Speaker 1: The Monday before the semester's start, I found myself surrounded
Speaker 1: by a seam of maps older than my career, stacking
Speaker 1: them in my classroom beside a battered globe and a new, white,
Speaker 1: bright wall board. This was the annual ritual of preparing
Speaker 1: for the onslaught of freshmen who would, in their first
Speaker 1: nervous days at Duvemont High, have to suffer my enthusiasm
Speaker 1: for local geography. The windows were open to a blue afternoon,
Speaker 1: the air carrying the good, earthy river smell that's inescapable
Speaker 1: this time of year. I'd plan to refresh the display
Speaker 1: above the chalk tray, perhaps add something from the university
Speaker 1: library's regional archives, or at least a more colorful surveyor's rendering.
Speaker 1: I'd pull the oldest, dustiest ones out of the school basement,
Speaker 1: foxed parchments stitched by hand, then a progression of crisp
Speaker 1: mid century topographies, the faded recent prints with their digital neatness.
Speaker 1: It was at first a workmanlike exercise, handled the way
Speaker 1: anyone handles the backdrop of their life. Tape, torn pins,
Speaker 1: straightened measurement by ruler along my makeshift ledger lines. You
Speaker 1: get used to seeing the Rhan and Belfield rivers drawn
Speaker 1: as twin blue ribbons, curving side by side across every map,
Speaker 1: each labeled in the same cursive script, never once meeting,
Speaker 1: despite running so close for nearly forty miles, I'd grown
Speaker 1: up brushing my fingers over these lines, pointing them out
Speaker 1: to board children as the great quirk of our region,
Speaker 1: though if I'm honest, I'd barely questioned what unique actually meant.
Speaker 1: Some towns have author's birth places, others have three story
Speaker 1: hay barns, and we have the story of two everlasting parallels.
Speaker 1: That's how I always thought of it. That was enough
Speaker 1: this time, though, as I stood back to check for
Speaker 1: any wrinkles or skewed tax under the glancing light, a
Speaker 1: hesitation slowed my hands. The rivers unwavering parallelism leapt off
Speaker 1: the page as not just special, but when really considered absurd.
Speaker 1: If you put this in an exam, I would have
Speaker 1: marked it impossible. Rivers converge when terrain demands it, don't they,
Speaker 1: especially rivers sharing a valley at the same elevation. Streams
Speaker 1: drawn by gravity, carving their way to the lowest point,
Speaker 1: rarely resist the logic pushing them together. Yet here map
Speaker 1: after map, decade after decade, it was as if the
Speaker 1: land itself insisted they keep their polite distance forever. Even
Speaker 1: in regions dense with hills and marshes and dovemont is,
Speaker 1: nothing if not undulating and sodden, nature seemed to permit
Speaker 1: a strange, persistent separation. I set the last map in place,
Speaker 1: the little thrill of unease stayed unsettling what should have
Speaker 1: been routine. I closed my eyes and tried for a
Speaker 1: moment to mentally recall standing at the banks of each river.
Speaker 1: I could remember them, yes, skimming stones into the rhone,
Speaker 1: with my brother leading students along Bellfield's grassy verge for
Speaker 1: end of term bird counts. I could see those scenes
Speaker 1: in flashes. Yet if pressed to sketch a route from
Speaker 1: one river bank directly to the other, I found my
Speaker 1: internal geography fuzzed, confused. A thick fog crept into the
Speaker 1: imagined in between. Was Roan west of Bellfield or was
Speaker 1: it the other way around? And if you set off
Speaker 1: intending to cross the green belt between them, where would
Speaker 1: you emerge? The notion so simple on the maps became
Speaker 1: inexplicably tangled in my mind. Had I ever actually tried walking,
Speaker 1: for real, straight from one to the other. Had any one,
Speaker 1: Surely some one must have The answer, disturbingly was lost
Speaker 1: in the mash of memory and convention. I nearly laughed
Speaker 1: at my spiraling thoughts. It would be easy to chalk
Speaker 1: this up to summer haze or too many years teaching
Speaker 1: the same syllabus. Yet as I looked again at the
Speaker 1: parade of maps stretching from a water stained eighteen twenty
Speaker 1: two hand drawing to the just printed State Geological Survey,
Speaker 1: I felt something drop, a faint wrong knocking against the
Speaker 1: floorboards of my certainty, one of those problems too obvious
Speaker 1: to notice until the perspective unexpectedly shifts. I scribbled a
Speaker 1: note in my planning journal to ask my new class
Speaker 1: to morrow what they made of it, Whether they could
Speaker 1: point out any actual reason for the rivers eternal parallel dance.
Speaker 1: Maybe they would know a story or an explanation hidden
Speaker 1: in their family law. Maybe there was a clever hydrologic
Speaker 1: thing I'd missed, some tectonic quirk named in a university paper.
Speaker 1: I should have gone on with my prep seating charts
Speaker 1: club rosters, but the thought clung and buzzed needling with
Speaker 1: the kind of question that makes you wonder how much
Speaker 1: of anything you really truly see? That was I realized
Speaker 1: the first time I'd questioned something so deeply woven into
Speaker 1: our world's background that curiosity itself felt misplaced. To morrow,
Speaker 1: I told myself, I'd find out what happens when you
Speaker 1: start pulling at a thread everyone else has let lie.
Speaker 1: In Dovemont, the rivers shape everything, or more precisely, their
Speaker 1: relationship does. You'd think they'd grant us a town logo
Speaker 1: of a meeting point, waters commingling, but instead there are
Speaker 1: emblems and slogans about reverence, separation, where rivers run together
Speaker 1: but apart, cross down banners for River Days, the only
Speaker 1: festival with two opening parades, one snaking along Rhane, another
Speaker 1: along Bellfield, each ending with trumpets and overlapping Burgher stands
Speaker 1: within sight of the other's fireworks, but separated by swathes
Speaker 1: of green and a conviction of where that river over
Speaker 1: there is meant to stay. As I walk down Main
Speaker 1: Street the next morning, a run of brick frontages unchanged
Speaker 1: since the Tobacco Days, I passed twin streams Dinah, its
Speaker 1: picture windows filled even at dawn with highway, mugs and
Speaker 1: pie under clear plastic domes. Theirs never meet. Canoe rentals
Speaker 1: on the rhone and right across the square, parallel paddles
Speaker 1: dealing in bell fields, blue canoes. Shop doors comeberdecked with
Speaker 1: split river sail signs. The school has a mural of
Speaker 1: the two rivers curling like musical staves, always staying their
Speaker 1: separate course. Dovemot's very identity curls, sometimes self consciously, sometimes
Speaker 1: with real pride around the never join, never cross motif.
Speaker 1: My own presence here feels half way inherited, half way accidental.
Speaker 1: I live in my grandparents old house on Ridge Road,
Speaker 1: an unfussy, broad eaved place set amid Dogwood and Elderberry,
Speaker 1: with the hilltop rising behind. It's a short walk to
Speaker 1: the high ground between the rivers, a longer one to
Speaker 1: their actual banks. The den holds relics from another era,
Speaker 1: carpenter's squares, weighted plum bobs, a transit level that belonged
Speaker 1: to my grandfather, Its brass scuffed from a hundred town
Speaker 1: survey jobs. My grandmother, before she slipped into quieter memories,
Speaker 1: told stories of the two water years, always with a
Speaker 1: mystery folded in so the words. For as long as
Speaker 1: I can remember, I've been the guy in the middle,
Speaker 1: a joke my colleagues repeat whenever I'm tapped to mediate
Speaker 1: between staff students, or as happens at river days. The
Speaker 1: committees managing the two parades routes my caste of regulars
Speaker 1: you might call the chorus of Dovemont. There's missus Rowan,
Speaker 1: the school librarian who's also the unofficial town historian, keeper
Speaker 1: of everything from bound minutes to yellowed yearbooks. She relishes
Speaker 1: nothing more than trapping unsuspecting students in a ramble about
Speaker 1: old land deeds or the proper way to catalog regional folklore.
Speaker 1: There's Justin, a sophomore with sun dyed hair whose passion
Speaker 1: for river fishing exceeds his attention span for school work.
Speaker 1: He has shown up to my class with half dried
Speaker 1: waders and stories of the big Bellfield trout. Nobody else
Speaker 1: ever sees. Madeline. Maddie, to her friends, is my neighbor,
Speaker 1: the sole Dovemont mail carrier, practical and unsentimental, whose care
Speaker 1: has mapped every twist and shortcut of our knotted back roads,
Speaker 1: and who insists the greatest miracle is not losing her
Speaker 1: van keys in the river mud. Lastly, there's mister Holloway,
Speaker 1: retired civil engineer walking contradiction, a man regarded as eccentric
Speaker 1: by nearly everyone, famed for his unsuccessful attempts to unite
Speaker 1: the rivers with canal projects and store a book bridges
Speaker 1: life here turns by the rivers, rhythms, carnival at the
Speaker 1: solstice parade, Friday, fish fries, roans, catch on odd years,
Speaker 1: bellfields on even the annual school river run, foot trace
Speaker 1: always pointedly along side by side tracks, and a peculiarly
Speaker 1: Dovemont tradition that prohibits any bridge from spanning both river's breadth.
Speaker 1: There are plenty of bridges wooden stone, even a shiny
Speaker 1: modern span or two, but each crosses just one water
Speaker 1: and brings you always to a splash of green and
Speaker 1: the certainty that the other river winds off on, visible
Speaker 1: but untouchable, looped just out of reach. I tucked my
Speaker 1: note about the rivers into my grade book and walked
Speaker 1: the length of the main corridor, past class photos and
Speaker 1: championship banners. Every step re enforced the town's mingled pride
Speaker 1: and indifference. The rivers are everywhere carved into mines, even
Speaker 1: if their true nature, what it means for two waters
Speaker 1: to live in perpetual side by side exil never seemed
Speaker 1: to trouble any one much as home rooms settled. I
Speaker 1: found myself nervous, without knowing why. The students filtered in,
Speaker 1: some I recognized from last year's field trips, others filling
Speaker 1: the spaces between desks with the initial hush of forcing
Speaker 1: themselves to look like you belong. I wrote on the
Speaker 1: board geography, do vm O and t s rivers a
Speaker 1: question and waited while the shuffling and whispering faded. Before
Speaker 1: we begin, I said, eyeing the window where sunlight caught
Speaker 1: a plane of dust motes, Let's try a riddle. Why
Speaker 1: don't the road and the bellfield ever cross? Or meet?
Speaker 1: For that matter? A few faces lit up at what
Speaker 1: they believed was a well trodden old chestnut. They never
Speaker 1: have muttered David from second row, a girl in a
Speaker 1: varsity jacket, said, maps say they just run next to
Speaker 1: each other, always have right. Maybe it's the hills ventured
Speaker 1: some one else, as if reciting from rote. Justin, perched
Speaker 1: by the window with a tackle box still visible in
Speaker 1: his bag, piped up without raising his hand, it's just
Speaker 1: how it is. But sometimes if you try to cut
Speaker 1: through the woods you get turned around, like the space
Speaker 1: stretches or something. The room chuckled a bit. The others
Speaker 1: didn't seem to find Justin's comment remarkable, so I pressed,
Speaker 1: if I said I wanted to walk straight from the
Speaker 1: Rohan to the bellfield, what would I find? Silence? Then
Speaker 1: you can, but it takes longer than you think. It's boring,
Speaker 1: just tall grass. My uncle tried to cut across once
Speaker 1: but got poison ivy. Nothing struck any one as particularly strange.
Speaker 1: The consensus was a shoulder shrug normalcy. An idea sparked.
Speaker 1: I drew a crude outline on the board, sketching the
Speaker 1: two rivers parallel, narrowing the green band between them, the
Speaker 1: way they pinch close near the old mill, almost touching
Speaker 1: by the football field. How close do they get here,
Speaker 1: I asked, tapping the spot. David's answer was quick, Oh,
Speaker 1: about a hundred yards, or maybe two hundred. Justin tilted
Speaker 1: his head. Feels like a mile, though, doesn't it. I
Speaker 1: checked my own memory, that fuzzy half image, grassy fields
Speaker 1: sloping down, then a rise in woods. But how far
Speaker 1: was it truly. Later, as the class filed out, missus
Speaker 1: Rowan stopped me in the hallway. She had a box
Speaker 1: tucked under one arm, her hair gathered in its usual
Speaker 1: turquoise dyed twist maps for your class, she said, and
Speaker 1: some diagrams originals from the Twin Rivers exhibit last river days.
Speaker 1: Let's see if your students can make any better sense
Speaker 1: than the rest of us. She handed over a set
Speaker 1: of worn diagrams, every one and echo of the maps
Speaker 1: I had already examined, with neat notes in looping cursive,
Speaker 1: never bridged natural separation, and every so often a margin
Speaker 1: scrawled in pencil, traveler reports, oddly long detour paths wandered
Speaker 1: off course. I told her what I'd noticed that when
Speaker 1: I really tried to reconstruct my own crossings, distances seemed
Speaker 1: to shift or memories clouded. She smiled, but with a
Speaker 1: tinge of surprise. Funny people have written about it for decades,
Speaker 1: but nobody ever minds for long. Maybe we're just used
Speaker 1: to being unique. But it wouldn't let go. The more
Speaker 1: I collected stories and diagrams, the less my own recollection
Speaker 1: seemed to snap into focus. I threw my note book
Speaker 1: and a map into my satchel that afternoon, told the
Speaker 1: office to expect me a bit late, and walked out
Speaker 1: under the cloudless sky for the first time. I intended
Speaker 1: not just to look at the rivers, but to really
Speaker 1: test what lay between them. I set off from the rhone,
Speaker 1: walking with the deliberate step of some one determined to
Speaker 1: prove or disprove an idea. The air at the river
Speaker 1: bank was sharp, with the scent of cold water and
Speaker 1: crushed limestone. A pair of fishermen, Kaleb and his uncle,
Speaker 1: as it turned out, sat with their feet planted in
Speaker 1: the mud, passing a battered Thermas between them. Kalib gave
Speaker 1: me a nod. I asked if the fishing was any
Speaker 1: better than last week. He shrugged, depends which river you prefer.
Speaker 1: I guess Bellfield always feels a world away, even if
Speaker 1: it's near enough to shout. I smiled, then asked, off hand,
Speaker 1: you ever try walking direct from here to the Bellfield
Speaker 1: looks so close on the map. His uncle cackled, Oh, sure,
Speaker 1: only takes all day if you don't get lost in
Speaker 1: the weeds. Feels like the more you stride for it,
Speaker 1: the farther it gets. I made a note in my book,
Speaker 1: such talk was common enough that it had become banter,
Speaker 1: an inside joke in local fishing circles. Leaving the bank,
Speaker 1: I let the map guide me toward what appeared, by
Speaker 1: all mathematical logic to be the shortest route to the Bellfield.
Speaker 1: The land sloped gently at first, then twisted through a
Speaker 1: sycamore grove whose trunks slanted at odd angles, as if
Speaker 1: each tree were slightly out of step with its neighbors.
Speaker 1: The old road showed no signs of recent use, but
Speaker 1: I followed it past the rustle of grasshoppers and thick reeds.
Speaker 1: After twenty minutes, expecting to reach the bridge that on
Speaker 1: my map at least crossed to Bellfield Road, I instead
Speaker 1: emerged at the same bridge i'd left, crossing only rhan
Speaker 1: the opposite bank, a bright thread of pure green with
Speaker 1: no sign of moving water. Had I doubled back unknowingly,
Speaker 1: I checked the compass. It spun no more than a
Speaker 1: degree away from north. The GPS in my foe, already
Speaker 1: temperamental in these parts. Through a string of coordinates that
Speaker 1: jagged along impossible lines. Brushing off the confusion, I turned,
Speaker 1: selecting a new approach that aimed east. This time, the
Speaker 1: fields angled strangely downward. The second river bank should have
Speaker 1: appeared within sight, but instead dusk strung my eyes, and
Speaker 1: the only sound was the muffled rumble of the nearby highway.
Speaker 1: An urge overcame me to simply abandon the search, but
Speaker 1: the stubbornness of curiosity took over. I climbed a hummock
Speaker 1: that should have given a clear view of both rivers.
Speaker 1: Binoculars poised for a brief moment, Bellfield danced to the east,
Speaker 1: missed hanging over its water like low wool. I took
Speaker 1: three steps sideways, and suddenly roans glittering bank overtook my view,
Speaker 1: as if the entire landscape had pivoted on a hidden axis.
Speaker 1: The between never seemed to line up at the same
Speaker 1: time or in the same place. Thwarted, I wandered into
Speaker 1: twin streams. Diner Madeline, in her usual red cap and
Speaker 1: grease marked apron, caught my distracted wave and slid into
Speaker 1: the booth with me a cup of burnt coffee in hand.
Speaker 1: How's the exploring professor, she teased, You grew up here, Maddie.
Speaker 1: How do you picture the rivers? She eyed me for
Speaker 1: a beat They're always there when I knead them. Roan's
Speaker 1: best for skipping rocks, Bellfield for walking the dog. She shrugged.
Speaker 1: If I want one, I get there. If I want both,
Speaker 1: I drive the long way round. But if you had
Speaker 1: to draw a map, I pressed, scribbling a quick outline
Speaker 1: on a napkin. Where do the rivers actually touch? She
Speaker 1: glanced down, then smiled with a flick of her wrist,
Speaker 1: crumpling the sketch. I always preferred roots to maps, aren't
Speaker 1: you the teacher? Her answer, annoyingly practical, bounced off my
Speaker 1: rising confusion. I finished my coffee and walked home as
Speaker 1: the sky went purple. That night, I compared notes. The
Speaker 1: GPS record criss crossed my intended paths in confounding angles,
Speaker 1: always measuring more distance than anticipated, neither starting nor ending
Speaker 1: where my memory placed them. Printed maps implied the green
Speaker 1: band was narrow. My walks stretched it into a seemingly
Speaker 1: inexhaustible run of fields and woods. Unable to settle, I
Speaker 1: rummaged in my grandfather's old tool cabinet for the surveyor's
Speaker 1: notebooks I had once found so dull. The top notebook
Speaker 1: brittle with age and scrawled with columns of figures held
Speaker 1: a margin note dated nineteen sixty three. Paths between seemed
Speaker 1: to shift, cannot account for daylight, bellfield farther away each season.
Speaker 1: Below this a sketch two rivers approaching, then diverging again,
Speaker 1: with a dotted line labeled lost, short cut vanished. I
Speaker 1: held the notebook up to the light until the late
Speaker 1: hour blurred the ink. It was a simple enough problem,
Speaker 1: or so I dethought. But nothing, not memory, not device,
Speaker 1: not the best of inherited instruments, could chase away the
Speaker 1: creeping feeling that the divide between the rivers was less
Speaker 1: a physical fact than a kind of local law, a
Speaker 1: rule so normal as to have erased the very capacity
Speaker 1: for doubt. I awoke, restless, the strangeness of the whole matter,
Speaker 1: gnawing quietly in the background of my every day routines.
Speaker 1: I saw the rivers everywhere the next day, in the
Speaker 1: arches of the school's entr away with their stylized blue lines,
Speaker 1: in the art projects taped to the library glass first
Speaker 1: grade twin rivers with bright sun overhead, an impossible green
Speaker 1: wedge forever between questions, formed, dissolved, formed again when the
Speaker 1: final bell emptied the corridors. I made my way to
Speaker 1: the library Rowan's domain, the scent of paper old, and
Speaker 1: knew her territory. I found her by the local history shelves,
Speaker 1: Flipping through a ledger thick with signatures. She eyed the
Speaker 1: satch in my hand, the one bulging with maps, Grandpa's
Speaker 1: note book, and my own frustrating sketches. You look like
Speaker 1: someone who's discovered we live under a riddle, she said,
Speaker 1: raising a brow. I keep finding contradictions. Maps say the
Speaker 1: rivers close and never meet. Walks say otherwise, memories don't cohere.
Speaker 1: I can't get the distances right. Nobody can. She tapped
Speaker 1: the ledger. You know, the towns always had legends back
Speaker 1: before settlers. The indigenous people called them twin spirits, forbidden
Speaker 1: to touch, or all the world unraveled. My grandmother used
Speaker 1: to say she'd walked a short cut from Bellfield to Rohan,
Speaker 1: but could never find it. Twice travelers diaries mention wandering
Speaker 1: crossings that seemed to fade. Maybe we're not supposed to
Speaker 1: question it. I laid out my drawings, torn and blotted,
Speaker 1: and for the first time someone didn't dismiss them. Instead,
Speaker 1: she retrieved a folder of historical river diagrams annotated with
Speaker 1: looped hand. Each diagram was strikingly uniform, twin rivers, unwavering
Speaker 1: except for occasional marginalia deetwood in rain, short cut gone
Speaker 1: before dusk. Travelers recall being spun about mister Holloway by
Speaker 1: luck or fate entered carrying a battered tool box and
Speaker 1: a flask. He caught sight of the river diagrams, trying
Speaker 1: to solve the unsolvable? Are you, he chuckled. I once
Speaker 1: tried building a canal between them after college. Got half
Speaker 1: way through excavating, then realized we'd looped back both ends
Speaker 1: of our works rested by Rohan checked the maps, the blueprints,
Speaker 1: the distance. Nothing fit. Next season, the ground had closed
Speaker 1: over our trench like we'd never been. He peered at
Speaker 1: the old surveyor's log. You know, Old Jim Holloway, my father,
Speaker 1: He wrote about the same footbridges planned, laid out straight,
Speaker 1: ended up with both ends on the same bank. We
Speaker 1: figured the rivers had some grudge. All of it. Legends
Speaker 1: and engineering records danced around the impossibility. I thought of
Speaker 1: the older generations, my own family included, who recalled days
Speaker 1: when you could take a short cut between, only to
Speaker 1: have those stories fade into jokes or metaphors. Some insisted
Speaker 1: they'd strolled through wild flowers and wound up across, yet
Speaker 1: none could point to the path or show it to you.
Speaker 1: Twice Justin approached us later that afternoon at the library table.
Speaker 1: He'd heard there was river stuff happening, and brought with
Speaker 1: him an enthusiasm undampened by adult skepticism. My grandad told me,
Speaker 1: he said, fiddling with his cap, that when you fish
Speaker 1: the Rhone early, then cross over for lunch, and fish
Speaker 1: the Bellfield by sunset, it feels like you've crossed half
Speaker 1: the county, but if you check your watch, you haven't
Speaker 1: gone far at all. Doesn't add up, like the place
Speaker 1: between the rivers is longer than the rest of the world.
Speaker 1: He was grinning, half proud, half uncertain. Sometimes I think
Speaker 1: both rivers move when you're not looking. We compared more diagrams,
Speaker 1: listen to more family storeries. Every recollection, it seemed, hugged
Speaker 1: the same invisible boundary. A world where paths and distances
Speaker 1: shuffled to maintain the perfect perennial divide. Travel became amrbious
Speaker 1: strip of memory. Everyone's accounts subtly curving away from a
Speaker 1: direct crossing, while the rivers themselves watched, calm and unmoved
Speaker 1: by dusk. It was clear our curiosity hadn't simply found
Speaker 1: a geographic oddity or a patch of failing memory. The
Speaker 1: contradiction was subtler and more thorough, as if reality itself,
Speaker 1: or our experience of it, reshuffled quietly according to the
Speaker 1: town's expectation. I stared long at my jumbled notes. Just
Speaker 1: in stories, Rowan's legends, holloways, failed bridges all formed a pattern.
Speaker 1: The rivers hadn't just avoided each other out of accident,
Speaker 1: but the whole structure of Dovemont seemed consciously or not
Speaker 1: to enforce their parallel intimacy. Crossings, vanished, paths, elongated, deep
Speaker 1: was multiplied, and nobody, it seemed, could recall an unambiguous
Speaker 1: breach of the divide. It was perhaps more than a
Speaker 1: mere oddity. It was a principle, a kind of spatial
Speaker 1: and communal law manifested not only in water and land,
Speaker 1: but in memory, in tradition, coded into our behavior, and
Speaker 1: even the act of forgetting. And now that I'd begun
Speaker 1: to pull at the thread, the odd geometry of our
Speaker 1: town felt at once more enchanting and more deeply confusing
Speaker 1: than I'd ever guessed. Justin's stories had left me with
Speaker 1: a peculiar charge an attentiveness humming in the background as
Speaker 1: he left, whistling through his teeth, and missus Rowan gathered
Speaker 1: her folders. Holloway winked, slid his flask deeper in his pocket,
Speaker 1: and muttered that he'd leave the undoable to the young.
Speaker 1: I promised them more news if I found a thread
Speaker 1: to pull, or better to tie off. Walking out of
Speaker 1: the library into the bruised violet dusk, the rivers twin
Speaker 1: Pool felt as real as any magnet, two lines in
Speaker 1: the belly of the landscape, and now somehow wound inside me.
Speaker 1: I wanted to touch the truth directly, not just circle
Speaker 1: its boundary. The most obvious next step, though hardly the
Speaker 1: most logical, was to run my own experiment, something systematic,
Speaker 1: something more than aimless walking or fuzzily skewed memory. My mind.
Speaker 1: As the lanterns flickered behind me on Main Street, reeled
Speaker 1: through logistics, I texted Justin, who agreed at once, name
Speaker 1: the time, got a plan, or just mackin it up
Speaker 1: as you go, I responded that improvisation was practically science's twin.
Speaker 1: We met the next morning under the tallest sycamore along
Speaker 1: Rhane's bank, just In lugging a canvas bag of what
Speaker 1: he called river gear. It turned out to be mostly
Speaker 1: fishing line, a set of child bright foam pool floats,
Speaker 1: and a half eaten sleeve of saltines. His eyes shone.
Speaker 1: He was already picturing trout twice the usual size. So
Speaker 1: here's my plan, I said, spreading out a laminated map
Speaker 1: and borrowing his best marker, hot pink, prone to leaking.
Speaker 1: We picked two spots, the closest approach just west of Millbend.
Speaker 1: Each of us releases a distinctive float in our river.
Speaker 1: We measure distance, record the launch site, track their progress.
Speaker 1: If the rivers really do nearly touch, maybe currants or
Speaker 1: wind will force the floats together. If not, perhaps we'll
Speaker 1: at least have quantifiable proof the separation is wider than
Speaker 1: we think. Justin grinned, what if the floats just don't cross, then,
Speaker 1: I replied, we watch what happens when they get close
Speaker 1: or don't. Maybe it's the first experiment ever attempted in
Speaker 1: a place where the results already folklore we hiked along
Speaker 1: overgrown paths. My steps measured Justin's bounding veering as he
Speaker 1: chased a blue jay or spotted a surprisingly unafraid rabbit.
Speaker 1: At the place the two rivers pinched, separated on every
Speaker 1: map by no more than a football field, we split
Speaker 1: each of us after making sure our watches and phones
Speaker 1: were about as sinct as possible. Signal was patchy at best,
Speaker 1: but the compulsion to try proved irresistible. Moved to our
Speaker 1: chosen launch points. I scrawled the precise latitude and longitude
Speaker 1: into my note book, even as I eyed the GPS's slow,
Speaker 1: stuttering display with a flourish Justin tossed a neon green
Speaker 1: float onto Bellfield's steady current. I did the same from
Speaker 1: roan pink, wobbling away, both disappearing around the same brushy bend.
Speaker 1: We perched binoculars in hand, several yards apart the vantage
Speaker 1: points in full view of the near meeting spot. Minutes
Speaker 1: passed as the floats bobbed along, their progress interrupted not
Speaker 1: just by twigs in the odd hidden rock, but mysteriously
Speaker 1: by subtle curves and ripples that made no cartographic sense.
Speaker 1: Green seemed momentarily to slow as if held by an
Speaker 1: invisible tether. Pink caught in a back current, danced in place,
Speaker 1: all the while two rivers, audible and visible, so near,
Speaker 1: so resistant to the logic of convergence. At the crucial moment,
Speaker 1: when on the map the rivers nearly touch, both floats
Speaker 1: veered off in opposite directions. Justin swore under his breath,
Speaker 1: throwing a pebble across Bellfield's dimpling surface. It's like someone
Speaker 1: installed a current wall. He grouped. We checked our devices,
Speaker 1: marked the new positions, and watched as the floats reappeared,
Speaker 1: each once again far from the other, with a bank
Speaker 1: of tangled woodland between implausibly broad We repeated the experiment thrice,
Speaker 1: altering launch points, times and even switching rivers. Each result
Speaker 1: was the same. Proximity never led to contact, nor provocatively
Speaker 1: to a neat parallel movement. The floats repelled each other,
Speaker 1: circling wide as if orbiting unseen gravity. Once reunited, Justin
Speaker 1: looked thoughtful. Maybe it's like magnets but backwards. Maybe we're
Speaker 1: working against the town's story too much, he shrugged. Or
Speaker 1: maybe the rivers just don't want to meet. I laughed.
Speaker 1: But the feeling was tinged with something deeper. It was
Speaker 1: as if even our attempts at objective measurement were folded
Speaker 1: into the town's will. On our way back, walking the
Speaker 1: green Divide along what looked at a glance like the
Speaker 1: most promising short cut, we found ourselves redirected by subtle slopes,
Speaker 1: by boggy swales. The map hadn't recorded by little outcrops
Speaker 1: of fragrant wild mint and bur laden grass. Occasional glimpses
Speaker 1: of both rivers, never at once, always in succession, tempted
Speaker 1: us to try for higher ground. We clambered up the
Speaker 1: nearest available hillock. At the top, the paradox was laid bare.
Speaker 1: Turn your head left and you saw the bellfield running
Speaker 1: east beneath the checker boarded autumn woods. Swivel right and
Speaker 1: roan gleamed further and then impossibly closer. The in between stretched, compressed,
Speaker 1: dissolved under scrutiny. Frowning, I rechecked the compass, watched as
Speaker 1: the arrow pointed north then west, depending on how I stood,
Speaker 1: as if even it were confused. Justin kept trying to
Speaker 1: joke it off, but I could smell the nervous curiosity
Speaker 1: in him, the sense that beneath our small town's easy
Speaker 1: going rituals, something genuinely weird was at work. By the
Speaker 1: time we made it back to the road, dust closing
Speaker 1: purple around us. I was resolved to go broader, to
Speaker 1: bring in the community test whether our personal experiences replicated
Speaker 1: across groups, or if our observations were somehow just a
Speaker 1: trick of perspective and personality. That weekend, Missus Rowan helped
Speaker 1: me organize what we dubbed the Parallel River's Day Walk,
Speaker 1: a kind of communal re enactment. It was officially billed
Speaker 1: as a celebration, unofficially a lightly constructed scientific trial. We
Speaker 1: invited students, families, old timers, and recent arrivals alike, gathering
Speaker 1: at the Grassy Amphitheater, where river days always ended between
Speaker 1: yet never quite at either river. The turnout surprised us.
Speaker 1: Perhaps fifty people gathered in a loose, chatty knot, some
Speaker 1: in hiking boots, others in their Sunday best. Rowan handed
Speaker 1: out old maps, just In distributed coco from a battered thermos,
Speaker 1: and Madeline in her element, offered root advice to any
Speaker 1: one who looked undecided. In small, staggered groups, we collectively
Speaker 1: attempted to travers the between, starting on Roan's sand stitched bank,
Speaker 1: walking directly to the supposed bellfield, crossing eyes on cardinal
Speaker 1: directions maps, consulted step count's tallid GPS gadgets, Blipping uncertainly
Speaker 1: from every other waist, it was quickly apparent that every
Speaker 1: group emerged slightly or wildly, of course back where they started,
Speaker 1: or unexpectedly farther from the river they'd aimed for. The
Speaker 1: most striking cases involved those who swore the divide between
Speaker 1: rivers seemed to length, the trek that ought to have
Speaker 1: been a ten minute stroll stretching to half an hour,
Speaker 1: the air thick with the kind of dizziness brought on
Speaker 1: by carnival rides or half remembered dreams. As the walk ended,
Speaker 1: we regathered for a firelit story exchange. The tales tumbled out,
Speaker 1: overlapping and correcting each other. Madeline, ever practical, recounted her
Speaker 1: repeated attempts to take a short cut for her postal route,
Speaker 1: only to lose ten minutes in return, flummixed to her
Speaker 1: van with no sense of having doubled back. The pastor's
Speaker 1: wife murmured about a spot where on misty days, the
Speaker 1: sound of one river will switch sides and you'll feel
Speaker 1: moved in your own skin. But newcomers to Dovemont, the Blakes,
Speaker 1: who derived from Flat Creek the previous fall, claimed nothing strange,
Speaker 1: just seems like muddy ground and too many brambles. Missus
Speaker 1: Blake insisted later, though her story veered. While house hunting,
Speaker 1: she and her husband had tried crossing the green by
Speaker 1: a path that should have been direct, only to wind
Speaker 1: up an hour later in sight of their real estate agent.
Speaker 1: And the same starting gait they'd left happened twice, she admitted,
Speaker 1: and the assembled crowd let out a soft murmur. Rowan
Speaker 1: approached me as embers dimmed. Stories change when people try
Speaker 1: to line them up, she mused, maybe the pattern is
Speaker 1: the only constant. Later, reviewing the day's maps and notes,
Speaker 1: I found that every GPS track, no matter the device
Speaker 1: or method, showed meandering courses that consistently stretched the expected distances.
Speaker 1: None plotted a clean straight line across the narrowest gap
Speaker 1: between the rivers. The closest approach invariably ballooned digitally and
Speaker 1: physically into winding loops and returns. That night, still buzzing
Speaker 1: from the day's overlapping conversations, I took a different tack.
Speaker 1: I decided to compare the rivers physical composition directly, using
Speaker 1: sample jars from the school's modest chemistry closet. Just In
Speaker 1: an eye scooped water from Roane chilled with a faint
Speaker 1: bite of chalk, and from Bellfield mineral rich sweeter on
Speaker 1: the tongue. Back at my kitchen table, I ran crude
Speaker 1: home tests, then mailed duplicate vials to doctor Levinson, a
Speaker 1: friend at the State University's ecology lab, with an odd
Speaker 1: but urgent request RANA comparison focus on the DNA markers
Speaker 1: in trout scale samples just In supplied from both rivers.
Speaker 1: My letter was apologetic, couched in local interest, but my
Speaker 1: sense of the stakes had grown. I half expected nothing,
Speaker 1: or perhaps charming family level folklore. Still, I included a
Speaker 1: note about long standing local questions, as delicately neutral as
Speaker 1: I could manage. A week later, the e mail reply
Speaker 1: pinged in, Eli, your town never fails to confuse me.
Speaker 1: Roan s and Bellfield's fish both descend from the same
Speaker 1: original hatchery stock, so say the records, but my team
Speaker 1: found zero current crossover, not just low numbers literally, no
Speaker 1: genetic migration markers. Has Duvemont been stocking each river separately
Speaker 1: for a century? Or is there something odd with migration?
Speaker 1: Water chemistry lines up with what you said chalky vs. Mineral,
Speaker 1: but that can't explain it entirely. Have you considered Wait,
Speaker 1: why am I even asking? Tell me if you find
Speaker 1: anything weirder? Mitch, I sat back, heart thumping. In a
Speaker 1: region where every system should push mingling, floods, droughts, wildlife corridors,
Speaker 1: complete lasting separation is a statistical impossibility, unless, of course,
Speaker 1: the divide wasn't simply precaution or tradition, but in some
Speaker 1: sense an immutable feature of local existence. The implication haunted
Speaker 1: but also excited me. It felt as if Dovemont's central
Speaker 1: riddle was less a question of unexplained geography and more
Speaker 1: one of reality's deep structure. For days after my mind
Speaker 1: chewed over the implications. Was the divide merely enforced by
Speaker 1: physical pattern or had generations of belief, ritual and practical
Speaker 1: adjustment locked it in more profoundly than any river, rock
Speaker 1: or soil striation ever could To go any further, I
Speaker 1: needed to lay hands on the place's oldest stories both
Speaker 1: from those who'd inherited the land and those who'd first
Speaker 1: named its rivers. I arranged with Missus Rowan to meet
Speaker 1: at her house, which doubled as a local history museum
Speaker 1: by virtue of clutter legend and her insatiable appetite for
Speaker 1: cataloging the unremarked peculiarities of Dovemont. She had already flagged
Speaker 1: a sheaf of notes on the town's indigenous history, oral
Speaker 1: retellings collected by her great uncle decades back from descendants
Speaker 1: of the Eshney and Whippock, for whom the two rivers
Speaker 1: had held spiritual resonance long before surveyors ever staked a claim.
Speaker 1: As I paged through faded translations and reconstructed melodies, certain
Speaker 1: phrases leapt out. The Rhone and Bellfield were sister waters,
Speaker 1: described as spirits running side by side, destined never to
Speaker 1: touch lest the seams of the earth unravel. Stories abounded
Speaker 1: of hunters trying to cross between the two and returning
Speaker 1: to their camp lost and disoriented, chased by the green,
Speaker 1: never reaching the opposite water, and finding instead paths that
Speaker 1: wandered to themselves. In early settler accounts, similar motifs recurred
Speaker 1: diaries from the eighteen twenties describing days spent walking a
Speaker 1: narrow wedge, the land persistently parting the waters, though the
Speaker 1: eye saw otherwise. For the first time, I began to
Speaker 1: suspect the line between the rivers was more than accidental,
Speaker 1: more than a fluke of town planning, river management, or
Speaker 1: selective memory. It was as if the very fabric of
Speaker 1: the community, memory, and land had synchronized into an axiom.
Speaker 1: These rivers do not, cannot, will not meet. Yet folklore
Speaker 1: alone could not account for g p S strangeness, fish lineages,
Speaker 1: or failed engineering. I needed more. Holloway proved the right
Speaker 1: sort of puzzle accomplice. He greeted my request with a
Speaker 1: theatrical sigh, yet seized on the challenge immediately. Eli, if
Speaker 1: you want to break the divide, you got to start
Speaker 1: in more dimensions than just physical, he declared, brewing coffee
Speaker 1: strong enough to take the shine off any one's nerves.
Speaker 1: Let's try thinking like mathematicians, or since you're the dreamer,
Speaker 1: like old mythmansers and so one drizzly Friday, in his
Speaker 1: den of blueprints and failed bridge models, we entertained the
Speaker 1: wildest hypothesis Yet, what if the terrain between the rivers
Speaker 1: did not obey Euclidean geometry or even the common sense
Speaker 1: of high school Trig Holloway, who nursed a lifelong fondness
Speaker 1: for topology, sketched a quick diagram amrbious strip with its
Speaker 1: single twisted surface. Look here, he said, Imagine you're walking
Speaker 1: the ridge. Left is bellfield, right is Roan, But walk
Speaker 1: the full loop on a myrbius left and right reverse.
Speaker 1: Could it be that the land between our rivers does
Speaker 1: something similar? I scoffed, But only half you think the
Speaker 1: in between is twisted? Folded? He grinned. Would explain why
Speaker 1: you never see both rivers at once, Why crossings loop
Speaker 1: back on themselves, why paths stretch, not saying the lands
Speaker 1: actually folded. Maybe it's how space and memory interact here especially,
Speaker 1: It wasn't a theory to publish, but for Dovemont it
Speaker 1: rang uncomfortably true. We performed a little experiment, whimsical but
Speaker 1: in lightning, marking our walk with objects, a bright red
Speaker 1: hat from Holloway's wartime days, a stone painted Robin's egg
Speaker 1: blue by Rowan's granddaughter. We placed them at what should,
Speaker 1: by our best estimation, be the midpoint of the between.
Speaker 1: After secuitous walking trying to cross from one river to
Speaker 1: the other in a direct line, we discovered that the
Speaker 1: hat and the stone, when found again, always ended up
Speaker 1: closer to the starting river than the endpoint. A trick,
Speaker 1: as if the in between was not just expanded, but
Speaker 1: curved back upon itself like a folded ribbon, A lining
Speaker 1: only on memory's terms. Other people had their own versions.
Speaker 1: Missus Rowan turned up with the nineteen thirties map labeled
Speaker 1: between the water's path with a penciled annotation. Once even
Speaker 1: a gentle walk sufficed. She recounted childhood stories from an
Speaker 1: elderly cousin a path connecting the waters that once trodden
Speaker 1: faded behind the traveler's back. Sometimes you only heard the
Speaker 1: other river a distant run in the trees. Sometimes, especially
Speaker 1: at dusk, it sounded as if both waters were singing,
Speaker 1: but turning every direction seemed the same. Justin always keen
Speaker 1: to replicate an adventure, badgert his family for river tales.
Speaker 1: His great uncle swore that, in a youth spent out
Speaker 1: beyond the mill, he'd once taken a short cut between
Speaker 1: both rivers, but when asked to demonstrate, or even to
Speaker 1: map the root memory failed. I remember running through Goldenrod,
Speaker 1: the rivers gleaming left and right, But at the end
Speaker 1: my boots were muddy and I was back at the start.
Speaker 1: As our experiments, stories and data accumulated, it became clear
Speaker 1: each effort to bridge the divide in bridges or boats,
Speaker 1: surveys or stories looped endlessly into deferment or revision. Town
Speaker 1: council minutes from the mid twentieth century, which I dug
Speaker 1: up with Rowan, included lengthy debates about new housing developments,
Speaker 1: flood planning, and the persistent trouble of aligning the rivers
Speaker 1: on property plats. The climax always arrived the same way, confusion, resignation,
Speaker 1: and a command to celebrate separation as a feature, not
Speaker 1: a bug. Ritual followed. Separation became identity, not only in parades,
Speaker 1: but in food and song. Split river casserole, two grain
Speaker 1: types divided by a ridge of carrots, twin spirits toast,
Speaker 1: and the river races always strictly divided lane. In every case,
Speaker 1: the divide was both literal and performative, a reminder perhaps
Speaker 1: of the town's grandest unresolved contradiction. Yet the more we pressed,
Speaker 1: the wider the contradiction opened. I was struck by how
Speaker 1: little the problem distressed people. The more I tried to
Speaker 1: name it geographic oddity, perceptual anomaly, cultural axiom. The more
Speaker 1: I saw that Dovemont took pride in its very impossibility,
Speaker 1: finding comfort in the certainty of the rivers stubborn divergence.
Speaker 1: It wasn't denial. It was function, a principle enforced by tradition, memory, adjustment,
Speaker 1: and something that hovered at the edge of the noble.
Speaker 1: The accumulated strangenesses, the normalization, the layered rituals all acted
Speaker 1: to continually reinforce the impossibility, embedding it not just in
Speaker 1: land and water, but in language, thought, daily navigation. Dovemont
Speaker 1: lived with the unexplainable, yet never allowed its presence to
Speaker 1: rattle everyday certainty. The impossible had, with centuries of practice,
Speaker 1: become merely the way things are so intangible and near
Speaker 1: as to require no further explanation. Yet in the midst
Speaker 1: of all this, a different flavor of wonder grew. Were
Speaker 1: we living with a natural impossibility, a fact of physics
Speaker 1: and locality, or was the true divide sustained in equal
Speaker 1: parts by ritual expectation and communal agreement. Was this Dovemont's
Speaker 1: private loophole, a place where the mutual policing of narrative
Speaker 1: and experience bent the rules themselves. I decided to run
Speaker 1: one final, more controlled experiment before declaring defeat or surrender.
Speaker 1: Rowan and I devised a protocol, a blindfold test with
Speaker 1: volunteers aimed at stripping away visual cues, memory and expectation
Speaker 1: as much as possible. We recruited a half dozen Townsfolk students, Madeline,
Speaker 1: mister Holloway, a pair of coaches from the high school.
Speaker 1: Each was blindfolded at the Rohans Bank, spun thrice for ori,
Speaker 1: and guided to march with hand signals for direction toward
Speaker 1: Bellfield's mapped line, a mere one hundred forty yards away.
Speaker 1: Each group veered, pivoted, drifted. At the end. When the
Speaker 1: blindfolds were removed, nobody stood at the Bellfield's edge. Most
Speaker 1: had curved away, stopping near Roane bewildered. A couple had
Speaker 1: wandered in circles, one ended up nearly back at the
Speaker 1: starting copse. The between again proved inimical to direct crossing,
Speaker 1: the path, stretching, folding, wriggling out of all attempted linearity. Later,
Speaker 1: when asked if they felt their sense of direction fail,
Speaker 1: most shrugged. Felt normal, except the end was missing. Just
Speaker 1: a longer walk, Madeline said, dusting burrs from her socks,
Speaker 1: Bellfield must be further than it looks. We tried a
Speaker 1: reverse run from Bellfield to Roan. Results matched That evening, drained,
Speaker 1: yet quietly elated by the day's collaborative failure. I reviewed photos,
Speaker 1: GPS data, and hastily drawn maps, correlating every instance in
Speaker 1: which the world's basic geometry misbehaved. Then, almost as an afterthought,
Speaker 1: I checked my inbox. A new message flagged urgent mapping anomaly.
Speaker 1: It was from Mitch at the University forded your river
Speaker 1: question to a body in satellite mapping. You won't believe this.
Speaker 1: Raw images Dovemont region reveal irregularities. In a few frames,
Speaker 1: rivers appear to touch or swap sides for a split second,
Speaker 1: then snap back. In the next scan. The topography between
Speaker 1: them looks his word stretched or folded, non euclidian in
Speaker 1: data terms. He's sending render files. But I thought you'd
Speaker 1: want to know. Is this some joke in your mapping files?
Speaker 1: Or my skin prickled the world at every scale now, memory,
Speaker 1: folk tale, engineering, mapping, even orbiting satellites conspired to enforce
Speaker 1: and sometimes glitterly betray the divide. Sometimes when nobody was watching,
Speaker 1: or perhaps when belief loosened its grip, the outlines dance
Speaker 1: briefly transgressive, then returned to their eternal parallel embrace. Yet
Speaker 1: no constructed object, float, photograph, or walk ever produced a
Speaker 1: breach in lived experience. As Holloway and I sat days
Speaker 1: later over a mug of coffee, in a scatter of renderings,
Speaker 1: we tried to catch the pattern directly, a fleeting moment
Speaker 1: in pixel or story, when the rivers might nearly join
Speaker 1: or cross. Always the anomalies resolved as soon as human
Speaker 1: attention or action pressed too close, places where, for a
Speaker 1: moment both rivers music might blend, then snap apart when approached.
Speaker 1: In historical accounts, too, the lost creek path that, if hurried,
Speaker 1: curved back again, the Old woman's tale of one river's
Speaker 1: song becoming too dissolving with a single startled breath. The
Speaker 1: explanation hovered just beyond the reach of measurement or myth.
Speaker 1: The rivers axiom, their central law seemed to run deeper
Speaker 1: than either geology or collective imaginetation could independently create the
Speaker 1: more compelling implication that in rare cultural and physical corners
Speaker 1: of the world, human expectation and landscape braided together so
Speaker 1: tightly that even physical laws could accommodate folk impossibility. Like
Speaker 1: knots in memory, these became new seams in reality, quietly
Speaker 1: edited by each new story or festival. With this in mind,
Speaker 1: the rivers stopped looking merely anomalous. They became, in a
Speaker 1: way models. Here in the middle of nowhere, people had
Speaker 1: absorbed impossibility into daily routine, celebrated it, even as though
Speaker 1: the heart of Dovemont was never about solving the riddle,
Speaker 1: but about living gracefully inside it. No more repeat experiments,
Speaker 1: no more verifications or additional stories. I found, to my
Speaker 1: own surprise that acceptance did not settle as resignation, but
Speaker 1: as a deep, expanding curiosity, a kind that acknowledged there
Speaker 1: was no neat closure yet found within the endless wondering,
Speaker 1: a richness unavailable to certainty. I walked home along Ridge
Speaker 1: Road that night, the sky a bruised navy, stars flickering
Speaker 1: in the gaps over the unresolved divide. Each step was ordinary,
Speaker 1: yet the world felt fractionally wider. I could not say
Speaker 1: what underwrote the rivers separateness, whether nature obade geography, or
Speaker 1: geography here bent to mind and myth. But I knew
Speaker 1: that the people who lived here, knowingly or not, had
Speaker 1: woven the impossible into the warp and weft of their
Speaker 1: lives so intimately that it no longer drew surprise. In
Speaker 1: the weeks that followed, I taught my students from the
Speaker 1: same battered maps, but now paused Whenever someone recited the
Speaker 1: usual lines about rivers that never meet, I asked them,
Speaker 1: what else in your world might be so quietly strange
Speaker 1: you'd only notice it by asking the answers I think
Speaker 1: matter less than the impulse to look. Once at sunset,
Speaker 1: I drove to the ridge separating Rhone from Bellfield, out
Speaker 1: near the old surveyor's post. I stood notebook in hand
Speaker 1: between the evergreen hush of one river's flow and the
Speaker 1: mineral brightness of the other's laughter, the gap alive with wind,
Speaker 1: and the remembered footsteps of a thousand town rituals. The
Speaker 1: sun traced a single seamless line of gold across the grass,
Speaker 1: a path that, in the moment seemed to reach from
Speaker 1: one water to the other. Though I knew with certainty
Speaker 1: it would vanish the instant I chased it. I lingered
Speaker 1: there as dusk enriched the spaces between, and a strange
Speaker 1: gratitude filled me, not for answers found or problems solved,
Speaker 1: but for the dignity of questions too entangled with living
Speaker 1: to unravel. The shape of our world, I realized, is
Speaker 1: made as much by what we believe and share as
Speaker 1: by what we can measure or map. And there, with
Speaker 1: the green bands shimmering and the twin rivers holding their
Speaker 1: parallel silence, I finally let the dilemma rest, content to
Speaker 1: live as Dovemont always has in the gentle, persistent paradox
Speaker 1: of impot sossibility normalized. Perhaps the world's true shape is
Speaker 1: not just what can be measured, but also what can
Speaker 1: be believed together, and that is the end. Thank you
Speaker 1: for listening, and I will see you in the next one.