T. Boyle: Talk Talk

Wrong question. “In my country,” Radko intoned, “people they are born in cells, they give birth in cells, they die in cells.”

“Is that good?” Bridger threw back at him. “Is that why you came here?”

But Radko just turned away from him, waving a hand in the air. “Pffft!” was all he had to add.

“I'm going,” Bridger said, and he could see Plum leaning out of her carrel to savor the spectacle. “Just so you know-I don't have any choice.”

Heavily, one hand on the door of the refrigerator, the other describing a quick arc as he swung round to point an admonitory finger, Radko rumbled, “One hour. One hour max. Just so “you” know.”

The officer at the desk-balding on top, sideburns gone white, milky exasperated eyes glancing up over the reading glasses riding the bridge of his nose-reassured the fat woman in soft, placatory tones, but the fat woman wasn't there for reassurance; she was there for action. The more softly the policeman spoke, the more the woman's voice seemed to rise, till finally he turned away from her and gestured across the room. A moment later, a much younger officer-a ramrod Latino in a uniform that looked custom-fit-beckoned to her from a swinging door that led into the offices proper. The man at the desk said: “This is Officer Torres. He's going to help you. He's our dog expert. Isn't that right, Torres?”

The second man took the cue, not a hint of amusement on his face. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “That's right. I'm the dog man.”

And then the man at the desk turned to Bridger. “Yes?” he said.

Bridger shuffled his Nikes, focused on a spot just to the left of the cop's head and said, “I'm here for Dana. Dana Halter?”

Two hours later, he was still waiting. This was a Friday, a Friday afternoon now, and things seemed to be moving slowly, in a quiet retrograde tumble toward the weekend and the fomenting parade of drunks and brawlers who could go ahead and set the place on fire for all these putty-faced men and women cared, these desk-hounds and functionaries and sleepwalkers with the thousand-yard stares. They were going home at five o'clock to drink a beer and put their feet up and until then they were going to shuffle back and forth to the filing cabinets and peck at their computers in a zone where nobody, least of all Bridger, could reach them. He had managed to pry a few essential nuggets of information from the cop with the white sideburns-Yes, they'd brought her in; No, bail hadn't been set yet; No, he couldn't see her; No, he couldn't talk to her-and after that he'd stationed himself on a bench by the doorway with nothing to read and nothing to do but wait.

There were four other people waiting along with him: a very old man in a heavy suit who held himself so perfectly erect his jacket never made contact with the back of the bench; a Middle Eastern woman of indeterminate age, dressed in what might have been a caftan or a sacramental robe of some sort, and beside her, her ceaselessly leg-kicking son who looked to be five or so, but Bridger wasn't much acquainted with kids and the more he observed this one the less certain he was about that estimate-actually, the kid could have been anywhere from three to twelve; and, seated farthest from him, a girl in her late teens/ early twenties who wasn't particularly attractive in either face or figure, but who began to take on a certain allure after two hours of surreptitious study. Beyond that, probably a hundred people had scuffed in and out of the place, most of them conferring in quiet deferential tones with the cop at the desk and then bowing their way back out the door. The fat woman had long since returned to her barking zone.

Bridger was profoundly bored. He had a difficult time sitting still under any circumstances, unless he was absorbed in a video game or letting his mind drift into the poisonous atmosphere of Drex III or some other digitized scenario, and he found himself fidgeting almost as much as the child (who had never ceased kicking his legs out and drawing them back again, as if the bench were an outsized swing and he was trying to lift them all up and away and out of this stupefying place). For long periods, Bridger stared into the middle distance, thinking nothing, thinking of bleakness and the void, and then, inevitably, his fears for Dana would materialize again, and he'd see her face, the sweet confusion of her mouth and the way she knitted her brows when she posed a question-“What time is it? Where did you say the omelet pan was? How many jiggers of triple sec?”-and his stomach would churn with anxiety. And hunger. Simple hunger. It occurred to him that he'd had neither the breakfast bagel nor the lunch-he'd had nothing but Starbucks, in fact-and he could feel the acidity creeping up his throat. What was wrong with these people? Couldn't they answer a simple question? Process a form? Dispense some information in a timely fashion?

He cautioned himself to stay calm, though that was difficult, given that he'd already called Radko six times and Radko had become increasingly impatient with each call in the sequence. “I'll work till midnight,” Bridger promised, “I swear.” Radko's voice, bottom-heavy and thick with the bludgeoning consonants of his transported English, came back at him in minor detonations of meaning: “You bedder,” he said. “You betcha. All through night, not just midnight.” But he was being selfish, he told himself. Imagine Dana, imagine what she was going through. He fought off the image of her locked up in a cell with half a dozen strangers, women who would mock her to her face, make demands, get physical with her. Dana would be all but helpless in that arena, the strange flat uninflected flutter of her voice that he found so compelling nothing but a provocation to them, angry women, hard women, needy women. It was all a mistake. It had to be.

And then he was focusing on nothing, the cop at the desk, his fellow sufferers in Purgatory, the dreary walls and glowing floors all melding in a blur, and he was revisiting the first time he'd laid eyes on her, just over a year ago. It was at a club. He'd gone out after work with Deet-Deet, both of them frazzled, their eyes swollen and twitching as an after-effect of fixating on their monitors from ten a. m. till past eight in the evening, the Visine they passed back and forth notwithstanding. First they'd gone for sushi and downed a couple of cold sakes each, and then, because they just had to unwind even though it was a Monday and the whole dreary week stretched out before them like a cinema-scape out of “Dune,” they decided to go clubbing and see what turned up. At the time, Deet-Deet had just broken up with his girlfriend and Bridger was unattached himself (going on three fruitless months), and so, especially after two sakes, this had seemed like a plan.

They were waiting in line in front of Doge, ten-thirty at night, the mist coming in off the sea to insert itself in the alleys and make the pavement shine under the headlights of the slow-rolling traffic, when Deet-Deet interrupted his monologue about the faults and excesses of his ex long enough to light a cigarette and Bridger took the opportunity to lift his head and check out their prospects. This particular club was open to the street so that the pulse of the music and the jumpy erratic flash of the strobe leaked out onto the sidewalk where the prospective patrons could get a look in advance and decide whether it was worth the five-dollar cover charge. Bridger observed the usual mass of bodies swaying under the assault of the music (or of the bass, which was about all you could hear), limbs flung out and retracted, people decapitated by a slash of the strobe even as their heads were restored in the next instant, knees lifted, butts thumping, the same scenario that had played out the night before and would play out the next night and the night after that. His eyes throbbed. The sake sucked the moisture from his brain. He was about to tell Deet-Deet he was having second thoughts about the club, about any club, because he could feel a headache coming on and it was only Monday and they had to keep sight of the fact that they were required to be in by ten to paint out the wires on the interminable martial arts movie they'd been working on for the past three weeks, when he spotted Dana.