Talk Talk (6 page)

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.

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 Ill'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 rest-room. 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 bulletproof 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...”