Chapter 5 The firewall
Daylight did not flatter the Obsidian Club so much as vouch for it.
Camille had half expected the place to look embarrassed at two on a Sunday afternoon, the way nightclubs look embarrassed — chipped paint, sticky floors, the machinery of illusion left out in the open.
Instead the walled garden was frankly, unapologetically beautiful: old brick gone rose-dark and soft-edged with age, a fig tree older than the club spreading its patient green weight over a wrought-iron table, and light coming down through the leaves in coins that moved when the breeze did.
Somebody had left a folded canvas chair against the trunk, angled toward the morning that was already gone, as though the tree kept regulars of its own.
There was coffee. Real coffee, in a heavy French press, with cream in a small white pitcher, and the smell of it reached her before Dahlia did.
“You came,” Dahlia said, coming through the kitchen door with the heavy clipboard under one arm and her reading glasses pushed up into the silver-threaded locs.
She was in daylight silk today, the same dried-blood color as her wraps on Thursday night, and she looked exactly as sovereign at a garden table as she had behind her desk.
“Adrian thought you would. I told him wanting a thing at midnight and wanting it on a Sunday afternoon are two different animals, and we’d see which one you were. ”
“And?”
“You’re here. Sit down, Ms. Carver. Pour yourself some coffee before we ruin your week.”
Adrian was already at the table. She’d seen him the moment she stepped into the garden and had been managing the seeing ever since — because he looked different by daylight too, and the difference was doing something unhelpful to her pulse.
No jacket. Shirtsleeves rolled to the forearm, a faint scar along one wrist she filed away before she could stop herself, and a stillness that was no less complete for being sunlit.
He stood while she sat. He poured her coffee without asking how she took it, then set the cream where her hand would find it, which was its own kind of sentence.
“Ms. Carver,” he said.
“Mr. Locke.”
“We’ll be past surnames by the bottom of this pot,” Dahlia said, settling across from her, “so let’s not waste them.
Camille. You asked Adrian for a scene Friday night.
He did the correct thing and declined to answer, because it wasn’t his to answer.
It’s mine first, then his, then yours — in that order, and I want you to notice the order, because it’s the last time in this house anything will come to you in an order you didn’t negotiate.
” She set the clipboard on the wrought iron with a click that sounded, in the green quiet, almost ceremonial.
“Do you still want it? Slept on, sober, in daylight, coffee in your hand?”
Camille had rehearsed this. She had rehearsed it in the shower and in the car and standing in her own kitchen at one in the morning eating cereal she didn’t want, and every rehearsal had produced a clean professional sentence with the want folded neatly inside it where nobody could see. What came out instead was:
“Yes.”
The word landed in the garden like something dropped from a height. Simple. Unqualified. Not managed. She heard herself say it and felt her face heat, and neither of them looked away, and neither of them made it smaller by being kind about it.
“Good,” Dahlia said. “Then here’s what changes, and I’ll tell you plainly: all of it.”
She pulled a single sheet from under the clipboard’s clamp and turned it to face Camille. It was not the limits document. It was a page from the ledger — lined, headed in Dahlia’s upright ink hand, dated today.
“On Thursday I gave you observer status on press terms. One night, escorted, notebook permitted, and everything you saw negotiated down to the minute by the people you saw it from. Those terms are dead as of this conversation. Not because you broke them — you didn’t; you were more careful than most — but because they can’t hold what you just asked for.
There is no version of this house where a woman is on the floor with her wrists in a Dominant’s keeping and a byline in her pocket.
So.” Dahlia tapped the ledger page, twice.
“We build a firewall, and we build it here, in the ledger, where the club builds everything it means. Two entries. Camille Carver, press — sanctioned visits, arranged through me, notebook at my desk on the way in and back in your hand on the way out, and anything you gather on those terms is yours to write, gods help us all. And Camille — no surname, because the surname is where the byline lives — who is a private adult woman doing private adult things that never happened as far as any page in this world is concerned, including your own notes, including your own memory the moment you sit down at a keyboard. The woman and the byline do not meet. Not in this garden, not in scene room two, not at three in the morning when the sentence is so good you could die. The wall goes where I’m drawing it, or none of this happens. ”
“That’s not a firewall,” Camille said. Her voice came out steadier than she felt, old reflex, blessed reflex. “That’s asking me to be two people.”
“No, baby.” Dahlia’s voice didn’t soften so much as become more exact. “You’ve been two people. Since long before Thursday, from the look of you. I’m asking you to stop making one of them do all the living while the other one takes all the notes.”
The garden was very quiet. Somewhere over the wall, blocks away, Atlanta went on being Sunday — a dog, a car door, someone’s grill smoking sweet on the other side of the brick.
Camille looked at the ledger page and understood, with the part of her that was still and would always be a good reporter, that she was looking at the club’s entire legal theory and entire theology on one lined sheet, and that Merchant would sell a kidney for a photograph of it, and that she was about to sign it instead.
“The notebook stays at the desk,” she said.
“On participant nights, yes.”
“You understand what you’re asking.” She hadn’t planned to say it.
It came up out of her like water finding a crack.
“I’ve carried a notebook into rooms where people were grieving, rooms where people were lying to me with lawyers present, a room where a man confessed to something ugly because he forgot I was writing.
It’s not a tool. Tools go in bags.” Her thumb was moving against her own fingertips, the ghost of a pen.
“It’s the — it’s where I stand. It’s how I’m in a room without being in the room. ”
“I know,” Dahlia said. “Why do you think I’m taking it?”
Adrian had said nothing for a long time. He said something now, low, and the low of it was different in daylight — no cello under it, no amber, just the man.
“Nobody here is confiscating your armor, Camille. You’ll walk it to the desk yourself, every time, and Dahlia will hand it back every time, and the door opens both ways — the day you want your press terms and nothing else, that’s the ledger’s other line, no penalty, no questions.
What we’re doing is making sure that when you’re on the floor as yourself, you are findable.
I can’t negotiate with a woman standing behind a notebook.
I can’t check the colour of someone who’s narrating.
” He turned his cup a quarter-turn on its saucer.
“And I won’t put my hands on a reporter.
That’s not caution, that’s the whole of it.
The woman, gladly. The byline, never. You’ll hear me say that again before we’re done, probably at a worse moment. ”
He warmed the cup first, her mind supplied, unbidden, from Friday’s notes. Nobody watched and everybody saw.
“Then we’re agreed on the wall,” Dahlia said, and turned the ledger page back toward herself, and wrote — two lines, upright ink — and Camille watched her own name become two names, watched it cost less on paper than it did in her chest, and reached for her coffee to have something to hold.
“Now,” Dahlia said, pulling the long-form limits document from the clipboard, and this time setting it in front of Camille with a pen laid across it like cutlery.
“You filled this out on Thursday like a woman building a cover story. Some of it was true anyway — you know I flagged what I flagged. Today you fill it out like it’s true, all of it, because Friday night this piece of paper is the floor you’ll be standing on.
Take your time. We are the only appointment the garden has. ”
There was no clock to check. There was never a clock in this place; she knew it now for policy rather than oversight. Camille uncapped the pen.
It took her the better part of an hour, and it was the strangest interview of her life, because the subject kept refusing to cooperate and the subject was her.
Experience: she’d written none relevant on Thursday, camouflage-flip, and the truth was longer and shorter at once — none, and I’ve wanted to know why I keep reading about it since I was twenty-six.
Her pen hovered over the hard-limits column and found the entries surprisingly ready, as though they’d been waiting in her wrist: no photographs — she almost laughed, she wrote it anyway; nothing that broke skin; no humiliation play, not yet, underlined yet and then stared at the underline like it had been made by someone else.
Marks: below the collar — she wrote it and heard the woman from the alcove Friday night, laughing, nothing I have to explain to a TSA agent, and understood the sentence from the inside now.
Restraint: yes, and her hand shook slightly, and she wrote next to it, small, in the margin, the way a source adds the thing they actually called to say: I want to know what my head does when holding still isn’t my idea.