Talk Talk

by T. C. Boyle

  “I mean, I can’t leave her there. In a cell. Would you want to be stuck in a cell?”

  Wrong question. “In my country,” Radko intoned, “people they are born in cells, they give birth in cells, they die in cells.”

  “Is that good?” Bridger threw back at him. “Is that why you came here?”

  But Radko just turned away from him, waving a hand in the air. “Pffft!” was all he had to add.

  “I’m going,” Bridger said, and he could see Plum leaning out of her carrel to savor the spectacle. “Just so you know—I don’t have any choice.”

  Heavily, one hand on the door of the refrigerator, the other describing a quick arc as he swung round to point an admonitory finger, Radko rumbled, “One hour. One hour max. Just so you know.”

  The officer at the desk—balding on top, sideburns gone white, milky exasperated eyes glancing up over the reading glasses riding the bridge of his nose—reassured the fat woman in soft, placatory tones, but the fat woman wasn’t there for reassurance; she was there for action. The more softly the policeman spoke, the more the woman’s voice seemed to rise, till finally he turned away from her and gestured across the room. A moment later, a much younger officer—a ramrod Latino in a uniform that looked custom-fit—beckoned to her from a swinging door that led into the offices proper. The man at the desk said: “This is Officer Torres. He’s going to help you. He’s our dog expert. Isn’t that right, Torres?”

  The second man took the cue, not a hint of amusement on his face. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “That’s right. I’m the dog man.”

  And then the man at the desk turned to Bridger. “Yes?” he said.

  Bridger shuffled his Nikes, focused on a spot just to the left of the cop’s head and said, “I’m here for Dana. Dana Halter?”

  Two hours later, he was still waiting. This was a Friday, a Friday afternoon now, and things seemed to be moving slowly, in a quiet retrograde tumble toward the weekend and the fomenting parade of drunks and brawlers who could go ahead and set the place on fire for all these putty-faced men and women cared, these desk-hounds and functionaries and sleepwalkers with the thousand-yard stares. They were going home at five o’clock to drink a beer and put their feet up and until then they were going to shuffle back and forth to the filing cabinets and peck at their computers in a zone where nobody, least of all Bridger, could reach them. He had managed to pry a few essential nuggets of information from the cop with the white sideburns—Yes, they’d brought her in; No, bail hadn’t been set yet; No, he couldn’t see her; No, he couldn’t talk to her—and after that he’d stationed himself on a bench by the doorway with nothing to read and nothing to do but wait.

  There were four other people waiting along with him: a very old man in a heavy suit who held himself so perfectly erect his jacket never made contact with the back of the bench; a Middle Eastern woman of indeterminate age, dressed in what might have been a caftan or a sacramental robe of some sort, and beside her, her ceaselessly leg-kicking son who looked to be five or so, but Bridger wasn’t much acquainted with kids and the more he observed this one the less certain he was about that estimate—actually, the kid could have been anywhere from three to twelve; and, seated farthest from him, a girl in her late teens/ early twenties who wasn’t particularly attractive in either face or figure, but who began to take on a certain allure after two hours of surreptitious study. Beyond that, probably a hundred people had scuffed in and out of the place, most of them conferring in quiet deferential tones with the cop at the desk and then bowing their way back out the door. The fat woman had long since returned to her barking zone.

  Bridger was profoundly bored. He had a difficult time sitting still under any circumstances, unless he was absorbed in a video game or letting his mind drift into the poisonous atmosphere of Drex III or some other digitized scenario, and he found himself fidgeting almost as much as the child (who had never ceased kicking his legs out and drawing them back again, as if the bench were an outsized swing and he was trying to lift them all up and away and out of this stupefying place). For long periods, Bridger stared into the middle distance, thinking nothing, thinking of bleakness and the void, and then, inevitably, his fears for Dana would materialize again, and he’d see her face, the sweet confusion of her mouth and the way she knitted her brows when she posed a question—What time is it? Where did you say the omelet pan was? How many jiggers of triple sec?—and his stomach would churn with anxiety. And hunger. Simple hunger. It occurred to him that he’d had neither the breakfast bagel nor the lunch—he’d had nothing but Starbucks, in fact—and he could feel the acidity creeping up his throat. What was wrong with these people? Couldn’t they answer a simple question? Process a form? Dispense some information in a timely fashion?

  He cautioned himself to stay calm, though that was difficult, given that he’d already called Radko six times and Radko had become increasingly impatient with each call in the sequence. “I’ll work till midnight,” Bridger promised, “I swear.” Radko’s voice, bottom-heavy and thick with the bludgeoning consonants of his transported English, came back at him in minor detonations of meaning: “You bedder,” he said. “You betcha. All through night, not just midnight.” But he was being selfish, he told himself. Imagine Dana, imagine what she was going through. He fought off the image of her locked up in a cell with half a dozen strangers, women who would mock her to her face, make demands, get physical with her. Dana would be all but helpless in that arena, the strange flat uninflected flutter of her voice that he found so compelling nothing but a provocation to them, angry women, hard women, needy women. It was all a mistake. It had to be.

  And then he was focusing on nothing, the cop at the desk, his fellow sufferers in Purgatory, the dreary walls and glowing floors all melding in a blur, and he was revisiting the first time he’d laid eyes on her, just over a year ago. It was at a club. He’d gone out after work with Deet-Deet, both of them frazzled, their eyes swollen and twitching as an aftereffect of fixating on their monitors from ten a.m. till past eight in the evening, the Visine they passed back and forth notwithstanding. First they’d gone for sushi and downed a couple of cold sakes each, and then, because they just had to unwind even though it was a Monday and the whole dreary week stretched out before them like a cinema-scape out of Dune, they decided to go clubbing and see what turned up. At the time, Deet-Deet had just broken up with his girlfriend and Bridger was unattached himself (going on three fruitless months), and so, especially after two sakes, this had seemed like a plan.

  They were waiting in line in front of Doge, ten-thirty at night, the mist coming in off the sea to insert itself in the alleys and make the pavement shine under the headlights of the slow-rolling traffic, when Deet-Deet interrupted his monologue about the faults and excesses of his ex long enough to light a cigarette and Bridger took the opportunity to lift his head and check out their prospects. This particular club was open to the street so that the pulse of the music and the jumpy erratic flash of the strobe leaked out onto the sidewalk where the prospective patrons could get a look in advance and decide whether it was worth the five-dollar cover charge. Bridger observed the usual mass of bodies swaying under the assault of the music (or of the bass, which was about all you could hear), limbs flung out and retracted, people decapitated by a slash of the strobe even as their heads were restored in the next instant, knees lifted, butts thumping, the same scenario that had played out the night before and would play out the next night and the night after that. His eyes throbbed. The sake sucked the moisture from his brain. He was about to tell Deet-Deet he was having second thoughts about the club, about any club, because he could feel a headache coming on and it was only Monday and they had to keep sight of the fact that they were required to be in by ten to paint out the wires on the interminable martial arts movie they’d been working on for the past three weeks, when he spotted Dana.

  She was poised at the edge of the dance floor, right up against one of the big standing speakers, lifting and dropping he
r feet—her bare feet—to the pulse of the bass and working her elbows as if she were doing aerobics or climbing the StairMaster. Or maybe, somewhere in her mind, she was square dancing, do-si-do and swing your partner. Her eyes were closed tight. Her knees jerked and her feet rose and fell. The red filter caught her hair and set it afire.

  “So what do you think, anything worthwhile?” Deet-Deet was saying. Deet-Deet was five foot four and a half inches tall, he was twenty-five years old and he affected the Goth style, despite the fact that most of the SFX world had long since moved on to a modified geek/Indie look. His real name was Ian Fleischer, but at Digital Dynasty people went by their online aliases only, whether they liked it or not. Bridger himself was known as “Sharper” because when he’d first started as a dust-buster, when he was earnest and committed and excited about the work they were doing, he was always hounding the Scan-Record people for sharper plates to clean. “Because I don’t know if I want to stay out too late,” Deet-Deet added, by way of elucidation, “and that sake, I think, is really starting to hit me. What do you mix with that, anyway—beer? Beer, I guess, right? Stick to beer?”

  Bridger wasn’t listening. He was letting the lights trigger something inside him, allowing the music to seep in and transfigure his mood. The line moved forward—maybe ten people between him and the bouncer—and he moved with it. He had a new angle now—a new perspective from which to study this girl, this woman, heroically fighting her way against the music at the edge of the dance floor. Up came her knees, down went her fists, out swung her elbows. Her movements weren’t jerky or spastic or out of sync with the beat—or not exactly. It was as if she were attuned to some deeper rhythm, a counter-rhythm, some hidden matrix beneath the surface of the music that no one else—not the dancers, the DJ or the musicians who’d laid down the tracks—was aware of. It fascinated him. She fascinated him.

  “Sharper? You with me?” Deet-Deet was gaping up at him like a child lost at the fair. “I was saying, I don’t know if I—you see anything worthwhile in there?” He raised himself up on his toes to get a better look. The music collapsed suddenly and then reassembled around the bass line of the next tune. “Her? Is that what you’re looking at?”

  They were almost at the door, twenty-five or thirty people gathered behind them, the mist shining on everything now, on the streetlights, the palms, people’s hair.

  Deet-Deet tried one last time: “You want to go in? Think it’s worth the five bucks tonight?”

  It took him a moment, because he was distracted—or no, he was mesmerized. He’d been involved in two major relationships in his life, one in college and the one—with Melissa—that had died off three months ago with the sound of a tree falling in the woods when no one’s there to hear it. Something tugged at him, the irresistible force, an intuition that sparked across the eroded pan of his consciousness like the flash of the strobe. “Oh, yeah,” he said, “I’m going in.”

  Now, as he pulled himself up out of the haze of recollection to see that the woman with the child had vaporized and the cop with the white sideburns had been replaced by a female with drooping, possibly sympathetic eyes, he got to his feet. What time was it? Past four. Radko would have a fit. He’d had a fit. He was having a fit now. Bridger had missed an entire afternoon at work just when the team needed him most—and what had he accomplished aside from having a nice nap at the public’s expense on a choice buttock-smoothed bench in the downtown San Roque Police Station? Nothing. Nothing at all. Dana was still locked up back there someplace and he was still here, clueless. He felt the irritation rise in him, a sudden spike of anger he could barely contain, and in order to calm himself he strode over to a display of pamphlets—How to Protect Yourself on the Street; How to Burglar-Proof Your Home; Identity Theft: What Is It?—and made a pretense of absorbing the sage information dispensed there. He gave it a moment, then casually turned to the desk.

  “Hello,” he said, and the woman lifted her eyes from the form she was filling out. “My name’s Bridger Martin and I’ve been waiting here since just past eleven—in the morning—and I was just wondering if you could maybe help me…”

  She said nothing, because why bother? He was a petitioner, a special pleader, a creature of wants and needs and demands, no different from the thousands of others who’d stood here before him, and he would get to the point in his own way and in his own time, she knew that. The prospect seemed to bore her. The counter and the computers and the walls and the floors and the lights bored her too—Bridger bored her. Her fellow officers. Her shoes, her uniform: everything was a bore and a trial, ritualized, clichéd, without beginning or end. Her eyes told him that, and they weren’t nearly as sympathetic as he’d thought, not up close, anyway. And her lips—her lips were tightly constricted, as if she were fighting some facial tic.

  “It’s my—my girlfriend. She’s been arrested and we don’t really know why. I took the whole afternoon off from work just to come down here and”—this was movie dialogue and the phrase stuck to the roof of his mouth—“bail her out, but nobody knows what the bail is or even what the charges are?” He made a question of it, a plea.

  She surprised him. Her lips softened. The humanity—the fellow-feeling and sympathy—came back into her eyes. She was going to help. She was going to help, after all. “Name?” she queried.

  “Dana,” he said. “Dana Halter, H-a-l-t-e-r.”

  She was hitting the keys even as he superfluously spelled out the name and he watched her face as she studied the screen. She was pretty for a middle-aged woman, or almost pretty, now that the vise of her mouth had come unclamped. But he wanted to be charitable, wanted to be helped, babied, led by the hand—she was beautiful, wielder of the sword of justice, radiant with truth. At least for the few seconds it took to bring up the information. Then she lost her animation and became less than pretty all over again. Her eyes were hard suddenly, her mouth small and bitter. “We don’t know what we’ve got here,” she said tersely, “—the charges are still coming in. And because of the Nevada thing, it looks like the Feds are going to be interested.”

  “Nevada thing?”

  “Interstate. Passing bad checks.”

  “Bad checks?” he echoed in disbelief. “She never—” he began, and then caught himself. “Listen,” he said, “help me out here: what does it mean, because it’s obviously all a mistake, mistaken identity or something explicable like that. I just want to know when I can get her out on bail? And where do I go?”

  The faintest flicker of amusement lifted the corners of her mouth. “She’s got no-bail holds in at least two counties because she walked in the past, which means I don’t see anything happening till Monday—”

  “Monday?” he echoed, and it was almost a yelp, he couldn’t help himself.

  A beat. Two. Then her lips were moving again: “At the earliest.”

  Three

  THEY PUT HER IN A CELL that had been freshly scoured by some unseen presence, the caged lights glaring down from above, a residuum of drying mop strokes fanning out from the stainless-steel toilet set like a display model in the center of the room. The smell of the disinfectant, a chemical burn lingering on the clamped close air of the place, made her eyes water, and for the first few minutes she tried to breathe through her mouth only, but that just seemed to make it worse. She backed up against the gray cement wall with its hieroglyphs of furtive graffiti and rubbed at her eyes—and these were not tears, definitely not tears, because she wasn’t intimidated and she wasn’t scared or sorrowful in the least. She was—what was the word she wanted?—frustrated, that was all. Maddened. Outraged. Why wouldn’t anyone listen to her? She could have written a deposition for them if somebody had thought to hand her a pen and a sheet of paper. And the interpreter, Iverson—he was all but useless, because in his eyes she was guilty until proven innocent, and that was wrong, just plain wrong. She needed somebody sympathetic. She needed a lawyer. An advocate. She needed Bridger.

  He was here now—she could feel it. In thi
s very building, in the front office with all those vacant policemen and hard-edged secretaries, straightening things out. He’d explain it all to them, he’d talk for her, do whatever it took to get her out—go to the bank, the bail bondsman, harangue the judge and the district attorney and anybody else whose ear he could bend. If he could just show them their mistake—it was some other Dana Halter they wanted; you’d have to be blind not to see that—they’d understand and come and release her. Any minute now. Any minute now the warder would shove through the heavy steel door at the end of the hallway and unlock the cell and lead her back into the light of day and they’d all bend over backward apologizing to her, the cop at the desk, the arresting officer, Iverson, with his punctilious mouth and accusatory eyes and his unforgivably sloppy signing…

  In her agitation—in her fury and sickness at heart—she found that she was pacing round and round the toilet, which was the single amenity in that strictly and minimally functional space aside from the two bunks bolted to the walls, and she wasn’t ready to sit down yet. She spoke to herself, told herself to calm down, and maybe she moved her lips, maybe she was speaking aloud, maybe she was. Not that it mattered. There was no one there to hear her, Friday morning an unlikely time to be arrested and locked away. The real criminals were in bed still, and the rest of them—the wife beaters, binge drinkers, motorcycle freaks—were at work, warming up for Friday night. TGIF. She remembered how in college she treasured Friday night above all, as the one time she could get really loose, looser than Saturday because Saturday gave onto Sunday and Sunday was diminished by the prospect of Monday and the whole round of classes and papers and tests starting up all over again. She would go out with her girlfriends on Fridays, drink a few beers, a shot of Cuervo, dance till the pulse of the music branched up from the soles of her feet and radiated through her body so she almost felt she could hear it just like anybody else. The release was what she craved, just that, because she’d had to work so hard to overcome her disability—and she still worked harder than anybody she knew, driving herself with an internal whip that kept all her childhood wounds open and grieving in the flesh, alive to the mockery of her classmates at school, the onus of being branded slow, one of the deaf and dumb. Dumb. They called her dumb when she was the equal of anybody in the hearing world, anybody out there beyond these walls. They were the idiots. The cops. The judges. The interpreters.