MRS. MAY: Marigold.

MARIGOLD: Yes.

MRS. MAY: You’re being open with me, and I’d like to be the same.

MARIGOLD: Yes.

MRS. MAY: Well, all right. It’s this. My feelings are hurt.

MARIGOLD: Why—

MRS. MAY: Why are my feelings hurt?

MARIGOLD: Yes.

Pause.

MRS. MAY: Because I’m realizing you have no appreciation for the purity of what I do. (Pause.) I don’t inspect food. I have no interest in what you do. Or what the Department does. None whatsoever. Or in anything that goes on outside this room. Or ever will. Or ever has gone on. All I am I dedicate to what we’re doing now.

MARIGOLD: And—what is that?

MRS. MAY: I am interrogating you.

Pause. A really long one.

Everything I’ve done since we found ourselves together here a few minutes ago has been designed to further the process. The light is neither intense nor dim. It is neutral. Do you see? The chair is comfortable, but it doesn’t invite you to doze off. Nothing around you here is intended to intimidate…When I showed you the pictures in the newsmagazine I meant to posit a world which we have left and to which we don’t really wish to return, do we?—not now, not while we have this process all around us…A world of charred bodies. A history that is really entirely out of our control. Whereas here in the Department things are actually within our grasp: if we adopt procedures, carry them out, all of that. It seems so boring, doesn’t it? But it’s a universe actually under our control. An elaborate collaboration. Government really doesn’t govern anything, does it? But it can attempt to govern itself. It’s possible it may, from time to time, succeed. But. The attempt doesn’t consist of trying. We don’t profit by an attitude of trying.

A long pause.

You’re doing awfully well at remaining quiet.

Pause.

MARIGOLD: Thank you.

Pause.

MRS. MAY: At not volunteering information.

Pause.

MARIGOLD: Thank you.

Pause.

MRS. MAY: I want to suggest an attitude for us both to take, Ms. Cassandra. May I do that? Marigold?

MARIGOLD: Of course.

MRS. MAY: Let me read you a passage from a journal. Do you know who John Wesley Powell was?

MARIGOLD: No, I’m afraid not.

MRS. MAY: Mr. Powell was an explorer. His party were the first white people to navigate the Colorado River in the early nineteenth century. May I read you this paragraph from his journal?

Pause. MARIGOLD shrugs.

MRS. MAY (reading): “The canyon is much narrower than any we have seen. With difficulty we manage our boats. They spin about from side to side, and we know not where we are going, and find it impossible to keep them headed down the stream. At first, this causes us great alarm, but we soon find there is but little danger, and there is a general movement of progression down the river, to which this whirling is but an adjunct; and it is the merry mood of the river to dance through this deep dark gorge…”