"You didn't answer my question," she said. "Don't bother. No matter what you say, I know how you'd feel. We'd have to live very carefully, save every cent and hope we could buy them back."
The loss of the book rights haunted us both, like putting our children up for auction to the highest bidder. Yet lost they would be, and auction there would be, if I filed for bankruptcy.
"If I file, the government gets thirty or forty cents for every dollar I owed it, when it could have been paid in full. The BLM trying to push through outlaw timber sales, failing at it, that cost the government another fortune. If this is happening to us, wookie, if we're just seeing our little part of it, how many millions are they wasting everywhere else? How can government be so successful at doing so much so wrong?"
"I've wondered that too," she said, "for a long time I've thought about that. I finally came up with the only possible answer."
"What's that?"
"Practice," she said. "Tireless, unrelenting practice."
We flew to Los Angeles, met with attorneys and accountants in a last-ditch attempt at settlement.
"I'm sorry," said John Marquart, "we can't get past their computer. There's not a human being we can reach to answer letters, return a phone call. The computer sends forms. Not long ago, we got a notice that a new agent has the case, a Ms. Faumpire. She's the twelfth. Want to bet she's going to ask for a financial statement?''
So clear, I thought. They are forcing me into bankruptcy. Still, I'm sure there's no such thing as injustice; I know lifetimes are for our learning and entertainment. We bring our problems to us to test our powers on them ... if I didn't have these problems, there would have been others equally challenging. Nobody gets through school without tests. But tests often have unexpected answers, and once in a while an extreme answer is the only right choice there is.
One of the consultants frowned. "I worked for IRS in Washington when the law you want to use, when the bill about discharging Federal tax debts in bankruptcy came up for a vote in Congress," he said. "IRS hated that bill, and when it passed into law we swore that if anybody tried to use it, we'd make them sorry!"
"But if it's the law," Leslie said, "how can they keep people from using ..."
He shook his head. "I'm giving you fair warning. Law or no law, the IRS is going to be after you; they're going to harass you every chance they get."
"But they want me to go bankrupt," I said, "so there's no blame for any of them!"
"That's probably true."
I looked at Leslie, at the strain showing in her face. "To hell with the IRS," I said.
She nodded. "Four wasted years is enough. Let's get our lives back."
To the bankruptcy attorney we brought lists of everything I owned: house, truck and trailer, bank accounts, computer, clothes, car-copyrights to every book I had written. I would lose them all.
The attorney read the list in silence, then said, "The court will not be interested in how many socks he has, Leslie."
"My bankruptcy book said to list everything," she said.
"It didn't mean list socks," he said.
Strung in limbo by the turgid Cyclops of the IRS on one hand, attacked on the other by the saw-swinging Bureau of Land Management, we had fought one monster or both-at-once for four years, nonstop.
No stories, no books, no screenplays, no films, no television, no acting, no production-nothing of the lives we'd lived before battle-with-government became our full-time occupation.
Through it all, through the most stressful difficult times either of us had known, the oddest thing ... we kept growing happier than ever with each other.
Having survived the test of the trailer, we had lived easily together in the little house we had built on the hill. Not once were we separated for more than the time it took to drive to town for groceries.
I knew she knew, but I found myself telling her more and
more that I loved her. We walked arm in arm like sweethearts along town sidewalks, hand and hand in the forest. Would I have believed, years before, that I'd be unhappy to walk with her without touching?
It was as if our marriage were working in reverse-instead of becoming cooler and more distant, we were growing closer and warmer.
"You promised ennui," she'd pout, from time to time.
"Where's my loss-of-respect?" I demanded.