The man sits alone in a room, on the fourteenth floor of a gray building. The man’s suit, his hair, the sky through the window, and the rows of figures sliding across the abacus of his mind—these too are gray, though each gray is of a different value. Against the wall stand rows of files containing data from the fifty-odd years of solitary room-sitting. The man drinks cola. He reads the paper. Every so often the phone rings and the man answers. Usually the answer is “no.” Long ago the man concluded that such quietude was optimal for making…