The end of the fiscal year loomed like high cliffs, and Ernie Kong’s desk in accounting was swamped with red flags and double flags and blood-colored urgencies stamped two or three times on each page and sometimes a whole separate cover sheet had been added to contain all the stickers and stamps. But there was only so much one accountant could do in a day even if that day lasted all night.
Paper piled like a wall studded with towers, and perforated vines of tractor feed paper swung from the unsteady sides. Extra-long sheets spanned from stack to stack like swaying rope bridges with columns of tiny black figures marching across. And no matter how many paper-chains bound Ernie Kong, no matter how mountainous his piles or how deep the deep valleys between them had grown, Denham from upstairs — raging wide-eyed and wild in the boardroom, pitching mad scheme upon scheme guaranteed to cost money that someone would have to account for — kept sending more paper, more piles, more marching figures and funds on the charge like an army demanding his accountant’s eye, capturing all Kong’s attention for Denham’s own dreams. Sometimes he called upstairs to demand that enough was enough, there was no more room in his office or time in his day, but he was so frustrated by impotent fury that he only managed to grunt or to growl into Denham’s voicemail and his complaints were never addressed.
Ernie Kong fell adrift in a sea of white sheets, suspended between the known fiscal year and the next, approaching whether he liked it or not and already ahead like a shadowy skyline of risk and reward Denham was towing him to. The Promised Land, perhaps, or the shoals of pecuniary peril and ruin — who knew what the financial future might hold, so why charge into it before the past had been tallied and checked?
He suffered his bonds, returning again and again to his inbox for fresh offerings of paper like a Pavlovian primate. He endured until the morning Denham deigned to parade downstairs with a raiding party of partners and potential investors, wandering into accounting on a tour of the building. He told his audience of shiny-shoed women and gentlemen in high-end suits “Look over here, folks, not to be missed. Here’s Kong in accounting making all of us rich.”
With an entirely unaccountable roar Ernie Kong the accountant rose from the tiny clear space by his desk, breaking the links of his paper chains, spilling sheets left, right, and center, toppling towers, pile driving piles, rending reports and separating coversheets from their documents maybe forever.
“Good God, man! What are you doing?” howled Denham as his guests shrieked and ran back to the elevators at the far end of the hall.
Ernie Kong climbed onto the lowest of his filing cabinets, then up to the next and the next and so on until he perched on the tallest and most overstuffed, swinging his legs so they knocked a whole year’s worth of records into unsortable chaos below.
“Kong!” Denham bellowed, then said something else that was lost in his red-faced blustering rage. From the hallway a bang and a clatter was followed by three members of the building’s security squadron charging into the room, pepper spray and cell phones drawn and ready to take down the rampaging accountant.
Up on the filing cabinet, above shouting supervisors and washed-out rent-a-cops, Ernie Kong dreamed of an island without paper or pens, calculators or software or audits, an island without even accountants save one, save himself. An island with nothing to count but coconuts dropping in their own good time and enough grains of sand to last him forever, sand he could count until finished instead of rushing from one year’s tabulation to the next before he was ready. He could count fish that leapt into his nets or he might let them leap without counting at all, living out all the rest of his days in the shade where the jungle edged onto the beach, watching the water for unwelcome ships and hiding deep in the brush when they came.
Then the guards charged and though he felled one with a wingtip to double-chin kick, the other two grabbed his arms and pulled him down from his perch, crashing him into the paper ocean below with a rustling splash then holding him under to make sure he drowned. Denham snarled, “Clean this up, Kong, and get back to work. The company can’t stop for you.” And the big man from upstairs, the almighty director, stormed off with his guards at his heels.
Ernie Kong closed his eyes and dreamt a return to his island, but all he saw in the dark of his memory were the white plains of his office so far from the real sea, paper devouring each surface and space, mapping all the next weeks and months of his life onto another man’s quests for small savings and forgotten funds, nothing to wait for or look forward to but the next offering of gleaming white sheets to arrive.
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