T. Boyle: Talk Talk

Her back was to the door when it opened, but she turned immediately, just as if she'd heard the slap of the approaching footsteps, the chime of the keys and the ratcheting groan of the iron hinges. All her life she'd been attuned to the slightest changes in the currents of the air, to rhythms and vibrations, to the vaguest scent or the faintest fleeting rumor of a touch the hearing wouldn't even begin to notice. She had to be, just to survive. And it was no parlor trick, as her hearing friends suspected, especially in grade school when her mother immersed her in the hearing world, mainstreamed her in a school where she was the only deaf child among eight hundred and more, the neighborhood kids creeping up the steps to her bedroom to stealthily push open the door and find her staring at them-no, it was elementary biology. When you were deprived of one sense, the neural pathways reconfigured themselves to boost the others, nature's synesthesia, and how many times had she adduced Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder as examples?

She looked up now to witness a moment of drama at the open door of the cell: two policewomen, blocky, clumsy, heavy in the breasts and buttocks, their faces bright with duress, were leaning into a third woman as if she were a stalled car they were pushing down the street. Hands flew like birds, shoulders stiffened, and the third woman-the prisoner-stood erect against her jailers, wedging her own right shoulder between the bars and jerking her wrists against the grip of the handcuffs. All three were shouting and cursing-the familiar lip-pop of “fuck you” running from mouth to mouth, as if it were contagious, like a yawn-and the policewomen were grunting with the effort to force the prisoner into the cell. “Ugh, ugh, ugh”-Dana had no idea what a grunt sounded like, but she saw it as it was written on the page and put it in their gasping mouths. The whole thing, the whole “danse macabre” with its kicks and flailings and ugly exploding violence, went on far longer than she would have imagined, a rocking back and forth, ground gained and lost, until finally the big-shouldered women prevailed and the prisoner was flung spinning into the cell. She took three reeling steps and then collided with the toilet and went down as if she'd been shot.

Both of the policewomen worked their mouths in an angry tearing way while the shorter and stouter one twisted the key in the lock, and then they squared their shoulders and stamped angrily up the hall, where the bolted steel door swung open for them on cue. As for the woman on the floor, she didn't move. She was stunned-or worse. Dana rose tentatively from the cot. Was there blood? No, no blood. What she was seeing was the woman's hair, dark and matted, pooling under the cheek that was pressed to the floor.

She didn't know what to do. The woman needed help, obviously, but what if she was violent or drunk-or both? She was breathing, that much was evident from the rise and fall of her rib cage, and there didn't seem to be any bruise or swelling where her head had struck the scuffed tile of the floor, or not that Dana could see from this angle. She wouldn't have gone down so hard if the police had bothered to remove the handcuffs, but they hadn't-it was a kind of punishment, Dana supposed, tit for tat-and so she'd hit the toilet in mid-stride and pitched headlong to the floor without bringing her hands into play. Dana was bent over her now, trying to control her voice. “Are you all right?” she asked. “Do you need help? Should I call someone?”

It was then that the smell hit her, a savage working odor of the streets, of festering clothes, body secretions, food gone rancid. The woman was wearing a pair of dirty maroon polyester pants that rode up her ankles, a plaid shirt six sizes too big for her and what looked to be men's brogans, cheap and clunky and without laces. She wore no socks, the dirt clinging to her ankles like lichen on a rock. Dana laid a hand on her arm. “Hello?” she said. “Are you awake?”

Suddenly the eyes flashed open, dark eyes, muddy, the color of knots in a pine board, and the lips curled round a snarl. She said something then, something hard and defensive-“Back off!” yes, that was what it was-and attempted to sit up. It took her three tries, her legs sprawled out in front of her, her hands pinned at her back, and Dana said, “Do you need a hand?” and the woman just repeated herself: “I said, 'Back off!'”

Using her elbows for traction, she dug her way across the tile to the near bunk and braced herself against it. In a moment, she was standing, though shakily. She said something else then-“What do you think you're looking at?”-though Dana couldn't be sure because even the Einstein of lip-readers got no more than maybe thirty percent of what was said, despite what the hearing world might think, but what did they know? They knew movies, some waif-like actress pretending to be deaf and holding a conversation like anybody else while her huge imploring eyes consumed the screen in a parody of compassion and need. But it didn't work that way. So many English sounds were monophonous-so many words formed identically on the lips-that it was impossible to tell them apart. Context, context was all. That and guesswork. Dana said nothing. She gave a weak smile and eased down on the opposite bunk, hoping that her body language would speak for her: “I'm no threat; I just want to help.”

For a long while the woman just stared at her. There was a lump on her forehead, visible now just over her left eye, and the skin there was stretched and abraded. Dana held her eyes because there was nothing else she could do-if the woman were to speak to her again it was her only chance of comprehending and the last thing she wanted under the circumstances was for the woman to think she was ignoring her. Or dissing her, as they said. “Dissing,” from disrespecting.

But now the woman was talking again, asking her for something-her eyebrows lifting with the interrogative. But what was it? Dana said, “I don't understand.”

“What, are you deaf or something?” the woman said, and Dana got every word of that because she'd seen the question a thousand times on a thousand pairs of lips. She tried to make her voice soft and non-threatening, though no matter how many sessions she had with the speech therapist it was always a gamble: “Yes,” she said.

The look on the woman's face, disbelief wedded to a flare of anger. She might have said, “Are you putting me on?” Or: “No shit-really?” Her lips moved, but she was clearly intoxicated-“Drunk and Disorderly,” wasn't that the way they phrased it in the police reports? — and the faulty mechanics of her lips and tongue would have slurred the words in any case. But here came the interrogative again, tied this time to a gesture, a universal gesture-she worked her hands round to one side, held up two fingers in a V and dropped her head to purse her lips as if she were inhaling: “Smoke,” she was saying. “You got a smoke?”

Dana shook her head, shook it with more emphasis than usual. And then, in case her fellow prisoner might misinterpret the gesture, might think she was holding out or maybe even “dissing” her, she said aloud, “Sorry, I don't smoke.”

As it turned out, the hours wore on and nobody came for her, not Bridger, not the booking officer or Iverson or a hired attorney inflated with outrage. Nobody came, nothing happened. The drunken woman-her name was Angela-made a number of long, lip-flapping speeches, little of which registered on Dana, and eventually the matron or warder or whoever she was came to the cell with a set of keys, said something to Angela and released her from the handcuffs. A short while later the woman returned with two brown paper bags and handed them through the bars. This was dinner-two slices of white bread encasing a thin sliver of bologna with a dab of ketchup painted like a bull's-eye in the middle of it, spotted yellow apple, sugary fruit drink in a wax carton with malleable straw attached-and when she took the bag, when she held it in her hand and felt the palpable weight of it, Dana came close to breaking down. And she would have broken down if she'd been in private, but there was no privacy here, the warder standing right there with her null-and-void expression, and Angela, at the bars, taking the bag from the warder's hand as if it were filled to the neck with human excrement.