But they didn't lock her away, not yet. She was handcuffed to a bench that gave onto a hallway behind the front desk, and she didn't catch the explanation offered her-the cop, the booking officer, a man in his thirties who looked almost apologetic as he took her by the arm, had averted his face as he gently but firmly pushed her down and readjusted the cuffs-but it became clear when a bleached-out wisp of a man with a labile face and the faintest pale trace of a mustache came through the door and made his way to her, his hands already in motion. His name-he finger-spelled it for her-was Charles Iverson and he was an interpreter for the deaf. “I work at the San Roque School sometimes,” he signed. “I've seen you around.”
She didn't recognize him-or maybe she did. There was something familiar in the smallness and neatness of him, and she seemed to recollect the image of him in the hallway, his head down, moving with swift, sure strides. She forced a smile. “I'm glad you're here,” she said aloud, lifting her cuffed hands in an attempt to sign simultaneously as she tended to do when she was agitated. “There's some huge mistake. All I did was run a four-way stop… and they, they”-she felt the injustice and the hurt of it building in her and struggled to control her face. And her voice. It must have jumped and planed off because people were staring-the booking officer, a secretary with an embellished figure and a hard plain face, two young Latinos stalled at the front desk in their canted baseball caps and voluminous shorts. “Put a lid on it,” that's what their body language told her.
Iverson took his time. His signing was rigid and inelegant but comprehensible for all that, and she focused her whole being on him as he explained the charges against her. “There are multiple outstanding warrants,” he began, “in Marin County, Tulare and L. A. Counties”-“and out of state too, in Nevada, Reno and Stateline.”
“Warrants? What warrants?”
He was wearing a sport coat over a T-shirt with the name of a basketball team emblazoned across the breast. His hair had been sprayed or gelled, but not very successfully-it curled up like the fluff of the chicks they'd kept under a heat lamp in elementary school, so blond it was nearly translucent. She watched him lift the lapel of his jacket and extract a folded sheet of paper from the inside pocket. He seemed to consider it a moment, weighing it like a knife, before dropping it to his lap and signing, “Failure to appear on a number of charges, different courts, different dates, over the past two years. Passing bad checks, auto theft, possession of a controlled substance, assault with a deadly weapon”-“the list goes on.” He held her eyes. His mouth was drawn tight, no sympathy there. It came to her that he believed the charges, believed that she'd led a double life, that she'd violated every decent standard and let the deaf community down, one more hearing prejudice confirmed. Yes, his eyes said, the deaf live by their own rules, inferior rules, compromised rules, they live off of us and on us. It was a look she'd seen all her life.
He handed her the sheet and there it all was, dates, places, the police department codes and the charges brought. Incredibly, “her” name was there too, undeniably and indelibly, in caps, under Felony Complaint, Superior Court of this county or the other, and the warrant numbers marching down the margin of the page.
She looked up and it was as if he'd slapped her across the face. “I've never even been to Tulare County”-“I don't even know where it is. Or to Nevada either. It's crazy. It's wrong, a mistake, that's all. Tell them it's a mistake.”
The coldest look, the smallest Sign. “You get one phone call.”
Two
BRIDGER WAS AT WORK, the morning obliterated by Starbucks and the twilit irreality of the long cool room at Digital Dynasty, seeing and hearing and breathing in the world within a world that was the screen before him. The scene-a single frame-was frozen there in a deep gloom of mahogany and copper tones, and he was working on a head replacement. His boss-Radko Goric, a thirty-eight-year-old entrepreneur wrapped in two-hundred-dollar designer shades, off-color Pierro Quarto jackets and clunky vinyl shoes out of the bargain bin-had underbid three other special effects companies for the contract on this picture, the last installment of a trilogy set on a distant and inimical planet where saurian warlords battled for dominance and human mercenaries shifted allegiance in observance of the tenets of an ancient warrior code. All well and good. He was a fan of the series-had seen the first two episodes six or seven times each, in fact, marveling at the detail, the sweep, the seamlessness of the effects-and he'd gone into the project with the best of intentions, a kind of euphoria even. But Rad (as he insisted on being called, and not Radko or Mr. Goric or Your Royal Highness) had given them zero leeway as far as the time frame was concerned. The film was due to premiere in less than a month and Bridger and his five co-workers were putting in twelve-hour days, seven days a week.
For a long while, he just stared at the screen, his chin propped on two pale fists that seemed to have gone boneless on him. The world was there, right there in front of him, much more immediate and real than this cubicle, these walls, the ceiling, the painted cement floor, and he was inside it, drifting, dreaming, sleeping with his eyes open. He was beat. Dead. His fingers were limp, his backside blistered. He'd been wearing the same socks three days running. And now he could feel an exhaustion headache building inside his skull like the turd-brown clouds that roiled Drex III, the planet he shaded and scored and polished to the gleam of a dagger's edge with the assistance of his Discreet software and a finger-worn mouse. The coffee did nothing for him. It had been Banjo's turn to go for Starbucks during coffee break, and he'd ordered a venti with a shot of espresso, and there it was, half-consumed, and all he felt was queasy. And sleepy, drowsy, narcoleptic. If only he could lay his head down, just for a minute…
But he had a message. From Deet-Deet. The icon popped up in the corner of his screen, and he opened it to find a cartoon image of a peg-legged pirate waving a cutlass, onto which Deet-Deet had grafted an outsized cutout of Radko's head. The text read: “Har-har-har, me hearties! You'll all walk the plank if this project isn't in the bag by the thirtieth”-“and no snoozing on the job!”
This was the way they kept their sanity. The work was drudgery, piecework, paint and roto at twenty-five dollars and seventy-two cents an hour, before taxes, and while it had its moments of artistic satisfaction-like painting out the wires on the tiny flying bodies hurled into the scabrous skies by one nasty extraterrestrial explosion or another-essentially it was a grind. The head replacement shot Bridger had been working on all the previous day and into this soporific morning involved superimposing the three-dimensionally photographed face of the film's action hero, Kade (or “The” Kade, as he was now being billed), over the white helmet of a stuntman on a futuristic blade-sprouting chopper that shot up a ramp and off a cliff to skim one of Drex Ill's lakes of fire and propel its driver into the heart of the enemy camp, where he would proceed to hack and gouge and face-kick one hapless lizard warrior after another. It wasn't exactly what Bridger had imagined himself doing six years out of film school-he'd pictured a trajectory more like Fincher's or Spielberg's-but it was a living. A good living. And it was in the industry.
What he did now was superimpose The Kade's head over Radko's-he had The Kade winking and grinning, then grimacing (the look when the bike lands amongst the saurian legions with a sacroiliac-jarring thump) and finally winking again-and messaged his reply: “Scuttle the ship and bring me coffee, my kingdom for a cup, another cup. ” He added a P. S., his favorite quotation from “Miss Lonelyhearts,” which he made a point of inserting wherever it applied: “Like a dead man, only friction could warm him or violence make him mobile.”