“Keep him liking things,” I say. “He’s not the enemy. He’s just noise that can be turned down.”
“And Mara,” he adds. “Are you really going to wake her to sell this immersion idea, or are you going to pretend we have a process for it so you can sleep for an hour?”
“I’m not sleeping,” I say. “Call me when the scaffolding is up.”
He clicks off. The line goes blank in the way the city never does. I scroll to the protocol file and pull it open. The language is careful:The Foundation may, upon mutualagreement, invite Artist to observe operational environments under strict confidentiality for the sole purpose of informing safety practices and preventing inadvertent risk through artistic output.Lawyers write like that because it keeps people from thinking about the room. I delete three sentences and write words that sound like what they are:We bring you inside under rules, so the outside doesn’t kill someone. Break the rules, you leave.I leave the polite version next to it so legal can see the bones.
I flip to the appendix titledTour Preparation.It’s a script for how to walk a person through a place where we keep secrets without giving them any they can use later. We haven’t used it on an artist yet. I’m going to use it like a blade.
I keep working the protocol, the way a surgeon works a process because the process is what saves you when thought fails. I add the NDA page to the front of the packet, rewrite the first paragraph to sound less like command and more like invitation because she’ll read to the end if she doesn’t throw it in my face after the first two lines. I add a line that wasn’t there at noon:You retain the right to end the tour at any time.That line isn’t for her. It’s for me. It’s a lever I can see and not pull.
The medic part of me sorts parts of the plan intonecessaryandindulgent.Necessary:get her inside a controlled Sanctuary before she finds a way to sniff around a real one. Show her enough to scare her into understanding what a careless choice does to people who didn’t get to choose the first time. Change her mind to our language: safety review, operational planning, coordination.Indulgent:keep her in a car for thirty minutes while she sits across from me without a crowd. Watch the way her body reacts to a hallway that doesn’t posture, just functions. Put her in a chair in our intake room and see if she can sit without owning it. Feel her resist and call theresistance evidence that she’s alive and that what I’m doing is a favor.
I push the indulgent list away. It comes back.
My hands remember the night it turned. The shelter smelled like tea and bleach and blood. My mother, smaller than I am now, told a woman named Lena that safety was a thing we could give her because the law had a shape to it and we had a door. That night, the door was nothing. A man put his foot through it, and we learned a door is a lie if you don’t know how to hold it. I pressed my palm there while my mother called a number that didn’t answer fast enough. I counted when counting was worse than useless. I watched the room tell the truth: if you don’t control context, nothing you say matters.
That’s the story inside every choice I make in rooms like this. It isn’t a justification so much as a set of vital signs. They don’t change because I want them to. They change because I decide to intervene or not.
I call Mara and put her on speaker because I don’t want to hold anything while I do this.
“You’re calling in the middle of the night,” she says before hello. “Either someone bled on a floor, or you want to do something you know I’ll tell you not to.”
“Neither” I say. “Both. I want to invite Hale on a controlled tour. Tomorrow.”
Silence greets me. Then a small laugh that has no humor in it. “Of a Sanctuary,” she says, making sure we’re naming the same thing.
“A pilot site.” I choose the phrase she’ll be able to live with. “We keep it clean and generic. We keep it under NDA. We call it part of the residency. It buys us clarity and obedience.”
“I knew you were going to say that word,” she sighs. “I hoped you wouldn’t lean into it like a man trying to get a reaction.”
“It isn’t about her,” I say. “It’s about our rooms. She’s searching. She’ll find something dirty and grab it because it’s the only thing with texture. I want her to find what we give her instead. I want to show her a version that won’t get anyone hurt.”
“She isn’t ready for that,” Mara protests. “She’ll take the details you don’t think are details and build a cathedral out of them. She’ll think a clinic is a church because she wants to sanctify what she does. You can’t out-argue an artist’s instinct to make meaning where a bureaucrat has placed an SOP.”
“She will do less harm if we manage the meaning,” I reason. “I’m not asking for your approval. I’m asking you to write the invitation that reads like an honor and an expectation. Ten a.m., my office. You, legal, me, her lawyer. We sign what we can. Then we go.”
“No,” she says flatly. “We do not take her inside on the same day we hand her a new leash and call it a lifeline. If she says yes to the contract, you will be tempted to think you have consent for other things you want. Separate the events. Give her one ‘win’ in a room where she doesn’t feel trapped and then ask for the tour.”
“You saidleash,not me,” I point out.
“You thought it,” she counters. “Because you know a schedule is control even when you dress it as safety. I won’t sign off on a same-day immersion.”
“You don’t get to sign off,” I say. I let the words come out the way I think them because Mara is one of the few people who won’t confuse honesty with tyranny. “You get to advise. I hear you. I’ll ignore you when I have to.”
“You always do,” she says. “Let me tell you the part that saves you from yourself: do not put her in a corridor with any of ours who know the stories we keep. She will smell blood through paint. She will see the way our social workers lean, the way ournurses hold a chart, and she will map it to the scar tissue inside her. You want to give her clean software. Don’t show her the code.”
“I know. The pilot is built for this.”
“Then use the pilot. And tell me when I have to pretend to be surprised when you call the meeting.”
“Ten,” I say. “Bring the version of yourself that likes writing words that sound nicer than what we’re doing. She’ll need to hear them.”
“She’ll need to hear you tell the truth and not enjoy it,” she says.
The line goes quiet. She’s still there. She doesn’t hang up because she knows the call isn’t over. “You’ll also need to think about whether you want to keep the camera across the street,” she adds. “You told her you’d pull it.”
“Tonight,” I say signaling the end of the call.
