Chapter 1: Bad News from a Son of Abraham

These troubles of mine began nearly two years ago to this day, when Aaron, the young Sephardic Jew who I then retained to watch over my accounts, came to my apartments with the mission of informing me that I must severely decrease my expenditures. He came bearing one his big black ledger-books, which he proceeded to set down with no small amount of dramatic flourish upon my writing desk. Squinting beneath the rim of his tiny spectacles, he commenced to support his audacious pronouncement by exhibiting the same sort of arcane numerology that got his people evicted from Spain so many centuries before.

When at long last he concluded his labyrinthine exposition, I felt as though I might swoon.

“From where on this God’s earth did you acquire all these pernicious figures, Aaron?” I asked him, thoroughly discombobulated by his equations. “All these numbers, these awful calculations. ‘Tis Satan’s vocation, to be sure.”

“It’s accounting, Mr. Dyer. Pure mathematics. Addition, subtraction, multiplication. It’s not Kabala.”

“Well, I just don’t buy it. Why, just this past April you tell me that I have a goodly amount of “liquidity”. And now you have the gall to inform me that there is nothing left?”

“Not nothing, Mr. Dyer. But if you continue on your current course, there will be nothing soon enough, you could be sure.”

“But I was liquid, Aaron! You said liquid was good!”

“I said that liquid was dangerous. Liquid leaks. Liquid evaporates. You are consuming too much of it, Mr. Dyer! You have to slow down. You need to solidify your assets. Buy property. Acquire stocks. You are spending every last penny you have.”

To his credit, Aaron argued with me until I was nearly convinced, but I continued to affect the look of a man who takes such admonitions with a grain of salt. It was not the first time, after all, that the young Jew had darkened my doorway with his grim counsels; not the first time to be sure that he tried to shake my resolve to continue my frivolous habits despite the cold-edged and irrefutable blade of hard numbers that he swung at me with all the vigor he could muster.

I dismissed the young Jew with as much Gentile incredulity as I could summon, and when he slammed shut the pages of his huge ledger book it was like the wind had blown closed the door of my tomb.