Speaker 1: Hollo I moalcan stories all the time. Glad you are here.
Speaker 1: Let's get into it.
Speaker 2: Some things in my delivery root are as fixed as sunrise,
Speaker 2: the hush of rue dew lies before the shutters roll up,
Speaker 2: the yeasty sigh from the bakery's back door, the creek
Speaker 2: my van makes at every red light. After twelve years
Speaker 2: carving slices through this city's old quarter, I trust my
Speaker 2: memory more than printed maps, but still keep one folded
Speaker 2: in the glove box, a limp coffee stained relic out
Speaker 2: of respect. Not need so much about my job is routine.
Speaker 2: Until the afternoon, I double delivered to the same shop
Speaker 2: on two streets, a half hour and a small universe apart.
Speaker 2: Papetrie Lecklerk first entered my life as a weekly stop,
Speaker 2: officially listed between Boulangerie Joffrein and a sun bleached apothecary,
Speaker 2: among doorways as familiar to me as my own knuckles.
Speaker 2: I remember the bell that greeted me an antique with
Speaker 2: a crisp, wavering chime, and the perfumed tumble of paper
Speaker 2: and lavender inside.
Speaker 1: M M. E.
Speaker 2: Lecklerk, herself short, quick eyed, a little stooped to her
Speaker 2: neck as if she listened more closely than she spoke.
Speaker 2: She wore a navy dress, white collar, reading glasses perched
Speaker 2: atop her cropped hair. She took the parcel rare ink
Speaker 2: from Marseilles, scanned the invoice with a soft mersy bay
Speaker 2: en always the ink for me, signed her looping signature,
Speaker 2: and tucked my carbon copy into the till. I left, smiling,
Speaker 2: feeling the world as it always was. Two stops later,
Speaker 2: after threading my way through a web work of twisty
Speaker 2: alleys and drab side streets, some so narrow the van's
Speaker 2: side mirror brushed pealing plaster, I reached Rue des Fontaine's,
Speaker 2: a good fifteen minute scramble away. I parked in a
Speaker 2: gap shaded by a vacant patisserie. The bells from Saint Agnes,
Speaker 2: a church out of sight but never out of ear shot.
Speaker 2: Struck four here. My g P S map jitted and stuttered,
Speaker 2: but my list was clear enough deliver to papetrie let clerk.
Speaker 2: Surely a mislabel. I thought, too much caffeine, too little sleep.
Speaker 2: May be an old record doubled by the office. Still
Speaker 2: I found it. Not only was the shop here the
Speaker 2: blue painted trim of its windows and door matched exactly same,
Speaker 2: sun faded patches, identical brass handle, even the hand lettered
Speaker 2: sign over the glass, papetrie let Clerk Fondy nineteen o one,
Speaker 2: inside a scatter of antique desks and stacked journals. Ribbon's
Speaker 2: peg to a wire rack behind the counter, rememy le
Speaker 2: clerk again, not a cousin, not a daughter, not a twin.
Speaker 2: Her glasses, her dry wit, smile, her navy dress. Ah,
Speaker 2: monsieur your prompt to day, she said, Her manner was
Speaker 2: exactly the same. I handed her a second parcel, the
Speaker 2: order number distinct, this time a box of parchment envelopes.
Speaker 2: She signed with the same calligraphic hand, clipped my receipt,
Speaker 2: and nothing gave me away as an intruder from elsewhere.
Speaker 2: It wasn't until I stepped back into the street, receipt fluttering,
Speaker 2: that my hands registered a faint tremble. The world around
Speaker 2: me was importantly comfortingly different. No bakery smell, no apothecary
Speaker 2: next door. Only the sweet tang of sawdust from the
Speaker 2: book binder's open window and the distant echo of water
Speaker 2: from one of Fontaine's namesake fountains in the little triangular square.
Speaker 2: I examined the two receipts as I walked both papetrie
Speaker 2: le Clerk, both signed but printed addresses unmistakably not the same.
Speaker 2: I risked a glance back through the window, half expecting
Speaker 2: trick mirrors or doubling walls. But no, it was only
Speaker 2: the gentle chaos of papers and pencils and m R
Speaker 2: me le Clerk rearranging her display of fountain pens. Precisely
Speaker 2: as before, the easy explanation twin shops run by sisters
Speaker 2: a franch wouldn't stand up to the details. The shops
Speaker 2: were too alike, so eerily were the women running them.
Speaker 2: I kept quiet. The day was busy, and the city,
Speaker 2: in its own distracted way, nudged me onward. But curiosity,
Speaker 2: once seated, is a burr. That evening, sitting in the
Speaker 2: battered van, the city winding down in streaks of neon
Speaker 2: and dusk, I kept running over the route in my head,
Speaker 2: chasing for anywhere logic had dropped the thread. The problem
Speaker 2: was not fear. It was that prickly insistent wonder, the
Speaker 2: kind that makes you check a locked door twice, not
Speaker 2: because you're afraid, but because something in the pattern asks
Speaker 2: for a closer look. I left it at that for
Speaker 2: the night, folding the receipts together, the addresses side by side,
Speaker 2: pressed flat under my dashboard map. My world is defined
Speaker 2: by this neighborhood, a maze of patched facades, alleys that
Speaker 2: bloom into court yards, staircases that climb one story and
Speaker 2: then decide they've had enough delivery drivers. Here are less postmen,
Speaker 2: more navigators through living quicksand the old city resists being drawn,
Speaker 2: and so we adapt. We trust rhyth not blueprints. I
Speaker 2: like the mess of it. There's Lucian, my route manager,
Speaker 2: king of practical jokes, who once replaced all our office
Speaker 2: labels with numbers from another arrendissement. Keeps you sharp jewels. Mauser,
Speaker 2: a friend and regular at the Cafe bin It, spends
Speaker 2: hours sketching the lanes at wild curving angles. He claims
Speaker 2: straight lines are a tourist myth In Zou and Julia,
Speaker 2: the couple from above, the antiquarian s past the afternoon's
Speaker 2: sunning on their wrought iron balcony. Giulia in long paisley
Speaker 2: dresses in Zoux with his battered pipe, serving memories with
Speaker 2: their espresso stories where the street downstairs once faced the river,
Speaker 2: or how a neighbour's window used to look that other way.
Speaker 2: I stepped through my days in a Ritualvankey's radio root
Speaker 2: clip board phone. Yes, I use GPS, but in the
Speaker 2: old Quarter it's a running joke. Maps stall recenterr then
Speaker 2: send you in loops, as if they too grow dizzy
Speaker 2: in these knotty streets. On a good day, you let
Speaker 2: memory guide you, keeping on just enough of a lookout
Speaker 2: for new scaffolds or rogue cyclists. It makes the world
Speaker 2: seem fluid, but only up to a point. The city,
Speaker 2: for all its quirks, always showed me one of each,
Speaker 2: one bakery, one cheese shop, one papetriye le clerk. That
Speaker 2: certainty was what unsettled me most Now, not danger, but
Speaker 2: a slip, something unique turned double. I replayed my route,
Speaker 2: checked my log for missteps. Each shop anchored by familiar landmarks,
Speaker 2: yet both perpetrie le clerks were pinned by their own neighbors.
Speaker 2: No easy confusion here. The next morning, with the city's
Speaker 2: air crisp and traffic still gentle, I lingered over coffee
Speaker 2: and studdied both receipts side by side, same script, but
Speaker 2: two addresses Rue dou Lies number thirty eight, Rue des
Speaker 2: Fontein's number forty one, one dated yesterday at three twelve,
Speaker 2: the other at three forty seven. For good measure, I
Speaker 2: called the number printed in that careful black italic papetrie
Speaker 2: le Clerk bonjour, m m E. Le Clerk greeted, bonjour, madame.
Speaker 2: Forgive me, But which location have I reached? She gave
Speaker 2: a small, amused hum, as if the question tickled her.
Speaker 2: Why I am always here? Monsieur? Do you have a
Speaker 2: delivery to day? I pressed, yesterday I visited Rue des Fontanes,
Speaker 2: but also Rue do Lies. Are you in both? There
Speaker 2: was a little pause, a clink. May be sorting the
Speaker 2: cash drawer. Our family has always been here, she said,
Speaker 2: not choosing then softer, you're very diligent. Did you want
Speaker 2: to check your receipt? That suggestion was both helpful and unhelpful,
Speaker 2: she seemed at once kindly and entirely deafenite. I left
Speaker 2: it there, not quite dismissed, but certainly no closer. Lucian
Speaker 2: in the warehouse office was more direct. Ah lek Clerk
Speaker 2: on Fontan's wish I'd known would have saved you a walk,
Speaker 2: But it's just the shop jewels, you know how the
Speaker 2: addresses a run together. He said it with the flourish
Speaker 2: of a man who'd long ago resigned himself to details,
Speaker 2: never quite making sense. I don't know what you mean
Speaker 2: about two. There's one, just you know there, He drew
Speaker 2: a circle in the air. That afternoon, stymied by all
Speaker 2: plausible explanations, I decided to get systematic. My pickups and
Speaker 2: drop offs would become a controlled experiment. Visit both perpetry
Speaker 2: leclerks in the same morning. Track each step, note timings,
Speaker 2: compare receipts, pin down whatever was being so slippery. If
Speaker 2: it was an elaborate error, I'd flush it out. The
Speaker 2: plan was simple, the execution less. So I set off
Speaker 2: for the Rue deu Liees shop at nine forty five.
Speaker 2: The alley, for once was empty except for a street
Speaker 2: musician unpacking an accordion at the far curb. The shop glowed,
Speaker 2: window lights glancing off pale shelves. M. M. E. Lecler
Speaker 2: greeted me, same blue dress, same gentle smile, tapping a
Speaker 2: glasses out of habit. I bought a notebook on impulse,
Speaker 2: curious if the register would say something odd, but the
Speaker 2: receipt was unremarkable. Rue do lies with today's date, my
Speaker 2: name spelled correctly. From there, I made my way to
Speaker 2: Rue des Fontan's. Map in hand and careful to avoid autopilot,
Speaker 2: I took the fastest possible route, looping past two closed
Speaker 2: storefronts and a florist. Flurred appear, where a display of
Speaker 2: lilacs in blue mason jars caught my attention. It looked familiar,
Speaker 2: the arrangement uncanny in its exactness. I was almost certain
Speaker 2: i'd pass that displayed just a few days before. But
Speaker 2: on rudesqu Capucins, which was half a kilometre from here,
Speaker 2: papetrie le Clerk Rue des Fontan's came into view just
Speaker 2: as a bell above struck ten. The shop was already open,
Speaker 2: light pouring from identical lace curtains, and inside the same
Speaker 2: arrangement of fountain, pens and stationery, only one shelf held
Speaker 2: a different jar of marbles. Mme le clerk again unchanged,
Speaker 2: smiled back so soon monsieur. This time she wore a
Speaker 2: patented scarf at her neck that the other had not,
Speaker 2: though she moved with the same gentle, almost habitual rhythm.
Speaker 2: A customer, an older man in a plum colored vest
Speaker 2: was browsing ink sets. I made small talk about the morning.
Speaker 2: He commented, I always come here for the blue ink,
Speaker 2: never anywhere else. How else would I get my letters written?
Speaker 2: His certainty had a kind of quiet pride, unshaken by possibility.
Speaker 2: On a whim, I deeateward to the isle with the
Speaker 2: old photographs clipped to twine above the cash register. The
Speaker 2: shop s changed over the years, None, I asked. M. M. E.
Speaker 2: Le Clerk nodded and lifted two photos for me, a
Speaker 2: Sepia print with a clock above the register, another in
Speaker 2: color with a new painting of a boat. Always a
Speaker 2: bit different, Always here, she offered. She seemed briefly to
Speaker 2: want to say more. Instead, she directed me to the
Speaker 2: pen display. Ten minutes later, receipts in hand and time
Speaker 2: still logically accounted for, I set out to connect the
Speaker 2: two le clerks by foot, following both instinct and digital maps.
Speaker 2: Each time the route elongated, side streets seemed to wind
Speaker 2: out of themselves, and what ought to have been a
Speaker 2: simple walk unfolded into a shifting, recursive loop. My phone
Speaker 2: re rooted me twice, first down an alley that ended
Speaker 2: in a locked gate, then along a market lane that
Speaker 2: split unexpectedly. I retraced my steps, consulting both map and memory,
Speaker 2: and arrived exasperated but not yet defeated, back where I started,
Speaker 2: but on the wrong shop front. Once again. I committed
Speaker 2: my observations to a note book, receipts from each shop
Speaker 2: stapled to adjacent pages, both bearing M. M. E. Le
Speaker 2: Clerk's signature. In familiar ink, I recorded the appearance and
Speaker 2: location of the florist two, marking when and where I
Speaker 2: had spotted the tell tale blue jars. That evening, I
Speaker 2: stopped at Cafe fay Binnett, where Mauser hunched over his
Speaker 2: battered sketch bud pencils splayed like pick up sticks, capturing
Speaker 2: the cafe facade from an angle that only made sense
Speaker 2: when seen inside his churning head. Have you noticed the
Speaker 2: stationery shop showing up twice? I asked my tone light,
Speaker 2: fishing for a wink, not a diagnosis. Mauser gave me
Speaker 2: one of his sideways glances. Lecklerk mi's wee. She's always
Speaker 2: there and never where I expect. I draw the same entrance,
Speaker 2: but sometimes it's across the park streets fold when you
Speaker 2: look the right way, or the wrong way. He smirked,
Speaker 2: not mocking, just bemused. Twilight shimmered along the street lamps.
Speaker 2: I felt not so much reassured as inducted into a
Speaker 2: club that didn't think the city's shifting was particularly urgent.
Speaker 2: The next day I was despatched to a cheese shop
Speaker 2: I remembered clear as Sunday lunch, tucked behind the old
Speaker 2: smithy off Russain Tan. I walked there quickly, only to
Speaker 2: discover the shop nested instead two blocks east, with the
Speaker 2: same cheerful goat painted on the sign board. The alley
Speaker 2: leading there was different, less cracked plaster a new mural
Speaker 2: were only last week I'd signed for a pungent rock
Speaker 2: for and yet turning a corner on the original street,
Speaker 2: the old chipped wall with faint graffiti remained its absence,
Speaker 2: a kind of presence. I began to suspect that neighborhoods,
Speaker 2: like some homesick octopus, could split their tentacles and re
Speaker 2: arrange them at night. But when I broached the subject
Speaker 2: with older customers, those who'd outlived half the pavement repairs
Speaker 2: in town, they shrugged it off. This street's always wandered.
Speaker 2: To morrow you'll find the shop has walked around the corner.
Speaker 2: You'll see, said one, spooning jam over a pastry. Truth
Speaker 2: delivered so matter of factly it would have sounded condescending
Speaker 2: were it not so gentle. I needed something concrete, a grid,
Speaker 2: old maps, hard lines. Back at Papetrie Lecklerk, I found
Speaker 2: in a storage cubby a curled, yellowed city map, thick
Speaker 2: with hand written notes. It bore little resemblance to my
Speaker 2: usual roots Alley's drawn, where to day only solid walls stand,
Speaker 2: shop fronts labeled with names lost to time. Comparing it
Speaker 2: to my current digital map, I found overlap in only
Speaker 2: the broadest strokes. The faces of the buildings remained, but
Speaker 2: the placement and orientation zigged where my foot or wheel
Speaker 2: would have zagged. M m Me Lecklerk, busy tallying ledgers,
Speaker 2: noticed me puzzling over the map. That's my grandfather s,
Speaker 2: she said. He walked every street twice, his words, not mine,
Speaker 2: to be sure no one's bakery had wandered off over night.
Speaker 2: I laughed, expecting a joke, but her face was entirely sincere. Later,
Speaker 2: Lucian called to rib me about being late on a
Speaker 2: pick up. Draw a map jewels, he teased, Then burn
Speaker 2: it to morrow. That's what I always say. I asked
Speaker 2: if street layouts used to be more stable, he shrugged.
Speaker 2: Only stable is the instability you get one set of
Speaker 2: houses to day another when it rains. Don't let it
Speaker 2: get to you. Just keep walking till something familiar spits
Speaker 2: you out. It was exactly what I didn't want to hear,
Speaker 2: a non explanation, adopting the shape of wisdom. In the
Speaker 2: following days, Unable to keep the patterns from gnawing, I
Speaker 2: pressed further, asking customers whether shops had always been here.
Speaker 2: Some asserted their steadiness, others, especially shop staff, gave gentle
Speaker 2: bemused deflections. Once over a mid morning espresso, in Zo
Speaker 2: and Julia joined me and Mouser at a sidewalk table.
Speaker 2: You want the city to behave jewels, in Zeu teased,
Speaker 2: Go move to the sixteenth and walk your rectangle every day.
Speaker 2: Here we measure by memories. Streets take what shape they
Speaker 2: need to. Julia murmured about old memories slipping corners and
Speaker 2: recollected wandering as a child through a market that ended
Speaker 2: in a stairwell, then the next week opened into a
Speaker 2: rose garden. These stories delivered over the clink of glasses
Speaker 2: and the whir of distant traffic added depth instead of clarity.
Speaker 2: I paged through municipal archives, tracking historic complaints filed with
Speaker 2: the city, lost bakeries, phantom squares, disputes about whose home
Speaker 2: fronted witch Alley. An entire sheaf of correspondence from nineteen
Speaker 2: thirty seven detailed one Madame Forat's frostration at neighbor's borrowing
Speaker 2: her front steps simply by virtue of a shifting fence
Speaker 2: at dawn. A papetriy le clerk I found tucked in
Speaker 2: the shadow beneath a display case an old, crumbling pamphlet
Speaker 2: titled Paths for the Lost The Monk's Procession. The language
Speaker 2: was ornate and to my mind, excessively poetic, urging the
Speaker 2: reader to make each wandering a meditation on newness, and
Speaker 2: referencing something called seeker's misdirection, supposedly designed to refresh the soul.
Speaker 2: By soft confusion locals I showed it to just smirked
Speaker 2: Enzeu said the monks had nothing to do with the
Speaker 2: city's own mind. More solid evidence came from a building
Speaker 2: inspector I cornered while he chalked measurements into the chipped
Speaker 2: footpath on rue Vert. Do you know why the plan
Speaker 2: says there should be eight doors here and the survey
Speaker 2: finds only seven? He grumbled, Every March we do an
Speaker 2: annual remap never matches, comes with the territory dry as
Speaker 2: dust but factual, And I made note. My own sense
Speaker 2: of space and certainty began to erode, or perhaps to adapt,
Speaker 2: Instead of seeking a single, locked solution. I caught myself asking,
Speaker 2: are these duplications and migrations not errors or misrememberings, but
Speaker 2: woven parts of the neighborhood. Did the shops know? Did
Speaker 2: the people were memories as malleable as paving stones? Here?
Speaker 2: Knew every day, even within the same routine. The festival
Speaker 2: came at week's end, a yearly riot of bunting lanterns
Speaker 2: and flower tossing crowds rimmed around every sticking out window
Speaker 2: and stoop. By then my curiosity had matured from quiet
Speaker 2: observational interest to kind of determined, even playful experimentalism. If
Speaker 2: the duplicating shops and shifting lanes were real, maybe the festival,
Speaker 2: with its jostling routines and roots, would reveal the gears
Speaker 2: inside the magic. I resolved to walk from papetrie Le
Speaker 2: Clerk Rude do Lies to papetrie Le Clerk Rue des Fontins,
Speaker 2: cutting every possible corner, keeping to main roads where crowds thinned,
Speaker 2: then through side alleys when noise thickened. Bouquets of children
Speaker 2: clattered past me in all directions with carnival flags, and
Speaker 2: a trio of bakers wheeled a rack of brioches down
Speaker 2: the gleaming flagstone. I checked my phone, set a timer,
Speaker 2: and started at the lie's location, smiling at Mme le
Speaker 2: Clerk's cheery bond courage. All roots plotted. I moved quickly,
Speaker 2: expecting sights to unfold, just as on ordinary days. But
Speaker 2: every alley I tried, every short cut so logical in theory,
Speaker 2: led invariably not to Rue des Fontines, but back to
Speaker 2: Rue do Lies. Sometimes it happened covertly, a square with
Speaker 2: a different fountain and Ali split in two. A cafe
Speaker 2: were just moments before there d been a locksmith's, now
Speaker 2: serving coffee to the same gray mustached man I'd waved
Speaker 2: to twenty minutes earlier. After four looping attempts and a
Speaker 2: growing sense of dejavou, laced with wonder, I re emerged
Speaker 2: on to rue Do lies winded. It was as though
Speaker 2: no matter the approach, each passage folded me back into
Speaker 2: my own starting point. The city's laughter, punctuated by a
Speaker 2: drowsy accordion and the shouts of children, was gentle, nothing sinister,
Speaker 2: just absurd. You can't get there from here unless you
Speaker 2: go round to morrow. A woman called from her balcony,
Speaker 2: her arms thick with carnival bunting, teasing and utterly at ease.
Speaker 2: Along the curb. Lucian spotted me and clapped me on
Speaker 2: the shoulder. Seeing my confusion jewels, he said, don't think
Speaker 2: on it too hard, you'll miss the fun. Let the
Speaker 2: city have its games. For a moment, I felt a
Speaker 2: relief in surrendering to it. I looked at the crowd, neighbors, friends, strangers,
Speaker 2: all swirling over the ground like river water, everyone making
Speaker 2: their own paths that stitched and unstitched behind them. In
Speaker 2: that moment, a hard edge of my old logic dropped away.
Speaker 2: For so long, I'd approached the city as a puzzle
Speaker 2: to be solved, believing persistence and careful mapping would inevitably
Speaker 2: complete the picture. I saw suddenly, with dizzy clarity, that
Speaker 2: my own careful watching had boundaries physical, yes, but also
Speaker 2: shaped by what the place itself allowed to be known.
Speaker 2: It wasn't simply that things were misplaced or doubled. The
Speaker 2: ordinary act of getting there refused its own normal logic.
Speaker 2: The city insisted on other terms, older or deeper, or
Speaker 2: simply inscrutable. Later, with the festival dissolving into slow, drifting lanterns,
Speaker 2: I sat on the church steps, my receipts and amateur
Speaker 2: maps scattered in my lap. Thought of the way m
Speaker 2: m e le Clerk, both of her, each of her
Speaker 2: always seemed at home, unmoved by duplications, as if her
Speaker 2: role was not to explain, but to persist gently. Untroubled.
Speaker 2: I suspected that careful observation, the hunger to pin everything down,
Speaker 2: would not solve but fray the mystery further. Maybe the
Speaker 2: point was not to catch the city at anything, but
Speaker 2: to let its own shifting logic teach me how to
Speaker 2: move through it Differently. As the dusk folded itself between
Speaker 2: street lamps and narrow archways, I felt fascinated, not defeated.
Speaker 2: I wanted to see how much stranger the city might
Speaker 2: become if, instead of chasing I tried to walk with
Speaker 2: it wherever its lines led. The slow sweep of lantern's
Speaker 2: cast flickering gold on to the receipts curled in my lap,
Speaker 2: I watched their light recal and glide, wondering if the
Speaker 2: city's mysteries, like lamplight, lengthened the closer you looked. My hands,
Speaker 2: in stained from inventory and note taking, rested atop a
Speaker 2: dogg eared notebook that now held three weeks of contradictions.
Speaker 2: I resisted the urge to mark yet another here be
Speaker 2: dragons on the map. Instead, I pressed palms against knees,
Speaker 2: letting the night's festival noise ebb into the distance, a
Speaker 2: small liberation from the desire to solve, catalog or outpace
Speaker 2: the city's misdirections. The next morning, the city breathed out rain,
Speaker 2: drizzled roof tops, missed veiling the bell tower, the scent
Speaker 2: of wet limestone mixing with exhaust I did not begin
Speaker 2: with perpetry leclerk tempting, but I recognized the trap of
Speaker 2: ritual would produce nothing but another variation of the same enigma. Instead,
Speaker 2: I started with coffee at cafe binnet. Mouse lounged with
Speaker 2: an umbrella across his lap, sketch pad open, four cups
Speaker 2: crowding his table. He tapped the pad when I sat
Speaker 2: across from him, came looking for straight lines or another circle,
Speaker 2: he teased. He was younger than me by a decade,
Speaker 2: but age seldom counted here. The city had a way
Speaker 2: of equalizing people, making adults play and children wise. I hesitated,
Speaker 2: then pulled my note book free. I've been trying to
Speaker 2: pin the city, I admitted, But the more I plot,
Speaker 2: the more it escapes your sketches. Ever repeat, mouse a
Speaker 2: grinned flipped through pages the same block, three different views,
Speaker 2: three different alignments, one with alley missing, one over and
Speaker 2: with potted palms, another with a church bell cropping in
Speaker 2: at an impossible angle. Which one is real, you think?
Speaker 2: He asked, Maybe all of them? I said, I'm sure
Speaker 2: if I was conceding or finally catching up. He drew
Speaker 2: a merbious band, a loop with one surface, one edge,
Speaker 2: never ending, a surface you can only fully see if
Speaker 2: you surrender to its twist. You can't see all of
Speaker 2: anything at once, he explained softly. But walk around and
Speaker 2: you'll come back somewhere near by somewhere new a city
Speaker 2: as a Merbia strip. I'm mew now a neighborhood as
Speaker 2: its own joke, he replied, But he patted my note
Speaker 2: book approvingly. Anyway, My delivery logs had grown thick, with
Speaker 2: more than just quirks about shop fronts or blue ink.
Speaker 2: I charted every pathway, every doubled business, every peculiar customer
Speaker 2: tale I could tease out. For every pattern I traced,
Speaker 2: a counter example emerged Giulia, who swore the stairs by
Speaker 2: her flower boxes used to descend twice as far Enzoux,
Speaker 2: whose memories shifted depending on the direction of sunlight. That
Speaker 2: one cranky baker who denied the existence of any other
Speaker 2: Rue des Fontin's even as he sold by, gets on both.
Speaker 2: As the morning wore through, I found myself making not
Speaker 2: a map but a collage. The city's shape was all slices, memory,
Speaker 2: rumor geometry, and the kind of ordinary magic that keeps
Speaker 2: the people content. My photos on the phone disagreed with
Speaker 2: my hands, sketches, GPS tracks folded over themselves, time stamped
Speaker 2: a minute ahead or behind depending on which direction I walked.
Speaker 2: I gave up a lining them. The contradiction was part
Speaker 2: of the pattern, a new wrinkle appeared in the form
Speaker 2: of my next pick up slip. I was to collect
Speaker 2: a parcel at the university, delivered to the mathematics department.
Speaker 2: The ride there was the only time the city granted
Speaker 2: a straight corridor, a tramline impervious to tricks, grumbling steadily
Speaker 2: from outskirts to the tangled heart. At the university steps,
Speaker 2: a trio of mathematicians stood huddled against the drizzle, arguing
Speaker 2: quietly over a doggyed sheaf of diagrams. When I presented
Speaker 2: my delivery, one of them, doctor Badawi, a woman with sharp,
Speaker 2: thoughtful eyes and an accentless French paused to ask if
Speaker 2: I knew the old quarter well well enough to know
Speaker 2: I don't know it at all, I said, She smiled.
Speaker 2: We've been studying your city s elastic alleys, as we
Speaker 2: call them. You see, topology sometimes appears in urban forms,
Speaker 2: most famously in land allocation. But here it is. How
Speaker 2: would I describe? She trailed off, Drawing a twisted ribbon
Speaker 2: on the back of an envelope. Beside it, she outlined
Speaker 2: what looked like city blocks, their corners joined in unexpected ways.
Speaker 2: It's like you can walk out the bookstore's back door,
Speaker 2: turn right three times and emerge on the left of
Speaker 2: a florist two streets away. But then try the same
Speaker 2: tomorrow and find yourself facing a bakery instead, she said,
Speaker 2: glancing at me sidelong I nodded eager. This was the
Speaker 2: clearest external confirmation I'd yet received. So you think it's
Speaker 2: a real physical biaxial fold or a perception trick? She hesitated,
Speaker 2: as if the boundary meant less. Here a non orientable
Speaker 2: space like Amrbius strip, or better, like a Kline bottle.
Speaker 2: If you could live inside one, the quarter might be
Speaker 2: organized that whey, always connected to itself, impossible to map flat, except,
Speaker 2: of course, there will be errors memory time, whether human error.
Speaker 2: But your shops, your cafe, they may all exist as versions,
Speaker 2: each reel from its own angle. Have you noticed the
Speaker 2: time's slips? I thought of the receipts from the papetrie,
Speaker 2: the clocks always slightly off from shop to shop, the
Speaker 2: light bending in at unfamiliar angles, always by minutes, sometimes hours.
Speaker 2: But nothing ever feels wrong, just doubled, rearranged. She nodded.
Speaker 2: We're trying to create a model. Perhaps you'd let us
Speaker 2: interview you sometime your log books and lived experience would
Speaker 2: make a fine counterpunt to our math that felt both
Speaker 2: thrilling and normal. In this quarter, mathematicians and bakers might
Speaker 2: as well share tools. I made my way back through
Speaker 2: the rain. My phone buzzed Lucien, checking if I'd gotten
Speaker 2: lost in a vortex yet. I smiled as I texted back,
Speaker 2: still mapping my own illusions. Boss I realized contentedly that
Speaker 2: this was no longer about frustration. The not knowing had
Speaker 2: become its own reward. That afternoon, challenged by the mathematicians
Speaker 2: diagrams and Mous's sketches, I decided to construct an experiment.
Speaker 2: A double delivery. Two parcels for Perpetrie Leclerk, one addressed
Speaker 2: Rue do Lies, one Rue des Fontin's, both marked urgent.
Speaker 2: I packed both carefully in the van, stowing them side
Speaker 2: by side, synchronized my phone clocks, took a final photo
Speaker 2: of them together, a kind of twins portrait. I started
Speaker 2: with Rue Do Lies, approaching at two zero zero, as
Speaker 2: the clocks in the shop windows, both in theory would
Speaker 2: read very nearly the same.
Speaker 1: M m. E.
Speaker 2: Lecler greeted me, not with any sign of surprise or
Speaker 2: knowing just her gentle fairness, AH jewels new ink, she asked,
Speaker 2: checking the parcel urgent delivery, I replied, enjoying the ambiguity
Speaker 2: special order. She signed her signature, looping in identical strokes
Speaker 2: as always, before pausing. I's a little sharper than usual.
Speaker 2: Will you be along on Fontins as well? She asked
Speaker 2: court I caught my breath. You're expecting me With a
Speaker 2: conspiratorial smile, she said, If not you, then some one
Speaker 2: very like you. There was no accusation, just the echo
Speaker 2: of an old joke. I thanked her, pocketed the fresh
Speaker 2: receipt and left. This time I made no attempt to
Speaker 2: short cut the path. I walked, letting the city arrange itself.
Speaker 2: Shops blurred in the drizzle, Children ran up steps, old
Speaker 2: men argued football at a corner. When I arrived at
Speaker 2: Rue des Fontin's two zero seven. By my watch, the
Speaker 2: shop stood as it ever did, window bright. A different
Speaker 2: cyclist leaning his bike beside the window. M m me
Speaker 2: le clerk, perhaps identical, was already waiting at the counter.
Speaker 2: Ah monsieur, she smiled, you've returned, or have you just left?
Speaker 2: She accepted The parcel signed the clocks behind her registered
Speaker 2: are four minut difference with the rue deu Lie's shop.
Speaker 2: This time, while copying her receipt, my pen caught and
Speaker 2: left a splatter of blue ink. She tamped it dry,
Speaker 2: said it's the right day for getting lost, isn't it.
Speaker 2: Instead of leaving, I asked her directly, do you ever
Speaker 2: visit the other Perpetrie leck clerk, or do you remember
Speaker 2: being there? I was trying, finally, not to solve, but
Speaker 2: to involve. She considered, head cocked. Oh, I remember everything,
Speaker 2: and not always at the right moment. Sometimes I recall
Speaker 2: signing for you in this blue light, sometimes with sunlight
Speaker 2: from the other direction. Perhaps I am always elsewhere or
Speaker 2: always here. I let the puzzle be. My records now
Speaker 2: held two near identical deliveries, two receipts, my signature on each,
Speaker 2: but one slightly smudged. A cafe binnett, I showed Mouser,
Speaker 2: who whistled softly, comparing the shop names. If it's a joke,
Speaker 2: you're the punchline, he said, sketching the two shops as
Speaker 2: edge joined at their roots, emitting arrows pointing out and
Speaker 2: in at once. Later, my route led past the mathematician's
Speaker 2: office and doctor Badawi waved me in. On a whiteboard,
Speaker 2: A crude map of the quarter was scrawled, but instead
Speaker 2: of a normal grid, she drawn a ribbon twisting folding,
Speaker 2: not once, but again and again, like ribbon candy or
Speaker 2: the inside of an unending glove. My students are obsessed,
Speaker 2: she said. They think there could be even more a model,
Speaker 2: not for two sides, but for many. Every time you
Speaker 2: travel the block, there's a choice point. A root branches
Speaker 2: and reconnects, makes a small difference, duplicates a shop front,
Speaker 2: a bench, even a memory. Not parallel worlds, just shifts
Speaker 2: like echoes, all real, none primary. Your route is a braid,
Speaker 2: not a line. I considered that the sense that I
Speaker 2: wasn't just walking a street, but every possible version of
Speaker 2: a street, all interwoven, each walk bringing out a slightly
Speaker 2: different city, never quite the same as before. Out on deliveries,
Speaker 2: I began to notice details the way. Shop menus at
Speaker 2: the duplicate cheese shops sometimes included a seasonal cheese too early,
Speaker 2: a child's mural holding an extra balloon, a scratch on
Speaker 2: a wall missing in its other twin. If I bought
Speaker 2: a note book in one perpetry lecklerk the other sometimes
Speaker 2: remembered the transaction, but with a switched detail, a different cover,
Speaker 2: or blue ink rather than green. Residents had their own
Speaker 2: fragmentary explanations. Some, like Julia, laughed off the slippages. She
Speaker 2: told me when I was small, I once got lost
Speaker 2: inside Emmy Foray's bakery, walked in for a tart, came
Speaker 2: out on a different street. The old woman told me,
Speaker 2: keep walking till you find the same smell, and you'll
Speaker 2: know your home. Others grew briefly irritated. A line cook muttered,
Speaker 2: that's just the old quarter. Nothing to do but cook
Speaker 2: and keep an eye out. But most, even officials, preferred
Speaker 2: to smile and gently redirect the questions. One afternoon, I
Speaker 2: visited the municipal Planning office, curious whether anyone there would
Speaker 2: acknowledge the extra shops, the bending street numbers, the layers
Speaker 2: of addresses. At the counter, I produced my receipts, laid
Speaker 2: out my observations, asked what they made of it. The clerk,
Speaker 2: a drowsy young man with a chipped coffee mug, issued
Speaker 2: a standard denial. At first, every address is unique, every
Speaker 2: shop licensed in exactly one location. When I pressed, he
Speaker 2: glanced around the office, and in a low voice, confessed,
Speaker 2: we budget for two sets of repairs every year, just
Speaker 2: in case. But you won't get anybody in charge to
Speaker 2: admit it on the record. That's just the quarter being itself,
Speaker 2: I wondered aloud. Was the city in some way alive,
Speaker 2: remapping itself to fit the people's needs or moods? He shrugged,
Speaker 2: a gesture of a man resigned to unresolvable realities. All
Speaker 2: I know is the numbers never add up, the complaints
Speaker 2: pile up, the world keeps on ticking. Monsieur, enjoy your
Speaker 2: extra shops while they last. One evening, Mouseer and I
Speaker 2: surveyed the maize from the church steps, sketches and receipts
Speaker 2: laid out between us. She told me, I said, m
Speaker 2: m E le clerk. I meant that sometimes she remembers
Speaker 2: both shops at once, sometimes only one. Mauser nodded at
Speaker 2: the tangle of drawings. So maybe you are both the
Speaker 2: same person, depending on what side you approach from. Maybe
Speaker 2: the streets shift because you're always walking into a version
Speaker 2: of yourself who's already there, or because the city wants
Speaker 2: to keep telling itself old stories. It didn't frighten me
Speaker 2: not any more. The city's strangeness came with a kind
Speaker 2: of gentle promise. Nothing would vanish, nothing was harmed. It
Speaker 2: all simply folded, repeated, let itself be known, and you
Speaker 2: by whoever cared enough to attend. The question was no
Speaker 2: longer how do I fix or trap this anomaly? But
Speaker 2: what does it mean for identity, for place, for memory
Speaker 2: to be written and rewritten, lived, and relived. I spent
Speaker 2: days compiling what evidence I could. Interviews, receipts, mappings, sketches,
Speaker 2: the mathematicians models. Each type of record revealed a different
Speaker 2: underlying pattern, each partial, non supreme. There was never a
Speaker 2: single realignable truth. Late one night, blinking at old city
Speaker 2: archives in the local library, I found a packet of
Speaker 2: complaints and counter complaints stretching back to the eighteenth century,
Speaker 2: referencing shops out of turn, streets dancing out of line,
Speaker 2: entire blocks turning about in the fog. Merchants had wrangled
Speaker 2: in city council over which tavern faces north. This year
Speaker 2: and a certain Monsieur Clement was recorded as living in
Speaker 2: three houses, claiming each as his principal residence. Curiosity led
Speaker 2: me to request a meeting with a geomorphologist in town
Speaker 2: for a conference, who, after missing his hotel for the
Speaker 2: third time, met me at the cafe. I've seen hills,
Speaker 2: my great coastlines shift, rivers, split and rejoin, But nothing
Speaker 2: like your city, he said. It's not the ground itself,
Speaker 2: no tectonic reason. But it's as if the urban shape
Speaker 2: is fractal, endlessly bifurcating, overlaying versions of itself, like a thicket.
Speaker 2: He compared it in miniature to patches you sometimes see
Speaker 2: in old towns, built up without a plan, a stable
Speaker 2: center with shifting edges. But here the whole area is
Speaker 2: a living thicket, maybe centuries of adaptation, a landscape, but
Speaker 2: human shaped, recursive. The history struck me too, stories of
Speaker 2: the path seekers, monks who were said to rearrange or
Speaker 2: ceremonially walk the streets, blurring their own navigation as a
Speaker 2: devotional act so as to contemplate the unfindable in order
Speaker 2: to grow humility, or so the stories go. But old
Speaker 2: stories blurred into new ones, like the very streets themselves.
Speaker 2: I returned to the mathematicians at doctor Badowi's invitation, I
Speaker 2: attempted their marked path experiment, a walk traced on a
Speaker 2: notebook map, following a prescribed route through the block. They'd
Speaker 2: drawn arrows showing turns at every corner transitions I was
Speaker 2: to record. I started at the bakery, let the g
Speaker 2: p s log my steps at a certain fork. As
Speaker 2: I followed the painted arrows on the wall. What ought
Speaker 2: to have been a left turn into a square became
Speaker 2: a spill out onto a side street. Yet the shops
Speaker 2: visible now were misaligned papetriy Lecloak's window, this time on
Speaker 2: the squares left instead of right. I doubled back, retraced
Speaker 2: my path as carefully as possible. Coming back, the route
Speaker 2: felt subtly different. An alley, a foot narrower, a green
Speaker 2: window shutter missing, the bakery farther from the square than before.
Speaker 2: The mathematicians poured over my logs and sketched an overlay.
Speaker 2: The patterns made sense only if one gave up inside
Speaker 2: and outside, left and right as absolute. Only if you
Speaker 2: accepted a surface that looped, twisted, reattached itself unexpectedly, but
Speaker 2: always impossibly locally. No inside or outside, no up or down.
Speaker 2: Doctor Badawi declared, here you live merbious. You can't finish mapping,
Speaker 2: only keep moving. Curiosity did not slacken for its lack
Speaker 2: of answers. More than ever, the city felt alive, not menacing,
Speaker 2: but renewing itself, seen by seam each walk a subtle rearrangement.
Speaker 2: One morning, standing on the threshold between Rue dou Lies
Speaker 2: and Rue des Fontaine's, the twin perpetry leclerk signs blinking
Speaker 2: blue in the angled morning light, I was struck by
Speaker 2: a doubt that now felt precious. If every route is true,
Speaker 2: every memory partial, then identity of places, people, and may
Speaker 2: be of myself was not diminished by repetition or ambiguity.
Speaker 2: It was instead woven, enduring because it could change. The
Speaker 2: old Quarter's persistence was not a flaw. It was a
Speaker 2: system at work. Inhabitants gently adapting their memories, customers seeking
Speaker 2: the comfort of finding their shop wherever needed. Artificial boundaries dissolved,
Speaker 2: life made flexible. I witnessed for the first time how
Speaker 2: the city's impossibility bred not confusion, but delight, a quiet
Speaker 2: confidence that each version, each retelling, was both valid and cherished.
Speaker 2: During a street gathering, tables laden with pastries, locals crowded together.
Speaker 2: I listened as in Zou and Julia debated which corner
Speaker 2: had hosted a friend's wedding decades earlier by the bakery,
Speaker 2: of course, claimed in Zeaux. Certain Julia smiled, correcting no.
Speaker 2: At Saint Agnes's, just across from the Papetrie, another neighbor
Speaker 2: chimed in. I was there both. It rained on the
Speaker 2: bakery side, but stayed sunny at the church. Laughters spilled
Speaker 2: up and down the lane. No one argued seriously, all
Speaker 2: events were equally cherished. The city I saw was not
Speaker 2: so much a puzzle as a living map of all
Speaker 2: possible paths, woven of journeys, errors, alternate roots, and memories
Speaker 2: all at once. It belonged not to any one definition,
Speaker 2: but to the tangle, a place whose greatest treasure was
Speaker 2: its refusal to be pinned or completed. Each person, by
Speaker 2: making their daily crossings and talk, recreated the map again,
Speaker 2: letting it grow and branch and overlap, keeping it vivid
Speaker 2: and real. Returning to my daily deliveries, I felt the
Speaker 2: old edge of uncertainty replaced by something like reverence Rue
Speaker 2: do Lies or Rue des Fontin's. It no longer troubled
Speaker 2: me to see both perpetrie leclerks gleaming in their own lights.
Speaker 2: I greeted each mme le clerk with recognition, unbothered by detail.
Speaker 2: The receipt signed always contained a small difference ink, color, time,
Speaker 2: slip of a letter. Each transaction was evidence of how
Speaker 2: the world could hold more than one truth. Gently. Sometimes
Speaker 2: mme le clerk winked, you remind me of yourself from yesterday.
Speaker 2: Welcome back. My comsations evolved, rather than interrogations seeking the
Speaker 2: one tru address, they became stories, passed around like pastries,
Speaker 2: exchanging favorite duplicate cafes with customers, joking with Mouser about
Speaker 2: the lost stairwell, Listening to Julia account how the rose
Speaker 2: garden now appeared further east, closer to her memory. The
Speaker 2: city's unpredictability became not a source of frustration, nor a
Speaker 2: puzzle to solve, but a kind of invitation. Certainty faded,
Speaker 2: but wonder expanded to fill its place. At dusk, I
Speaker 2: found myself outside, breath curling as the sun set behind
Speaker 2: entwined chimneys. I stood a moment between the perpetry leclerks,
Speaker 2: their identical signs painted blue windows golden from lamps within.
Speaker 2: For the first time, I did not try to choose
Speaker 2: which was the shop, which neighbor belonged to, which corner,
Speaker 2: which path was the real one. I closed my note
Speaker 2: book on the last page blank. Waiting, I began to
Speaker 2: consider that perhaps every great city, and every memory we
Speaker 2: carry of them, is a repeating street, a place in
Speaker 2: which paths can never be quite retraced, where gentle impossibilities abound,
Speaker 2: and every turning offers one more surprise. I walked home,
Speaker 2: content in the knowledge that this unfinished map, this living tapestry,
Speaker 2: would always offer new ways of being found.
Speaker 1: And that is the end. Thank you for listening, and
Speaker 1: I will see you in the next one.