Talk Talk

EPILOGUE

It was late, past nine by now, but Bridger wasn't going anywhere. He wasn't even hungry, though somewhere in the back of his mind the icon of the Campbell's Chunky Soup can glowed like the figure in a shrine. “Soup that eats like a meal” was the promo line the company had come up with, and he and Deet-Deet had bounced that one around, creating a digital can with stick limbs surmounted by Radko's squared-off head and glowering face-“The producer that eats like a special effect”-and how does a meal eat, anyway? Does it use utensils? Is it autophagic? Does it have a mouth? He was working late because he didn't have a whole lot else to do and he wanted to get on Radko's good side and stay there since Radko, against his better judgment, had brought him back on board. The young woman-girl-who'd replaced him hadn't worked out. Her name was Kate and she was just a tad bit self-obsessed, or so it went in Deet-Deet's recounting, coming in one Monday with a breast augmentation that took her from borderline flat to Graf Zeppelin overnight. She was a prima donna-or a diva, as she liked to call herself-but around Digital Dynasty she was known as Phisher because she was always phishing for compliments. At any rate, she was gone, and he was back. And he planned to keep his head down and make the most of it. The only light in the long sweep of the burnished concrete room descended from the EMERGENCY EXIT sign Radko had put up over the back door to mollify the building inspector when he put in the carrels and computer hookups and transformed what had been San Roque's last machine shop into a special effects studio. It was all right with Bridger. He had his iPod to keep him entertained and the soup was on the shelf by the coffeepot, awaiting the microwave. In the meanwhile, the screen gave him its solace, the solace of the proportionate world, edited, reduced, with the colors enhanced and the blemishes removed. At the moment he was working on a picture to be released for the Thanksgiving weekend, a remake of “The Wild One” starring The Kade in the Marlon Brando role and Lara Sikorsky as the sheriff's daughter, though the role of the daughter had been expanded and modified to reflect the post-feminist realities of the twenty-first century-she was now a motorcycle enthusiast herself, and there were any number of spectacular jumps and mid-air pas de deux that featured Lara and The Kade thumbing their noses at the clueless townsfolk and the smirking models and steroid freaks who'd been tricked up to represent the rival motorcyle club. It was all in good fun. Nothing more than a little reinvention of film history and an attempt to cash in on The Kade while the going was good. Bridger had no problem with that, no problem at all-he was just happy to be working again.

The cast had come off a week ago, but even with it on he'd been able to manipulate the mouse and run his programs pretty effectively-in fact, he'd got so used to propping the thing up on the edge of his desk he felt strange without it, as if his arm were levitating all on its own. There was no pain, though when he took a deep breath he could still feel a premonitory prickling in the place where the two ribs had sustained their hairline fractures, and his voice was huskier now. He hadn't noticed the change himself-you don't really listen to yourself unless you're singing, and he hadn't felt much like bursting into song lately-but when he'd first got back and called Deet-Deet to suss things out and then Radko to offer his services in the absence of the girl with the breast implants, neither of them had recognized his voice, and that told him something.

And his mother. Right from the outset his mother had wanted to know when and how and to what extent he would regain his voice, demanding facts, statistics, terminology, chasing nurses down the hallway and dialing every specialist in the phone book, starting with Ahmad and running down to Zierkofski. She'd swept into the hospital in a cyclone of flowers, putting on her adversarial face and grilling the doctor who'd operated on him (a soft-spoken Taiwanese woman with peeled-back eyes who looked as if she were awaiting the gun at the start of the hundred-meter dash) till the doctor had thrown up her hands and said, “Look, maybe what you need is an outside specialist,” and his mother had tightened her voice till it was like strung wire and said, “That's exactly what we need.” He hadn't known what to do. He was unfocused and tentative, adrift on a sea of medication. He was having trouble swallowing and it felt as if there were something stuck in his throat, some balled-up wad of cardboard that kept him on the verge of gagging all the time, and that concerned him. It scared him. It made him susceptible to his mother and her reductive fears in a way that brought him back to his childhood-she was his mother, and she was there for him, and he was glad of it-and when she told him she'd made an appointment for Thursday back in San Diego with the best otolaryngologist in Southern California, all he could do was nod. It wasn't his fault. He wasn't thinking beyond the moment. And he wasn't-forgive him, because he was the one who'd been hurt here, he was the one in the hospital-thinking of Dana.

She'd driven back down to New York, that was all he knew, and he messaged her on his cell that night, the second night in the hospital, but he couldn't find a way to say what he wanted to say, not without seeing her face to face.

“Hi.”

“How you feeling?”

“Okay. Can't swallow too well.”

“What did the doctor say?”

“Not much.”

“When do you get out?”

“Tomorrow.”

“What time?”

“You don't need to come.”

“I do. I want to.”

“My mother's here.”

“So?”

They released him the next morning, early, and he called from the train to tell her he was on his way, hoping to catch her before she left the apartment. It was awkward-the cast was on his forearm but they wanted him to wear a sling for the first two weeks, just to keep it stationary-yet he was already adapting, flashing on the summer he'd spent under the hoop out back of the house when he was in high school and trying, with mixed results, to train himself to take the three-point shot from either side. His mother sat beside him with the newspaper and a cardboard cup of coffee, making one-way conversation-his father was going to be happy to see him, and the dog too, and he was welcome to stay as long as he liked because nobody had been in the guest room since Junie and Al had been there in the spring and did he know they'd sold their business and had all the figures worked out for early retirement? Could he believe that? Junie and Al retired? As he listened to the phone ring he couldn't help picturing Dana in motion, sliding out of the cab at Grand Central with the light exploding round her and the pigeons blasting up off the sidewalk in living color or tapping her foot and doing the crossword as the northbound train hurtled past them at Tarry-town or Dobbs Ferry or some such place, the numb staring faces passing in instant review and hers shuffled in with all the rest. There was no answer. His mother, in high spirits, leaned in to read him choice bits from the newspaper and she sipped her coffee and worked one shoe off and on again with the toe of the other, and when he needed to respond, when she put a question to him-“So what's she like, Dana? Are you two serious? It must be, I don't know, “difficult” to communicate?”-he wrote out the reply in an awkward scrawl on one of the paper towels from the restroom “(Awesome; Yes; Not too bad).”

Then they were in the cab, the streets crushed by the weight of the light, monuments of light cut and formed and shaped by the buildings, everything held in stasis till the cab turned one corner and then the next and the weight came down all over again and he couldn't swallow and he had to have the driver pull over so he could scramble out and get a bright red super-sized container full to the plastic brim with Coke and ice and the straw to deliver it sip by soothing sip. And then they were at the apartment and the doorman was phoning up and he watched his mother's face as the elevator rose toward the meeting of the mothers, his mother and hers, and what that meant or could mean. Vera was waiting for them at the door. She'd combed her hair and put on lipstick. “You poor thing,” she said, or something to that effect, and stepped forward to embrace him before he had a chance to introduce his mother, which he did a moment later with a shrug of the shoulders and a broad grimacing gesture that made the side of his face-the side that had hit the pavement-ache all over again.

He could see that his mother was tense, her smile automatic and her eyes panning away from Dana's mother to the open door and the dim interior beyond. She didn't know what to expect-she'd had no experience of the deaf and this was uncharted territory-but to her credit she held out her hand and Vera took it and then they were emerging from the hall into the living room in a scatter of small talk. “Would you like something to drink?” Vera wanted to know and he saw that she'd made an effort to push back the clutter so that the couch and easy chair presented their surfaces unencumbered and a good square foot of the coffee table was ready to receive the drinks and the blue can of Planters nuts. He watched his mother take it all in and he wanted to smooth things over, to make the off-hand comment that would put them at ease, but all he could do was hold out the Coke container and rattle the ice in response. His mother, looking doubtfully at the easy chair, momentarily lost her smile. “Water,” she said. “Thank you.”

Just as Dana's mother was about to turn away, thankful to have this little ritual of welcoming and graciousness to occupy her, he jerked his left arm into her line of vision, a sudden spastic gesture that must have made it seem as if he were fighting for balance, but it had the desired effect: he caught her attention. There was a suspended moment, both women staring at him, and then he signed, as best he could under the conditions, “Where is Dana?”

Vera looked to his mother and then turned back to him. “Sleeping,” she said. “I let her sleep in. I mean, after all she's been through-yesterday, yesterday especially.” She paused to draw in her breath. “Yesterday was a nightmare.”

“Yesterday?”

“At the station. When he-I was scared to death. Literally scared to death.” She saw his face then and caught herself. “You mean you don't know? Didn't she tell you?”

He could feel his heart going. The side of his face throbbed. The walls were closing in on him, the floor giving way, special effects, very special effects. “Tell me what?”

She started to say something-the words were right there on her lips-but she stopped herself. She was wearing a print dress in some shiny fabric, something she'd put on to impress his mother, and she was barefooted. He watched her shift her weight to her back foot as her toes flexed and rose on point for balance, and then she pushed a hand through her hair and gave him a sidelong look, a gesture he knew well, a Dana gesture. “Come on,” she said, and she held out her hand even as a look passed between her and his mother, “maybe you ought to talk to her yourself.”

They paused at the door to the guest bedroom, the light dim, books and newspapers stacked up against the walls, a chair there, strewn with dresses and undergarments, and then, all in one motion, Vera shoved the door open and jerked it shut again. She gave him a soft smile. “That's our knock at the door,” she murmured, already turning away. “You can go in now. I'll sit with your mother-we have a lot to talk about.”

As it turned out, Dana wasn't asleep. She was sitting at the desk she'd shoved up against the window, working on her laptop. Her face was turned to him as he stepped into the room, her hair shoved up away from her forehead and the faint white crescent of the scar that had bloomed there where she'd hit the windshield. She was dressed in T-shirt and panties, one bare leg folded under her, a Diet Coke at her elbow. “Hi,” she mouthed, and she smiled, but didn't get up.

He crossed the room to her and leaned over to press his lips to hers, instant communication, then took two steps back and eased himself down on the bed.

She was still smiling, though she was examining him as if she hadn't seen him in a week. “You look”-she paused-“better. Much better. How do you feel?”

There was something wrong here, something he didn't like. He needed more than this-he needed elaboration, needed acknowledgment. He was hors de combat, her soldier, her man. He just shrugged. Looked away. Almost without thinking, his hands said: “What happened yesterday?”

“I should have told you, but I didn't want to upset you. You were sleeping. That's what they said at the hospital-you were sleeping.”

He just looked at her.

“He was there. At the train station. Peck Wilson.”

His hands were like bricks. “What do you mean? How? Did they catch him?”

“He was just there-he must have followed me. He didn't do anything. He just… bumped me, that's all.”

He wanted to repeat that, make a question of it, but he didn't know the verb. The muscles fired in his face. “What?”

“They didn't catch him,” she said. “He just bumped me, to show he could do it, I guess-he could do anything-and then he just walked away and got on the train.” She brought her leg out from under her and set both feet on the floor and leaned forward, her hair falling loose round her shoulders. “I don't know, it was strange, very strange, but I think he was saying it's over, like as if he was calling a truce.”

Calling a truce? He couldn't believe what he was hearing. In a fury he pushed himself up from the bed and went to the desk, to the lined yellow pad there and the ballpoint-what was she doing, taking notes? — and started writing. Poorly. With his left hand. “You mean you didn't call the cops?”

She shook her head.

“Or your mother? On the cell? They could have been at the next station”-“we could have nailed him.”

She was still shaking her head, but more emphatically now. Her mouth was set, her eyes locked on his. “No,” she said, “it's over. Let him go. It's not worth it. I mean, look at you. Just look at you.”

The logic eluded him. He tried to pull the threads of it together, tried to see the beating he'd taken, down there on the sidewalk choking for air while Peck Wilson cracked his ribs and ground his face into the cement, as a link to the phrase she'd used: Not worth it to whom? Who was being sacrificed here? It all came up in him then and he slammed his fist down on the desk, even as he tried to gasp out the words that wouldn't come and she wouldn't have heard anyway, the hurtful words, the curses and recriminations.

“I don't want to talk about it,” she said, and she snatched the pad away from him.

Clumsily, spelling it out, left hand only: “You never want to talk.”

She dropped her eyes to shut him out, and then, as if they'd been discussing the price of gasoline or where they were going for dinner or a movie neither of them wanted to see, she said, “But I do. I want to talk because I've got some good news, really good news-”

And as she told him, as he listened to her untethered voice ride the currents of her emotion, now cored-out and hollow, now muffled as if she were speaking through a gag, it became clear that the news was good for one of them only, for her. She'd e-mailed her former mentor at Gallaudet, Dr. Hauser-he remembered him, didn't he? The one who'd first introduced her to the Romantic poets and served as chair of her Ph. D. committee? — just to touch base and let him know what had happened at the San Roque School, and he'd e-mailed back to say that he might have something for her, two core classes in freshman writing-if she was interested, that is.

“So what I'm saying is maybe we should drive down to Washington, just to see?” She gave an elaborate shrug, and her face, the face that always told him so much, transformative, articulate, sad and beautiful and wrenchingly alive, told him nothing now. “I mean,” she said, “we've come this far, anyway-”

Someone nailed a wall up in front of him. Bang, bang, bang, the hammer blows echoed in his head. And what was this wall made of? It wasn't stone, it wasn't brick-some temporary material, plywood, fiberboard, something you could construct and tear down in a day. The left hand, the awkward one, spoke for him, the index finger to the breast, then the jump, up and down: “I can't.”

It was past ten by the time he got up from the desk to shuffle back to the kitchenette by the soda machine, lift down the can of soup and peel back the easy-opening top to expose the contents. He licked the glutinous saffron-colored paste from the inside of the curled recyclable top before dropping it in the wastebasket, then upended the can over the coffee mug with “Sharper” stenciled along the rim, gave it a tap to facilitate the action of gravity and then shoved the mug in the microwave. It was quiet, preternaturally quiet, the long bare room held in equipoise between the absence of sound and the sudden startling mechanical beep of the microwave and the muted roar that succeeded it, cuisine in the making. And how would he have described the sound to someone who had never heard it? Like holding a seashell to your ear. For three minutes and thirty seconds. White noise. Static. And then there was the culminating beep, sharp as a gunshot.

He was back at his desk, working on a double head replacement-The Kade and Lara Sikorsky, suspended in mid-air on their motorcycles against a vibrant enhanced sky, a perfect crossing pattern, his face and hers, aloft-and spooning up soup when he heard the sound of a key in the lock at the front door. Radko, he was thinking, coming to check up, and he was thinking too that he wouldn't have heard him at all if he hadn't removed his earphones when he went up to fix the soup. Not that it mattered. He was hard at work, totally focused, and even if the boss had crept up on him he would have seen that. But now Radko was there, dropping his shoulders as he leaned back into the door and blinking as he came down the hall and peered into Bridger's cubicle.

“What, you are here?” he said, his face going through its permutations, running from surprise to suspicion-was Bridger in fact working or screwing around on company time? — to a kind of muted pleasure in the dawning awareness of his errant employee's dedication.

“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