“Well, what is it?” I said.
His thin shoulders sagged and when he finally spoke, his voice contributed to the general impression of a small, furry animal in a trap. “You are bankrupt,” he squeaked.
My accountant was a limp rag of a man with a lined, ashen face and a bald head spotted with a few patches of nondescript hair. The color of his eyes was an odd mixture, neither grey nor brown, and he never met your gaze, but looked down at your feet or to one side. He wore a grey suit with a vest that had specially made pockets to contain his pharmaceutical supplies, including not only pill boxes and bottles, but his own spoon and a collapsible cup.
Although he was very neat, he bit his fingernails to the quick. Still, I found his hands fascinating when he added up columns of figures. His figure 8’s and his 7’s had a special quality about them, a precision bordering upon elegance.
He came into the store once a month, went over my bookkeeping, prepared the necessary forms for my signature, and left. Sometimes he would linger for just a few minutes looking at titles on the bookshelves. Then he would turn, shrug his shoulders, and depart.
When he looked up and informed me tragically, “You are bankrupt,” the words were utterly meaningless to me. “Wait until I finish,” I said, waving him aside, “then we’ll talk.” His distress was pitiful, yet I couldn’t help laughing.
Talk we did. He showed me the stack of unpaid statements, then my bank balance, then the cost of my inventory. There was no doubt about it: I was bankrupt. Those pretty 8’s and magnetic 7’s proved it. The ledger sheets with the long red and blue lines and the numbers so small and so beautifully shaped within the spaces spoke the awful truth. But somehow this truth meant nothing to me, except strangely to remind me of a story told by my father about a man who lost a leg but ran on as though he still possessed two.
I looked at my accountant in silence. He sat next to me, his squeaky voice now still, his red-rimmed eyes peering at me and at the evidence lying before us on the desk, along with a neat pile of Kleenex sheets, a spoon, and a bottle of pink medicine. My accountant’s adam’s apple began moving silently in his throat and as I observed this, I placed my man as a literary character with whom I was well familiar, the awful little man in The Magic Mountain who mashed all his food together, bent his head over it, and shoveled and pushed the mess into his mouth. Again I began to laugh helplessly, and my accountant kept saying, “Not funny, not funny, remember—you are bankrupt.”
“What do you suggest?” I finally asked.
“There is not much to suggest,” he said. “The books show bankruptcy. File for bankruptcy and call it a day.”