Bills

Midday traffic on Caltrain having dwindled to a nothingness, I see my chance and take it.  The disabled seat is empty.  Not the space for wheelchairs, but the actual seat that asks occupants to surrender it.  Not to a foreign power, and one must note that World War I ended in a railway carriage, but to a cripple.  Or as the sign puts it 'persons with disabilities.'  I rarely have the chutzpah to demand separate spaces for both my wheelchair and my tush, but the train is empty, so what the hell.  A formidable rain is falling, the economy is falling and I am now falling into an empty seat, perching my leg on the opposite wall.  That's the thing about this seat.  It faces a wall, or a bulkhead in airline parlance.  Keeping the right foot elevated is among my life ambitions, and with the rain and the decline of all things, the rails and I head south.

I have been to see my accountant.  He has given me a bill.  No, it is not a bill, but it feels like a bill, and that is one of my essential and structural flaws of character.  Things are only how they feel.  Unless I think terribly hard and wrench my consciousness toward reality.  No, Bill, my accountant's appropriate name, has not given a bill, but the IRS will, unless I preempt them with a $32,000 check on 15 April.  Why, Bill wants to know, did Marlou put the money in the trust?  I stare at him dazedly.  My eyes glaze over at such times, matters of financial instruments and accounts and taxation first confusing me, then putting me to sleep faster than a fairytale potion.  So we dissect this matter.  What is the problem, I ask?

The money should have stayed in Ohio, Bill says.  In a sense, I agree with him.  The 401(k) money would have had a warm summer of corn stands and fireflies, a harvest autumn and a bracing winter.  Instead, it took up residence in the Schwab offices down the street from me, here in our region of colorless climate.  The question is why.  My response is why not?  What I really say is that I got a check payable to Marlou's trust and deposited it there.  And there it has stayed, sheltered from the rain but not, of course, the tax man.  

Bill wants to know what she was thinking.  I tell him the truth, that she was lying in a bed, our bed, secondary brain tumors spreading in her brain like mushrooms after a storm.  And at least someone, our friend Laurel, I think, remembered this State of California retirement account, run by some company in Cleveland.  Which under the circumstances, and the circumstances were dire, seems to have been as much as anyone could manage.  I spare no oncological detail in my account of these matters, because I want to get Bill off my back.  Which happens quite nicely.  Now he wants to know the cost basis of certain transactions in Marlou's retirement savings.  I want to know what a cost basis is.  He tells me, and I feel reasonably pleased, although the financial lingo seems unnecessary.  Not to worry, I will get him his cost basis.

The trackside Peninsula slips by, rain streaking the windows, clouds hanging dark.  Bay Meadows was once a racetrack, a vast greenery all in an oval, muddy horse path around it, with covered bleachers and bars and a restaurant or two, and now it is in a fascinating state of post-apocalypse.  The place is being demolished for something more commercially viable and, doubtless, less aesthetically pleasing.  An enormous pile of timber and beams sits in the former place of the grandstand.  Across the way, a temporary lake has formed in a depression.  Odd how the train is so empty.  But things, including racetracks, change....  Startled awake...I was dozing...a dream fragment lingers with underworld fright.  Marlou has died.  That was the dream.  Nothing more.  But stark and savage as a child's primal fear.  Marlou has died.  As though I didn't know.  And perhaps I didn't on some level.

A newfound anger is assailing me with the approach of Marlou's yahrzeit, her death's anniversary.  It is hard for me to feel this, yet it is a clarifying experience.  It puts things in their proper perspective.  The weeks leading to her death so disoriented me that they truly felt like months, the days and nights in a rolling state of crisis.  And, yes, on some soul-saving level they angered me.  My life already had enough challenges.  I had every right to shake a fist at the heavens, scream and kick the shit out of something nonsentient.  But at the time I didn't.  Now, the anger has a liberating quality.  It's like crawling out from a collapsed building.  It demonstrates that you have a right to be somewhere other than beneath heaps of rubble.

As for this fragment of a dream, being startled by Marlou's death, what does this mean?  That as Jung concluded, the human soul cannot conceive of its own death...and by inference, the death of someone close?  This mystery only deepens as it clarifies.  There's more to come, but at least things are changing.