Shufflebrain

Illumination is just enough safe light to cast red-black shadowy hints of the work area. Salamanders wait unseen in solitary plastic dishes. In rows and columns, the dishes form the tiers of a cell block, where the lonely occupants await training as a convict waits for a tour in the yard--the only break in an otherwise amorphous daily routine. A dot of amber light indicates the location of the punishment switch. The oversized air conditioner hums a baritone background din. Carl's breathing is deep, controlled, regular. The stopwatch is set for ten seconds and cocked at zero.

Starch in Carl's lab coat crackles the signal that he is about to begin a twenty-five round bout for an inmate of the plastic tiers. Soundless transfer of dish to work area. Isometric wavelets wash the animal aboard a body scoop miniaturized to the scale of all things here. The animal enters the training alley on an invisible cascade. Carl pauses while the salamander adjusts.

Suddenly, without warning, like an unexpected slap in the face, on comes the spotlight. A lonely narrow shaft of white crosses our tiny universe, catching in transit random eddies of moonlike dust, and ending in a gold-fringed halo around the little salamander's head.

The sweep second hand of the stopwatch is already fast at work, as though sprinting around the track toward the finish line and driven by a will against all that goes on in places such as this. How can a goddamn dumb salamander really learn anything, anyway? the anatomist wonders to himself.

Carl's steady fingers now partially shade the amber indicator light and poise at the punishment switch. But the salamander swims forward and out of the light only a millifraction of a tick within the allotted ten seconds. He avoided the light and escaped the shock.

The spotlight goes off. Carl's fingers withdraw into the black of space. There's a silent, indeterminate pause. Again without warning another trial begins. Again, light. Again micromoons in a minicosmos. Again, halo. Again, torture inflicted on a shaky faith by the relentless race of the stopwatch. But again, escape just before the sweep second hand devours the last precious measure of short-rationed time.

It's like this throughout almost all the remaining trials. Only on the seventeenth round does the stopwatch win. At the end of the bout, the animal safely back in its dish, the steel spring in Carl's armless swivel chair squeal out under the full welter of his suddenly relaxed weight. He laughs a long, high bar of F-sharp and, with the universal pride of proud coaches everywhere, proclaims, "The little shitasses! They really make you sweat out those last few seconds!" Then it's silent again. And the miracle repeats itself, full cycle.

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