The Numbers Game

Jim Palonko never asked for a spirit guide, never wanted those little balls of words pinging against his eardrum like some jazz improvisation. He never knew what was coming next, which note would rumble and shake the very chair where he sat hunched over a computer in his gray cubicle. Like that spirit guide was boss. Like Jim would do what he was told even though the swooshing in his ears hurt deep down where he could not itch. He could not add the columns of figures in front of him. Yet, he knew his real boss was waiting for the number, the total of all. That final number.

Don't think Jim Palonko did not know numbers. He did. They had been drummed into him at Walsh College where he went when his father paid for him to be an accountant, which he did not want to be. Unlike his father, Jim Palonko did not believe in the power of money or of CPAs. He did not know what he believed in back then, but it wasn't numbers.

Still, Jim became a numbers man stuck in a cubicle adding figures for 20 years. All those years, music flowed through his headphones to drown out the calculators rat-a-tat sound, the click of computer keys. Today, Jim knew what he wanted. He longed for a breath of country air, one well-used rowboat and a lake full of bass waiting to open their mouths as one of his 15 hand-tied flies skipped across the surface of the water. He longed for his spirit guide to develop laryngitis, to ride a trail of vapor to some cloud far away.

Jim would fix his spirit guide who set up house in his ear last year. He had a plan. He powered up his cassette player, turned it up full volume to Muddy Rivers. So loud the other voice was silenced. Then he lowered the volume, decibel by decibel, until there was almost silence when he removed his earphones, set them on his chair and walked away.

When Jim looked back, there was another pale man in a gray suit who materialized in his chair. This man had shape, hummed a few bars of those pinging words that used to roll around in his ear like seven zeros.