Talk Talk

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  She was wearing her own orange jumpsuit by now, her clothes—even her shoes and underwear—taken from her and replaced with well-washed easy-care cotton (SAN ROQUE COUNTY JAIL was emblazoned across the shoulders in six-inch letters) and a pair of cheap flip-flops, courtesy of the taxpayers of San Roque County. Angela had come to life the minute they entered the cell—she embraced the big girl as if they were sisters, then immediately trolled for cigarettes, employing the same pantomime gesture she’d used on Dana and Marcie. That was the last thing Dana remembered clearly, because what followed were two nights and two interminable days of focused aggression. She was repeatedly backed up against the wall trying to explain herself with her lips and her hands while one woman or another breathed some sort of malcontent’s tirade in her face. Didn’t she have anything to offer, no cigarettes, lozenges, gum, makeup, nothing? What was she, stupid? Deaf and dumb, right? And then there’d be an arch look for the rest of the cell and all their faces (except Marcie’s: she’d been bailed out the first morning) would twist with the kind of cruel glee Dana had endured all her life. But this was worse. It was special. It was like being on the playground at Burgess Elementary all over again, and they never got tired of the routine because she couldn’t answer them, or not quickly enough and not in any recognizably human accent, and so she was their pincushion, their totem, the only animate thing in sight that could make them feel better about themselves through all the long hours of brooding and hate.

  On Monday morning, at four a.m. by the clock at the end of a long hall that led to the fresh air and the sick-sweet punishing smell of exhaust that rode heavily atop it, they were herded back onto the buses, women on one side, men on the other. Dana was beyond despair. She felt numb to everything, cauterized against the humiliation of using the toilet in the middle of a brightly lit room while seven other women watched her, dead to the clasp of the chains round her ankles and the cuffs that pinned her left wrist to the big girl’s right, rinsed clean of any memory of student papers, her apartment, her job, her boyfriend, even innocence. This was her life, these chains, these abusive, ignorant and foul-smelling women, two slices of white bread, a sliver of bologna, one red squirt of ketchup. This, only this.

  Four

  THAT NIGHT, the night they met, Bridger had stood beside Deet-Deet at the bar and ordered a beer he never tasted. He was trying to look casual, his back to the shining mahogany surface and his weight supported on the props of his elbows, cultivating an air of unconcern, what he liked to call “terminal cool,” the beat dragging everyone down as if sound were heavier than air, as if it were some other medium altogether, glue, lead, volcanic ash, but he wasn’t succeeding. In fact, as anyone observing him would have seen in an instant, he was locked in on Dana as if he’d been hypnotized. Certainly he looked casual, in his not-hardly-ever-washed jeans, mostly destroyed Nikes and the Digital Dynasty T-shirt with its flaming orange extraterrestrial grinning lickerishly over one shoulder, not to mention his hair, which was growing back in to the point at which random spikes of it projected toothily from his crown, but casual was the last thing he was feeling. What he was feeling, even before Deet-Deet reached out almost blindly for the hand of a doll-sized girl in a yellow tank top and found himself sucked out onto the dance floor, was a peculiar kind of tension—call it anxiety, fear of rejection, the punishment of attraction—he hadn’t felt in a very long time.

  He waited through three anonymous dance tunes till he was reasonably sure she wasn’t with anybody, except maybe a girlfriend with a white-blond ponytail tied up in a high knot on the crown of her head, and then he began to move his shoulders and let the beat infest him as he worked his way through the crowd on the dance floor. He danced opposite her through an entire interminable number, generating a real sweat and working the dregs of the sake back up from his legs to his head, before she noticed him, and when she did notice him it was with a look of surprise tailed by an unguarded smile. Which he took to be a good sign. After the next tune he shouted a few things at her and she shouted back—Love the way you move; Hot tune, huh?; What’d you say your name was?—and the wonderful thing, the amazing and insuperable thing, the thing that echoed in his brain even now was that he had no idea she was deaf. Because he was deaf too—everybody was deaf, at least until the lights went up and the DJ took away the thunder.

  Deet-Deet was gone and he was standing there in the dissipating crowd and he had Dana by the hand, feeling the gentle pressure of her palm in his while she introduced the girl—woman—with the ponytail and another woman he hadn’t registered, Mindy and Sarah, friends of hers from the apartments, and he was lucky, very lucky, because she never would have been out on a Monday except that it was her birthday. Yes, she was thirty-two—she made a face—and wasn’t that ancient? Thirty-two? No, he protested, not at all. It was nothing. “Oh, yeah,” she said, her whole face opening up to him, the most expressive face he’d ever seen, the most sensual, the prettiest, and he noticed her accent, he did, but thought it was Scandinavian or maybe Eastern European, “then how old are you?” Well, he was twenty-eight. She was still grinning, her eyes crawling all over his face, “You see?” she crowed, and looked to Mindy and Sarah before coming back to him. “You’re just a baby.”

  They didn’t get around to exchanging phone numbers, but despite the residual effects of the sake he did manage to commit her name to memory, and when he got home he looked her up in the phone book (D. Halter, #31 Pacific View Court). He called the next morning to ask her to dinner but there was no answer and the message on her machine, delivered in her hollow monotone, instructed him not to leave a message but to e-mail her, and gave a Hotmail address. As soon as he got to work he shot off an e-mail, relieved in a way to duck the uncertainty and potential embarrassment of direct contact—he barely knew her and she could turn him down, she could be married, engaged, actively uninterested or so pathologically dedicated to her career she excluded all else—and after typing in a witty line or two about the previous night he made his pitch. To his surprise, she answered within seconds—Yes, it’s just what I want, Italian, but only if you promise not to make me dance off all that pasta afterward, and gave him directions to her apartment.

  The complex was nice, nicer than his, and it sprawled over a hillside with mature plantings—birds-of-paradise, plantains, palms of every size and variety—but the numbers seemed to run in random patterns and he couldn’t for the life of him find number 31, which, as far as he could tell, bore no relation to numbers 29 and 30, in front of which he’d already washed up twice. After he’d made three circuits of the place without luck, he stopped a woman about Dana’s age who was just going down the steps with a cat on a leash. “Excuse me,” he said, “but do you know which apartment is Dana Halter’s?”

  She gave him a blank look.

  “You know,” he said, “Dana? She’s early thirties, about your height, dark hair, really pretty?”

  He watched the light come into her face. “Oh, sure, yeah—sorry, sorry. You mean the deaf woman, right?”

  It hit him with the force of epiphany. Suddenly it all made sense: her atonal voice, the non sequiturs, the fluidity of her face when she spoke, as if every muscle under the skin were a separate organ of communication. When he pushed the buzzer at her door it produced a persistent mechanical hum like any other buzzer, but at the same time a light began to flash in the apartment. And suddenly there she was, looking beautiful, her hands fluttering, her voice too loud as she greeted him, and she never took her eyes from his face, a kind of unwavering eye contact that made him feel either irresistible or self-conscious, he couldn’t tell which. Then there was the CD he’d agonized over in the car (Would she judge him by it? Did she know the band? Did she like them?) but which she never mentioned, and there were the specials she didn’t order, the dinner conversation that drifted from autobiography to mutual interests to politics and the environment and bogged down when he got excited and tried to talk too fast or with food in his mouth, but still he couldn’t bring
himself to broach the subject of her deafness. No one asked the blind kid at school how he’d lost his sight—he’d tell you in his own time (basement, pipe bomb)—and it would have been unthinkable to quiz the swimmer with the prosthetic leg at the health club. It just wasn’t done. It was rude, a way of calling attention to their difference.

  For her part, Dana waited till the meal was finished, till the waiter had cleared away their plates and they were both frowning over the dessert menu, before she lifted her head and said, “You know, I don’t know if you noticed, but I have to tell you something”—she paused, holding him with her eyes, and then her voice boomed out so that the people two tables over turned to stare—“I’m deaf. Profoundly deaf. They put my hearing loss at close to a hundred decibels. You know what that means?”

  He shook his head. The whole restaurant was listening.

  “I can’t hear a thing.”

  He fumbled with the response—what could he say: I’m sorry; It doesn’t matter; The tiramisù looks good?—and she thought it was hilarious. Her shoulders twitched, her eyes caught fire. She was beaming at him across the table, as triumphant as the grand prize winner on a quiz show. “I really put one over on you, didn’t I?” she gasped, and laughed till he joined her and they both had to pound the table to keep from floating away.

  Things moved slowly from there—she was busy; he was busy—but they graduated from dating (sushi, Thai, the art museum, movies, the beach) to a less formal arrangement, and before either of them realized it they’d come to depend on each other. San Roque was a small coastal city—89,000, if you could believe the population estimate posted at the city limits; perhaps twice that at the height of tourist season—and his apartment was ten minutes from hers on the quiet, uncongested streets. It was nothing to drop by, leave a message, meet for coffee or an impromptu concert (and yes, she loved concerts, classical, jazz, rock, fixated on the body language of the musicians as if she were watching a silent ballet). Rarely did a day go by when they didn’t either see each other or at least communicate through e-mail and instant messaging. She was there suddenly, and she filled a hole in his life. He was in love. And so was she, because he could read the signs—her eyes, her hands, the expression on her face when he stepped into the room—and the signs were favorable, they made him feel god-like, as if he were The Kade himself. She’d watch his lips across the table in a coffeehouse and laugh out of all proportion to what he was saying. “Oh, yeah,” she’d say in her curious uninflected tones, her voice wavering and tossing till it smoothed out all the bumps, “you’re a funny guy. You know that, don’t you?” And then she’d quote some statistic she’d found in “Dear Abby” about how the majority of single women above all prized a sense of humor in their prospective mates.

  Of course, at the same time, she was quick to point out that in ninety percent of all cases the deaf married their own kind and when they did get attached to the hearing, the divorce rate was stratospheric, and then, needless to say, there was the problem of children. One deaf couple she knew had agonized when the wife became pregnant—“All they could talk about was ‘Will it be deaf, will it be deaf?’” And they had a girl, slick and red and fat and with all her fingers and toes in the expected places, and the parents clapped their hands in her face and shouted till the nurse came running and the whole place was in an uproar, but the child never reacted. “‘Thank God,’ they said, ‘she’s one of us.’”

  “And what do you mean by that?” Bridger had asked.

  She dropped her eyes and her face became immobile. “Nothing.”

  They were in her apartment at the time, working on their second bottle of wine after she’d whipped up her special crab salad and he’d pitched in with its perfect complement, a bag of Lay’s barbecue potato chips. It took him a moment, struggling to decode what she was trying to tell him, and then he reached across the table and took her hands in his till she lifted her eyes again. “But that isn’t you,” he said, fumbling around the issue. “I mean, you’re not like that.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You’re not—I mean, you weren’t born like that. Right?”

  She’d looked as if she were going to cry, but now she forced a smile. “Born like what?”

  “Deaf.”

  She’d gotten up then and left the room. When she came back a moment later she was wearing a T-shirt she’d preserved from her student days at Gallaudet, one he’d seen before, one she wore when the mood took her, when she felt conflicted or defiant. It featured an upraised fist, reminiscent of the old Black Panther logo, and above it the legend DEAF POWER.

  At the age of four and a half she’d been stricken with spinal meningitis and barely survived it, her temperature as high as 105 degrees for three days running. The doctors explained to her parents that her aural nerves had been irreparably damaged, that she was now and always would be profoundly deaf. But she was lucky, she insisted, because she was post-lingually deaf, which made it a thousand times easier for her to learn to speak and read and function in the hearing world. What did she remember from that brief period before the fever set in? Words. Stories. Voices. And her father taking her to see Yellow Submarine at a revival house.

  “Yes,” she told him, reaching to bury her hand in the bag of potato chips as if to hide it from him, as if she were afraid of what it might say otherwise, “that’s not me.” And then, in the flattest tuneless disconnected echo of a voice, she began to sing: “We all live in a yellow summarine, yellow summarine…”

  He didn’t leave the police station till they told him she’d been transferred to the county jail in Thompsonville, and by then it was past nine. Earlier, from his cell phone, he’d called the only lawyer he knew, a friend from college who was practicing entertainment law with a firm in Las Vegas. “Steve,” he’d crooned into the phone, “it’s me, Bridger,” and Steve had instantly begun schmoozing and catching up and pouring the syrup of his top-drawer voice into the receiver until they’d exhausted the trivia and he cleared his throat in a way that indicated that the ticker was running, or should have been running, and Bridger said, “Well, really, the reason I called is I’ve got a problem.” He explained the situation.

  “Not good,” Steve said. “Not good at all.”

  “It’s not her. She didn’t do it. She ran a stop sign, that’s all—you understand that, right?”

  “You look into identity theft?

  “I don’t know: mistaken identity, identity theft—what’s the difference?”

  Bridger could hear someone else talking in the background. “Yeah, yeah,” Steve was saying, “I’ll make it short.” And then: “Bridger? Yeah, well, the difference is money, big money, because if it’s ID theft, you’ve got to clear the records in whatever jurisdiction this other woman’s been committing fraud, and then you’ve got to go to the CRAs and it can be a real hassle, believe me.”

  “I hear you,” Bridger said, “but what do I do right now? I mean, I can’t just leave her in jail.”

  “You need to call a lawyer.”

  “I thought that was what I was doing.”

  “A criminal lawyer. Somebody local. You don’t know anybody who knows anybody?”

  “Nope.”

  “All right, so you go to the yellow pages, start making calls. But I got to warn you, once they hear the charges they’re going to want in the neighborhood of fifty thousand as a retainer and probably ten just to talk to her, and that guarantees nothing, especially with extradition to Nevada and these no-bail holds. But you give them the money and they’ll promise you anything.”

  “But I don’t—I mean, I’m doing okay, but…”

  “What is paint and roto, anyway?”

  “Hey, it would take too long to explain—it’s special effects, that’s all. I’ll show you next time you’re in town, promise. And I like the job, the money’s good, but what I’m saying is I don’t really have a whole lot in the bank and there’s no way I could, well, you know, come up with anywhere near that figure…”


  There was the voice in the background again, a wash of voices now. Steve shifted from honey to vinegar. “She’s in jail for the weekend, nothing anybody can do about that. Monday they’ll arraign her and assign a public defender, some troll out of a cave in a cheap suit with a cheap briefcase and a look of terminal harassment, and then you just hope for the best. But hey, listen, great talking to you. Luck, huh?”

  On Monday morning, he called in sick (Radko: Pliss liv a message) and drove down to the county courthouse, a showcase building erected in the twenties to resemble something out of the Alhambra. It was all stone, stucco and tile with a monumental clock tower and an observation deck on the roof that gave tourists a view of downtown San Roque, from the blue rug of the ocean to the hazy arras of the mountains. At the information kiosk, a beaming old lady with a long flaring nose and the trace of a British accent told him to consult the daily calendar at the far end of the hall, and he saw Dana’s name listed there with some eighty or a hundred others. Her arraignment on charges was scheduled for eight-thirty a.m. in Courtroom 2.

  The courtroom was the sort of place that inspired confidence in the legal system: vaulted ceilings, dark pews with the rich grain of history worked into them, the elevated jury box to the left, the judge’s buffed and burnished high-flown bench in the center under the great seal of the state of California, and a long file of lesser furniture—desks for the court recorders and clerks—tucked in along the right-hand wall, everything very hushed and efficient-looking at five past eight in the morning. Bridger took a seat in the last row. Aside from the bailiff—a tall, muscular, eager-looking cop in a tan cop’s shirt with some sort of walkie-talkie pinned to the collar—there were only two other people present, a young couple who might have been college students huddled in the front row over the comics page from the morning newspaper. For his part, Bridger was exhausted. He’d worked all weekend trying to catch up, fueled exclusively by Red Bull, coffee and pizza, The Kade’s face so bleakly familiar to him it was like a hallucination, the too-small eyes and the ape-like bone structure of the skull visible to him even when he wasn’t staring at the screen. It was a good thing the work didn’t require even the smallest modicum of thought, because his mind was as far from Drex III as it possibly could be. All weekend he’d thought of nothing but Dana, Dana locked away in a cell, Dana scared and vulnerable, Dana eating some slop out of a bucket, harassed, put upon, unable to explain herself.