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Show 11 handle down, and then the inner door, as heavy as the first, and perhaps she stepped inside the box, as she would have with a dog, any dog, with Mustard or Muffin or Petunia, to see one last time the stout canvas harness in which she would have strapped the dog, Pablo, maybe, or Theresa, the dangling wires, ready to connect to the pedestal, cemented to the center of the skull, and other wires to be taped to the dog's wrist to administer graduated levels of electric shock, according to the design of the experiment; perhaps she would finger the slender bar to which the dog's foreleg would be tied so that when the dog lifted its leg in the response expected of it, the bar would move and record the leg lift, that was what was expected of the dog, leglift, record the leglift on the dual spools of tape turning slowly at the top of the recording apparatus outside. Perhaps Maia, her eyes still rimmed in black and her hair falling free, would sit motionless in the soundproof silence of the box, or perhaps she simply turns away, steps down out of the empty box and lets the door bang heavily shut behind her. Or perhaps she did not come back. Still later, much later, Maia shows someone a photograph, though the circumstances are so far out on the periphery that almost none of the details are clear. It may be in responding to the courtship of a new lover that Maia takes the small, square photograph, its corners bent, from her purse, as if by that one picture to explain herself; or perhaps she reminisces with her family, leafing through a dusty album of her single years. Perhaps she shows the photo to a colleague, |