T. Boyle: Talk Talk

“Yeah,” Bridger heard himself saying, “I was thinking I'd put in some extra time tonight just to push that deadline a little,” and in the silence of the room he became aware of the faint lingering rasp in his voice. “Deet-Deet was here till seven. And Plum stayed late too.”

Radko was silent a moment, squinting into the screen where The Kade's digital features were superimposed over the white helmet of the stuntman and Lara Sikorsky remained an opaque blur. “All right,” he said finally. “But no overtime, only regular hour. Yes? You know that.”

“Yeah,” Bridger said, and he didn't want to tell him he had nothing better to do, “yeah, I know.”

At some point Radko took his material presence and retreated back down the hall, footsteps echoing, to reverse the sequence of events that had brought him there in the first place, and the studio fell into a silence that seemed even deeper than before. Bridger was so intent on the screen he forgot about his iPod and before long it was so quiet he could hear the faint click of the mouse, and the keys-the keys rattled like thunder over a miniature world. He finished the frame he was working on and brought up the next, the figures frozen in position, the white nullity of their faces, his and hers. But then, instead of bringing up The Kade's head, he clicked on his own and implanted it there on The Kade's shoulders, and it took him a moment before he came up with the right expression, a smile, rueful and yet playful too, with all the promise of joy and fulfillment. And then, and he knew he was going to do it before his fingers crept to the mouse, he brought up Dana's face. He gave her a smile too and he put her there, right next to him, ascendant, with all the blue sky in the universe crowding in behind her.

The End

I would like to thank Marie Alex, Jamieson Fry, Susan Abramson and Linda Funesti-Benton for their generous help and advice. ****

T. C. Boyle's novels include “World's End,” winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, “The Tortilla Curtain, Riven Rock, A Friend of The Earth, Drop City” (which was a finalist for the National Book Awards) and “The Inner Circle. ”His stories appear regularly in most major magazines, including “The New Yorker, Esquire, Playboy, Granta” and the “Paris Review”. He lives in California.