably never know.

As low man on the totem pole, he was tasked with the unfolding of crumpled receipts that needed to be put in order. Measuring his worth as he did according to other criteria altogether, he didn’t actually mind that. This was, after all, simply a job for which he was being paid. But the boredom! The lack of intellectual stimulation and challenge! It was doing to his once fine mind what the keyboard was doing to his fingers. Often, to his embarrassment and chagrin, he found himself dozing off. He had taken to playing games with himself to keep alert, making up stories to explain the receipts and expenditures, some of them quite risqué. More often, he went on automatic, allowing himself to use the time to think about his family, his problems, his hopes and dreams, and especially his fears.