The Dancing Bookkeeper

She taps her feet in harmonious rhythms as she taps the keys. Numbers swirl about her. She’s happy to produce figurative symbols in neat columns and rhythmic intervals.They are so much more manageable than the matters they stand for. The dancing bookkeeper remains oblivious to what her numbers represent—it’s music that swirls about her, and digital scratchings that appear on the screen before her like runic invocations.
She prefers illusion to reality but knows how important it is to keep count. Numbers behave and can be changed to suit circumstance—something she knows nothing about but sustains in memory for the potential of last refuge. She is given only digits to place in existing columns and the task of tallying them. Lately numbers have surged. She’s not intimidated by the growing numbers; she’s fascinated. She has only to expand the width of column and elaborate her tapping, both finger and foot.
She conducts a grand symphony of percussion.

Below her, in a ground-floor apartment, a young man moves to her rhythm—when he’s not jacked into his own network of data. He dresses, undresses, showers and performs personal activities to the cadence of her tapping, unaware of this synchronicity. She too is unaware of the percussive nature of their connection.
Occasionally each of them make their way into an unrhythmic outside world. For a long time, they do this separately as even the most synonymous tempo is not always precisely coordinated.
One day the dancing bookkeeper returns home just as the young man is leaving. As their paths cross, they recognize accord. By some mysterious internal mechanism that neither can explain, they are drawn into each other’s context. The result is new improvisation, periodic adaptation and adjustment.
The dancing bookkeeper circles the young man, she leaps and flexes.
He is transfixed.