"I don't know."
"Approximately. Plus or minus ten thousand dollars."
"I don't know."
"Richard! Come on! Plus or minus fifty thousand, a hundred thousand dollars?"
"Honest, Leslie, I really truly don't know!"
She put the pencil down, looked at me as though I were some biology sample brought in from arctic mud. "Within a million dollars," she said, very slowly and clearly. "If you earned less than a million dollars last year, say, 'Less than a million dollars.' If you earned more than a million dollars, say, 'More than a million dollars.'" Patiently, as though talking to a stupid child.
"Maybe more than a million," I said, "but maybe less and maybe two."
Her patience snapped. "Richard! Please! This isn't a game! Can't you see I'm trying to help?"
"CAN'T YOU SEE I DON'T KNOW? I DON'T HAVE THE FAINTEST IDEA HOW MUCH MONEY I EARNED, I DON'T CARE HOW MUCH MONEY I EARNED! I HAVE ... I HAD PEOPLE I TRUSTED TO KNOW ALL THAT STUFF, I HATE KEEPING TRACK OF IT, / DON'T KNOW HOW!" It sounded like a scene from a script. "I don't know."
She touched the eraser to the corner of her mouth, looked at me, and after a long silence, she said, "You really don't know, do you?"
"No." I felt sullen, misunderstood and alone.
"I believe you," she said gently. "How can you not know within a million dollars?"
She saw my face and waved her hand to take back what she had said. "OK, OK! You don't know."
I pawed through boxes for a while, hating it. Papers, look
at all these papers. Numbers in unknown handwritings, from different typewriters, yet they were supposed to have something to do with me. Investments, commodities, brokers, taxes, bank accounts . . . "Here's taxes!" I said. "A whole folder of taxes!"
"Good boy!" she said, as though I were a cocker spaniel dug up a lost bracelet.
"Bark," I said. She didn't reply, scanning the titles of the returns, checking the entries there,
It was quiet while she read, and I yawned without opening my mouth, a trick I had learned in high school English. Hating paperwork so, was this to be required learning for me now, more deadly than grammar? Why? I hadn't ignored the paperwork, I had hired people to do it! After hiring them and paying them, why is it me stirring this mess, looking for tax-forms; why is it Leslie catching the load dropped by six high-paid employees? It's not fair!
When somebody writes a best-seller or sings a glorious song or acts a lovely film, they should be issued a heavy grey manual, along with their checks and fanmail and bushels of money:
INTRODUCTION AND WARNING
Congratulations for doing whatever you did to earn all this cash. Although it seems to be yours and you think it ought to be yours for giving whatever gift you gave to society, only about one-tenth of it might actually wind up under your control IF YOU ARE SKILLED IN PAPERWORK.
The rest goes to agents and taxes and accountants and lawyers and staff and governments and guilds and employees that you are going to have to hire to keep
track of all this and to pay the employment taxes for the employees. It doesn't matter that you don't know where to hire the people to do this, that you don't know whom to trust or that you don't know all the bodies that you have to pay; you have to pay them, anyway.
Please begin on Page One and read straight through to page 923, memorizing every line. Then you can go out and have a deductible dinner if you take a business-person with you, talk business, keep the receipt and write who joined you for the meal. If you don't do that you have actually spent twice the amount you thought you did when you paid it.
Hereafter, live your life in strict accord with the rules herein, and we your government might allow you to exist a little longer. Otherwise, abandon hope all ye who enter here.
Not even a pamphlet. Every person who writes a song to enchant us is presumed a competent accountant, record-keeper, guardian of credits and debits payable to invisible agencies of city and state and nation. If one or two of those persons are not suited to these tasks or not blessed with an orderly mind that understands careful record-keeping, their star in the firmament is netted and stuffed into a jail cell. There they must turn their full talent to learning the ways of cells, to mastering this boresome stuff no matter how it tastes like cardboard; they must spend years in stifled darkness before their star may shine again if there is a spark of it left.
Such energy wasted! What other films, what other books, what other songs go unsung while those hours and months
and years pour down plush rat-hole offices of attorneys and accountants and advisers and counselors and consultants paid in desperation for help?
Calm, Richard. You are peeking at your future. If you choose to stay in this country, careful attention to money and its records will be a choke-chain at your neck. Lunge against it, fight it and you will strangle. Just take it nice and easy, walk along slow, agree with every bureau and agent you meet, smile sweetly ... do that and you will be allowed to breathe without being hanged dead on that chain.
But my freedom! I lunged. Aaak! Wheeze. Yike, that is a ferocious collar!