Electricity was not, unfortunately, the only system requiring attention that day. While Don occupied himself with the comparatively straightforward problem of persuading electrons to travel where intended, I had undertaken the more difficult business of persuading the State of California that I wished to answer a lawsuit.
This desire, which might appear sufficiently communicated by the act of answering it, cost approximately five hundred dollars.
Courts, like electricity, possess an elaborate system of rules intended to produce predictable results. The resemblance deteriorates upon examination. Electricity is indifferent but scrupulously consistent. It does not care whether one understands it, approves of it, can afford it, or has recently undergone a series of personal reverses which render its requirements inconvenient. Connect two points of unequal potential and current will flow between them. No fee is demanded. No declaration of indigence need be submitted. The electron does not require proof of service.
The law is more particular.
My landlord had sued to recover possession of the house, and the machinery by which this might be accomplished was already in motion. There was nothing remarkable in that. I owed rent. They wanted their property back. Whatever disagreements might exist concerning the details, neither side was laboring under much confusion as to the general condition of affairs.
I did, however, wish to answer.
This is a term of art. In ordinary conversation, an answer is what one gives when somebody has asked a question. In litigation, an Answer is a document by which a defendant informs the court, in the prescribed manner and upon the prescribed form, that matters may be somewhat more complicated than the plaintiff has suggested. It must be completed correctly, filed correctly, served correctly, and accomplished within a period of time sufficiently short to discourage any defendant inclined toward leisurely reflection.
It must also be paid for.
There is something almost admirable in charging a person several hundred dollars for the privilege of defending an action whose object is to establish that she cannot afford her house.
I had reached that peculiar stage of poverty at which money had ceased to represent money. Five hundred dollars was no longer an abstraction appearing upon a bank statement. It was fuel. It was food. It was Yang’s medicine. It was a trailer payment. It was some considerable distance down a highway upon which I would shortly depend for the distinction between being homeless in a cargo trailer and merely being homeless.
The court, naturally, had anticipated the possibility that a person being evicted might not possess five hundred dollars with which to announce her objection to being evicted.
There was a form for that.
American bureaucracy has an almost touching faith in forms. There are forms by which one asserts a right, forms by which one denies an allegation, forms by which one proves that another form was delivered to the proper person, and, when the price of filing these forms exceeds one’s resources, forms by which one may formally explain that one is poor.
Poverty itself is insufficient. It must be properly documented.
This seems unreasonable only until one considers the administrative difficulties which would arise if the poor were permitted to know they were poor without official confirmation.
I therefore found myself in the curious position of having to conserve the remaining resources necessary to leave my home while simultaneously expending those resources upon the process by which the State would determine how quickly I must do so.
None of this was the court clerk’s fault. Nor was it the landlord’s responsibility to finance my defense against the landlord. Institutions are particularly good at producing absurdities for which no individual participant need be personally absurd. Everyone may perform his assigned function with perfect reasonableness and nevertheless produce, at the far end of the machine, a woman contemplating whether access to justice should cost approximately the same amount as several weeks of groceries.
There are phrases such as equal protection and access to justice which acquire a different texture when encountered by someone with enough money to require the protection but not enough to purchase convenient access to it.
I had spent much of my adult life on the other side of such inconveniences. Five hundred dollars had once been irritating. Irritation is one of the many luxuries purchased by having enough money. One complains about a fee precisely because one can afford to pay it.
Poverty introduces arithmetic.
Every expenditure acquires competitors.
The filing fee was not five hundred dollars. It was five hundred dollars instead of something else.
And everything else had recently become important.
There were other procedural niceties. Papers filed with the court must also reach the opposing side, and the person whose name appears beneath the word DEFENDANT is not, merely by possessing both an envelope and a stamp, necessarily permitted to perform every part of this ceremony herself. There were attachments to prepare, copies to make, deadlines to calculate and proof to obtain that the proper papers had traveled through the proper hands toward the proper destination.
I had spent a career designing systems and had therefore developed an unreasonable prejudice in favor of processes which become simpler when their objective is simple.
The judicial system had not consulted me.
Somewhere beneath my bed, Don was installing a four-hundred-ampere fuse.
This was a device whose entire purpose could be stated in one sentence: if conditions became sufficiently wrong, it would destroy itself so that something more valuable might survive.
I regarded this as unusually lucid public policy.
The form upon my screen was less accommodating.
There were boxes to check.
I checked them.
There were allegations to deny.
I denied them.
There were explanations to attach.
I attached them.
The printer produced its pages with that maddening composure peculiar to machinery which has no appreciation whatever of the significance of what it is printing. Somewhere outside, tools moved against plywood. Don swore at something. The air conditioner labored against September. Yang slept through the proceedings, having reached an age at which human administrative emergencies had presumably become repetitive.
Piece by piece, the Answer accumulated upon my desk.
Piece by piece, the electrical system accumulated beneath my bed.
Both were intended to preserve something.
I had considerably greater confidence in the fuse.