“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
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.