“Perhaps I am getting a bit far afield. The Introduction is the part of this my science fair project’s presentation about which I am the least confident and thus the most shy. I will attempt to speed the Introduction along now.
“From the cinders of my total failure to devise a scientific method of determining whether Curios are truly shy has arisen the phoenix of some truly unexpected findings.
“You see, in the course of thinking so much about shyness, I began to consider rear ejection. Every morning ever since my first Curios emerged from their marbles, I have, like all other owners of normally functioning Curios, discovered rear ejections in their PillowNests, one per Curio per morning, and yet the process by which these rear ejections entered the world was something I hadn’t—not even once—witnessed. ‘How strange,’ I thought. Maybe it was just me? I had to find out! And so I informally surveyed members of my peer group about this very subject, and when the ones who were willing to talk to me answered, they confirmed the commonality of our experience, or rather our lack of experience: they had never witnessed any of their Curios rear-eject either.
“Were Curios shy when it came to rear-ejecting? That was the question I had been asking myself at that time, but it was the wrong question, for shyness, as I have already explained, is a subjective state the study of which is beyond the scope of our present abilities as scientists, even when it comes to human animals. The question I should have been asking was: ‘Why have I never rigged a camcorder to a PillowNest so as to capture moving images of my Curios rear-ejecting in the night?’ And when I did, finally, ask myself that question…”
Maya pivots a little and, with her smaller shoulder, indicates one of the PillowNests on the table beside her. The camera zooms in on it. The lid of the PillowNest has a large hole in the middle. “With the help of my father, I removed, with a saw, a circular section from the lid of this PillowNest.”
The camera zooms back out. “That night,” says Maya, “I left the light on in the PillowNest, and then, after having affixed a fish-eye lens to the camcorder that my father is using to tape this very presentation you are watching, I set the camcorder over the hole and pressed the record button.
“In the morning, however, I was very disappointed to discover that there was nothing to discover. Neither Mick nor Keith nor John nor Paul—these were the names of the Curios I recorded—seemed to have rear-ejected in the night. Was it possible the Curios had rear-ejected, and then, for some reason, hidden, or even perhaps consumed their rear ejections? This thought occurred to me, of course, but upon reviewing the tape, I saw that they had done nothing of the sort. They simply had not rear-ejected at all. I could not recall this ever having happened before.
“Being a scientist, though, I did not allow myself to jump to the conclusion that the correlation between the presence of the camcorder and the inhibition of the rear-ejecting was meaningful; I permitted myself to hypothesize that the correlation was meaningful, but knew that in order to confirm my hypothesis, my results would need to be replicated. And so, the following night, I created the same conditions as I had the first night.
“And my results were replicated. No rear ejections did I find in the nest. No hiding or consumption of rear ejections did I find on the tape.
“A third night applying the same conditions engendered exactly the very same results.
“On the fourth night, I replaced the piece we’d sawn off the PillowNest lid and turned out the light; in the morning I discovered four larger-than-average, but otherwise normal-looking, typically grape-bubblegum-smelling rear ejections in the nest.”
“After that, the correlation seemed undeniably meaningful. That is: the presence of the camcorder had inhibited the Curios from rear-ejecting.
“But what exactly was it about the presence of the camcorder that inhibited them? First, I should say that I wondered, very briefly, if I had it all wrong: I wondered if perhaps it wasn’t the presence of the camcorder at all that had caused the inhibition, but rather that I’d left the light on in the PillowNest. Upon but the shortest moment of reflection, however, I became certain it couldn’t be the light in the PillowNest that inhibited the Curios’ rear-ejecting: over the past couple of years, I had, on numerous occasions, forgotten to turn out the light in the PillowNest at bedtime, yet the Curios had always rear-ejected by morning nonetheless. So the light could not have been what inhibited them. Of that I was certain. Perhaps, then, it was the sound that inhibited them? The sound of the videotape turning inside the camcorder? Well, maybe, but…You see, I, like most young Curio owners—and, I would suppose, many adult Curio owners as well—keep my PillowNest beside the bed in which I sleep, which means that I and my Curios, although we cannot see each other while they are in their PillowNest, can hear each other. I know this because, if I whistle good night to them after closing the lid to the PillowNest, they whistle back to me. And there are louder things happening in my room in the night than whistling, I assure you! Exempli grati, after settling my cures in their nest, but before I retire, I often do this…”
The screen blinks. We see a five-second clip of Maya, seated on the edge of a bed in pajamas, playing the first verse of “Yankee Doodle Dandy” on a large harmonica.
The screen blinks, and we’re back to the original tableau: Maya beside the kitchen table. “Soooo embarrassing,” she says, giving off, unexpectedly, a whiff of false humility. “But if you think that that is bad, how about this…?”
The screen blinks. We see a ten-second clip of Maya, same bed and pajamas as before, but lying down, asleep, and snoring continuously, waterously, and at such a high volume that it seems inauthentic until, halfway into the clip, she turns her head, spilling drool from her lips onto the pillow, twitching awake, mumbling, “Shh, Maya. Quiet now, Maya. Maya Maya Maya,” and turning back over and snoring again.
The screen blinks, and once again we’re back to the original tableau. “Now that,” Maya says, “is really, really, really embarrassing. And not only is my snoring as loud, if not louder, than the sound of me jamming out on my mouth-harp, but, part of my affliction is that I do it all night long, every night, only occasionally pausing when the sounds I am making wake me up, as you saw in that clip. Can you testify to this, Daddy? The persistence of my snoring?”
A man offscreen says, “My brilliant, beautiful daughter snores like a goat and has never told a lie!”
Maya lowers her eyes, removes her hand from the cane to wave off the compliment, swallows, swallows again, looks back at the camera. “But what I am attempting to convey,” she says, “is that, while it did seem possible that the specific atmospheric sounds that the camcorder made while recording may have inhibited the rear ejections of the Curios, it seemed very unlikely, because other, louder, presumably more disruptive atmospheric sounds had not historically done so.