It was a beautiful experiment, you might write, a thinly veiled approximation of the true experiment, which was not so much beautiful as very real. Of course what happened around it was beautiful, a wonderful shade of purple tights, rain-drenched beautiful men with unusual hair, vaulted ceilings and spires cutting sharply into storm skies. The only beautiful spines we stroked were those of books, and the beautiful people we kissed were others in our dreams. The real experiment, in which you probed with a thermometer, watched my temperature rising as you got closer to the not-so-scientific answers to your careful postulations- cold, warmer, warmer, hot – was not beautiful, but a rather ugly peeling back of layers, which were yours and not mine. My hypotheses, the proving and disproving of these, were equally as ugly.

 

You wrote in your notebook full of your findings on me – how you found me on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, where you first found me picked me up and took me home, how you found me then and now – you wrote: found nothing experiment over and drew beneath me a solid black line. What is the French word for ‘to leave’? Sortir. Again, I am that substance chiselled from the ground you know nothing about, tinged a vaguely alluring metallic, most likely fool’s gold, unclassified. Put it back where you found it, and no-one need know, if you dig over it, that you ever uncovered it.