Talk Talk Read online

  It took her a moment, the blood burning in her veins, her face flushed with shame and anger and frustration, until she understood: it was a case of mistaken identity. Of course it was. Obviously. What else could it be? Someone who looked like her—some other slim graceful dark-eyed deaf woman of thirty-three who wasn’t on her way to the dentist with a sheaf of papers she had to finish grading by the time her class met—had robbed a bank at gunpoint, shot up the neighborhood, hit a child and run. It was the only explanation, because she’d never violated the law in her life except in the most ordinary and innocuous ways, speeding on the freeway alongside a hundred other speeders, smoking the occasional joint when she was a teenager (she and Carrie Cheung and later Richie Cohen, cruising the neighborhood, high as—well, kites—but no one ever knew or cared, least of all the police), collecting the odd parking ticket or moving violation—all of which had been duly registered, paid for and expunged from her record. At least she thought they’d been. That parking ticket in Venice, sixty bucks and she was maybe two minutes late, the meter maid already writing out the summons even as she stood there pleading with her—but she’d taken care of that, hadn’t she?

  No, it was too much. The whole thing, the shock of it, the scare—and these people were going to pay, they were, she’d get an attorney, police brutality, incompetence, false arrest, the whole works. All right. All right, fine. If that was what they wanted, she’d give it to them. The car rocked beneath her. The cop held rigid, like a mannequin. She closed her eyes a moment, an old habit, and took herself out of the world.

  They booked her, fingerprinted her, took away her pager and cell phone and her rings and her jade pendant and her purse, made her stand against a wall—cowed and miserable and with her shoulders slumped and her eyes vacant—for the lingering humiliation of the mug shot, and still nothing. No charges. No sense. The lips of the policemen flailed at her and she let her voice go till it must have grown wings and careened round the room with the dull gray walls and framed certificates and the flag that hung from a shining brass pole in limp validation of the whole corrupt and tottering system. She was beside herself. Hurt. Furious. Stung. “There must be some mistake,” she insisted over and over again. “I’m Dana, Dana Halter. I teach at the San Roque School for the Deaf and I’ve never…I’m deaf, can’t you see that? You’ve got the wrong person.” She watched them shift and shrug as if she were some sort of freak of nature, a talking dolphin or a ventriloquist’s dummy come to life, but they gave her nothing. To them she was just another criminal—another perp—one more worthless case to be locked away and ignored.

  But they didn’t lock her away, not yet. She was handcuffed to a bench that gave onto a hallway behind the front desk, and she didn’t catch the explanation offered her—the cop, the booking officer, a man in his thirties who looked almost apologetic as he took her by the arm, had averted his face as he gently but firmly pushed her down and readjusted the cuffs—but it became clear when a bleached-out wisp of a man with a labile face and the faintest pale trace of a mustache came through the door and made his way to her, his hands already in motion. His name—he finger-spelled it for her—was Charles Iverson and he was an interpreter for the deaf. I work at the San Roque School sometimes, he signed. I’ve seen you around.

  She didn’t recognize him—or maybe she did. There was something familiar in the smallness and neatness of him, and she seemed to recollect the image of him in the hallway, his head down, moving with swift, sure strides. She forced a smile. “I’m glad you’re here,” she said aloud, lifting her cuffed hands in an attempt to sign simultaneously as she tended to do when she was agitated. “There’s some huge mistake. All I did was run a four-way stop…and they, they”—she felt the injustice and the hurt of it building in her and struggled to control her face. And her voice. It must have jumped and planed off because people were staring—the booking officer, a secretary with an embellished figure and a hard plain face, two young Latinos stalled at the front desk in their canted baseball caps and voluminous shorts. Put a lid on it, that’s what their body language told her.

  Iverson took his time. His signing was rigid and inelegant but comprehensible for all that, and she focused her whole being on him as he explained the charges against her. There are multiple outstanding warrants, he began, in Marin County, Tulare and L.A. Counties—and out of state too, in Nevada. Reno and Stateline.

  Warrants? What warrants?

  He was wearing a sport coat over a T-shirt with the name of a basketball team emblazoned across the breast. His hair had been sprayed or gelled, but not very successfully—it curled up like the fluff of the chicks they’d kept under a heat lamp in elementary school, so blond it was nearly translucent. She watched him lift the lapel of his jacket and extract a folded sheet of paper from the inside pocket. He seemed to consider it a moment, weighing it like a knife, before dropping it to his lap and signing, Failure to appear on a number of charges, different courts, different dates, over the past two years. Passing bad checks, auto theft, possession of a controlled substance, assault with a deadly weapon—the list goes on. He held her eyes. His mouth was drawn tight, no sympathy there. It came to her that he believed the charges, believed that she’d led a double life, that she’d violated every decent standard and let the deaf community down, one more hearing prejudice confirmed. Yes, his eyes said, the deaf live by their own rules, inferior rules, compromised rules, they live off of us and on us. It was a look she’d seen all her life.

  He handed her the sheet and there it all was, dates, places, the police department codes and the charges brought. Incredibly, her name was there too, undeniably and indelibly, in caps, under Felony Complaint, Superior Court of this county or the other, and the warrant numbers marching down the margin of the page.

  She looked up and it was as if he’d slapped her across the face. I’ve never even been to Tulare County—I don’t even know where it is. Or to Nevada either. It’s crazy. It’s wrong, a mistake, that’s all. Tell them it’s a mistake.

  The coldest look, the smallest Sign. You get one phone call.

  Two

  BRIDGER WAS AT WORK, the morning obliterated by Starbucks and the twilit irreality of the long cool room at Digital Dynasty, seeing and hearing and breathing in the world within a world that was the screen before him. The scene—a single frame—was frozen there in a deep gloom of mahogany and copper tones, and he was working on a head replacement. His boss—Radko Goric, a thirty-eight-year-old entrepreneur wrapped in two-hundred-dollar designer shades, off-color Pierro Quarto jackets and clunky vinyl shoes out of the bargain bin—had underbid three other special effects companies for the contract on this picture, the last installment of a trilogy set on a distant and inimical planet where saurian warlords battled for dominance and human mercenaries shifted allegiance in observance of the tenets of an ancient warrior code. All well and good. He was a fan of the series—had seen the first two episodes six or seven times each, in fact, marveling at the detail, the sweep, the seamlessness of the effects—and he’d gone into the project with the best of intentions, a kind of euphoria even. But Rad (as he insisted on being called, and not Radko or Mr. Goric or Your Royal Highness) had given them zero leeway as far as the time frame was concerned. The film was due to premiere in less than a month and Bridger and his five co-workers were putting in twelve-hour days, seven days a week.

  For a long while, he just stared at the screen, his chin propped on two pale fists that seemed to have gone boneless on him. The world was there, right there in front of him, much more immediate and real than this cubicle, these walls, the ceiling, the painted cement floor, and he was inside it, drifting, dreaming, sleeping with his eyes open. He was beat. Dead. His fingers were limp, his backside blistered. He’d been wearing the same socks three days running. And now he could feel an exhaustion headache building inside his skull like the turd-brown clouds that roiled Drex III, the planet he shaded and scored and polished to the gleam of a dagger’s edge with the assistance of his D
iscreet software and a finger-worn mouse. The coffee did nothing for him. It had been Banjo’s turn to go for Starbucks during coffee break, and he’d ordered a venti with a shot of espresso, and there it was, half-consumed, and all he felt was queasy. And sleepy, drowsy, narcoleptic. If only he could lay his head down, just for a minute…

  But he had a message. From Deet-Deet. The icon popped up in the corner of his screen, and he opened it to find a cartoon image of a peg-legged pirate waving a cutlass, onto which Deet-Deet had grafted an outsized cutout of Radko’s head. The text read: Har-har-har, me hearties! You’ll all walk the plank if this project isn’t in the bag by the thirtieth—and no snoozing on the job!

  This was the way they kept their sanity. The work was drudgery, piecework, paint and roto at twenty-five dollars and seventy-two cents an hour, before taxes, and while it had its moments of artistic satisfaction—like painting out the wires on the tiny flying bodies hurled into the scabrous skies by one nasty extraterrestrial explosion or another—essentially it was a grind. The head replacement shot Bridger had been working on all the previous day and into this soporific morning involved superimposing the three-dimensionally photographed face of the film’s action hero, Kade (or The Kade, as he was now being billed), over the white helmet of a stuntman on a futuristic blade-sprouting chopper that shot up a ramp and off a cliff to skim one of Drex III’s lakes of fire and propel its driver into the heart of the enemy camp, where he would proceed to hack and gouge and face-kick one hapless lizard warrior after another. It wasn’t exactly what Bridger had imagined himself doing six years out of film school—he’d pictured a trajectory more like Fincher’s or Spielberg’s—but it was a living. A good living. And it was in the industry.

  What he did now was superimpose The Kade’s head over Radko’s—he had The Kade winking and grinning, then grimacing (the look when the bike lands amongst the saurian legions with a sacroiliac-jarring thump) and finally winking again—and messaged his reply: Scuttle the ship and bring me coffee, my kingdom for a cup, another cup. He added a P.S., his favorite quotation from Miss Lonelyhearts, which he made a point of inserting wherever it applied: Like a dead man, only friction could warm him or violence make him mobile.

  And then, from the physical distance of two cubicles over and the hurtling unbridgeable interstices of cyberspace, Plum chimed in, and then Lumpen, Pixel and Banjo, and everybody was awake again and the new day that was exactly like the preceding day and the day before that began to unfold.

  He was painting out the vestigial white edges around The Kade’s head and beginning to think about breakfast (bagel and cream cheese) or maybe lunch (bagel and cream cheese with lox, sprouts and mustard), when his cell began to vibrate. Radko didn’t like to hear any buzzing or carillons during working hours because he didn’t want his employees distracted by personal calls, just as he didn’t want them surfing the Web, going to chat rooms or instant messaging, so Bridger always kept his cell phone on vibrate, and he always kept it in his right front pocket so that he could be instantly alerted to the odd crepitating motion of it and take his calls on the sly. “Hello?” he said, keeping his voice in the range of a propulsive whisper.

  “Yes, hello. This is Charles Iverson with the San Roque Police Department. I’m an interpreter for the deaf and I have Dana Halter here.”

  “Police? What’s the problem? Has there been an accident or something?”

  “This is Dana,” the voice said, as if it were the instrument of a medium channeling a spirit. “I need you to come down here and bail me out.”

  “For what? What did you do?”

  “I don’t know,” the voice said, the man’s voice, low-pitched and with a handful of gravel in it, “but I ran a stop sign and now they think I—”

  There was a pause. The Kade stared back at him from the screen, grimacing, the left side of his head still encumbered with three-quarters of his white halo. Overhead, the barely functional fluorescent lights briefly brightened and then dimmed again, one tube or another eternally going bad. Plum—the only female among them—got up from her cubicle and padded down the hall in the direction of the bathroom.

  Iverson’s voice came back: “—they think I committed all these crimes, but”—a pause—“I didn’t.”

  “Of course you didn’t,” he said, and he pictured Dana there in some anonymous police precinct, her face angled away from the phone and the man with the voice signing to her amidst the mug shots and wanted posters, and the picture wasn’t right. “I thought you were supposed to be at the dentist’s,” he said. And then: “Crimes? What crimes?”

  “I was,” Iverson said. “But I ran a stop sign and the police arrested me.” There was more—Bridger could hear Dana’s voice in the background—but the interpreter was giving him the shorthand version. Without further elaboration he read off the list of charges as if he were a waiter reciting the specials of the day.

  “But that’s crazy,” Bridger said. “You didn’t, I mean, she didn’t—”

  “Time’s up,” Iverson said.

  “Listen, I’ll be right there. Ten minutes or less.” Bridger glanced up as Plum slipped back into her cubicle, dropping his voice to the breath of a whisper. “What’s the bail? I mean, what does it cost?”

  “What? Speak up. I can’t hear you.”

  Radko was coming down the hall now and Bridger leaned deeper into the cubicle to mask the phone. “The bail—how much?”

  “It hasn’t been set yet.”

  “All right,” he said. “All right. I’ll be right there. Love you.”

  There was a pause. “Love you too,” Iverson said.

  He’d never been to the San Roque Police Station and he had to look up the address in the phone book, and then, when he turned down the street indicated, he was startled to see it lined on both sides with idle patrol cars. It took him a while to find a parking spot, circling the block again and again till one of the cruisers finally pulled out and he cautiously signaled his intention and did an elaborate and constrained job of parallel parking between two black-and-whites. He was agitated. He was in a hurry. But this was hardly the time or place for a fender bender or even a bumper-kiss.

  A puffing bloated woman who seemed to have a crust of dried blood rimming her eye sockets—or was that makeup?—was stumping up the steps ahead of him and he had the presence of mind to hold the door for her, which in turn gave him a moment to compose himself. His relations with the police over the course of his adult years had been minimal and strictly formal (“All right, out of the car”) and he’d been arrested exactly twice in his life, once for shoplifting when he was fourteen and then, in college, for driving under the influence. He understood theoretically that the police were the servants and protectors of the public—that is, his servants and protectors—but for all that he couldn’t help experiencing a sudden rapid uptick of alarm and a queasy sense of culpability whenever he saw a cop on the street. Even rent-a-cops gave him pause. No matter: he followed the bloated woman through the door.

  Inside, a waist-high counter divided the public space (flags, both state and federal, fierce overhead lights, linoleum that gleamed as if in defiance of the bodily fluids and street filth that were regularly deposited on its surface) from the inner sanctum, where the police and detectives had their desks and a discreet hallway led presumably to the holding cells. Where Dana was. Even as he walked up to the counter, he shifted his eyes to the hallway, as if he might be able to catch a glimpse of her there, but of course he couldn’t. She was already locked up in some pen with a bunch of prostitutes, drunks, violent offenders, and the thought of it made him go cold. They’d be all over her. It wasn’t as if she couldn’t handle herself—she was the most insistently independent woman he’d ever met—but she was naïve, too sympathetic for her own good, and as soon as they discovered she was deaf they’d have a wedge to use against her. He thought of the way street people would hit on her whenever he took her anywhere, as if she were their special emissary, as if her handicap—he had t
o check himself: her difference—reduced her somehow to their level. Or lower. Lower still.

  But this was all a misunderstanding. Obviously. And he would have her out before they could get their hooks in her, no matter what it took. He waited his turn behind the fat woman, checking his watch reflexively every five seconds. Ten past eleven. Eleven past. Twelve. The fat woman was complaining about her neighbor’s dog—she couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat, couldn’t think, because it barked so relentlessly, and she’d called the police, this very precinct, twenty-two times already and had a log of each phone call going back fifteen months to prove it. And were they going to do anything about it? Or did she have to stand here at this desk till she dropped dead? Because she would if that’s what it took. She’d stand right here.

  Radko hadn’t been pleased when he begged off work. “It’s Dana,” Bridger had said, flagging him down on his way to the refrigerator. Bridger was already on his feet, already patting down his pockets for the car keys. “She’s been arrested. It’s an emergency.”

  The lights fluttered, darkened. Drex III glowed menacingly from the screen—there were twenty-seven days left till it was due to take its place in the firmament among the other interstellar spheres. Radko took a step back and squinted at him out of his heavy-lidded eyes. “Emergency?” he repeated. “For what? People they get thrown in jail every day.”

  “No,” Bridger said, “you don’t understand. She didn’t do anything. It’s a mistake. I need to, well—I know this sounds crazy but I need to go down there and bail her out. Right now.”

  Nothing. Radko compressed his lips and gave him a look Pixel had described in a sudden flare of inspiration as “Paranoia infests the frog.”