T. Boyle: Talk Talk

He was here now-she could feel it. In this very building, in the front office with all those vacant policemen and hardedged secretaries, straightening things out. He'd explain it all to them, he'd talk for her, do whatever it took to get her out-go to the bank, the bail bondsman, harangue the judge and the district attorney and anybody else whose ear he could bend. If he could just show them their mistake-it was some other Dana Halter they wanted; you'd have to be blind not to see that-they'd understand and come and release her. Any minute now. Any minute now the warder would shove through the heavy steel door at the end of the hallway and unlock the cell and lead her back into the light of day and they'd all bend over backward apologizing to her, the cop at the desk, the arresting officer, Iverson, with his punctilious mouth and accusatory eyes and his unforgivably sloppy signing…

In her agitation-in her fury and sickness at heart-she found that she was pacing round and round the toilet, which was the single amenity in that strictly and minimally functional space aside from the two bunks bolted to the walls, and she wasn't ready to sit down yet. She spoke to herself, told herself to calm down, and maybe she moved her lips, maybe she was speaking aloud, maybe she was. Not that it mattered. There was no one there to hear her, Friday morning an unlikely time to be arrested and locked away. The real criminals were in bed still, and the rest of them-the wife beaters, binge drinkers, motorcycle freaks-were at work, warming up for Friday night. TGIF. She remembered how in college she treasured Friday night above all, as the one time she could get really loose, looser than Saturday because Saturday gave onto Sunday and Sunday was diminished by the prospect of Monday and the whole round of classes and papers and tests starting up all over again. She would go out with her girlfriends on Fridays, drink a few beers, a shot of Cuervo, dance till the pulse of the music branched up from the soles of her feet and radiated through her body so she almost felt she could hear it just like anybody else. The release was what she craved, just that, because she'd had to work so hard to overcome her disability-and she still worked harder than anybody she knew, driving herself with an internal whip that kept all her childhood wounds open and grieving in the flesh, alive to the mockery of her classmates at school, the onus of being branded slow, one of the deaf and dumb. Dumb. They called “her” dumb when she was the equal of anybody in the hearing world, anybody out there beyond these walls. They were the idiots. The cops. The judges. The interpreters.

Friday night. She and Bridger were planning to go out for Thai and then to a movie he'd worked on, some kung fu extravaganza with actors flying around like Peter Pan on invisible wires. She'd been looking forward to it all through her long crazy work week, final papers coming in from her students, endless conferences and department meetings and hardly a moment to focus on her own writing, bills piling up and no time to sit down and balance her checkbook let alone mollify the gas and electric and American Express and Visa, and on top of it all the ceaseless fulminating throb of that molar on the bottom left-and she wondered if anybody had gotten word to Dr. Stroud?

But there was the toilet. Or the throne, as her mother used to call it. She couldn't help musing over the expression (was that jailhouse jargon, was that where the trope had come from?), and then she realized that she had to use it, the piss-warm coffee converted to urine-to “piss” itself-and she looked to the adjoining cell and the empty hallway and to the big steel door. Did they have cameras here? Was some dirty jailer or infantile cop watching a monitor in a musty back office and waiting for the moment when she would lift her skirt and perch on the stainless-steel seat? The thought of it made her burn all over again. She wouldn't give them the satisfaction-she'd rather reabsorb her own wastes, die of a burst bladder. She kept pacing round and round the throne, practicing thought control and comforting herself with the notion that she'd be out before she knew it, and then she'd use the ladies' room in the courthouse like any other innocent.

Time passed. How much, she couldn't say. There were no windows here and they'd taken her watch from her and in her world there were no church towers marking off the quarter hour or birds calling down the close of day. For her, it was as quiet at rush hour as it was for the hearing in the dead of night-or no: quieter, quieter by far. They heard crickets, didn't they? Ambient noise, the sound of the refrigerator starting up, the piping distant howl of a coyote on its prey, a car lost somewhere in the glutinous web of the night? They heard all that in books. They heard it on TV and in horror films. “Loud noise,” prompted the closed captioning. “Sound of glass shattering. A scream.” She didn't hear it. She heard nothing. She lived in a world apart, her own world, a better world, and silence was her refuge and her hard immutable shell and she spoke to herself from deep in the unyielding core of it. That was her essence, her true self, the voice no one could detect even if they wore the highest-decibel hearing aids or cochlear implants or marched thunderously through the world of the hearing. That they couldn't touch. Nobody could.

At some point, she stopped pacing. She was tired suddenly, overburdened, and she eased herself down on the edge of the bunk. For a long while she just sat there, her back slumped, one foot jiggling as she slipped the heel of her shoe off and on, off and on. It was all too much. Here she was, caged up like an animal, and for what? For stupidity. Incompetence. Some paper-shuffler's error. The thing that irritated her the most, more than the injustice and inanity of the whole business, more than Iverson and the cops and everybody else who supported this faltering twisted half-witted bureaucracy, was the waste of her time. Her student papers were in her car-which had no doubt been impounded at this point-and she'd have to skip dinner and the movie and any notion of spending the night at Bridger's, because now she'd have to stay up half the night correcting them. Which she could be doing right now, right here, in her enforced solitude. And her book. She'd vowed to herself-and to Bridger too-that she'd stick with it, a page a day, until it was done. What a joke. She'd been behind all month-it was more like a paragraph a day, if she was lucky-and she'd been looking forward to making up for it over the weekend, tapping away at her laptop while Bridger slept in, a cup of chai to grease the wheels, the morning unfolding in a sure steady flow of inspiration and the promise of summer break on the horizon.

Or now. What was wrong with now? Hadn't Jean Genet written “Our Lady of the Flowers” in prison? On scraps of toilet paper, no less? She wanted to get up and rattle the bars like Cagney or Edward G. Robinson in one of those old movies she revered and Bridger hated, rattle the bars and holler till they came running with a ballpoint pen and a spiral notebook. It was almost funny. And it would be riotous in the telling, her own personal reality show: “Use a Car and Go to Jail.” Dr. Stroud would find it hilarious, wouldn't he, with two hours of dead time on his hands? And her students. And the headmaster, Dr. Koch-wouldn't he find it a scream, one of his teachers in the calaboose instead of the classroom?

Lots of laughs, oh, yeah. But she had to pee. It was an imperative now, no mere feeling of congestion or malaise or a vague gnawing urge-if she didn't use the toilet this very minute she was going to lose control, and how would Bridger feel taking her in his arms in front of all those cops and secretaries with a long dark stain trailing down the front of her skirt?