Talk Talk

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  His cell began to vibrate and he surreptitiously slipped it from his pocket and leaned deep into his cubicle to screen it from anyone—i.e., Radko—who might be passing by on the way to the refrigerator or restroom. Dana had a tendency to text messages that went on for paragraphs, but this time she was terse: Koch is a real A-hole! I’m quitting. I swear.

  He punched in a response: Do you want to talk?

  Nothing to talk about. I’m going home.

  Don’t. You only have four more days.

  Nothing. He held the phone a moment as if it were totemic, as if it could project meaning apart from any human agency, and then she retransmitted the original message: Koch is a real A-hole!

  All else aside, this was a proposition he couldn’t deny. He’d met the man four or five times now, at one grindingly dull school function or another (which Dana was required to attend on pain of forfeiture of administrative patience and goodwill), and he was as stiff and formal and unsympathetic as one of the helmeted palace guards on Drex III. And the way he condescended to the deaf teachers—and to the students too—you would have thought his special talent was for humiliation rather than education. Still, he was the man in charge and it wasn’t as if she had a whole lot of options: the San Roque School was the only show in town—in fact, it was the only school for the deaf on the Central Coast, as far as he knew. He phoned her back, but there was no answer.

  He called every fifteen minutes after that, but she wouldn’t pick up, and he took a moment to peer out of his cubicle and determine Radko’s whereabouts before e-mailing her as well (Don’t do anything rash, was the message he left on cell and PC alike). As the morning wore on, though, he couldn’t seem to recover his concentration, the mouse moving so slowly it might have been made of kryptonite, the frame before him frozen in an instant that wasn’t appreciably different from the instant that had preceded it, the whole movie turning to sludge before his eyes. All he could think about was what would happen to her if she lost her job. At the very least she’d have to move God knew where to find another one—there was a deaf school in Berkeley, he was pretty sure, but the others might have been anyplace, Texas, North Dakota, Alabama. The thought of it—Alabama—made his stomach skip, and he dialed her yet again.

  When Radko left at three-thirty to drive down to L.A. for “a meeding,” Bridger slipped out too. Despite his assurances to the contrary, he had no intention of working straight through, not today—he had to drive Dana to the impound yard to retrieve her car and then sit down with the victims’ assistance people and start the process of reclaiming her life, because there was no guarantee she wouldn’t be arrested again, not until they caught this jerk who’d stolen her identity. When he pulled into the parking lot at the school, she was sitting on the front steps waiting for him, and that was a relief, though he never really believed she’d just walk out on her classes, no matter what degree of ass-holery the headmaster attained. That wouldn’t be like Dana. She never gave up on anything.

  She was having an animated discussion in Sign with one of her students, a weasel-faced kid of seventeen or so who seemed to have given an inordinate degree of thought to his hairstyle (bi-colored, heavy on the gel, naked skin round the ears and too far up the nape), and she looked like her old self as she rose to her feet, gathered up her things and slid into the car. But then her eyes went cold and the first thing she said wasn’t “How was your day?” or “I love you” or even “Thanks for picking me up,” but “I’m really at the end of my rope.”

  He lifted his eyebrows in what he hoped was an inquisitive look, though he wasn’t much good at pantomime.

  “With Koch, I mean.”

  “Why?” he asked, careful to exaggerate the movement of his lips. “What happened?”

  The car—a ’96 Chevy pickup he’d bought used when he was in college and had been meaning to service ever since—stuttered, died and caught again. “Never mind,” she said. “It would take me a week to explain.” The weasel-faced kid gave them a tragic look, a look that ratified what Bridger had already surmised—that he was burning up with the delirium of love and would walk through fire for his teacher, as soon as he could eliminate the competition, that is. She gave the kid a farewell wave and turned back to him: “Just drive. I’ve got to get my car back—I mean, I’m helpless without it. And the papers”—she did a characteristic thing then, a Dana thing, a sort of hyperactive writhing from the waist as if the seat were on fire and she couldn’t escape it—“oh, Jesus, the papers.”

  At the impound yard—CASH OR CREDIT CARD ONLY ABSOLUTELY NO CHECKS—they waited in line for twenty minutes while the people ahead of them put on a demonstration of the limits and varieties of hominid rage. The office, to which they were guided by a series of insistent arrows painted on the outer wall, was made of concrete block and had the feel of a bunker, dark and diminished and utterly impregnable. Immediately on entering they were confronted with a wall of bullet-proof Plexiglas, behind which sat a skinny sallow grim-faced cashier with hair dyed the color of engine oil. She might have been forty, forty-five—an age, at any rate, beyond which there is neither hope nor even the pretense of it—and she wore a blue work shirt with some sort of badge affixed to the shoulder. Her job was to accept payment through a courtesy slit and then, at her leisure, stamp a form to release the vehicle in question. From early morning till closing time at six, people spoke to her—cursed, raved, foamed at her—through a scuffed metal grille. There were no cars in sight. The cars were out back somewhere, secreted behind a ten-foot-high concrete-and-stucco wall surmounted with concertina wire.

  The couple who were stalled at the window when they arrived inquired as to whether the woman on the other side of the Plexiglas would take a personal check and the woman didn’t bother with a reply, merely raising a lifeless finger to point to the NO CHECKS sign nearest her. There was some further negotiation—Could she accept the major part of the amount on a credit card and the rest in a check?—followed by a second objectification of the finger, after which there was a rumble of uncontained threats (a mention of lawsuits, the mayor, the governor himself) before the couple swung round, murder stamped across their brows, and slammed out the door, vehicleless. Next in line was a man so tall—six-six or more—that he had to bend nearly double and lean into the counter in order to speak through the grille. He was calm at first—or at least he made an effort to suppress the rage and consternation in his voice—but when the cashier handed him the bill for towing and two days’ storage, he lost it. “What is this?” he demanded. “What the fuck is this?”

  The woman fastened on him with two dead eyes. She never moved, never flinched, even when he began to pound at the Plexiglas with both fists. When he was done, when he’d exhausted himself, she said only, “Cash or charge?”

  Dana had observed all this, of course, though she was spared the details, the whole business a kind of mute Punch and Judy show to her, Bridger supposed, but when it was her turn she stepped forward, slid the impound notice and her driver’s license through the courtesy slit and waited for the woman to return her keys. But the woman didn’t return the keys. Instead she pushed an invoice through the slit and said, “That’ll be four hundred eighty-seven dollars, towing fee plus four days’ storage. Cash or charge?”

  “But you don’t understand,” Dana said, her voice like an electric drill, “I’m innocent. It’s all a mistake. It was somebody else they wanted, not me. Look”—and she held up the affidavit, pressed it to the glass. “You see? This exonerates me.”

  Bridger couldn’t be sure, but it seemed as if the smallest flare of interest awakened in the cashier’s eyes. There was something unusual here, something out of the ordinary, and for a moment he almost thought she was going to act on it, but no such luck. “Cash or charge?” she repeated.

  “Listen,” he said, stepping forward, though Dana hated for him to interfere, as if his acting as interpreter somehow exposed or diminished her. She didn’t need an interpreter, she always insisted—she’d got on
just fine all her life without him or anyone else conducting her business for her. Dana gave him a savage look, but he couldn’t help himself. “You don’t get it,” he said. “I mean, ma’am, if you would only listen a minute—they got the wrong person, is all, she didn’t do anything…You saw the affidavit.”

  The cashier leaned forward now. “Four hundred eighty-seven dollars,” she repeated, enunciating slowly and carefully so there would be no mistake. “You pay or you walk.”

  Next it was the victims’ assistance office in the back annex of the police station. They were fifteen minutes late for their appointment with the counselor because even after Bridger convinced Dana to go ahead and pay the impound fee and put in a claim with the police later on, there was a delay of over an hour before the car was released, and no one—not a clairvoyant or a president’s astrologer or even the public defender—could have said why. As a result, Dana was pretty well worked up by the time they stepped through the door—mad at the world, at the headmaster, the torturer’s assistant in the impound office and Bridger too, for daring to speak up for her—and things went badly, at least at first. To give her credit, the woman behind the desk (middle-aged, creases under the eyes, every mother’s face) was a living shrine to patience. Her name, displayed on a plaque in the center of the desk, was Mrs. Helen Bart Hoffmeir—“Call me Helen,” she murmured, though neither of them could bring themselves to do it. She let Dana vent for a while, offering sympathy at what seemed the appropriate junctures, but of course the soothing soft gurgle of her voice was lost on Dana.

  At some point—Dana was clonic with anger; she wouldn’t take a seat; she wouldn’t be mollified—the woman extracted a three-tiered box of fancy chocolates from the filing cabinet behind her and set it out on the desk. “Would you like a cup of chamomile tea?” she asked, lifting the top from the box and looking from Dana to Bridger with a doting smile. “It helps,” she added. “Very soothing, you know?”

  So they had chocolates and tea and Dana calmed down enough to take a seat and attune herself to what the counselor had to say. They made small talk for a few minutes while they sipped tea and worked their jaws around nougat and caramel and cherry centers, and then the woman looked to Dana. “You do read lips, then, dear? Or would you be more comfortable with an interpreter? Or your husband—?”

  “My boyfriend.”

  “Of course, yes. Does he—can he translate?”

  “Sure,” Bridger said. “I can try. I took a course last semester in adult ed, but I’m pretty clumsy with it—” He gave a laugh and the woman took it up. Briefly. Very briefly. Because suddenly she was all business.

  “Now, Dana,” she said, spreading open the file before her, “as you’ve already no doubt gathered, you’ve been the victim of identity theft.” She removed four faxes from the file and pushed them across the table. The mug shot of the same man gazed out at them from all four, and Bridger felt a jolt of anger. Here he was, a white male who looked to be thirty or so, with a short slick hipster’s haircut and dagger sideburns, his eyes steady and smug even there in that diminished moment in the Tulare County Sheriff’s Department, in Marin, L.A., Reno, here he was, the shithead who’d put Dana in jail. “Unfortunately,” the counselor was saying, a little wince of regret decorating the corners of her mouth, “the onus is on you to defend yourself.”

  “Is that him?” Bridger said. His voice was hard, so hard it nearly choked him getting it out. All his life he’d cruised along, high school, college, film school, Digital Dynasty, living a video existence, easy in everything and never happier than when he was sunk into the couch with a DVD or spooned into a plush seat in the theater with the opening credits rolling—Melissa used to call him a video mole, and it was no compliment—but in that moment he felt something come up in him he’d never felt before, because now everything was different, now the film had slipped off the reel and the couch was overturned. It was hate, that was what it was. It was rage. And it was focused and incendiary: So this was the son of a bitch.

  The woman nodded. A pair of reading glasses dangled from a cord round her throat and she lifted them now to her face and peered down at the photos. “We don’t know his real name and he could have been arrested under any number of aliases in the past—”

  Dana spoke up suddenly. “What about fingerprints?”

  “We haven’t run a fingerprint trace. They haven’t, I mean. It’s because”—here she paused, looking to Bridger to carry her past the sad truth of the moment—“well, I’m sorry to say that a crime like this, a victimless crime, just doesn’t merit the resources…”

  Bridger’s hands were traumatized. He had to fingerspell most of it—“victimless” took him forever—but Dana picked right up on it. “Victimless?” she said. “What about me? My job? My students? What about the four hundred and eighty-seven dollars—who’s going to pay that?”

  Who indeed?

  The explanation was circuitous, dodging away from the issue and coming back to it again, and it took a while to unfold. First of all, Dana was a victim, of course she was, but she had to understand just how much violent crime there was in the state of California—in the country as a whole—and how limited law enforcement resources were. There were rapists out there, murderers, serial killers. Sadists. Child molesters. But this in no way diminished what had happened to her and there was a growing awareness of the problem (the counselor—what was her name?—dispensed clichés like confections, like tea, because they were soothing) and there were a number of steps Dana could take to restore her good name and maybe even bring the criminal to justice. At this point, the woman drew a pad and pencil from the top drawer of her desk. “Now,” she said, “do you have any idea who this man is or how he might have got hold of your base identifiers?”

  Dana hesitated a moment till Bridger had laboriously spelled out “base identifiers,” a term neither of them had previously come across. “No,” she said, shaking her head emphatically. “I’ve never seen him before.”

  “Have you lost your purse or had it stolen anytime in the past few months?”

  She read this on the woman’s lips and shook her head again.

  “What about your mailbox—is it secure? Locked, I mean?”

  It was, yes. The mailboxes at her apartment complex were located in a special alcove, and everybody had a key to his or her own box.

  “What about at work? Do you receive mail at the”—here the woman brought the glasses back into play and glanced down a moment at the sheet before her—“the San Roque School for the Deaf?”

  Dana did. And no, the mailboxes there were in the main office and anyone could have access to them. But Dana hadn’t missed anything—her pay stubs were there every two weeks on schedule and there had been no interruption of her mail at home, or not that she knew of, anyway.

  The woman looked to Bridger a moment. He’d been so rigidly focused on what she’d been saying and the effort to communicate it to Dana that he’d forgotten where he was. Now he saw that it was getting late, past six anyway, the venetian blinds pregnant with color, thin fingers of sunlight marking the wall like the vestiges of a thief. He thought of Radko. He thought of Drex III. He’d have to go back after dinner, he was thinking, and that thought—of dinner—made his stomach churn in an anticipatory way. When was the last time he’d eaten?

  “You see, the reason I ask,” the woman went on, holding Bridger’s eyes a moment before shifting back to Dana, just to be sure he was with them so that none of this—her spiel, her words, her professional empathy—would be wasted, “is because the vast majority of identity fraud cases come from a lost or stolen wallet or misappropriated mail. In fact, one of the thieves’ favorite modus operandi is to get your name and address—out of the phone book, off your business card—and put in a change of address request with the post office. Then they get your mail sent to a drop box in Mailboxes R Us or some such, and there’s all your financial information, credit card bills, bank statements, paychecks and what have you.”

&nb
sp; She paused to see what effect she was having. The fingers of light crept higher up the wall. On her face was a look of transport or maybe of triumph—she knew the ropes and she was in no danger and never would be. “Then all they have to do is make up a driver’s license in your name, order new checks, replacement Visa cards, and voilà—you’re out an average of something like five thousand dollars nationwide.”

  Bridger was thinking about his own mailbox, just a slot with his apartment number under it, and how many times had the cretins at the U.S. Postal Service stuffed it with his neighbors’ mail by mistake? Or what about the time he wound up with half a dozen mutual fund statements addressed to a woman on the other side of town who had only a street address—196 Berton instead of 196 Manzanita—and a zip code in common with him? What if he’d been a crook? What then?

  Dana broke into his reverie. She was getting impatient. She wanted action. That was Dana: cut to the chase, no time to spare. “Yeah,” she said, her voice even hollower and more startling than usual, “but what do I do now, that’s what we want to know.”

  The woman looked flustered a moment—this was a departure from the orthodoxy, from the ritual that soothed and absolved—but she recovered herself. “Well, you’ll want to file a police report right away and you’ll need to include that in any correspondence with creditors, and the credit reporting agencies should be notified if there are any irregularities. Your credit reports. You should order copies and check them over carefully—your Visa and MasterCard and what-have-you as well. But we’ll get to all that. What I want you to know, what I want to tell you, is how these things happen—so you’ll be prepared next time around.” The look of rapture again. She arched her back and gazed into Dana’s eyes. “An ounce of prevention, right?”

  She held them there for half an hour more, and by the end of it Bridger began to wonder exactly what she was trying to convey. Or even how she felt about it. Her eyes seemed to flare and she became increasingly animated as she trotted out one horror story after another: the woman who had her rental application swiped from the desk in her landlord’s office and wound up with some thirty thousand dollars in charges for elaborate meals and services in a hotel in a city she’d never been to, as well as the lease on a new Cadillac, the purchase price and registry of two standard poodles and $4,500 for liposuction; the twelve-year-old whose mother’s boyfriend assumed his identity till the kid turned sixteen and was arrested when he applied for a driver’s license for crimes the boyfriend had committed; the retiree whose mail mysteriously stopped coming and who eventually discovered that thieves had not only filed a change of address but requested his credit reports from the three credit reporting agencies so that they could drain his retirement account, cash his social security checks and even appropriate the 200,000 frequent flier miles he’d accumulated. And it got worse: deprived of income, the old man in question—a disabled Korean War veteran—wound up being evicted from his apartment for non-payment of rent and was reduced to living on the street and foraging from Dumpsters.