Page 209 of The Off Limits Captain
The bubbles appear. Disappear. Appear.
Fine. Please stop asking.
Then, a minute later, when I have stopped expecting it:
They can’t kill what you wrote, so they’ll make it about who you are. I can’t put my name next to that. I’ve got guys who still take my calls. That’s all I kept.
That’s all I kept.
I think about arguing. The documents hold. Marcus has the money. The equipment guy gave me the pattern. Dwyer is not the whole story.
He is just the only part willing to say a name out loud.
I’m sorry, I type. Take care of yourself.
He does not write back.
Gil calls at five.
“You’re in it,” he says. No hello.
“I noticed.”
“The conflict piece is slick. It’s also built so nobody has to argue with the reporting. They make you the story instead.”
My father’s warning, in a stranger’s mouth, three weeks late and exactly on time.
“Dwyer took his name back,” I say.
A beat. “Then we don’t have it.”
“We have Marcus. We have the staffer. We have pattern.”
“We have culture.” Gil is not unkind, which is worse. “Legal will not clear culture. You told me that in my office. If the story cannot stand without the man willing to be named, it does not stand.” A pause. “Right now it can’t. And it can’t because of who they’ve decided you are.”
“How do I un-decide it?”
He does not answer fast. That is how I know he already has, and hates it.
“You go gray. No box. No captain. No father in the owner’s glass. You make yourself a byline nobody can build a story around, and you wait, and maybe Dwyer comes back when standing next to you stops costing him the last thing he’s got.”
No captain.
Two words. The whole bill.
I do not say anything for long enough that Gil says my name.
“I heard you,” I tell him.
“Did you?”
Out the window, the bar across the street has taped a paper twenty-one in the glass. The city is still in love with a man I have stopped pretending I do not love.
The only way to save the story I came to Texas to write is to stop being seen with him.
In California I chose the room over the story and called it access. Now the story is asking me to choose it over the room.
My father was never warning me about other people.
