Bright Existence

Toll Collector

Toll Collector On the way to therapy or to play across the water I have to pass the toll collector; she always has her hand out by the time I get there, a gray-brown palm with thick lines which are dull olive-green, like the money. I seem to get her booth so often that I know her (in the sense of 'at first sight') though I've only seen the upper half of the uniformed body. She faces two kinds of ugliness all day: ugliness which moves and that which doesn't: the still white tablets and tubes of the oil company, thinning this century's black blood, oil that passes her in one shape or another, either smooth from the smokestacks or as amber viscosity, lunging in the trucks. And behind her back, two kinds of beauty, beauty that moves and that which doesn't: the fish-scale surface of the water and the beaten-cgg-yolk yellow of San Quentin. So much of everything passes her: valuable campers, trucks of toxins on their way to the destruction of the earth, and lovers pass her . . . I've passed her with mine, chatting, looked across his arm as he hands her the dollar, but mostly I'm alone in my metal box holding a hand out to her in hers— she takes the bill with a slight snap and when I yell Thanks! (that spattered exclamation point at the end) or Hi! (with its expectant i hooked downward, as if she were supposed to grab onto the end of it and feel something for me) she looks at me blankly, 39 starts unwrinkling the bill at the corners though the bill isn't too wrinkled, she only pretends it's wrinkled, the kind of gesture one might make to kill time what a friend might do if she wanted you to stay longer while the water boils so she could tell you of the new, secretjoy or some special need she has that you could not possibly meet. . . In the texts I've read of those who stand guard at the many entrances of the many worlds lest the migrating souls go by with too much weight—it's their job to make sure the journey goes easily, the debt assumed by heaven is not too great and I see sometimes that her face absorbs whatever trouble is least known to me, and I am no longer apart from her— she thinks I have given what I owed, that now I owe her nothing, and she has started to gesture forward to the wet, starry haze of the bridge where a whole line of cars is disappearing as I must disappear, and the one after me— 40 ...