Talk Talk

by T. C. Boyle

  She was so wound up she almost forgot Bridger. But there he was, rushing toward her in the hallway as she stepped through the door with Marie Eustace, Iverson and her freshly issued affidavit, his face bleeding sympathy and love. She let him hold her, though she was embarrassed by her odor and furious with him—why hadn’t he done anything? He was saying something, saying it uselessly—she could feel his breath at her ear as he squeezed her to him—and then she pushed away from him and signed, How could you leave me in there?

  His signing was clumsy, nearly illiterate—he’d taken a course in ASL just for her, but his hands were like sledgehammers, bludgeoning the language. I tried.

  Well you didn’t try hard enough.

  That was when a cop in a brown shirt—the bailiff—intervened. He, Iverson and Marie Eustace conferred for a moment, and then Marie turned to give her a look of consternation. She let her eyes roll and stamped her foot. “What?” Dana said. “What is it now?”

  “You’re not going to believe this,” she said, and she looked to Iverson to interpret, her eyes skittering apologetically between them, “but, well, I’m afraid you’re going to have to go back to County to get processed out.”

  Dana shook her head. Violently. Jerked it back and forth, and they could read that, couldn’t they? “No,” she said, and she felt her voice go loud, the force of it constricting her larynx till it felt like a hard compressed ball in her throat, and she turned her back on the lawyer and the cop and signed furiously to Iverson: I am innocent and here’s the document to prove it and I will not go back there, never, and don’t you or anyone else try to make me.

  Iverson, with the face of a bad actor and his hands that stalled and stuttered, translated for the lawyer and Dana refused to look at her, though Marie Eustace was speaking to her, though she put a hand on her arm till Dana shook it off. She looked to Iverson alone. There’s no way around it, he signed. It’s the law, guilty or innocent. They brought you here on the bus and they have to take you back on the bus. You need to change out of those clothes and get your own things back, there’s paperwork—

  No, she signed, no. I won’t go. In a fury, she let her hands go silent and began to tear at the jumpsuit, to tear it from her, and she shouted aloud so they could all hear her, the cop and Bridger and the judge in her chambers, “Just take the shitty thing and I’ll walk out of here naked, I don’t care, I don’t care—”

  Ultimately, she did care—she was made to care. The bailiff stepped forward and informed her that she was still in custody and that he would have to use the restraints if necessary. Marie Eustace’s face was livid. She blew air in the direction of the bailiff and Iverson signed his threats and Bridger just took hold of Dana, as if to shield her with his body. She’d never been so enraged in her life—the absurdity of it, like something out of Kafka, or worse, out of some police state, Cuba, North Korea, Liberia—but what calmed her, what took all the fight out of her in an instant, was the sight of the bailiff’s hand on Bridger’s wrist. She couldn’t make out what they were saying, their lips gyrating, faces red, but she understood in an instant that Bridger himself was a heartbeat away from being arrested for interfering with the duties of an officer of the law or some such nonsense. “It’s okay,” she said aloud, “it’s okay,” and the officer took her by the elbow and escorted her down the hallway, through a pair of heavy doors, and then back to the cell itself, back to Angela and Beatrice Flowers and all the rest.

  It was nearly midnight by the time they finally released her from the county jail in Thompsonville, seventeen miles from San Roque, and Bridger was there waiting for her in a crowded over-lit anteroom. For a long moment she just held him. She hadn’t wanted to cry, but the minute she saw him there, the minute it was over, she couldn’t hold back. Then they were moving toward the door and she broke away from him and lunged through it to stand there on the steps feeling the air on her face—salt and faintly fishy, refrigerated by the sea, clean air, the first clean air she’d taken into her lungs since Friday morning. Bridger came up behind her and put an arm round her shoulders, but she pushed him away. She was angry suddenly, angry all over again. “Can you even imagine what it was like in there?” she demanded. “Can you?”

  All the way home, all the way to her shower and her bed and the door that locked people out instead of in, he tried to explain himself, but she was getting very little of it because his hands were on the wheel and his mouth was venting like any other hearing person’s and that made her more unforgiving still. Finally, her hair in a towel and the beer he’d got her and the sandwich he’d made her set out on the coffee table, he led her to the computer and pecked furiously at the keys, typing out a whole long unfolding apologia that could have been the epilogue of a Russian novel, and she saw what he’d done and how hard he’d tried and that it wasn’t him but the system that was to blame—or no, the thief, the thief was to blame, and for the first time the image of that face, that dark blur on a slick sheet affixed above her own name, came careening into her mind, a man, a man no less—and after a while she leaned into him, wrapped her arms round him and began to forgive.

  In the morning, Bridger drove her to work. She hadn’t got much sleep, her dreams poisoned and antithetical, and every time she woke she had to catch her breath, thinking she was back there again, under the lights, on the hard floor of the cell. As it was, she was twenty minutes late, and if it weren’t for Bridger she might have been later still—she’d trained herself to respond to the flash of the alarm clock, but she’d never been so exhausted in her life and would have slept right through it if he hadn’t been there to wake her. The first thing she’d done on getting out of the shower the night before, even before she chugged the beer cold from the bottle and devoured the sandwich and half a thirty-two-ounce bag of potato chips, and cookies, a whole bag of cookies, was to e-mail Dr. Koch. The e-mail ran to three pages. She gave him a blow-by-blow account from the moment she was pulled over for running the stop sign to her release in Thompsonville some eighty-three hours later, because she knew she could communicate better on the page than in person, or more fully at any rate, and she had to make her case—Koch was a brooding, tough, sour little man who thought of himself in inflated terms and brooked no nonsense, and he was as demanding with the deaf teachers as with the hearing. Maybe more so. She needed his understanding, that was what she said in conclusion, and she promised to come to him before her first class and bring the affidavit with her too. But there was the problem: she was twenty minutes late and her class started without her—and Dr. Koch was there in the classroom, covering for her, and she’d never seen him look sourer.

  He rose from her desk the minute she stepped through the door—he’d had the students reading in their texts while he put his head down and made his way through a pile of paperwork his secretary had handed him as he fled the office—and he gave her a look that needed no translation. The students were seniors, and this was a college-prep course, one of her best classes. There were twelve of them, each with his or her own nascent gift to take out into the hearing world, and she knew their secrets and their strengths and their failings too. Sorry I’m late, she signed, flinging her purse and briefcase on the desk. She was out of breath. Her color was high. She pinched her shoulders in apology: I overslept.

  Koch gave her nothing. He was already at the door, a stripe of sun fallen across the first row of desks as if to slice the room in two. Every one of her twelve students sat riveted, watchful and tense, and Robby Rodriguez, always emotional, looked as if he were about to collapse under the weight of his private agony. For a long moment Koch just stood there, his hand on the latch. Then he signed abruptly that he’d see her in his office during the lunch hour, jerked the door open and stalked out of the room.

  Like most deaf schools, San Roque was residential, the student body drawn from all over the country, though the majority came from the West Coast. It was run along the lines of a college campus rather than the standard high school (which to Dana’s mind wasn’t
much better than a reformatory in any case), and when the students weren’t in class or attending speech therapy, they were free to do as they pleased—within limits, of course. On Tuesdays and Thursdays Dana met with three classes, one in the morning, two in the afternoon, and in the interval she held office hours, ran errands or stole the odd hour to work on her book. She had a secret hope for this book, an ambition that drove her to obsess over its smallest details, to make it right, to communicate in a way that might have been second nature to the hearing but which for her at least was as new and intoxicating as love itself—not erotic love, but agape, a flowing unstoppable love for all creation. Just to think of it, to think of what she’d accomplished so far and the hazy uncharted territory to come, gave her a secret rush of fulfillment and pride. She wouldn’t talk about it, not with anyone except Bridger. It was too close, too personal. Even the title—Wild Child—was like an incantation, a way of summoning a spirit and a voice she’d never before been aware of, and at the oddest times she’d find herself chanting it, deep inside, over and over.

  As soon as she dismissed the morning class (she gave the group a shorthand version of what had happened to her—and to their final papers, which she vowed to have back the next day without fail), she went straight to Koch’s office to explain herself. His secretary signed that he was in conference and she signed back that she would wait, taking a chair in the corner of the main office and flipping through the underscored pages of her classroom anthology in an effort to calm herself, but she remained far from calm. Her tooth was bothering her, for one thing—the distant throb had been replaced now with a sharp intermittent pain that seemed to accelerate along with the racing of her pulse—and sitting there in the bright molded plastic chair with her elbows tucked in while the rest of the world went about its business was like being back in the jail cell all over again.

  When Dr. Koch did finally see her—at noon, precisely—he was brusque and impersonal, as if she were just another delinquent student. She hadn’t expected sympathy, not from him, but courtesy was the one thing she demanded—of anybody, especially the hearing. She’d spent too much of her life trying to communicate with people who turned hostile the minute she opened her mouth to put up with anything less. Look at me, she demanded. Just look at me. And listen. That was her social contract, and if people didn’t like it she was ready to turn her back on them. No exceptions. Not anymore.

  He was seated at his desk when she stepped in the door, and he waved a hand to indicate the hard oaken supplicant’s chair at the foot of it. She gave him a neutral smile as she slipped into the chair, the affidavit tucked under one arm in a stained manila folder she’d dug out of her filing cabinet in the rush to get to work in the morning. “Good afternoon,” she said aloud, but he didn’t answer. He was bent over the desk, impressing his precise infinitesimal signature on the diplomas the school would give out at commencement Saturday morning, shifting them from one pile to another, and every time it seemed as if he were about to pause and look up, he reached for another and then another.

  The office was pretty much standard issue: a tumult of books and papers everywhere, various certificates and framed photos of graduates leaching out of the walls, the multicolored pennants of colleges the school’s students had gone on to—USC, Yale, Stanford, Gallaudet. She was trying to remember when she’d last been in this room—could it have been as long as a year ago, when she was hired?—and her gaze came to rest on a very small portrait, in oil, of Dr. Koch signing to an ill-defined audience in a sketchy auditorium somewhere. The artist seemed to have had a thing for red, and the result gave the subject’s face the texture and coloration of a slab of raw meat.

  “So this is all very unfortunate,” he said, glancing up sharply and signing simultaneously to get her attention. “A real mess. And the timing couldn’t have been worse. Really, I mean, finals week.” A pause, his hands at rest. “Did you even give finals?”

  Maybe it was that she was wrought up—her car was still in the impound yard, there was a criminal out there impersonating her, she’d barely slept in three days and if someone had stuck an electric prod in her mouth it couldn’t have felt any worse than her own natural dentition did—but his words hit her the wrong way. They entered her eyes and then her brain and there they set off a chemical reaction that caused her to stand up so abruptly the chair fell out from under her and hit the floor with what might have been a thud, if only she could have heard it. You talk as if I’m the one at fault, she signed.

  He regarded her steadily, his hands folded on the desk before him. He was hearing, but he’d been in deaf education all his life and his signing would have been as proficient as a native speaker’s if he hadn’t lacked expression. And there was no way to teach that, not that she knew anyway. “I don’t know who else is,” he said, and his hands never moved.

  Didn’t you get my e-mail? she demanded.

  “I got it. But it still doesn’t begin to explain how you could just not show up for classes on Friday and Monday both—and be late today on top of it. You couldn’t have called in at least? Couldn’t have had the courtesy?”

  I was in jail.

  “I know. That’s why we’re having this discussion.” He looked down at the desk a moment, picked up a paperweight in the shape of a football (Second Place, Division III Playoffs, 2001) and set it down again. “Don’t they give you a phone call?”

  One. One only. I used it to call my boyfriend—

  “Well, good for you. But couldn’t he have called? Couldn’t anybody?”

  So I could get bailed out.

  “You know, your students were upset—the Rogers girl, what’s her name, Crystal, especially. We all were. And I think it’s pretty unprofessional of you—and inconsiderate as well—to just disappear like that. Finals week too. But you didn’t get bailed out, did you?”

  You read the e-mail. There was nothing I could do. It was a case of mistaken identity—worse, identity theft—here she brandished the manila folder—and if you think it’s a joy being locked up you just try it, you’ll see. It was the worst nightmare of my life. And now you have the gall to blame me?

  “I don’t like your tone.”

  I don’t like yours either.

  He brought both palms down on the desk with enough kinetic energy to dislodge a stack of papers and then, as if the impulse had just come into his head, jumped to his feet even as the papers settled silently round his shoes. “Enough!” he shouted, and he was signing now, signing angrily, punching out his hands like a prizefighter. It’s not for you to like or dislike. Let me remind you that you’re the employee here, not me—and an untenured employee at that. One that comes in late half the time as it is—

  “Bullshit!” she said, and then repeated it for emphasis—“Bullshit!”—before turning her back on him and slamming the door behind her with such force she could feel the concussion radiating all the way up her arm as she strode past the secretary, down the hall and out of the building.

  Six

  BRIDGER WAS AT WORK, dwelling deep in Drex III, cruising right along, the mouse a disembodied extension of his brain and his blood circulating in a steady, sure, tranquil squeeze and release, when Dana called. He’d come in early, directly after dropping her off at school, hoping to make up some of the ground he’d lost over the past four days, and he’d already got two hours in before anyone else showed up. Which didn’t prevent Radko from lecturing him in front of the whole crew about “the impordance of deamwork” and how he was letting everyone down. This struck him as unfair, grossly unfair, especially when Deet-Deet leaned out of his cubicle and made Radko faces at him throughout his dressing-down, but he didn’t say anything in his own defense other than that he’d been there since eight and would stay on through dinner—whatever it took—until he finished up every last frame of this sequence (another head replacement, this time of The Kade’s co-star, Lara Sikorsky, whose stand-in did a triple-gainer off one of Drex III’s needle-like pillars and into a lake of fire, from
which she emerged unscathed, of course, because of a genetic adaptation that allowed her skin, hair and meticulously buffed and polished nails to survive temperatures as high as a thousand degrees Fahrenheit). In fact, he’d been so absorbed in the work he hadn’t opened any of the pop-ups from his co-workers or even put anything on his stomach yet, other than coffee, that is.

  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.