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Show on the tile floor, which the janitor, if he has come at all, must have missed. The lab has not changed. But what of the people who were in the lab? Can we discover why they were there, how they felt when the dogs howled in pain, what kept them there while the dogs whimpered into dying? Can we trace where they went afterwards, when the dogs lay silent, their howling still and their heartbeats slow? If we look back we shall see that much is not clear, though we can distinguish two figures: the researcher Boaz, and his assistant, a girl named Maia. They move, they talk, they look together at the clock, but the causal antecedents are dim, their goals obscure: we cannot discover why. We cannot tell, for instance, what brought Boaz to neuropsychological research: whether he was groomed, as the eldest, most promising son of a well-established family, through the finest schools for an eminent career in science; whether he was impelled to the study of mental phenomena by a scrupulously sublimated attraction to a particular professor; whether he chose psychology simply to spite his mother; or whether his penchant for experimentation was born in the alley, nailing half-conscious rats to the boards of the tenement fence. Nor does it matter, for no concatenation of circumstances can explain away the afternoon in the lab: no matter how he has come, following whatever imaginary attractions or responding to whatever irresistable pressures, citing reasons good or deceptive, motivations pure or evil -- still, he is here. We can watch him in his laboratory, though his past be indeterminate and his future uncertain: we see him now not as the product of any painstaking development, nor as a process |