The letter claimed I had claimed a massive deduction on a fictitious line of the tax form. I say fiction because there isno line 18d on the legendary Form 1040, where 17, 18, 19 etc. have nos subsections. So we pay a price for the facility and economics of the age of automation. Millions of returns are optically scanned,then processed by giant mainframes. A little genie lurks in them and sometimes extorts a forfeit from the unsuspecting,which we pay. I addressed the machine in the first person: we admire you I said, but I must tell mother on you. Will it say what a killerin prison, Larry Davis, once said to me : bring your uncles, he said. Deolali the town entered the Cockney dialect as Doolally. Their men in uniform were offered a sanctuary in a 'home'there, when the heat and dust of our plains induced the melancholy. Larry was murdered in the yard. I missed him.
