KATE: Yes. But. First. Just wait. Wait—first just tell me what’s going on. Then ask me to trash the notes. And I think we’ll have a deal.

Pause.

TOAST: Well, that’s no deal at all, but I don’t mind filling you in, because it’s just what you’re gonna find out ten minutes into the interview. In fact, it’s exactly what you already know. Nothing more. All right. Now—can I back up a bit?

KATE: All the way to Genesis!

TOAST: June of three years ago. District Nine enters…

KATE: Wait. Start five years ago.

Pause.

TOAST (after some thought): Five years ago District Nine completes a lengthy investigation of Kernwood Farms which fails to yield satisfactory results. Leaving everybody bitter that “regulations have been flouted with impunity,” and yes, I’m quoting from the report, which basically swore an oath of revenge. An oath never to give up on Kernwood Farms, which we all understood to be a blood oath to destroy, to trash, to strangle the Kernwood Farms Corporation and bury it and piss on its grave…But first an internal bloodbath commenced. Which amounted to nothing in the end. A few transfers.

KATE: Bill Jenks.

TOAST: Wild Bill. You bet. (Pause.) So that was Kernwood Investigation Number One.

KATE: Okay. Now three years ago.

TOAST: June. Thirty-six months ago. District Nine undertakes the second investigation of the Kernwood Farms Corporation. Within six months it’s clear all the way to Washington that District—What District Nine has created is its own ridiculous Vietnam.

KATE: Bavaria invades the Far East.

TOAST: By forming independent units—

KATE:—teams, as Washington instructed—

TOAST:—and attempting coordination with the Food and Drug Administration—

KATE:—as Washington encouraged us to do—

TOAST:—such a massive fiasco of duplication and repetition and just plain running around ensued, that—now it’s July, twenty-three months ago, the investigation in progress over a year—such a fiasco that a three-page overview submitted by some Kernwood attorney’s law clerk to a staffer on the Hill results in Senate hearings. Televised.

KATE: Hey! On cable. C-Span. Big deal.

TOAST: Big deal, yeah. But the Senators listened raptly to descriptions of how Team One would show up waving a manifest for certain samples just loaded into vans by Team Three, while FDA teams got two, three, four separate search warrants going after the same items, convinced they were hidden. And then the hearings were pre-empted all of a sudden one day by a miracle—

KATE: I was on the ground—

TOAST:—the televised spectacle of seventeen—and I’m not talking about C-Span—

KATE:—tell me about it—

TOAST:—tell me about it, my boss delivered the apology for the Ag side—the spectacle of seventeen workers—the whole three-to-eleven shift—held, trapped, by armed agents in a canning factory. By armed agents of the Department of Agriculture? We don’t have arms! We don’t have agents! We’re people!

KATE: I was at the farm. At the cannery. At the hearings.

TOAST: Seventeen workers—and a video camcorder. (Pause.) Weeping teenage gals in white hair nets and blue smocks eating jam with their little fingers. The tiny little black girl! That pretty little—