The narrator returns to the origin story she invented around Priest Valley, on Highway 198, which she had only ever passed through once, while driving from Coalinga with an animal liberation activist in her passenger seat. The boy, twenty-three and earnest, had just purchased five hundred pounds of nitrate fertilizer from a farm supplier, a step toward sabotage that the narrator herself had pushed him toward.

She explains that she had been working for a federal agency convinced that the boy's circle of green anarchists were capable of violence. After months of conversation produced no evidence, pressure from her supervisor led her to plant the idea of a bomb in the boy's mind, framing 'direct action' as a test of his viability as a romantic partner and conflating activism with intimacy. When he agreed, he wept, frightened but grateful. The narrator absolves herself, blaming the Feds' obsession with eco-activists for forcing her hand.

The boy's actual purpose was to implicate Nancy, a woman in West Oakland who was the federal investigation's true target. The narrator watched him deliver the fertilizer to Nancy's warehouse, observing Nancy in a too-short kimono with stubby legs. She digresses into reflections on the random distribution of beauty, noting that her own conventional good looks—tall, symmetrical, unremarkable—have served her professionally because she looks familiar to everyone and identifiable to no one.