T. Boyle: Talk Talk

She was poised at the edge of the dance floor, right up against one of the big standing speakers, lifting and dropping her feet-her bare feet-to the pulse of the bass and working her elbows as if she were doing aerobics or climbing the StairMaster. Or maybe, somewhere in her mind, she was square dancing, do-si-do and swing your partner. Her eyes were closed tight. Her knees jerked and her feet rose and fell. The red filter caught her hair and set it afire.

“So what do you think, anything worthwhile?” Deet-Deet was saying. Deet-Deet was five foot four and a half inches tall, he was twenty-five years old and he affected the Goth style, despite the fact that most of the SFX world had long since moved on to a modified geek/Indie look. His real name was Ian Fleischer, but at Digital Dynasty people went by their online aliases only, whether they liked it or not. Bridger himself was known as “Sharper” because when he'd first started as a dust-buster, when he was earnest and committed and excited about the work they were doing, he was always hounding the Scan-Record people for sharper plates to clean. “Because I don't know if I want to stay out too late,” Deet-Deet added, by way of elucidation, “and that sake, I think, is really starting to hit me. What do you mix with that, anyway-beer? Beer, I guess, right? Stick to beer?”

Bridger wasn't listening. He was letting the lights trigger something inside him, allowing the music to seep in and transfigure his mood. The line moved forward-maybe ten people between him and the bouncer-and he moved with it. He had a new angle now-a new perspective from which to study this girl, this woman, heroically fighting her way against the music at the edge of the dance floor. Up came her knees, down went her fists, out swung her elbows. Her movements weren't jerky or spastic or out of sync with the beat-or not exactly. It was as if she were attuned to some deeper rhythm, a counter-rhythm, some hidden matrix beneath the surface of the music that no one else-not the dancers, the DJ or the musicians who'd laid down the tracks-was aware of. It fascinated him. She fascinated him.

“Sharper? You with me?” Deet-Deet was gaping up at him like a child lost at the fair. “I was saying, I don't know if I-you see anything worthwhile in there?” He raised himself up on his toes to get a better look. The music collapsed suddenly and then reassembled around the bass line of the next tune. “Her? Is that what you're looking at?”

They were almost at the door, twenty-five or thirty people gathered behind them, the mist shining on everything now, on the streetlights, the palms, people's hair.

Deet-Deet tried one last time: “You want to go in? Think it's worth the five bucks tonight?”

It took him a moment, because he was distracted-or no, he was mesmerized. He'd been involved in two major relationships in his life, one in college and the one-with Melissa-that had died off three months ago with the sound of a tree falling in the woods when no one's there to hear it. Something tugged at him, the irresistible force, an intuition that sparked across the eroded pan of his consciousness like the flash of the strobe. “Oh, yeah,” he said, “I'm going in.”

Now, as he pulled himself up out of the haze of recollection to see that the woman with the child had vaporized and the cop with the white sideburns had been replaced by a female with drooping, possibly sympathetic eyes, he got to his feet. What time was it? Past four. Radko would have a fit. He'd had a fit. He was having a fit now. Bridger had missed an entire afternoon at work just when the team needed him most-and what had he accomplished aside from having a nice nap at the public's expense on a choice buttock-smoothed bench in the downtown San Roque Police Station? Nothing. Nothing at all. Dana was still locked up back there someplace and he was still here, clueless. He felt the irritation rise in him, a sudden spike of anger he could barely contain, and in order to calm himself he strode over to a display of pamphlets-“How to Protect Yourself on the Street; How to Burglar-Proof Your Home; Identity Theft: What Is It?”-and made a pretense of absorbing the sage information dispensed there. He gave it a moment, then casually turned to the desk.

“Hello,” he said, and the woman lifted her eyes from the form she was filling out. “My name's Bridger Martin and I've been waiting here since just past eleven-in the morning-and I was just wondering if you could maybe help me…”

She said nothing, because why bother? He was a petitioner, a special pleader, a creature of wants and needs and demands, no different from the thousands of others who'd stood here before him, and he would get to the point in his own way and in his own time, she knew that. The prospect seemed to bore her. The counter and the computers and the walls and the floors and the lights bored her too-Bridger bored her. Her fellow officers. Her shoes, her uniform: everything was a bore and a trial, ritualized, clichéd, without beginning or end. Her eyes told him that, and they weren't nearly as sympathetic as he'd thought, not up close, anyway. And her lips-her lips were tightly constricted, as if she were fighting some facial tic.

“It's my-my “girlfriend.” She's been arrested and we don't really know why. I took the whole afternoon off from work just to come down here and”-this was movie dialogue and the phrase stuck to the roof of his mouth-“bail her out, but nobody knows what the bail is or even what the charges are?” He made a question of it, a plea.

She surprised him. Her lips softened. The humanity-the fellow-feeling and sympathy-came back into her eyes. She was going to help. She was going to help, after all. “Name?” she queried.

“Dana,” he said. “Dana Halter, H-a-l-t-e-r.”

She was hitting the keys even as he superfluously spelled out the name and he watched her face as she studied the screen. She was pretty for a middle-aged woman, or almost pretty, now that the vise of her mouth had come unclamped. But he wanted to be charitable, wanted to be helped, babied, led by the hand-she was beautiful, wielder of the sword of justice, radiant with truth. At least for the few seconds it took to bring up the information. Then she lost her animation and became less than pretty all over again. Her eyes were hard suddenly, her mouth small and bitter. “We don't know what we've got here,” she said tersely, “-the charges are still coming in. And because of the Nevada thing, it looks like the Feds are going to be interested.”

“Nevada thing?”

“Interstate. Passing bad checks.”

“Bad checks?” he echoed in disbelief. “She never-” he began, and then caught himself. “Listen,” he said, “help me out here: what does it mean, because it's obviously all a mistake, mistaken identity or something explicable like that. I just want to know when I can get her out on bail? And where do I go?”

The faintest flicker of amusement lifted the corners of her mouth. “She's got no-bail holds in at least two counties because she walked in the past, which means I don't see anything happening till Monday-”

“Monday?” he echoed, and it was almost a yelp, he couldn't help himself.

A beat. Two. Then her lips were moving again: “At the earliest.”

THEY PUT HER IN A CELL that had been freshly scoured by some unseen presence, the caged lights glaring down from above, a residuum of drying mop strokes fanning out from the stainless-steel toilet set like a display model in the center of the room. The smell of the disinfectant, a chemical burn lingering on the clamped close air of the place, made her eyes water, and for the first few minutes she tried to breathe through her mouth only, but that just seemed to make it worse. She backed up against the gray cement wall with its hieroglyphs of furtive graffiti and rubbed at her eyes-and these were not tears, definitely not tears, because she wasn't intimidated and she wasn't scared or sorrowful in the least. She was-what was the word she wanted? — “frustrated,” that was all. Maddened. Outraged. Why wouldn't anyone listen to her? She could have written a deposition for them if somebody had thought to hand her a pen and a sheet of paper. And the interpreter, Iverson-he was all but useless, because in his eyes she was guilty until proven innocent, and that was wrong, just plain wrong. She needed somebody sympathetic. She needed a lawyer. An advocate. She needed Bridger.