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Show 5- There we have it, some of the scene the afternoon the dogs died. We saw the researcher, Boaz, as he parried the anxious questions of the women who work across the hall, but perhaps we missed the girl Maia, his assistant. Perhaps she had just stepped out, down the long corridor to the bathroom, to comb her straight black hair back out of her face -- when she came to work that morning her hair was hanging loose, but by the time the dogs were dead she had bound it back, severely, with a thin rubber band -- or perhaps when we looked she was hidden by the door of the sound-proof experimental box. The box, after all, is very large, a double-walled cube of steel, insulated so well that even a dog, whose sense of hearing is much more acute than any man's, can hear nothing, nothing at all outside the box, nor can anyone outside hear the noise of even the loudest dog within. She might have easily been standing behind the box. Beside the box is the recording and control apparatus, a complex construction of knobs and dials and levers, displaying a small oscilloscope screen and twin reels of recording tape. Might she have been watching from behind the apparatus, peering out between its irregular protrusions? Or perhaps she was standing behind the box to put the rubber band in her hair, for she is always just a little shy of Boaz' gaze and is not eager to invite any intimacies. In any case, she was there the afternoon the dogs died. Of course she was there: it was part of her job. She must have known; she must have been told when she was hired to be Boaz* assistant what would happen to the dogs. Surely the institute's personnel officer, a conscientious man exactingly aware of the institute's regulations, had felt obliged to tell her that the job involved handling |
