T. Boyle - Talk Talk

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.