Talk Talk (3 page)
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 after-effect 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 her 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.”
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 this very building, in the front office with all those vacant policemen and hardedged 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.
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.
