TOAST: Can we back up? All the way up?

KATE: We keep backing up, Jack.

TOAST: I was sitting here—

KATE:—monitoring a room full of Germans—

TOAST:—minding my own goddamn business.

Pause.

By a complete coincidence—can we agree on that? By a complete coincidence. A random happenstance—

KATE:—two souls collided in Bavaria.

Pause.

TOAST: You know…I sort of feel like that. Not about meeting you, but, yes. About meeting you, and about your District, and a lot of other people have observed that District Nine is a kind of swamp, or Bavaria, if you prefer, full of incompetents—

KATE:—full of snakes without legs—

TOAST:—that’s right, where every simple personnel procedure becomes polluted. You’re all too incompetent to weed out the incompetents! Inevitably, on appeal, the action gets reversed, they’re reinstated with back pay and come back unmotivated, pissed off, and still incapable. And yes. The Legless Snake. A case in point.

KATE: Is it with legs? Or without? The snake.

TOAST: Whatever you do to the guy’s legs, Jenks is the last idiot who’ll ever transfer out of the Ninth. No more refugees. The bridges are blown. Bavaria is festering in its own pus. Therefore, Riggs and Northup, before conducting a simple Closure Interview—

KATE: Closure?

TOAST: Closure! Closure! An interview to put an end to the entire incident. Or at least to seal this particular compartment.

KATE: All right. Closure. So Riggs—

TOAST: So Riggs, and so Northup, they get flown out and briefed on Compartmentalization. And then quizzed on Compartmentalization. (Pause.) Compartmentalization. It’s new. It’s new because of your District. From now on, every investigation—

KATE: Investigation?

TOAST (overlapping):—will be approached as if the matter under scrutiny were divided into a number of separate compartments.

KATE: You said it wasn’t an investigation—

TOAST: In your particular compartment we are only conducting an “interview”…Look, it’s really kind of an elegant concept. Would you like to hear it? (Pause.) The process of pollution is arrested by viewing the entire procedure as consisting of discrete units, or entities—compartments. Where proper procedure gets violated by idiots, or where for some reason pollution is threatening to render, for instance, a personnel action reversible, we seal that compartment off. By conducting a closure interview, in this case.

KATE: In this case.

TOAST: Or: in other cases. For instance. We go for bifurcation. We split the process into two separate processes. In the action to shitcan Marigold Cassandra it’s this compartment—the issue between you and Marigold Cassandra…That’s where the pollution is.

Pause.

KATE: So. Jack. (Pause.) How serious is this?

TOAST: You know better than to ask that.

KATE: Why? You’ve been reassuring me it wasn’t—

TOAST: You know better than to ask that while you’re taking notes.

KATE (putting down pen): Okay! There! I’m not! Okay?

Pause.

TOAST: Katherine…Can I ask you do destroy those notes?

KATE: Yes.

Pause.

TOAST: I’m not sure what was just agreed to.

KATE: You asked if you could ask. And I said yes.

TOAST: Yes: I can ask.