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Adam Jones

HYPOTHESIS

Hypothesis

Hunger is real. Hysteria is real. People, isolated, grow lonely. People, stung with nettles, hurt and cry; stung repeatedly, bleed; left bleeding, die.

Materials Needed

Subjects, hundreds
Auditorium, sizable
Scissors
Crepe Paper
Rosaries
Punch
Meatloaf
A dead lover
Two dead lovers

Procedure

Take the subjects to dinner and explain the experiment, its hypothesis, procedures, results. Discuss the conclusions you’ll draw from their data. You should find the subjects curious and attentive. Encourage questions. Illustrate complicated points with parables. Show them they’ll have a good time.

Decorate the auditorium with crepe paper and scissors. You may need tape.

Subjects enter the auditorium at 19:14. The meatloaf sits on the buffet, covered, warm. Check IDs as they enter. Turn unauthorized citizens and renegade scientists away. Smile. Distribute rosaries.

Analysis

When asked, fourteen subjects would not eat the meatloaf, despite repeated assurances it did not contain the flesh of a ground-up lover. The other subjects ate enthusiastically, licking their own and each other’s lips.

Nineteen subjects, when pressed, would not dance, would not even stand at the edge of the dance floor snapping their fingers, shuffling their feet. They were taken to a corner and shown flashcards. We showed these subjects a brown man and a yellow man and asked them to discriminate between the two.

"Define brown," they demanded. "Define yellow."

"Brown," we told them: "The ground, muddy rivers, chocolate. Feces, but don’t think of that. Yellow: lemons, buttercups. The sun, popularly, although the sun is orange. Yellow is a favorite color."

Three subjects favored the brown, fifteen the yellow. "The feces," the fifteen told us. "We could think of nothing else."

One subject, a hippie chick, spoke up. "Free Brother Man!" She ranged about the auditorium, burning everyone’s bras.

Results

Curious what the subjects thought of the experiment so far, I approached one subject, a sputtering elderly man, at the punch bowl.

"I find this experiment not unlike other experiments I’ve taken part in," he said. He drooled as he spoke; was sticky with drool and spittle. "At first no one dances, but you make them, with pleasant yellow lights and music and encouraging cooing sounds. At first people crowd the buffet, forking crumbling pieces of meatloaf onto tiny paper plates, dripping Italian dressing on their lettuce and radish slices. Or they mill at the punch bowl, jokingly insisting the experimenters have ‘spiked’ it, their true experiment to determine the role alcohol plays in making life bearable." He slurped from a thin dark flask labeled ‘VODKA.’

"Some lovely research in alcohol studies," I said.

The old man spat vodka into the punch bowl.

Arms wrapped around me from behind, a body pressed into me, hands fumbled with my belt.

"I’m out of bras," said the hippie chick. "The bras are cinders. Now I need panties, briefs and boxers."

Back at the lab, not one subject wanted to sleep in his or her sleep tube.

And Conclusions

We learned nothing previously unknown, nothing we could not infer from preexisting data. The experiment, like all others, is successful.

 

1 "Why, certainly burning tongs hurt," she said, " –– But how much?"

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