The office was pretty much standard issue: a tumult of books and papers everywhere, various certificates and framed photos of graduates leaching out of the walls, the multicolored pennants of colleges the school's students had gone on to-USC, Yale, Stanford, Gallaudet. She was trying to remember when she'd last been in this room-could it have been as long as a year ago, when she was hired? — and her gaze came to rest on a very small portrait, in oil, of Dr. Koch signing to an ill-defined audience in a sketchy auditorium somewhere. The artist seemed to have had a thing for red, and the result gave the subject's face the texture and coloration of a slab of raw meat.
“So this is all very unfortunate,” he said, glancing up sharply and signing simultaneously to get her attention. “A real mess. And the timing couldn't have been worse. Really, I mean, “finals” week.” A pause, his hands at rest. “Did you even give finals?”
Maybe it was that she was wrought up-her car was still in the impound yard, there was a criminal out there impersonating her, she'd barely slept in three days and if someone had stuck an electric prod in her mouth it couldn't have felt any worse than her own natural dentition did-but his words hit her the wrong way. They entered her eyes and then her brain and there they set off a chemical reaction that caused her to stand up so abruptly the chair fell out from under her and hit the floor with what might have been a thud, if only she could have heard it. “You talk as if I'm the one at fault,” she signed.
He regarded her steadily, his hands folded on the desk before him. He was hearing, but he'd been in deaf education all his life and his signing would have been as proficient as a native speaker's if he hadn't lacked expression. And there was no way to teach that, not that she knew anyway. “I don't know who else is,” he said, and his hands never moved.
“Didn't you get my e-mail”? she demanded.
“I got it. But it still doesn't begin to explain how you could just not show up for classes on Friday and Monday both-and be late today on top of it. You couldn't have called in at least? Couldn't have had the courtesy?”
“I was in jail.”
“I know. That's why we're having this discussion.” He looked down at the desk a moment, picked up a paperweight in the shape of a football (Second Place, Division III Playoffs, 2001) and set it down again. “Don't they give you a phone call?”
“One. One only. I used it to call my boyfriend”- “Well, good for you. But couldn't he have called? Couldn't anybody?”
“So I could get bailed out.”
“You know, your students were upset-the Rogers girl, what's her name, Crystal, especially. We all were. And I think it's pretty unprofessional of you-and inconsiderate as well-to just disappear like that. Finals week too. But you didn't get bailed out, did you?”
“You read the e-mail. There was nothing I could do. It was a case of mistaken identity”-“worse, identity theft”-here she brandished the manila folder-“and if you think it's a joy being locked up you just try it, you'll see. It was the worst nightmare of my life. And now you have the gall to blame me?”
“I don't like your tone.”
“I don't like yours either.”
He brought both palms down on the desk with enough kinetic energy to dislodge a stack of papers and then, as if the impulse had just come into his head, jumped to his feet even as the papers settled silently round his shoes. “Enough!” he shouted, and he was signing now, signing angrily, punching out his hands like a prizefighter. “It's not for you to like or dislike. Let me remind you that you're the employee here, not me”-“and an untenured employee at that. One that comes in late half the time as it is”- “Bullshit!” she said, and then repeated it for emphasis-“Bullshit!”-before turning her back on him and slamming the door behind her with such force she could feel the concussion radiating all the way up her arm as she strode past the secretary, down the hall and out of the building.
Six
BRIDGER WAS AT WORK, dwelling deep in Drex III, cruising right along, the mouse a disembodied extension of his brain and his blood circulating in a steady, sure, tranquil squeeze and release, when Dana called. He'd come in early, directly after dropping her off at school, hoping to make up some of the ground he'd lost over the past four days, and he'd already got two hours in before anyone else showed up. Which didn't prevent Radko from lecturing him in front of the whole crew about “the impordance of deamwork” and how he was letting everyone down. This struck him as unfair, grossly unfair, especially when Deet-Deet leaned out of his cubicle and made Radko faces at him throughout his dressing-down, but he didn't say anything in his own defense other than that he'd been there since eight and would stay on through dinner-whatever it took-until he finished up every last frame of this sequence (another head replacement, this time of The Kade's co-star, Lara Sikorsky, whose stand-in did a triple-gainer off one of Drex Ill's needle-like pillars and into a lake of fire, from which she emerged unscathed, of course, because of a genetic adaptation that allowed her skin, hair and meticulously buffed and polished nails to survive temperatures as high as a thousand degrees Fahrenheit). In fact, he'd been so absorbed in the work he hadn't opened any of the pop-ups from his co-workers or even put anything on his stomach yet, other than coffee, that is.
His cell began to vibrate and he surreptitiously slipped it from his pocket and leaned deep into his cubicle to screen it from anyone-i. e., Radko-who might be passing by on the way to the refrigerator or rest-room. Dana had a tendency to text messages that went on for paragraphs, but this time she was terse: “Koch is a real A-hole! I'm quitting. I swear.”
He punched in a response: “Do you want to talk?”
“Nothing to talk about. I'm going home.”
“Don't. You only have four more days.”
Nothing. He held the phone a moment as if it were totemic, as if it could project meaning apart from any human agency, and then she retransmitted the original message: “Koch is a real A-hole!”
All else aside, this was a proposition he couldn't deny. He'd met the man four or five times now, at one grindingly dull school function or another (which Dana was required to attend on pain of forfeiture of administrative patience and goodwill), and he was as stiff and formal and unsympathetic as one of the helmeted palace guards on Drex III. And the way he condescended to the deaf teachers-and to the students too-you would have thought his special talent was for humiliation rather than education. Still, he was the man in charge and it wasn't as if she had a whole lot of options: the San Roque School was the only show in town-in fact, it was the only school for the deaf on the Central Coast, as far as he knew. He phoned her back, but there was no answer.
He called every fifteen minutes after that, but she wouldn't pick up, and he took a moment to peer out of his cubicle and determine Radko's whereabouts before e-mailing her as well “(Don't do anything rash,” was the message he left on cell and PC alike). As the morning wore on, though, he couldn't seem to recover his concentration, the mouse moving so slowly it might have been made of kryptonite, the frame before him frozen in an instant that wasn't appreciably different from the instant that had preceded it, the whole movie turning to sludge before his eyes. All he could think about was what would happen to her if she lost her job. At the very least she'd have to move God knew where to find another one-there was a deaf school in Berkeley, he was pretty sure, but the others might have been anyplace, Texas, North Dakota, Alabama. The thought of it-“Alabama”-made his stomach skip, and he dialed her yet again.