She touches the twisted shape of the fence (I made this, perhaps she thinks with pride or disgust or calm disinterest) and this is the phrase that comes to her; we know this because it is occasionally found scrawled between the other symbols on the inside of the cell. The symbols that trace the outside perimeter of the cell have, after a few rain and dry spells, hardened in the clay; those written on the inside she often erases, a few hours later or a day, either intentionally with the sweep of an arm or unintentionally when she moves about the enclosure.
To this date, the aforementioned question has been written a total of 16--no, there were two more this afternoon--18 times. In only one of these instances was the question answered: "don't know," written with a quick, jabbing stroke. The question was erased two hours later; the answer hung around for six more hours before it, too, was smudged out (by a shuffle-walk that we suspect was intentional).
The writing of the phrase appears most often in conjunction with the feeling of the walls, either immediately before or immediately after. Sometimes, while feeling the metal, she will, with a sudden movement, bend them violently so that they cave in or bow out. The act serves no practical purpose, as the affected area is so small that it does not enlarge (or shrink) the enclosure in any significant way. Further, the same area is never bent twice, so it is clear she does not mean to weaken the structure (though the bending inarguably does weaken the walls, even we can see this, and if she continues long enough, we must assume she will start bending the same areas twice over, and thus begin truly damaging the structure in unintentional earnest).
We must conclude, then, that the bending is truly an impulsive gesture, perhaps a frustrated response to the unanswerable question that precedes or follows it. We cannot discern if the answer is known and ungivable, or ungivable because it is not known. For all the things we have set to paper in our hours of observation, this has been the most elusive. Not for lack of trying--there must be at least forty-two, no, forty-four pages on this already, and the script gets quite cramped on some of them. But in all these pages, we cannot quite say what is said. That is to say, our descriptions seem embarrassingly vain and hypothetical; there is nothing but cringing when one reads back on them. But strange thing--it is in these moments of realized futility when I think of the way the lone answer--"don't know"-- made its fleeting appearance in the dirt. And I feel very good, and very bad, and also, a desire to cast my pen down and write sharp, inconstant words in the earth that will not mean anything in the morning, that will beg, embarrassed, to be erased in the morning.
In these moments, I find the pen sometimes falling from my hand. But then some sound catches me, or some smell, or a movement at the side of my eye (the camp is often plagued by little desert lizards who seem to exist for the sole purpose of disrupting my reverie), and I continue writing where I had left off.
I must remember to tear these pages from the journal before turning them over to my colleagues, as they have nothing to do with the subject of study.
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