Talk Talk

by T. C. Boyle

  Friday night. She and Bridger were planning to go out for Thai and then to a movie he’d worked on, some kung fu extravaganza with actors flying around like Peter Pan on invisible wires. She’d been looking forward to it all through her long crazy work week, final papers coming in from her students, endless conferences and department meetings and hardly a moment to focus on her own writing, bills piling up and no time to sit down and balance her checkbook let alone mollify the gas and electric and American Express and Visa, and on top of it all the ceaseless fulminating throb of that molar on the bottom left—and she wondered if anybody had gotten word to Dr. Stroud?

  But there was the toilet. Or the throne, as her mother used to call it. She couldn’t help musing over the expression (was that jailhouse jargon, was that where the trope had come from?), and then she realized that she had to use it, the piss-warm coffee converted to urine—to piss itself—and she looked to the adjoining cell and the empty hallway and to the big steel door. Did they have cameras here? Was some dirty jailer or infantile cop watching a monitor in a musty back office and waiting for the moment when she would lift her skirt and perch on the stainless-steel seat? The thought of it made her burn all over again. She wouldn’t give them the satisfaction—she’d rather reabsorb her own wastes, die of a burst bladder. She kept pacing round and round the throne, practicing thought control and comforting herself with the notion that she’d be out before she knew it, and then she’d use the ladies’ room in the courthouse like any other innocent.

  Time passed. How much, she couldn’t say. There were no windows here and they’d taken her watch from her and in her world there were no church towers marking off the quarter hour or birds calling down the close of day. For her, it was as quiet at rush hour as it was for the hearing in the dead of night—or no: quieter, quieter by far. They heard crickets, didn’t they? Ambient noise, the sound of the refrigerator starting up, the piping distant howl of a coyote on its prey, a car lost somewhere in the glutinous web of the night? They heard all that in books. They heard it on TV and in horror films. Loud noise, prompted the closed captioning. Sound of glass shattering. A scream. She didn’t hear it. She heard nothing. She lived in a world apart, her own world, a better world, and silence was her refuge and her hard immutable shell and she spoke to herself from deep in the unyielding core of it. That was her essence, her true self, the voice no one could detect even if they wore the highest-decibel hearing aids or cochlear implants or marched thunderously through the world of the hearing. That they couldn’t touch. Nobody could.

  At some point, she stopped pacing. She was tired suddenly, overburdened, and she eased herself down on the edge of the bunk. For a long while she just sat there, her back slumped, one foot jiggling as she slipped the heel of her shoe off and on, off and on. It was all too much. Here she was, caged up like an animal, and for what? For stupidity. Incompetence. Some paper-shuffler’s error. The thing that irritated her the most, more than the injustice and inanity of the whole business, more than Iverson and the cops and everybody else who supported this faltering twisted half-witted bureaucracy, was the waste of her time. Her student papers were in her car—which had no doubt been impounded at this point—and she’d have to skip dinner and the movie and any notion of spending the night at Bridger’s, because now she’d have to stay up half the night correcting them. Which she could be doing right now, right here, in her enforced solitude. And her book. She’d vowed to herself—and to Bridger too—that she’d stick with it, a page a day, until it was done. What a joke. She’d been behind all month—it was more like a paragraph a day, if she was lucky—and she’d been looking forward to making up for it over the weekend, tapping away at her laptop while Bridger slept in, a cup of chai to grease the wheels, the morning unfolding in a sure steady flow of inspiration and the promise of summer break on the horizon.

  Or now. What was wrong with now? Hadn’t Jean Genet written Our Lady of the Flowers in prison? On scraps of toilet paper, no less? She wanted to get up and rattle the bars like Cagney or Edward G. Robinson in one of those old movies she revered and Bridger hated, rattle the bars and holler till they came running with a ballpoint pen and a spiral notebook. It was almost funny. And it would be riotous in the telling, her own personal reality show: “Use a Car and Go to Jail.” Dr. Stroud would find it hilarious, wouldn’t he, with two hours of dead time on his hands? And her students. And the headmaster, Dr. Koch—wouldn’t he find it a scream, one of his teachers in the calaboose instead of the classroom?

  Lots of laughs, oh, yeah. But she had to pee. It was an imperative now, no mere feeling of congestion or malaise or a vague gnawing urge—if she didn’t use the toilet this very minute she was going to lose control, and how would Bridger feel taking her in his arms in front of all those cops and secretaries with a long dark stain trailing down the front of her skirt?

  Her back was to the door when it opened, but she turned immediately, just as if she’d heard the slap of the approaching footsteps, the chime of the keys and the ratcheting groan of the iron hinges. All her life she’d been attuned to the slightest changes in the currents of the air, to rhythms and vibrations, to the vaguest scent or the faintest fleeting rumor of a touch the hearing wouldn’t even begin to notice. She had to be, just to survive. And it was no parlor trick, as her hearing friends suspected, especially in grade school when her mother immersed her in the hearing world, mainstreamed her in a school where she was the only deaf child among eight hundred and more, the neighborhood kids creeping up the steps to her bedroom to stealthily push open the door and find her staring at them—no, it was elementary biology. When you were deprived of one sense, the neural pathways reconfigured themselves to boost the others, nature’s synesthesia, and how many times had she adduced Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder as examples?

  She looked up now to witness a moment of drama at the open door of the cell: two policewomen, blocky, clumsy, heavy in the breasts and buttocks, their faces bright with duress, were leaning into a third woman as if she were a stalled car they were pushing down the street. Hands flew like birds, shoulders stiffened, and the third woman—the prisoner—stood erect against her jailers, wedging her own right shoulder between the bars and jerking her wrists against the grip of the handcuffs. All three were shouting and cursing—the familiar lip-pop of “fuck you” running from mouth to mouth, as if it were contagious, like a yawn—and the policewomen were grunting with the effort to force the prisoner into the cell. Ugh, ugh, ugh—Dana had no idea what a grunt sounded like, but she saw it as it was written on the page and put it in their gasping mouths. The whole thing, the whole danse macabre with its kicks and flailings and ugly exploding violence, went on far longer than she would have imagined, a rocking back and forth, ground gained and lost, until finally the big-shouldered women prevailed and the prisoner was flung spinning into the cell. She took three reeling steps and then collided with the toilet and went down as if she’d been shot.

  Both of the policewomen worked their mouths in an angry tearing way while the shorter and stouter one twisted the key in the lock, and then they squared their shoulders and stamped angrily up the hall, where the bolted steel door swung open for them on cue. As for the woman on the floor, she didn’t move. She was stunned—or worse. Dana rose tentatively from the cot. Was there blood? No, no blood. What she was seeing was the woman’s hair, dark and matted, pooling under the cheek that was pressed to the floor.

  She didn’t know what to do. The woman needed help, obviously, but what if she was violent or drunk—or both? She was breathing, that much was evident from the rise and fall of her rib cage, and there didn’t seem to be any bruise or swelling where her head had struck the scuffed tile of the floor, or not that Dana could see from this angle. She wouldn’t have gone down so hard if the police had bothered to remove the handcuffs, but they hadn’t—it was a kind of punishment, Dana supposed, tit for tat—and so she’d hit the toilet in mid-stride and pitched headlong to the floor without bringing her hands into play. Dana
was bent over her now, trying to control her voice. “Are you all right?” she asked. “Do you need help? Should I call someone?”

  It was then that the smell hit her, a savage working odor of the streets, of festering clothes, body secretions, food gone rancid. The woman was wearing a pair of dirty maroon polyester pants that rode up her ankles, a plaid shirt six sizes too big for her and what looked to be men’s brogans, cheap and clunky and without laces. She wore no socks, the dirt clinging to her ankles like lichen on a rock. Dana laid a hand on her arm. “Hello?” she said. “Are you awake?”

  Suddenly the eyes flashed open, dark eyes, muddy, the color of knots in a pine board, and the lips curled round a snarl. She said something then, something hard and defensive—“Back off!,” yes, that was what it was—and attempted to sit up. It took her three tries, her legs sprawled out in front of her, her hands pinned at her back, and Dana said, “Do you need a hand?” and the woman just repeated herself: “I said, ‘Back off!’”

  Using her elbows for traction, she dug her way across the tile to the near bunk and braced herself against it. In a moment, she was standing, though shakily. She said something else then—“What do you think you’re looking at?”—though Dana couldn’t be sure because even the Einstein of lip-readers got no more than maybe thirty percent of what was said, despite what the hearing world might think, but what did they know? They knew movies, some waif-like actress pretending to be deaf and holding a conversation like anybody else while her huge imploring eyes consumed the screen in a parody of compassion and need. But it didn’t work that way. So many English sounds were monophonous—so many words formed identically on the lips—that it was impossible to tell them apart. Context, context was all. That and guesswork. Dana said nothing. She gave a weak smile and eased down on the opposite bunk, hoping that her body language would speak for her: I’m no threat; I just want to help.

  For a long while the woman just stared at her. There was a lump on her forehead, visible now just over her left eye, and the skin there was stretched and abraded. Dana held her eyes because there was nothing else she could do—if the woman were to speak to her again it was her only chance of comprehending and the last thing she wanted under the circumstances was for the woman to think she was ignoring her. Or dissing her, as they said. Dissing, from disrespecting.

  But now the woman was talking again, asking her for something—her eyebrows lifting with the interrogative. But what was it? Dana said, “I don’t understand.”

  “What, are you deaf or something?” the woman said, and Dana got every word of that because she’d seen the question a thousand times on a thousand pairs of lips. She tried to make her voice soft and non-threatening, though no matter how many sessions she had with the speech therapist it was always a gamble: “Yes,” she said.

  The look on the woman’s face, disbelief wedded to a flare of anger. She might have said, “Are you putting me on?” Or: “No shit—really?” Her lips moved, but she was clearly intoxicated—Drunk and Disorderly, wasn’t that the way they phrased it in the police reports?—and the faulty mechanics of her lips and tongue would have slurred the words in any case. But here came the interrogative again, tied this time to a gesture, a universal gesture—she worked her hands round to one side, held up two fingers in a V and dropped her head to purse her lips as if she were inhaling: Smoke, she was saying. You got a smoke?

  Dana shook her head, shook it with more emphasis than usual. And then, in case her fellow prisoner might misinterpret the gesture, might think she was holding out or maybe even dissing her, she said aloud, “Sorry, I don’t smoke.”

  As it turned out, the hours wore on and nobody came for her, not Bridger, not the booking officer or Iverson or a hired attorney inflated with outrage. Nobody came, nothing happened. The drunken woman—her name was Angela—made a number of long, lip-flapping speeches, little of which registered on Dana, and eventually the matron or warder or whoever she was came to the cell with a set of keys, said something to Angela and released her from the handcuffs. A short while later the woman returned with two brown paper bags and handed them through the bars. This was dinner—two slices of white bread encasing a thin sliver of bologna with a dab of ketchup painted like a bull’s-eye in the middle of it, spotted yellow apple, sugary fruit drink in a wax carton with malleable straw attached—and when she took the bag, when she held it in her hand and felt the palpable weight of it, Dana came close to breaking down. And she would have broken down if she’d been in private, but there was no privacy here, the warder standing right there with her null-and-void expression, and Angela, at the bars, taking the bag from the warder’s hand as if it were filled to the neck with human excrement.

  It wasn’t so much the contrast between bologna-on-white and pad thai or the ambience of the cell as opposed to the restaurant with its exotic smells and the fish tanks and scurrying waiters and all the rest, or even the absurdity of the situation, the wrongness, the waste, but the fact that if this was dinner it was the first marker of time she’d had since they’d led her in here and locked her up. If this was dinner, then it must be six o’clock, six at least, and nobody had come for her, not Bridger, not a lawyer, not her mother in New York who could have made phone calls, pulled strings, shaken the earth to its molten core in her deaf daughter’s behalf. There was nothing. Nothing but the walls and the bars and Angela, who, after an interval, curled up on the bunk opposite and absented herself in a deep drugged sleep.

  If she’d been impatient and angry, now she was scared, lonely, distracted. She wanted out, only that, and she found herself pacing again, round and round the confines of the cell, one foot in the trace of the other, like some neurotic animal in a zoo. Something had gone wrong. Bridger couldn’t get through to them. He couldn’t raise the bail money, couldn’t find a lawyer because all the lawyers in town had shut down their offices for the weekend. Worse: more charges kept coming in, this other Dana Halter, whoever she was, off on a regular crime spree. Tulare County. Where in God’s name was Tulare County, anyway? Couldn’t they see—couldn’t anybody see—that it didn’t have anything to do with her? She hugged her arms to herself and kept pacing. There was nothing else she could do.

  At some point—it might have been an hour later or even two: there was no way to know in this place—the door at the end of the corridor swung open and the taller of the two policewomen appeared, her right arm supporting the elbow of a blond woman who looked to be in her late thirties/early forties and who seemed to be having trouble standing upright. Down the corridor they came, the woman leaning heavily into her escort, and then the door to the cell stood briefly open, Angela rousing herself to fire off a few random curses before dropping her head to the cradle of her arms, and their number had grown to three. The door slammed shut with what must have been a boom—doors were always booming in books—and then the policewoman was gone and the blond woman stood there befuddled, as if she couldn’t quite make sense of the sequence of events, the arm at the elbow, the opening and shutting of the door, the turning of the key in the lock and the interposition of vertical cylinders of steel between her and the naked gray wall of the corridor.

  She looked round her in bewilderment, both hands clinging to the bars, before slowly subsiding to the floor. She was drunk, that much was evident, but as a drunk per se she was the antithesis of Angela. Her hair, which looked as if it had been washed, set and dried at the salon ten minutes earlier, was parted just to the right of center and fell glistening to her shoulders. She was wearing a matching navy blue skirt and jacket, very business-like, with a fresh white carnation pinned to the breast, a white silk blouse and sheer hose, but no shoes—they must have taken her heels away when they booked her. Dana was trying to decide whether she was a lawyer or maybe a real estate lady when the woman fixed her eyes on her and gave her a full, dazzling wide-lipped smile. “Hi,” she said. “My name’s Marcie, what’s yours?”

  Angela stirred herself, raised her head and said something in response. Dana watche
d her lips round and draw back in a grimace. “She’s deaf,” that was what it was.

  Dana ignored her. “I’m Dana,” she said.

  “Pleased to meet you,” Marcie said. And added something she didn’t catch.

  Angela said something then. “I’m telling you,” it looked like. “She’s deaf.” And then something else. And then, to Marcie, she made the sign for a smoke.

  Marcie was still grinning. “I’m drunk,” she said, ignoring Angela and staring into Dana’s eyes from where she sat on the floor with her knees tucked up under her. She moved her lips mechanically, enunciating as slowly and exactly as she could. “They made me walk the line and sing the alphabet. Isn’t that a riot?”

  Neither of them had anything to say to that. Even if Dana had interpreted her correctly, and there was no assurance of that, the rhetoric was questionable: they were in jail, all three of them, whether guilty or innocent, drunk or sober. And that was no riot—it wasn’t even funny.

  At the county jail—a bus had come for them in some dead hour of the night and they were made to line up, submit to leg restraints and handcuffs and shuffle aboard—the three of them were put into a larger cell already occupied by six sleep-deprived, angry-looking women in various stages of degradation and despair. Two of them had the faded blue outline of a scorpion tattooed on the right side of their throats, and one, a massive baby-faced teenager whose head had been shaved to stubble, looked as if she could break through the wall without working up a sweat. The other three—thin Asian girls wearing heavy makeup and all but lost in the orange prison jumpsuits—might have been prostitutes. They all might have been prostitutes for all Dana knew. And what difference did it make? She was one of them now, and if she had to sleep on the floor because a quick calculation showed nine people sharing six bunks, she would. She’d do whatever it took if only she could get through this, if only the nightmare would end.