T. Boyle - Talk Talk

Marie Eustace blanched. Iverson signed frantically, “That's enough. No more. She's going to dismiss.”

Dana swung round on him, signing back, big Sign, angry Sign, her arms looping and elbows jabbing: “You shut up because I don't need you”-“and when I did need you you weren't there.” All of it came out then, all the hurt and confusion, and she turned back to the judge and let her voice lash out like a physical extension of herself, of her furiously signing hands: “I've been locked up, I've been abused-I missed two days of work with no way even to call anybody-and you give me this, this “apology” and it's supposed to make everything all right?” Her face twisted. She felt absurd, hateful, a clown in an orange jumpsuit, and she could see the judge's eyes hardening, and what word was on her lips, what curse? — “Shit, shit,” that was what it was, she was about to proclaim it all “shit”-but before she could spew it out Marie Eustace stepped forward and said something to the judge and the judge looked directly at Dana and her lips said, “Case dismissed.”

She had no intention of sitting in an airless office disclosing herself to the victims' assistance people, answering their idiotic questions, filling out forms, lip-reading the banality of their clichés while Charles Iverson juggled his hands-she didn't have one more second to waste. Not one. She wanted out of the jumpsuit, wanted her clothes back, her keys, her car-and the papers, the student papers. And she had to call the school and explain herself, had to go in in person and throw herself on Dr. Koch's mercy, had to meet her class and do her job-if she still had a job. Because who was going to believe her? People didn't just get thrown in jail for no reason, not in this country, anyway. Even as they began the paperwork to process her out, even as Marie Eustace arranged for the court to provide her with an affidavit proclaiming her innocence, she could picture the look of incredulity and anger on Dr. Koch's face, less than a week left in the term and one of his teachers skipping out early…

But what she wanted most of all, sitting mutely in a colorless anteroom somewhere in the depths of the building and waiting for them to file their papers and rescind the charges and give her back her life, was a shower. She worked at her fingernails, one nail under the other, and they were black with the filth of that place, with the filth of those ugly jeering women, the prostitutes and street people and addicts and drunks, common drunks. She'd passed them in the street a hundred times, felt sorry for them, always one to reach into her purse for a handful of change or a dollar bill, but never again. They “were” common, she knew that now, common as in “not refined; vulgar; low; coarse.” And petty. Nasty. With no human feeling and no love but for themselves. The “menu peuple,” the mob, the hoi polloi. That was what they were-it was “Lord of the Flies” in that cell, on the streets, everywhere she turned, and where did that leave her? Where it left Ralph, where it left Piggy. But she was no victim, she refused to be, and once she got home, once she shut the door behind her and locked out the world, she was going to stand under the shower and scrub the dirt off her till the water ran cold and then she was going to call Dr. Koch and go straight to the impound yard, wherever that was, and get those papers out of the backseat of the car. Just the thought of it gave her a pang-she was so far behind. It was insane. Like the nightmares she'd have in the moments before waking, the ones in which she appeared in front of the class with no lesson, no plan, her hair a mess, her clothes fallen in a heap at her feet. Naked. Frozen. Unable to speak with her hands or her tongue either.

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

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

“Well you didn't try hard enough.”

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

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

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

Iverson, with the face of a bad actor and his hands that stalled and stuttered, translated for the lawyer and Dana refused to look at her, though Marie Eustace was speaking to her, though she put a hand on her arm till Dana shook it off. She looked to Iverson alone. “There's no way around it,” he signed, “It's the law, guilty or innocent. They brought you here on the bus and they have to take you back on the bus. You need to change out of those clothes and get your own things back, there's paperwork”- “No,” she signed, “no. I won't go.” In a fury, she let her hands go silent and began to tear at the jumpsuit, to tear it from her, and she shouted aloud so they could all hear her, the cop and Bridger and the judge in her chambers, “Just take the shitty thing and I'll walk out of here naked, I don't care, I don't care-”

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

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