Speaker 1: Hollo I moalcan stories all the time. Glad you are here.
Speaker 1: Let's get into it.
Speaker 2: The window in the whale gallery looked out over the
Speaker 2: harbor in a way that didn't make sense at first. Well, no,
Speaker 2: not at first. For a good while after stepping over
Speaker 2: the museum's threshold, I was content to assume I just
Speaker 2: hadn't paid attention on the lane outside, distracted by the
Speaker 2: chatter from the nearby fish key and the smell of salt.
Speaker 2: The crumbling Maritime Museum stood in the elbow of the
Speaker 2: high Street, tucked between a row of faded boarding houses
Speaker 2: and a steep, moss bound passage. I'd never been inside
Speaker 2: during my earlier excursions through town. I'd always meant to,
Speaker 2: of course, but meaning too and doing are cousins more
Speaker 2: than twins, especially in retirement. But that morning, something about
Speaker 2: the mild, drizzly air sent me looking for a change.
Speaker 2: The entryway, barely wider than my old umbrella, offered a
Speaker 2: wall of notices volunteer openings see shanty Thursdays support local history.
Speaker 2: Behind the welcome desk, a cheerful teenager passed the time
Speaker 2: with a book on knots. Beyond her was a cramped
Speaker 2: corridor lined with museum placards aging at different rates. Nothing
Speaker 2: about the place suggested impossibility. If anything, it was precisely
Speaker 2: the worn friendly type of institution that invites forgiveness for
Speaker 2: leaky ceilings and mismatched rails. But in the first major
Speaker 2: exhibit room, three steps from the front desk, lay the
Speaker 2: first oddity. A sash window framed a view of the wharves,
Speaker 2: the masts bobbing at waterline, exactly as you'd expect. It
Speaker 2: was almost too perfect. A little tableau of the working
Speaker 2: port tucked behind glass, a place for school children to
Speaker 2: press their noses and count gulls, A set of ships logs,
Speaker 2: and an arrangement of whaleburn artifacts completed the scene. I
Speaker 2: took it at face value. Why wouldn't I? There was
Speaker 2: nothing obviously strange, just a room of view the classic
Speaker 2: must of old varnished wood and see air that all
Speaker 2: seaside museums carry like a birthmark. It was the next
Speaker 2: room that issued the quiet invitation to doubt. No more
Speaker 2: than twelve steps along a short passage up a slope
Speaker 2: i'd call a ramp more than a stair, The room
Speaker 2: beyond was barely larger than a generous closet. Still its
Speaker 2: slightly fogged window overlooked not the harbor, but the lumpy
Speaker 2: backs of dark tiled roofs the street up hill, a
Speaker 2: nott of tangled greenery, nowhere near the sea level view
Speaker 2: I just left. The terrain outside didn't rise so steeply,
Speaker 2: I thought, frowning, Or perhaps the building was cleverer inside
Speaker 2: than I'd realized. Stepping abruptly up some lost gradient, I
Speaker 2: circled the central exhibit table, a display about an eighteen
Speaker 2: twenty one rescue at sea, staring out and back at
Speaker 2: the window. My old Cataaloagu's brain whirring. These hilly seaside
Speaker 2: places could twist the logic of elevations in older towns.
Speaker 2: Floors might double back over themselves. Had a lower staircase
Speaker 2: only visible from the alley. Half the establishments along this
Speaker 2: lane seemed to balance on ancient stilt work, or slouched
Speaker 2: drunkenly in their footings. I'd seen worse in the stacks
Speaker 2: of city libraries. After the third room, however, my reason
Speaker 2: began to develop small cracks. This time after a brief ascent.
Speaker 2: The window spanned almost the breadth of the far wall.
Speaker 2: Looking out, I expected to see a little more sky,
Speaker 2: perhaps the topmost chimneys of those same houses. Instead, the
Speaker 2: pane cut a slice of air above the entire town,
Speaker 2: down onto the same rooftops I had seen earlier, but
Speaker 2: now from several stories higher. Beyond that the silver scribble
Speaker 2: of the river's outflow, and impossibly a hint of the
Speaker 2: outermost rock pools half a mile further down the coast.
Speaker 2: I stood perfectly still, fingers gripping my notebook. For one
Speaker 2: sharp moment I entertained the idea that the window was
Speaker 2: an elaborate, very convincing illusion, a cunningly backlit mural perhaps,
Speaker 2: or a digital screen so realistic it fooled the senses.
Speaker 2: But glass was cool. Beneath my palm. The salty wind
Speaker 2: found its way through a crack at the latch. Out
Speaker 2: on the slates, A real gull shrieked and flapped as
Speaker 2: two schoolboys splashed below. I, instinct honed by a life
Speaker 2: of reference queries, was not to ask at once. A
Speaker 2: good librarian catalog's her curiosities, stores them for later. Instead,
Speaker 2: I quietly committed the contradiction to memory and carried on,
Speaker 2: determined to trust in old bricks and the knack for
Speaker 2: odd window placements. I suspected someone clever had designed the
Speaker 2: rooms to capture different iconic views, a trick of the light,
Speaker 2: a well staged journey through the buildings, centuries of additions. Clever,
Speaker 2: but not impossible, surely for now I resolved, observed first
Speaker 2: catalog questions later. The museum, it seemed, was content to
Speaker 2: play along. The locals called it the Sideways Museum, mostly
Speaker 2: with a shrug, as if the odd name were just
Speaker 2: another flavor in the stew of town gossip, not something
Speaker 2: that demanded greater explanation. I only learned of it thanks
Speaker 2: to to Mars, whose postal rounds gave him a legendary intimacy,
Speaker 2: not only with post codes and attic stairwells, but with
Speaker 2: every shade of local peculiarity. To Mars delivered half the
Speaker 2: town's news, parcels and secrets. He was equal parts historian, postman,
Speaker 2: and sometimes unreliable narrator. You haven't poked about in there yet, Marjorie,
Speaker 2: he'd asked one afternoon as we walked home from the bakery.
Speaker 2: Funny place. That can't say I ever keep straight which
Speaker 2: weighs the back and which is the front? Seems different
Speaker 2: every time you step inside, He'd grinned, as if this
Speaker 2: were the most natural trouble in the world. These days,
Speaker 2: routine defined my life, and it was by design. After
Speaker 2: decades spent deep in cathedral like archives public libraries, mostly
Speaker 2: with their leathery quiet and the hum of the central heating,
Speaker 2: I'd come to the town for its edges, edges of
Speaker 2: the country, at least where the cliffs shelter, a cluster
Speaker 2: of lanes and houses grown up like barnacles on the rock.
Speaker 2: My retirement was a contented one, books, long walks along
Speaker 2: the headlands, cups of strong tea with the neighbors, and
Speaker 2: the steady thrill of learning the local histories by browsing
Speaker 2: old maps and wayfinding the tangled lanes. Yet, where habit
Speaker 2: tends to dull curiosity, I'd found it instead honed mine
Speaker 2: to a softer, persistent point. Every morning I set out,
Speaker 2: intending to know the town a little better, to catalog quietly,
Speaker 2: privately the subtle rotations of its life. Here was a
Speaker 2: bench that moved two meters east every few months. There
Speaker 2: was the fishmonger who swore his grandfather had survived three
Speaker 2: separate shipwrecks, none adequately explained, I loved the puzzle aspects
Speaker 2: of local history, the ways stories propagate, mutate, settle into
Speaker 2: the stone work. The museum itself was less an institution
Speaker 2: than a patchwork. It sprawled down the steepest lane, hugging
Speaker 2: the curve of the road, appearing at once solid and improvisational.
Speaker 2: The foundation boasted timbers from the seventeen hundreds, a gothic
Speaker 2: archway from the next century, and more recent concrete post
Speaker 2: war additions squatting behind. Over the last fifteen years. According
Speaker 2: to every write up and the faded brass plaque by
Speaker 2: the door, it had undergone waves of restoration, integrating its
Speaker 2: many epochs into a living record of maritime life. From outside,
Speaker 2: you could make a reasonable guess at where each ear joined.
Speaker 2: A change in brick color, a blocked chimney, a window
Speaker 2: that didn't quite match its sibling. Across the entryway, the staff, too,
Speaker 2: bore the friendly hall marks of local pride and limited resources.
Speaker 2: Alongside the teenage guide Lucy and the director, Miss Appledore,
Speaker 2: always in cheerful prints, her hands waving as she narrated
Speaker 2: the museum's funding challenges. There were two or three regular volunteers,
Speaker 2: Jorge with his white mustache and encyclopedic knowledge of local shipwrecks,
Speaker 2: and Angela, who wore a knit beare year round and
Speaker 2: dispensed cups of weak tea in the small kitchen past
Speaker 2: the wailing exhibit. Their air was always more neighborhood gathering
Speaker 2: spot than serious archive. Lucy, in particular, seemed to carry
Speaker 2: the building's contradictions as if they were nothing more than
Speaker 2: inside jokes. Whenever a visitor asked for directions between exhibits,
Speaker 2: she'd respond with cheerful vagueness. Up the corridor, or you
Speaker 2: could try the stairs at the end, but really you'll
Speaker 2: get there either way. I'd seen her reassure confused tourists
Speaker 2: three times in a single afternoon, never losing her smile.
Speaker 2: If anyone in the building noticed its illogicalities or cared
Speaker 2: to raise an eyebrow, their attitude seemed to be that
Speaker 2: of affectionate tolerance. Bit of a muddle, isn't it to
Speaker 2: Mars had said again when I relayed my observations. But
Speaker 2: you have to love it keeps us guessing. As a
Speaker 2: lover of maps and the order they promised, I found
Speaker 2: myself increasingly attentive to details At home, My shelves were
Speaker 2: lined with charts and plans, old fire regulations for the libraries.
Speaker 2: I had managed hand drawn maps of the Headland walks,
Speaker 2: some by locals, others collected over years of vacationing before
Speaker 2: my move. There was something comforting about pinning down space,
Speaker 2: giving every shelf and window its place. The Sideway's museum,
Speaker 2: it seemed, did not share my respect for such discipline,
Speaker 2: and yet with every visit I felt less the urge
Speaker 2: to fix its oddities, and more the compulsion to understand them.
Speaker 2: Curiosity in such places isn't a hunger for answers, so
Speaker 2: much as a quiet invitation to linger in the strange
Speaker 2: gap between sense and surprise. The next real contradiction came
Speaker 2: in the Whale Skeleton gallery. It wasn't the centerpiece an
Speaker 2: impressive vertebral column suspended from iron hooks, the vertebrae as
Speaker 2: broad as stools, or even the exhibits low, slightly sloping ceiling,
Speaker 2: which I could have explained away as part of the
Speaker 2: building's age. Now it was the way. After pausing only
Speaker 2: long enough to take in a wall of weathered harpoons,
Speaker 2: I passed into the next gallery and found myself faced
Speaker 2: with yet another impossible view through a broad window in
Speaker 2: this new room, I looked down onto the jumbled rooftops
Speaker 2: of the upper High Street, their moss dark gutters, sloping
Speaker 2: away to the church. This would have made sense had
Speaker 2: I just scaled a significant flight upward. But the transition
Speaker 2: from whale skeleton to this gallery involved little more than
Speaker 2: the most gentle of inclines, a subtle carpeted rise beneath
Speaker 2: my shoes. There was certainly no sense of having outclimbed
Speaker 2: the physical building. Puzzled, I turned to Lucy, who was
Speaker 2: restocking pamphlets near by. Lucy, the gallery with the sea view?
Speaker 2: Is it above or below this one? I tried to
Speaker 2: keep my tone casual, she laughed, tucking her hair behind
Speaker 2: her ear. Neither really they run parallel, she looked, absolutely certain.
Speaker 2: You can get from one to the other without really
Speaker 2: going up or down, if you just take the corridor
Speaker 2: by the models ships, or if you prefer the stairs
Speaker 2: that works too parallel. I gave her a polite nod
Speaker 2: and a thoughtful hum mentally mapping the distances and levels
Speaker 2: that she, just with utter confidence rendered unhelpfully contradictory. Thank you,
Speaker 2: I said, and wrote a hasty note visitors orientation seems
Speaker 2: to depend on their chosen route, but all routes seem
Speaker 2: to rise or descend in impossible ways. A wild explanation
Speaker 2: flitted through my mind. Maybe the building encapsulates a series
Speaker 2: of half levels, like a split foy house where you
Speaker 2: never quite notice your turning in a circle. Or perhaps
Speaker 2: I'd simply missed an intermediate stare. It happens, especially in
Speaker 2: unfamiliar terrain. Still, there was something about the way the
Speaker 2: outside world shifted so dramatically from one window to the next,
Speaker 2: beyond the credible tricks of Victorian architects or modern renovators.
Speaker 2: I tested my theory by retracing my steps, trying to
Speaker 2: span the buildings with and compare each window's view in
Speaker 2: quick succession. I began counting paces, even humming a little
Speaker 2: under my breath to keep time. Twelve strides to the
Speaker 2: whale room, five to the end of the gallery, ten
Speaker 2: more up the short rise. The sum of it simply
Speaker 2: didn't account for the apparent changes outside. Back in the lobby,
Speaker 2: I paused to observe the flow of visitors. A pair
Speaker 2: of women compared exhibits animatedly, each describing the layout to
Speaker 2: the other. In terms completely at odds. One insisted the
Speaker 2: boat models were to the right past the whaling exhibit,
Speaker 2: while her companion swore you had to follow the odd
Speaker 2: staircase behind the lighthouse. Dirama. There was no friction in
Speaker 2: their disagreement, only the cheerful certainty of memory, as if
Speaker 2: each version belonged to a private geography. Returning to the
Speaker 2: teen Lucy, I asked, are there two galleries with views
Speaker 2: of the roofs? She shook her head, smiling, Oh, there
Speaker 2: are three, I think, unless you count the one with
Speaker 2: the leaded glass. But nobody goes in there much. She
Speaker 2: seemed unbothered by my confusion. If you get lost, just
Speaker 2: head for the biggest window. You can always see where
Speaker 2: you are from there. But that, of course, was the trouble.
Speaker 2: Every window insisted on its own sense of place. I
Speaker 2: left the museum that afternoon with a head full of questions,
Speaker 2: convinced I was missing some essential architectural insight, or that
Speaker 2: the building itself had developed a private joke at the
Speaker 2: expense of cartographers and librarians. I told myself to return
Speaker 2: properly equipped to morrow. The next morning dawned pale and
Speaker 2: fitful with drizzle. The streets shimmered, emptied of all but
Speaker 2: the heartiest dog walkers. I arrived at the Sideways Museum
Speaker 2: just after they raised the dusty open sign, prepared with
Speaker 2: a plan borrowed from many years in archives, observe record,
Speaker 2: seek evidence. The wider world, I thought had no patience
Speaker 2: for vague impressions, rigor if I could bring it might
Speaker 2: help decode the quirks. Inside the entrance, three different maps
Speaker 2: were found out on the front desk, each marked with
Speaker 2: colored lines and keyed icons. Ground floor, harbor, entry, upper wing.
Speaker 2: I selected the plainest, no point in getting distracted by
Speaker 2: artists flourishes, intending to anchor my observations to a fixed plan.
Speaker 2: The volunteers warming mugs at the reception nook nodded in
Speaker 2: my direction. Bit of a maze our museum. Take a
Speaker 2: map or two if you like one, said amiably. I'll
Speaker 2: take just the one for now, I replied. I set
Speaker 2: off notebook, open eyes, sharp pace, counting between rooms, sketching
Speaker 2: crude outlines, listing window views and the visible landmarks beyond
Speaker 2: each pane. In the whale gallery. Once more, I marked
Speaker 2: twelve steps from entry sea view. Immediately afterward, I tested
Speaker 2: all possible exits, noting each subtle grade. Was it a
Speaker 2: true stare or only a slope disguised with carpet. I
Speaker 2: photographed every detail, concentrating not just on displays, but the
Speaker 2: exact angle of sunlight, the line up of boats in
Speaker 2: the harbor, the particular colors in the alley beyond. Moving
Speaker 2: deliberately from gallery to gallery, I discovered the second time
Speaker 2: through the corridor to the next room was three steps
Speaker 2: longer than the day before. The arrangement of ships in
Speaker 2: bottles had swapped with a glass case of navigational tools.
Speaker 2: This change, I tried to reassure myself, might simply be
Speaker 2: the work of volunteers re arranging the exhibits. Still, the
Speaker 2: order of rooms themselves seemed subtly off. I entered what
Speaker 2: my map called North Annex and found a sequence of
Speaker 2: displays labeled for two separate wings. Confident I was just
Speaker 2: muddling the plan, I checked my phone's camera roll, expecting
Speaker 2: a neat procession of images. Instead, I found something odd.
Speaker 2: The whale bone bench appeared first on the left of
Speaker 2: the room, then the right. In the next image, a
Speaker 2: model schooner's painted hull changed shade red to brown, perhaps
Speaker 2: a trick of the lighting, except it looked markedly different,
Speaker 2: and the museum's lighting was unchanging, clouded as it was
Speaker 2: with daylight. I resolved then to observe the other patrons,
Speaker 2: listening as they gently wrangled over directions. It's just this way, oh,
Speaker 2: isn't it? I thought? We came up a stair, a
Speaker 2: visitor said to their companion. Now look, it's straight along
Speaker 2: past the shipwrecks, then left at the mural. You remember
Speaker 2: the mural. Both then, seemingly without disagreement, went right, not left.
Speaker 2: I took a chance and approached Miss Appledoor herself, catching
Speaker 2: her as she arranged a basket of handouts by the
Speaker 2: fire exit. Excuse me, I'm working on understanding the building's layout,
Speaker 2: I wondered, if you might know. Do the gallery floors
Speaker 2: a line with the streets outside? She tilted her head
Speaker 2: that perpetual smile, forming, Oh, our little oddities, they're half
Speaker 2: the charm. The town's full of them. Being as old
Speaker 2: as it is. This place is a collection of wings
Speaker 2: and add ons, a bit of Victorian here, Edwardian there.
Speaker 2: The whole buildings patched together like a favorite quilt, keeps
Speaker 2: us on our toes. She saw my skepticism and patted
Speaker 2: my arm. I've worked here six years and still end
Speaker 2: up surprised by a new corner now and then. Her
Speaker 2: answer was plausible, but I couldn't shake the feeling that
Speaker 2: something was being left unsaid, or else simply unconsidered. A patchwork. Yes,
Speaker 2: but mosaics didn't usually rearrange their own tiles while you
Speaker 2: looked away. To test my remaining doubt, I did one
Speaker 2: last thing. I stepped outside, circled the alley, and re
Speaker 2: entered the building from the main entrance. This time, the
Speaker 2: door opened impossibly, facing the largest exhibit directly where only
Speaker 2: yesterday you'd had to climb and turn twice before reaching it.
Speaker 2: I halted, surprised enough for my heart to stutter. A
Speaker 2: staff member, not one I recognized, nodded a greeting. Unaware
Speaker 2: or so I thought, of the contradiction, she just played
Speaker 2: host to. I left soon after, my head buzzing with
Speaker 2: not confusion but the need to go deeper. I resolved
Speaker 2: to approach the building as I would a rare and
Speaker 2: confounding text, return with compass, tape and patience catalog the
Speaker 2: evidence test every theory, Sooner or later, the logic or
Speaker 2: its absence would reveal itself. That night, my small kitchen
Speaker 2: table became an operations room. I laid out my notes,
Speaker 2: transcribed yesterday's route alongside to day's. The museum's map, dogged
Speaker 2: and smudged with finger prints, quickly became a tangle of
Speaker 2: arrows dotted lines that refused to square with any consistent geometry.
Speaker 2: Rooms I could swear were adjacent, ended up two corridors apart.
Speaker 2: Window views sometimes doubled back, as if the outside world
Speaker 2: had rotated without moving the building at all. I tried
Speaker 2: to overlay the printed plan with my sketches. Misalignment compounded
Speaker 2: with every attempt, I told myself it must be an
Speaker 2: error of scale, or perhaps my own haphazard note. Taking.
Speaker 2: Years in the stacks had taught me to distrust subjective
Speaker 2: accounts when hard data was available, but my methods here.
Speaker 2: If anything leaned too far in the opposite direction. With
Speaker 2: every adjustment I made, the reality I experienced receded, side stepped,
Speaker 2: almost as if reluctant to be neatly cataloged. Still, I
Speaker 2: was determined as ever to make sense of things, and
Speaker 2: perhaps more so, because sense seemed tantalizingly out of reach,
Speaker 2: I needed more than memory and loane observation. I needed
Speaker 2: to compare my experience to that of some one else,
Speaker 2: a check against my own fallibility or possibly a new contradiction.
Speaker 2: On my third deliberate visit, I enlisted to Mars the postman.
Speaker 2: He just finished his morning round and responded to my
Speaker 2: request for company with the kind of mischievous enthusiasm unique
Speaker 2: to the semi attired. We agreed to walk the museum together,
Speaker 2: each with a note book, each prepared to jot down
Speaker 2: the sequence of rooms, their features, and the views from
Speaker 2: every window. It's a bet, then he laughed, waving a
Speaker 2: stubby pencil. The reception that day was busy, and Lucy
Speaker 2: greeted us with a clipboard, half distracted as she recounted
Speaker 2: museum membership numbers from Memory to Mars and I set
Speaker 2: off on our agreed procedure, enter each gallery side by side, pause,
Speaker 2: write down the salient features, remark on the external view,
Speaker 2: and crucially resist the urge to confer until we'd finished
Speaker 2: a full circuit. It was in the side gallery, the
Speaker 2: one with the battered diving bell, that the first true
Speaker 2: oddity emerged. Peering through the small cloudy window to my left,
Speaker 2: I jotted quiet alley brambles garden shed two blue bins.
Speaker 2: To Mars with a grunt, leaned over and muttered, your
Speaker 2: missing the fig tree on the hillside, grand thing, He insisted.
Speaker 2: The view, which I could not perceive, showed nothing but
Speaker 2: a tumble of green and a footpath winding upward. Are
Speaker 2: we not looking at the same window, I asked, quietly,
Speaker 2: fighting the impulse to squint, as if my vision might
Speaker 2: be persuaded into agreement. He grinned, maybe the glass is
Speaker 2: that mucky you can't see. To check our perceptions, I
Speaker 2: photographed the window, handed to Mars my phone and watched
Speaker 2: as he did the same from his point of view. Later,
Speaker 2: comparing images, each one looked reasonable enough, except no two
Speaker 2: accounted for the same details I shed on mine, his
Speaker 2: fig tree on his. I laughed, then nervously it was
Speaker 2: not possible, but impossible at a level subtle enough not
Speaker 2: to provoke alarm. We continued, each leaving subtle markers. In
Speaker 2: one case, my blue silk scarf atop a wooden bench
Speaker 2: shaped like the keel of a ship to Mars waved
Speaker 2: as I walked on, promising not to touch it. I
Speaker 2: navigated a loop through two more galleries, intending to return
Speaker 2: the same way. When I circled back, the scarf wasn't
Speaker 2: on the bench. It was behind glass in a display
Speaker 2: case labeled Maritime Costume nineteen o one nineteen twenty nine. Panicked,
Speaker 2: I glanced at to Mars, who, from his point just
Speaker 2: inside the next doorway, called, still there, just as you
Speaker 2: left it, he gestured, and seeing his version, I realized
Speaker 2: he believed the scarf to be on the bench Still.
Speaker 2: I caught Lucy as she passed to ask if the
Speaker 2: staff ever moved visitors belongings. Not usually, she said, unconcerned.
Speaker 2: But sometimes the exhibits seemed to shift around by themselves,
Speaker 2: you know, sometimes one of the Mannikins disappears, or a
Speaker 2: flag s turned up where nobody left it. It's all
Speaker 2: part of the building's character, isn't it. We finished our experiment,
Speaker 2: careful to document every transition, steps, views, orientations. Each of
Speaker 2: us became more convinced that, however systematically we tried, the
Speaker 2: building refused to be locked down to a single sequence. Later,
Speaker 2: over tea, we reviewed the photos on our phones to
Speaker 2: Mars's sequence made perfect sense within itself, beginning with the
Speaker 2: signal flags, proceeding inevitably to a case of model trawlers
Speaker 2: ending with the north facing window. My sequence was no
Speaker 2: less plausible, except it made an entirely different, mutually exclusive
Speaker 2: tour of the same building the same afternoon. Laughing to Mars, shrugged,
Speaker 2: must have taken a wrong turning in my own head. No,
Speaker 2: I said the words slow and careful. I think this
Speaker 2: place refuses to be mapped, at least not the way
Speaker 2: we're used to mapping things. Or perhaps it's mapping us.
Speaker 2: He thought it over, you reckon, we each get our own.
Speaker 2: He sounded delighted at the notion. Before the afternoon was out,
Speaker 2: I sought out another staff member, Jorge, the volunteer with
Speaker 2: the beard and the twinkle in his eye. Does every
Speaker 2: one's map of this place differ? I pressed? He shrugged, nonplussed.
Speaker 2: Nobody's map, ever, matches up not really old building, old town,
Speaker 2: layers on top of layers. But people say the museum
Speaker 2: decides what makes sense for you. In the end. That
Speaker 2: struck me as at once too poetic, too dismissive, and
Speaker 2: just plausible enough to let the querulus stop wondering. But
Speaker 2: I felt the tension shift. This was no mere architectural
Speaker 2: quirk nor a case of unreliable memory. The pattern was persistent, reproducible,
Speaker 2: and weirdly gentle, non threatening, even pleasurable in a sideway's way.
Speaker 2: No one was made anxious, only perhaps bemused. I walked
Speaker 2: home that day under a lowering sky, thinking hard about
Speaker 2: what it meant for a place to quietly warp itself
Speaker 2: according to the the mind or expectations of its visitors.
Speaker 2: The museum was not a maze or a trick. There
Speaker 2: was no sense of danger, only a growing certainty that
Speaker 2: reality here bent itself mildly but persistently to each person's
Speaker 2: private logic. My final notes that night were more questions
Speaker 2: than conclusions. Was this a case of suggestibility, a series
Speaker 2: of invisible cues only passed by subconscious minds, or was
Speaker 2: the building itself a quiet, ongoing impossibility, reshaping itself for
Speaker 2: every step and every eye that passed through. Did it
Speaker 2: matter that nobody seemed troubled? Or was the strangeness only
Speaker 2: visible because I had spent a career worried that every
Speaker 2: shelf and every book must have its proper singular place.
Speaker 2: Either way, I knew the rules had changed, the museum's boundaries,
Speaker 2: its very doors, and halls were not simply hard to
Speaker 2: pin down, they were fundamentally unstable, a living contradiction. I
Speaker 2: resolved to approach the building as an experiment. Notebook comes, tape,
Speaker 2: another mind, if possible. I wanted not to fix it,
Speaker 2: but to see just how deeply the foundation ran for
Speaker 2: each of us, and how many versions of the sideways
Speaker 2: world lay hidden behind the same familiar walls. Arriving at
Speaker 2: the museum with my compass and tape pockets bristling with
Speaker 2: note books, I felt almost sheepish, the old, familiar energy
Speaker 2: of a new reference challenge, but shaded by the uncertainty
Speaker 2: that I wasn't really hunting for something any one else required.
Speaker 2: The rain had quit, leaving the cobblestones shining and the
Speaker 2: air brisk, as if the weather itself had washed the
Speaker 2: town clean for the day's experiment. Lucy was at the
Speaker 2: desk again, finishing a cross word in bulpunt blue. She
Speaker 2: looked up and grinned, you're back with some tools. I
Speaker 2: see cartographers, itch, I said, smiling, relieved, she accepted these
Speaker 2: oddities without a wink toward mischief or skepticism. Would you
Speaker 2: help me with a project? I thought it might be
Speaker 2: useful maybe even fun to make proper floor map gallery
Speaker 2: to gallery as we go, double check the museum's plans.
Speaker 2: I wanted to see whether the systematic note taking side
Speaker 2: by side would confirm or fracture the museum's geography. Lucy
Speaker 2: lit up. Yes, Miss Appledore is always after us to
Speaker 2: update the plans. Things move around so much. It'll give
Speaker 2: us something to show the next school visit. She found
Speaker 2: a stack of plain white paper and some fresh pencils.
Speaker 2: You want to go left or right from the entry.
Speaker 2: Let's go left to day, and let's be careful not
Speaker 2: to prompt each other, just note down what we each
Speaker 2: see and meet at the end of each room. She nodded,
Speaker 2: slinging a canvas tote over her arm, and together we
Speaker 2: set off at a measured pace, trading quiet commentary about
Speaker 2: the color of banisters and the squeak of the aging floor.
Speaker 2: The first room, once again, the whale gallery seemed thoroughly
Speaker 2: as I remembered. We stopped outside each drawing outlines marking
Speaker 2: whale vertebrae signal flags, the view for the long sash window,
Speaker 2: the busy slipway. Gulls hunched on bobbing dinghies a trawler
Speaker 2: easing in with its cargo. We didn't compare notes. Instead,
Speaker 2: we moved methodically onward through a lopsided doorway. I noticed
Speaker 2: the incline felt more pronounced than usual, Perhaps just my nerves,
Speaker 2: but Lucy glanced back as if momentarily uncertain, then shrugged
Speaker 2: and darted ahead. Next gallery, another room, another window, this
Speaker 2: time the rooftops in soft focus, a glistening antenna picking
Speaker 2: up late morning sun. I reached into my pocket and
Speaker 2: produced a stub of chalk, making a bright mark on
Speaker 2: the door frame as we passed. Lucy, catching sight of it,
Speaker 2: looked puzzled. You're marking breadcrumbs. It's something archivists do when
Speaker 2: the map doesn't match the stacks, I smiled, just testing
Speaker 2: a theory. We navigated onward, stepping through a corridor lined
Speaker 2: with old sailors photographs. I unspoiled a length of string
Speaker 2: at the entrance to the next room, tying it loosely
Speaker 2: around the banister. When we exited out the far end,
Speaker 2: the string was gone. Lucy noticed, but didn't seem surprised.
Speaker 2: Things wander, she said, enigmatic. We once lost an entire
Speaker 2: bench for a week, found it back in the kitchen.
Speaker 2: Right as rain. Does this happen everywhere? I asked, trying
Speaker 2: for nonchalance as I checked my compass, adjusting as surreptitiously
Speaker 2: as I could. Lucy grinned, only here far as I know.
Speaker 2: Maybe the place gets bored if you don't pay attention.
Speaker 2: Midway through the planned circuit, we stopped to sketch. The
Speaker 2: room layoud, working quietly side by side. Glancing at my paper,
Speaker 2: Lucy commented, you've got the boats lined up by the window,
Speaker 2: not under the clock. She slid her own sketch over.
Speaker 2: Her model's ships were arrayed differently, the sequence of rooms
Speaker 2: slightly altered, her stairwell facing east while mine faced west.
Speaker 2: It's remarkable, I said, as intrigued as I was unsettled.
Speaker 2: Do you ever find you your map matching someone else's exactly? Never?
Speaker 2: Even the fire inspectors maps don't match ours, and those
Speaker 2: have to be updated every other year. Does that cause problems?
Speaker 2: Lucy shrugged. When there's a drill, we just tell every
Speaker 2: one follow the green arrows and stick together. It works
Speaker 2: well enough. The school visits are always fine. She looked
Speaker 2: up at the ceiling, brow puckered. I suppose nobody's ever
Speaker 2: minded it keeps things fresh. Does your old library ever
Speaker 2: change like that? The shelves moved sometimes, but only according
Speaker 2: to a plan, I said, Though people's memories of where
Speaker 2: a book was that's a different story. Maybe that's a
Speaker 2: kind of map shifting, too, I asked, Can we try something.
Speaker 2: I'll draw the route we've taken so far, and you'll
Speaker 2: do the same. Then in the next room we talk
Speaker 2: through what we remember. She agreed, cheerfully, marking out her
Speaker 2: sketches again. After two more rooms, a small gallery with
Speaker 2: a river pilot uniform, and the next a snug alcove
Speaker 2: lined with ship's bells, I compared our outlines my version
Speaker 2: intraway whale gallery, sea view model boats north facing window,
Speaker 2: pilot uniforms looked out to moss in a narrow lane,
Speaker 2: Bell's gallery windowless, lucy entryway model ship's east window half
Speaker 2: stare up to the whale gallery, then pilot uniforms right
Speaker 2: Bell's alcove. After we puzzled over the sketches, neither able
Speaker 2: to recall climbing a stair where the other insisted there
Speaker 2: was one. Everything seemed plausible, nothing fit in a shared geometry.
Speaker 2: Would you call this a maze, I asked, or more
Speaker 2: like a fun house. Lucy gave it real thought. I
Speaker 2: think it's more like a friend that's always telling you
Speaker 2: a story. Sometimes it leaves out bits, sometimes it adds
Speaker 2: new ones. You just have to go along. I took
Speaker 2: a long look at the walls, tracing the cornices with
Speaker 2: my finger. There was nothing overtly deceptive, just the comfortable
Speaker 2: muddle of a building old enough to have a mind
Speaker 2: of its own, and perhaps to know it well. I sighed,
Speaker 2: map making is clearly a two person job here. If
Speaker 2: it's a job at all, thank you for trying with me.
Speaker 2: She grinned and tucked the sketches into her tote. Any time, Marjorie,
Speaker 2: if you ever work it out, let me know. But
Speaker 2: I was coming to suspect that the point was not
Speaker 2: to work it out, not in the sense of pinning
Speaker 2: down a single reality. At home that evening, I reviewed
Speaker 2: our maps, considering whether the contradictions could be chalked up
Speaker 2: to mere perception, in attentiveness, even the variances of memory,
Speaker 2: perhaps agreeing too easily with what we thought we'd seen.
Speaker 2: But that failed to account for the deliberate markers that vanished,
Speaker 2: the physical cues that shifted beneath our notice. This was
Speaker 2: now beyond the fun house of perception. The museum seemed
Speaker 2: to lean into the expectations and routines of its visitors,
Speaker 2: flexing just enough to match them, bending plausibility, but never
Speaker 2: outright breaking it. I began to consider the possibility that
Speaker 2: the space was actively, albeit gently, co authoring each itinerary,
Speaker 2: not through mechanical trickery, but with some more elusive kind
Speaker 2: of logic. I needed history, something rooted beyond the day
Speaker 2: to day. The next morning, I set out across the
Speaker 2: winding lanes to the modest brick building where the town
Speaker 2: archives were kept. The clerk, a patient man with delicate spectacles,
Speaker 2: remembered me from a prior inquiry about Victorian's storm records
Speaker 2: floor plans. He mused, retrieving a battered catalog, I think
Speaker 2: we've got a dozen. The museum es been reinvented more
Speaker 2: times than I've had birthdays. He produced a series of
Speaker 2: rolled blueprints, each a different eras proposal for the building.
Speaker 2: The first, dated eighteen eighty nine, showed a U shaped structure,
Speaker 2: complete with stables to the rear and a side entrance
Speaker 2: from the alley. The next was nineteen forty six, now
Speaker 2: a rectangle with only three rooms and the stables gone.
Speaker 2: A nineteen seventy three plan, hand edited in margin notes,
Speaker 2: added a museum shop, two fire exits, and a wing
Speaker 2: labeled temporary exhibits. Not a single drawing matched its predecessor,
Speaker 2: None matched current reality. Council never could agree where to
Speaker 2: put the drains, the archivist murmured, shuffling the papers. Every
Speaker 2: set of plans, something else gets added or cut away
Speaker 2: or blocked up again. I photocopied the blueprints, determined to
Speaker 2: cross reference them with my notes and sketches. Next, I
Speaker 2: sifted through old news clippings on local restoration efforts, museum
Speaker 2: renovations another year endless repairs read one irreconcilable Florpland's delay
Speaker 2: building works reported another listing cost overruns and unforeseen discoveries.
Speaker 2: I found a turn of the century editorial, the museum
Speaker 2: eccentric as its nautical collection invites vagabonds and school children
Speaker 2: to be forever lost, even while inside it was not
Speaker 2: a source of alarm. Even in reportage, the nonconformity of
Speaker 2: the building was handled like a familiar quirk, a strange
Speaker 2: but benign member of the town's social fabric. Later I
Speaker 2: sought out missus Edra, the town's oldest resident, who lived
Speaker 2: in a weathered cottage above the cliffs, Her mind sharp
Speaker 2: as attack. If you asked about days long past the museum,
Speaker 2: she repeated, pouring tea with a trembling hand. I went
Speaker 2: there just after the war, must have been twelve or thirteen.
Speaker 2: My mother told me not to worry if I got
Speaker 2: turned about. They said it was all the extensions and
Speaker 2: back stairs. My grandfather, now, he came out at the
Speaker 2: harbor when he'd gone in from the upper lane. He
Speaker 2: swore the museum had doors that only opened when you
Speaker 2: needed them, and sometimes the upper rooms would flood with
Speaker 2: sunlight on days when the town itself was under cloud.
Speaker 2: She sipped her tea, chuckling softly. Places get used to
Speaker 2: being retold, Marjorie. Buildings don't stay the same, not on
Speaker 2: the inside. As I left, she pressed a handful of
Speaker 2: lemon drops into my palm and whispered, some things just
Speaker 2: like to be a bit sideways. I think that phrase
Speaker 2: stuck with me, the idea of a place accommodating itself
Speaker 2: to its retelling, as if geography were a kind of
Speaker 2: live performance. Back at the museum, I made an appointment
Speaker 2: to speak with Miss Appledore, who always projected effortless camaraderie
Speaker 2: even when fielding the most uninspired of questions. I waited
Speaker 2: in her small office, walls lined in water colors and
Speaker 2: a dozen mismatched chairs. She entered with a sheaf of
Speaker 2: newsletters in one hand and a mug in the other.
Speaker 2: I hear you and Lucy have designs on appending the
Speaker 2: museum's maps, she said, slyly amused. I explained carefully my
Speaker 2: experiments comparing maps, marking rooms, tracking the slippage between memory
Speaker 2: and reality. She listened, bright eyed, then, after a pause,
Speaker 2: said it's just as well to let the building do
Speaker 2: what it needs to. Marjorie. We never did get the
Speaker 2: fire inspector to agree on an exit diagram. He left,
Speaker 2: grumbling that our plans made him seasick. She gestured to
Speaker 2: the window. We've patched this place for years, added a
Speaker 2: room here, knocked through another there. I think the museum
Speaker 2: just likes to stay flexible. Each year, the stories get retold,
Speaker 2: and so does the building. We've decided not to mind
Speaker 2: too much. The visitors come and find their way. The
Speaker 2: children especially, they love it. Her tone was gentler than teasing,
Speaker 2: But I saw that the limits of sense here had
Speaker 2: been gracefully accepted, even celebrated. Somehow, the building's mutability, its
Speaker 2: refusal to settle into a single, definitive form, had become
Speaker 2: part of its allure. That night, I sat at my table,
Speaker 2: surrounded by archives. There was an undeniable thread across decades.
Speaker 2: Every account, whether municipal, journalistic, or personal, described the museum
Speaker 2: as a space resistant to singular description, a place animated
Speaker 2: not by a trickster's malevolence, but by a kind of
Speaker 2: patient pluralism, always different, yet always plausible for every visitor.
Speaker 2: Another pattern began to shimmer through the details. It was
Speaker 2: not that people were deceived. Rather, everyone experienced a version
Speaker 2: fit for them, a geography as intimate and mutable as
Speaker 2: a favorite story, retold and reimagined at each retelling. Not
Speaker 2: one of these maps, mine Lucy's to Mars's. The surveyors
Speaker 2: could be mapped over another, but taken together, they described
Speaker 2: a kind of mosaic possibility layered upon possibility, each sequence
Speaker 2: a record not only of place but of its perceiver.
Speaker 2: I decided I needed more evidence, not to confirm, but
Speaker 2: to explore how deep this sideways quality ran. And whether
Speaker 2: it lived in the memories as much as the walls.
Speaker 2: The following week, I invited a handful of regulars to
Speaker 2: the museum lounge for tea in sketching. Lucy brought time
Speaker 2: laps video on her phone of her own roots through
Speaker 2: the galleries, never the same sequence twice. Jorge Steadfast, with
Speaker 2: a mug of weak coffee, arrived with a sheaf of
Speaker 2: quick ballprint floor plans from the last several months. Angela,
Speaker 2: the bearet firmly in place, produced a water colored layout
Speaker 2: she painted for a festival leaflet, a charming image of
Speaker 2: the museum. As a gentle maze, I asked each to
Speaker 2: draw the interior from memory, labeling galleries, stairways, window views.
Speaker 2: Lucy's sketch put the model ships upstairs by the east window.
Speaker 2: Johia's shaded gallery sat at garden level, opening onto the alley.
Speaker 2: Angela's kitchen emerged as the building's warm center, Flanked by
Speaker 2: histories on three sides. We compared diagrams. None matched in
Speaker 2: any meaningful way, not merely in details, but in the
Speaker 2: very roots between rooms, the relative placement of stairs and windows,
Speaker 2: even the vistas beyond the glass. Still, each person described
Speaker 2: their tour in confident strokes, certain they'd captured the truth
Speaker 2: of their daily rounds. Looks like we all work in
Speaker 2: different buildings, Jorgey joked, spreading the diagram's side by side,
Speaker 2: I asked, could you too try tracing each other's drawings,
Speaker 2: see if you can match up your steps. Jorgey and
Speaker 2: Angelus stood, each gripping the other's map, narrating their progress
Speaker 2: with theatrical drama. Within moments, they doubled back, each becoming confused.
Speaker 2: The route that should have led them to the lighthouse
Speaker 2: mural instead emptied into broom cupboards, or found them outside altogether.
Speaker 2: After a few minutes, Jorgey threw up his hands. It's
Speaker 2: a good thing nobody's running any races in here. Their
Speaker 2: laughter was light, genuine, the contradiction a well worn pleasure,
Speaker 2: not a source of worry. Angela mused, I suppose it's
Speaker 2: fitting the sea, the tides. You never step in the
Speaker 2: same spot twice, do you, The museums always going try
Speaker 2: a new route. You might find something you've missed. I
Speaker 2: found myself nodding. Maybe it remembers us as we remember it.
Speaker 2: Lucy's head snapped up at that. The older guides say
Speaker 2: something like that. She said, when you work here long enough,
Speaker 2: you stop expecting the rooms to sit still, you stop
Speaker 2: needing them too. It keeps the place feeling alive. That
Speaker 2: image stuck with me. Was this just a trick of memory.
Speaker 2: Were we adapting so well to the unpredictable that we
Speaker 2: each carved our own plausible path, or with something deeper
Speaker 2: in play, a mutual adaptation, the building and the visitor
Speaker 2: collaborating to create reality as needed. I recruited to Mars
Speaker 2: again for a final, more rigorous experiment. We brought compasses, notepads,
Speaker 2: even a pedometer. The plan begin at the entrance, synchronizing
Speaker 2: our watches side by side, marking every turn, every gallery entered,
Speaker 2: every window view at each room, We paused to describe
Speaker 2: what we saw, each capturing the details without prompting or
Speaker 2: correction from the other. Again, the discrepancies crept in what
Speaker 2: I described as a quick loop through the model ship's
Speaker 2: gallery and up a six step stair to Mars claimed
Speaker 2: as a right wood turn through the harpoon display and
Speaker 2: onto a ramp. Step counts matched, but the feel and
Speaker 2: features of the rooms did not. Our compass bearings disagreed slightly,
Speaker 2: but often on the orientation of the stairs. Our window views,
Speaker 2: though both plausible, described worlds that couldn't coexist. There was
Speaker 2: no irritation, only a sense that the place was contriving
Speaker 2: gently to remain just out of our grasp. Later, reviewing
Speaker 2: our notes, we laughed helpless at the irreconcilable account. Maybe
Speaker 2: Tamars said, it's not about getting it right, is it.
Speaker 2: Maybe the buildings just letting us find what we hoped
Speaker 2: to find. That night, it dawned on me just how
Speaker 2: elaborate this sideway's logic was. Everyone who entered had a
Speaker 2: museum that fit them, their memories, expectations, and perhaps their moods.
Speaker 2: No map, however carefully made, was ever quite transferable. The
Speaker 2: building didn't resist inquiry so much as absorb it, yielding
Speaker 2: a version of itself most plausible for each visitor, allowing
Speaker 2: them to return with stories no less real than the
Speaker 2: objects in the cases. Yet this wasn't chaos or confusion,
Speaker 2: not instability or disorder. It was persistent, comprehensive, and most
Speaker 2: of all, untroubled by its contradictions. There were rules, but
Speaker 2: perhaps they were visitors specific written on the fly. The building,
Speaker 2: like a patient host, adapted its geography. For the comfort, curiosity,
Speaker 2: and sense of adventure of its guests. The more I compare,
Speaker 2: the clearer it seemed that none of the phenomena could
Speaker 2: be fixed in objective or collective memory. Even those determined
Speaker 2: to document to be rigorous, professional precise would come away
Speaker 2: with their own intact version of the museum, each one
Speaker 2: internally consistent, completely incompatible with the next. In a final
Speaker 2: attempt to draw the curiosity out to its core, I
Speaker 2: returned to Jorgey, who sat by the kitchen with a
Speaker 2: biscuit and a local newspaper. Jorgey, I said, I keep
Speaker 2: trying to explain the museum to myself. Are there hidden
Speaker 2: corridors we miss? Or did some inspired architect build it
Speaker 2: as a riddle? He chuckled, shaking his head. You can
Speaker 2: blame the architects if you want, though I think they'd
Speaker 2: argue back from their grave.
Speaker 1: No.
Speaker 2: I think it's simpler than that. The building remembers you
Speaker 2: as you remember it. Maybe sometimes it remembers a bit better.
Speaker 2: His eyes crinkled. Everyone escort their own version, but none
Speaker 2: of us is wrong, at least least not for us.
Speaker 2: I paused, considering whether memory the shifting unreliable, but entirely convincing.
Speaker 2: Sought that archives struggle to preserve could be this powerful.
Speaker 2: Do you think it's something in our expectations, our need
Speaker 2: for order, making the museum match us, I asked. He nodded.
Speaker 2: That's a good enough answer. Buildings like this they collect stories,
Speaker 2: don't they. Maybe they like to fit themselves around those
Speaker 2: who listen best. Afterward, I picked up my own notes, sketches,
Speaker 2: the mismatched maps, the legacy of days spent pacing, questioning, recording.
Speaker 2: I suddenly saw a new logic emerging, not in fixed
Speaker 2: corridors or invariant plans, but in the overlap, the palimpsest
Speaker 2: of a thousand narratives. What if I thought the very
Speaker 2: work of remembering was not one sided? What if this
Speaker 2: place emerged day after day from the mutual act of observation,
Speaker 2: each mind part of the architecture, every story, leaving a
Speaker 2: subtle mind. The building then would be a map not
Speaker 2: only of beams and bricks, but of the human urge
Speaker 2: to make sense, to order, to remember, to forgive and
Speaker 2: forget inconsistencies in favor of delight. I tested this idea,
Speaker 2: returning with Lucy to repeat one last experiment. She would
Speaker 2: try to expect in advance a certain sequence whale gallery
Speaker 2: to signal flags to bells. I, independent of her, would
Speaker 2: expect a parallel sequence lighthouse mural to river pilot to
Speaker 2: whale gallery. We walked together, concentrating, describing each new gallery
Speaker 2: as it appeared, sometimes landing in agreement, sometimes diverging without stress.
Speaker 2: The museum seemed to offer up the rooms we each
Speaker 2: half expected, half invented, giving us enough overlap to share
Speaker 2: the story, enough mystery to keep us guessing. It was
Speaker 2: no longer about catching the place out or exposing a trick.
Speaker 2: It was about understanding that geography might always be, in
Speaker 2: some way a conversation, a negotiation between what is there
Speaker 2: and what is brought, that the solid ground beneath our
Speaker 2: feet is sometimes more provisional than permanent. My days at
Speaker 2: the Sideways Museum became gentler after that. I walked it
Speaker 2: less as a cartographer, more as a participant in a
Speaker 2: curious improvisation, the building's memory weaving with my own. The
Speaker 2: layered contradictions are kind of welcome, not a barrier. One afternoon,
Speaker 2: Miss Appledore beckoned me into her office, stack upon stack
Speaker 2: of architectural proposals lay arrayed on her desk, each marked
Speaker 2: in different colored pencil. We never built a one of
Speaker 2: them exactly as planned, she confided, spreading the drawings like
Speaker 2: playing cards. It seems the building always found its own way.
Speaker 2: May be it like the uncertainty, the give and take.
Speaker 2: The exhibits change, the windows swap their views. People bring
Speaker 2: what they need. Maybe it's best for the building to
Speaker 2: do what it does adapt. She slid a plan toward me,
Speaker 2: an outlandish sketch from the nineteen sixties, windowless, with staircases
Speaker 2: that doubled back over themselves, leading nowhere. This was my
Speaker 2: grandfather's contribution. They never built it, but he liked to
Speaker 2: imagine what it might have been. Sometimes, she smiled. I
Speaker 2: still see echoes of his impossible stairs when I come
Speaker 2: in early before the others. It felt suddenly as if
Speaker 2: the museum's heart had always been this, a living testament
Speaker 2: to the provisional, shared and repeatedly recreated nature of place,
Speaker 2: a space that, rather than hiding from contradiction, found its
Speaker 2: life in embracing it. I joined Lucy for a last
Speaker 2: sketching session, the two of us drawing our museum side
Speaker 2: by side. The diagrams were unlike as ever stairs facing
Speaker 2: opposite ways, galleries swapped windows showing impossible scenes, yet both
Speaker 2: felt utterly right in my hands. Where mine resolved along
Speaker 2: the edges of the sea has stretched up and around
Speaker 2: the hill, the museums overlaying each other, imperfect, beautiful in
Speaker 2: their persistent, improbable friendship. I realized I no longer wanted
Speaker 2: a map that could explain everything. The delight, the wonder
Speaker 2: lay in the co creation, in the quiet but genuine
Speaker 2: truth that the museum, like any place remembered and loved,
Speaker 2: is a mosaic of experience, more alive for refusing to
Speaker 2: condense itself to a single story. Leaving the museum that day,
Speaker 2: I paused in the central lobby behind me conversations overlapped,
Speaker 2: visitors swapping stories, guides waving windows admitting fractured ribbons of light.
Speaker 2: I traced one last circuit through the building, not looking
Speaker 2: for error, but noticing instead how each gallery shimmered with
Speaker 2: the presence of all who passed, each footsteps stitched into
Speaker 2: the mutable, ever brightening fabric of the place. I emerged
Speaker 2: at a door that used to be at the side,
Speaker 2: but now faced the lane head on the building's latest kindness.
Speaker 2: I walked home lighter, and in that new openness I
Speaker 2: caught a glimpse that seemed to come from the corner
Speaker 2: of my mind as much as from the hill above,
Speaker 2: the sense that reality, in its steady patients, sometimes allows
Speaker 2: us to write our own versions alongside itself. The Sideways
Speaker 2: Museum was not a puzzle to solve, I thought, but
Speaker 2: an invitation not to one map, but to a flourishing
Speaker 2: of possibilities sheltered under one roof, each one truer for
Speaker 2: having been quietly, delightedly refuted by another. On my final
Speaker 2: visit before the summer, I took the long path through
Speaker 2: the museum, pausing at every window, appreciating the way the
Speaker 2: shifting light seemed to polish each contradiction. I stopped in
Speaker 2: the room that on my first day had looked out
Speaker 2: over the harbor, but now revealed a garden staircase climbing
Speaker 2: up into a cloud of brambles, as if the building
Speaker 2: had turned once more to meet whoever needed it there.
Speaker 2: I wondered how many unseen versions drifted just beside this one,
Speaker 2: slight changes flickering past like oats in the afternoon sun.
Speaker 2: Would I ever really want it mapped? The answer felt
Speaker 2: as sure as the old floors beneath my feet. I
Speaker 2: wanted instead to keep returning, an explorer not of certainty,
Speaker 2: but of the wonderful, unending possibilities held by a place
Speaker 2: that remembers us as we remember it over and over again.
Speaker 2: And stepping out at last into the narrow lane, I
Speaker 2: looked back through the pane above the door and court,
Speaker 2: just for a second, a view of the whole town
Speaker 2: from an impossible height, rooftops crowding together under a bright
Speaker 2: and permeable sky, as if to remind me, perhaps the
Speaker 2: world is quietly more various than any of us can
Speaker 2: ever quite believe.
Speaker 1: And that is the end. Thank you for listening, and
Speaker 1: I will see you in the next one.