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EMMA, DAVISON, AND I arrived on campus a few minutes before the scheduled start of the biotech debate and made our way to the Science Building. A desk was set up outside the door. My student, Lars Suzuki, was stationed behind it, making sure the attendees signed in.
“Oh, hey Professor,” Lars chirped. “Glad you’re here. Can you sign in right there? Your email too if you don’t mind. We need to document how many people showed up for when we do our report to the Student Events Board.”
I filled in my information, then handed the pen to Emma.
“It’s how we used to do it on the cruise ship,” Lars went on. “You always have to count heads. You have thousands of people on one cruise. There’s no way you can know who everyone is, and you don’t wanna leave anyone behind.”
Lars continued to expound on the operations management techniques used at his former cruise ship job as Emma, and then Davison, wrote in their contact information.
“Okay, we’d better let the next people sign in,” I said, finally. “Nice to see you, Lars.”
The event was being held in the big classroom, the newer one with stadium seating. Only a few empty seats remained, all of them in the middle of the rows, toward the front of the room. Four folding metal chairs had been arranged down in the front of the room, facing the audience. Davison sat on one side of Emma, I sat on the other.
Art Lam came down from the back of the room and sat in one of the four folding chairs facing the audience, elbows on his knees, hands folded, scowling.
“He’s not dead.” Emma elbowed me in the ribs.
“I know. I can see him.”
It was strange to see Art Lam sitting there alive and well. He briefly made eye contact, then looked away quickly without acknowledging me. I wondered what his lawyer had told him to make him afraid even to look at me.
A smirky fortyish dude in a pineapple-patterned aloha shirt and chinos swaggered out and sat down next to Art. After him came a hollow-eyed, grey-haired woman in flowing batik. The last folding chair remained empty.
I felt someone sit down beside me. It was Pat Flanagan.
Emma reached behind me and shoved Pat’s shoulder by way of greeting. Davison looked over and gave Pat a cool-guy chin jut.
“Those are fab shoes,” Pat whispered to me. “Love the buckles. How do you walk in them?”
“They’re platforms.” I turned my foot to show Pat the shoe’s profile. “I’m high off the ground, but my foot’s still at a comfortable angle. I don’t have to do Barbie feet.”
“I thought Coco Chanel said you weren’t supposed to wear anything too memorable.”
“Not exactly. She said, ‘Dress shabbily and they remember the dress; dress impeccably and they remember the woman.’ Anyway, Coco Chanel is not the boss of me. So this is weird to see Art Lam here.”
“Is he still not talking to you?”
“He won’t even make eye contact. What about those other two sitting down there? I assume Mister Business Casual is pro-biotech, and the lady in batik is anti.”
“Right,” Pat said. “The aging frat boy down there is Randy Randolph, the community liaison for Seed Solutions, formerly PlantGenex.”
“Aging frat boy? What happened to your journalistic objectivity?”
“Randolph is the weaselly sack of unearned privilege who’s buying my house out from under me.”
“What about the other one? The woman who looks like she’s on a hunger strike?”
“She’s your councilwoman,” Pat said.
“Looks like a mostly anti-biotech crowd,” Emma remarked.
“How can you tell?” I asked.
“All the gray ponytails in the audience.”
At around ten minutes after the hour, the crowd hushed as Crystal Phoenix from the yoga studio walked to the podium. She wore a close-fitting clay-dyed tank dress, which was just a shade darker than her sun-warmed skin. Davison leaned forward and stared.
Crystal welcomed the crowd, thanked the student organizations for arranging the debate, and introduced the three panelists and the moderator. Then she walked over to the vacant folding chair and rested her hand on the back.
“Primo Nordmann was planning to be here tonight,” she announced. “Unfortunately, he wasn’t able to make it. I know Primo is with us in spirit. Please give a warm welcome to our guests.”
Davison watched Crystal walk offstage, swiveling his head to follow her up to the back of the room. I pulled the tablet out and started up the note-taking app. I was still getting used to the interface, which allowed me to take notes as sound and video were recorded. I got the recording started and braced the tablet on the little flip-down arm desk at the correct angle to record the three panelists, farmer Art Lam, biotech executive Randy Randolph, and county councilwoman Alohalani Zabek, as they made their opening statements. From there the debate meandered along in a free-form style, with minimal intervention from the moderator.
I took notes, but by this time, I was so familiar with the arguments, I could have written them out in advance:
We’re helping farmers to feed the world / You’re poisoning the ecosystem and making farmers dependent. / If biotech food is so great, why won’t you label it so we know what we’re buying? / Biotech food is just as safe as any other food, so why should we have to label it? Genetic modifications have been going on for millennia / But not across species. It can’t happen in nature / What’s so great about nature? Nature will kill you the minute she gets a chance.
When it was time for the presenters to make their closing statements, Art Lam did not speak. Instead, we were shown a clip of Art Lam’s October 28 testimony to the legislature.
“Looks like Art Lam really was out of town that morning,” Pat whispered.
“He coulda done the murder the night before,” Emma suggested. “And then flown over to the capitol that morning.”
“And left the mess there for us to find?” I whispered.
“Maybe he didn’t think it through.”
When the closing statements were finished, the questions from the audience began, more or less recapitulating the same arguments but occasionally hijacking the discussion over to the questioner’s pet issue. Emma was right; it was an overwhelmingly anti-biotech crowd, and the discussion didn’t seem to change anyone’s opinion.
More interesting to me than the arguments themselves were the rhetorical styles of the panelists. The wispy-haired councilwoman may not have looked like a professional politician, but she struck exactly the right note: earnest, gentle, and above all, concerned. As a local farmer, the cantankerous Art Lam should have been a sympathetic figure, but he seemed like he was itching to wave us all off with a shotgun. Being under his lawyer’s gag order didn’t help; he made an oblique reference to vandalism on his property and complained about his broken window. Then he changed the subject and refused to say anything more about the incident, which made him seem evasive and paranoid.
Randy Randolph’s performance on behalf of Seed Solutions was slick and flawless. Of the three panelists, I found him the least sympathetic. Maybe it was because of what Pat had told me, although how can you fault someone for wanting to buy a house? It wasn’t like he was displacing Pat on purpose.
When the audience questions had finally petered out, Pat, Emma, Davison, and I repaired to the back of the room for gluten-free cookies, courtesy of Students for a Better World, and locally grown coffee provided by the Ag club. Davison grabbed a handful of cookies and wandered off into the crowd.
Emma waved a cookie at me.
“It says GMO-free on the box, but that’s a lie. Do they know that the wheat used in cookies has been genetically modified over millennia? This is biotech right here. Hey everyone, you’re eating biotech food right now.”
“It’s not the same,” Pat said. “You could use conventional breeding techniques forever, but you’ll never be able to import a gene from one species into another. That’s what people are freaked out about.”
“I notice there’s an anti-vaccine faction here. Is that usual?”
“Every friggin’ time,” Emma said. “And don’t forget about those people who think they can fly and communicate with dolphins.”
“The alliances are interesting,” Pat said. “The antivaxxers and the anti-biotech people are usually on the same side. Which I guess makes sense, because both positions are pro-nature. But then, you have your libertarians. They tend to be anti-vax but pro-GMO.”
“Make a note, Molly,” Emma said.
I patted my bag. “Still recording audio.”
“Hey, what about my civil rights?” Pat protested.
“Put in a section on alliance-building,” I said to my bag. “And look into the flying dolphins.”
“Make sure you talk to that chiropractor who claimed she was a mermaid,” Emma said.
“I don’t see her. It looks like she’s already left.”
“Guess she swam back home. “And it’s flying AND dolphins,” Emma pointedly told my laptop bag, “not flying dolphins. Hey, what happened to Davison? Isn’t he supposed to be hanging around looking menacing?”
“He’s over there, talking to Crystal,” Pat said.
Crystal and Davison were down by the whiteboard, standing much closer than they needed to.
“Well, look at that,” Emma said. “The hippie chick and the military academy boy. You know what? If I was that girl, not knowing Davison’s personality or anything, he’d probably look pretty good to me. Look, he got a nice aloha shirt on and everything.”
“Donnie made him dress up for this. I guess he does look less loutish than usual.”
“And that scar tissue on the side of his face and neck looks like some kind of heroic battlefield injury,” Pat said.
“Instead of what it really is. The residue of his lasered-off neck tattoo. Fine. Crystal can keep Davison occupied while we collect some data. Okay, how should we do the interviews now? Art already said he wasn’t going to talk to us. Maybe one of us should take Randy Randolph, and one of us should take Councilwoman Zabek. There’s a long line for her, though.”
“I’ll wait for Zabek,” Emma said. “You go talk to Randolph.”
“There’s only the one tablet to record the interviews. Maybe we should have requisitioned one for each of us.”
“I’ll go with Emma,” Pat said. “You take the tablet. I’ll remember the conversation.”
Pat wasn’t bragging. I knew he could do it. I’d seen him interview people for his Island Confidential pieces, committing the conversation to memory in real time. That way there was no notepad to lose, no tape recorder to get stolen or stomped on.
“I’ll go talk to Randolph then,” I said.
“Good,” Emma said. “Better you than me. I can’t trust myself not to punch his smug face.”
“What are you talking about? He’s pro-biotech. He’s on your side.”
“That smarmy little schmuck is kicking Pat out of his house. I hate him.”
“As long as we keep our Scientific Objectivity,” I said.
I walked over to introduce myself to Randy Randolph.