T. Boyle: Talk Talk

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 to 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.”

“I mean, I can't leave her there. In a cell. Would you want to be stuck in a cell?”