And now the rustling, the creaking of the chairs and the whisper of voices, excitement flashing through the crowd like an electrical charge: this is what they’ve come for. And it’s what she’s come for too, the moment of truth. She straightens up, squares her shoulders. She has them in her power and now is the time to lean into the microphone, hold them with that squint, and say: “Which is why we have, after long deliberation and with the full backing of the National Park Service’s biologists and the California Department of Fish and Game as well as the scientific community at large, decided to go to the air with the control agent brodifacoum to suppress the invasive rodent population, which, incidentally, is threatening the native deer mice in addition to the murrelet, the pigeon guillemot, the western gull and the cormorant.” She clicks the mouse to display a close-up of a tiny Xantus’s murrelet with its black head and mask over a white throat and underbelly, looking stricken as the snaking dark form of a rat gnaws the egg out from under it. “And let me assure you that this agent is quick-acting and humane, and that if we were presented with any other alternative we would gladly have taken it, but given the urgency of the situation and our confidence in the method of control, we have, have. .”
The crowd has fallen silent. They’ve become aware of a presence she’s just now perceived at the periphery of her vision, the figure of a man risen from a seat at the far end of the front row, his hair in rusty dreadlocks, his head bowed, muscles rigid, his jaw clamped in fury. She knows him. Of course she does. And of course he’s here and of course he’s interrupting her and behaving like a brownshirt, like a, a—
“Bull,” he pronounces, and his voice echoes from one end of the auditorium to the other. “Propaganda and doublespeak.” He swings round on the audience suddenly, his arms raised like a prophet’s. “Did we come here to listen to the party line like a bunch of drones under some communistic dictatorship, or is this a public meeting? Do we want our questions answered? Our point of view represented? Or is this show for mutes only?”
A groundswell of applause, a scattering of voices, male and female alike, calling out encouragement and then a chant starting like the rumor of a distant wind and blowing stronger with each repetition, “Q and A, Q and A, Q and A!”
And now she’s raising both her hands, palms out, in a gesture for silence, patience, simple common courtesy, and a rumble of voices arises in support. “Sit down,” someone calls from the darkness. “Button it.”
“All right,” she hears herself say, her amplified voice coming at them like the voice of a god, stentorian, omnipotent — she has the microphone and they don’t—“we’ll address all your concerns and take your comments in a minute. As for you, Mr. LaJoy”—he’s still standing there, his arms crossed in defiance—“your opposition to our goals is well documented, and you will have your chance to comment, but I’m going to have to ask you to sit and wait your turn.” And then she adds, superfluously, “All things in time.”
The applause now is definitely on her side, on the side of civility and restraint, and it continues until Dave LaJoy sinks back into his seat and she’s had a chance to take a sip of water from the glass Frieda has left for her on the ledge beneath the lectern, and is her hand shaking as she lifts it to her lips? No. It’s not. It’s definitely not. Determined not to let them ruffle her, she sets the glass firmly down and picks up where she’s left off, describing — and yes, minimizing — the effects of the control agent and once again bringing home the point, in ringing terms, that there is absolutely no alternative to the proposed action, even as the final image, of a murrelet tending its nestlings against a soft-focus background of clinging plants and dark volcanic rock, crowds the screen behind her. She takes the applause graciously, bows her head and waits till Frieda has mounted the stage in her rangy unhipped slump-shouldered stride and thrust herself into the spotlight. “Now,” Frieda projects into the microphone on an admonitory blast of static, “now Dr. Takesue will take your questions. In turn. And one at a time, please.” She waits a moment, as if daring anyone to defy her, shields her eyes against the glare, and calls out into the void, “Up with the house lights, Guillermo. We want to see just whom we’re addressing.”
Immediately, Dave LaJoy is on his feet, his hand rocketing in the air — and there she is, Anise Reed, seated beside him in her cyclone of hair, her eyes burning and her hands clenched in her lap. Alma, her glasses clamped firmly over the bridge of her nose now, ignores them and flags a woman ten rows back. Red-faced, with a corona of milk-white hair and a pair of rectangular wire-rimmed glasses that could have come from the same shop as Frieda’s, the woman unfolds herself from the chair and in a thin sweet aqueous voice asks, “What about the mice? Won’t the poison hurt them too?” then drops back into the chair and the anonymity of the crowd as if to stand for one second more under the public gaze would crush the breath out of her.
“Good question,” Alma purrs, congratulating her, relieved to field a query from someone who’s come to be informed, to learn something rather than suck up attention like a parasite, and that’s exactly what Dave LaJoy is, a parasite on the corpus of the Park Service and the museum and Frieda and everyone else who works to improve things rather than tear them down. “Our field biologists”—her voice is soft now, honeyed, the pleasure of the exchange erasing the tension that settled in her stomach and migrated all the way out to the tips of her fingers till they tingle as if they’ve been frostbitten—“have taken the mice into account and we’ve trapped a representative population for captive breeding and release after the rats have been extirpated — and we expect them to repopulate very quickly in the absence of competition from the rats.”
“And the birds? What about the birds? Isn’t it a fact that there’ll be a massive kill-off?” A man on her left — a confederate of LaJoy’s? — has popped up out of nowhere, unrecognized. She sees a goatee, the glint of gold in one ear, the glaring blue unbreachable eyes of the fanatic, and for an instant she thinks to ignore him, but immediately relents — if she doesn’t answer she’ll look as if she’s evading the issue.
“The bait is colored bright blue, a hue that doesn’t fall within the range of anything the avifauna might be expected to consume. And, of course, we’re going to do the aerial drop now, in winter, when bird numbers are down.” She raises a placatory palm and lets it fall. “We expect very little collateral damage.”
“Little?” It’s LaJoy again, again on his feet. “The loss of a single animal — a single rat — is intolerable, inhumane and just plain wrong. Why don’t you tell them—Dr. Takesue — about what this poison does to any animal unlucky enough to ingest it, whether that’s a rat or one of your precious little birds? Huh? Why don’t you tell them that?”
She can see Frieda stirring in the chair she’s taken in the front row, Frieda the watchdog, her neck craned, glasses shining militantly. And where’s Bill Braithwaite — wasn’t he supposed to provide the muscle here? And Tim? Where’s Tim?
“The agent is quick-acting and humane,” she hears herself say.
“More doublespeak.” LaJoy is swinging round to incite the crowd, juggling his arms and flaying the dreadlocks round the stanchion of his neck. “The fact is that this poison — call it by what it is, why don’t you? — this poison causes slow death from internal bleeding over anywhere from three to ten days. Ten days! You call that humane?”