Speaker 1: Hello, I'm welcomed stories all the time. The glad you
Speaker 1: are here. Let's get into it. If you'd asked me
Speaker 1: last year, before I put away my trokim retired from
Speaker 1: Saint to Maybe's School, how long it would take to
Speaker 1: walk from Arcove's room at Office seventeen in our town's
Speaker 1: municipal hall. I would have given you precise answer, thirty
Speaker 1: seconds forty at the outside if the janitors caught blocked
Speaker 1: the corridor, or you stopped to nod at the painting
Speaker 1: of Mayor Goertz, his class lifted in that of a
Speaker 1: lasting vintage toast. Having prided myself on decades of punctuality
Speaker 1: and the sword of spatial awareness that lets a person
Speaker 1: find a lost paper clip in a clotter desk drawer,
Speaker 1: I held a quiet faith and clarity measurable distances and
Speaker 1: known spaces. No one prepares you for how odd familiarity
Speaker 1: might feel after you stop running on bells and timetables.
Speaker 1: I began my new routine two weeks after my send
Speaker 1: off cake, volunteering on alternate mornings in the archives of
Speaker 1: our ancient somewhat maze like city hall. It let me
Speaker 1: keep a foot in the life of order if on
Speaker 1: the softer side of the clipboard. On Monday, I delivered
Speaker 1: the previous centuries census record folders heavy or coward cardboard
Speaker 1: container's hand over hand from Archave's Room A along the
Speaker 1: short spur of the old east wing, passed the little
Speaker 1: side corridor with its once grand always dustich in the layer,
Speaker 1: over the messaic tile floor, and directly to Office seventeen.
Speaker 1: Just as the building map in my volunteer packet promised,
Speaker 1: the two rooms nestled side by side, almost sharing a wall.
Speaker 1: Thirty seconds even with that awkward folder, and not a
Speaker 1: second waisted. Tuesday, the walk stretched inexplicably long. I must
Speaker 1: have hesitated at the junction, I told myself, but I
Speaker 1: made nothing of it. Yet on Thursday, following the exact
Speaker 1: same errand at the same hour, my thirty seconds turned
Speaker 1: to nearly seven minutes, seven minutes during which time scened,
Speaker 1: for lack of a better word, to lose traction. At first,
Speaker 1: I blamed myself. Perhaps I paused to read a notice
Speaker 1: or chatter too long with Jonas, but I distinctly recalled then, and,
Speaker 1: after walking at sturdy pace, focused on getting the delivery down.
Speaker 1: Briefcase clutched shoes scuffing the old parquet in confident little paces.
Speaker 1: The hall was quiet. I remember passing the new staff
Speaker 1: Anne and Luccas only once by the door to the
Speaker 1: west wing. When I reached Officer of I felt a
Speaker 1: polite astonishment. Nothing had delayed me. Yet the clock ab
Speaker 1: of the door, one of those old fashioned namal jobs,
Speaker 1: lovely and in practical, marked exactly seven minutes since I'd
Speaker 1: left Arcavey. I doubled back immediately, certain I must have
Speaker 1: lost track of myself, but I recognized every turning, every
Speaker 1: crack in the stone baseboard, every frame charter on the wall.
Speaker 1: Yet a bend in the corridor appeared where I'd sworn
Speaker 1: there was none worse. The old portrait of meyer Gertz,
Speaker 1: the ever cheerful, was tilted at a new two sangle
Speaker 1: catching corridor, a light like a glare from a waiter
Speaker 1: with a secret the map pin next to the stay.
Speaker 1: While the same diagram I'd used showed no such bend,
Speaker 1: Yet I had just walked it. The stone felt real
Speaker 1: under my hand. The door handle stuttered its little hint
Speaker 1: of resistance, exactly as it always had. For several minutes,
Speaker 1: I stood between the two doors, hand on the lack outward,
Speaker 1: caught in a beginner's mixture of a knees and growing curiosity,
Speaker 1: such things should not shift in a day. I hunted
Speaker 1: for a physical explanation, heat warping perception, new paint or
Speaker 1: rearranged plant, but nothing fit. The space, it seemed, had
Speaker 1: quietly and inexplicably rearranged itself just enough to be undeniable.
Speaker 1: I did not rush to confide this to anyone. Practical people,
Speaker 1: especially the former principal sort, do not leave at phantasms.
Speaker 1: But as I walked the familiar rooms, stacks of papers
Speaker 1: in hand, I could not shake the impression that, far
Speaker 1: more than misremembering, the building itself had lent me a
Speaker 1: new geography to consider out han Haull stands at the
Speaker 1: crossroads of two main streets that bear both pretentious and
Speaker 1: laughably little names, Market Lane and Church Street. The building
Speaker 1: itself is a contradiction of errors. Its oldest bones date
Speaker 1: some late medieval century, with the carches and windowless buttresses
Speaker 1: that have long now grown their original defensive purpose. Later
Speaker 1: wings unfold and baroque flourishes, every corner adorned with encuondruent,
Speaker 1: decoratively excessive embellishments, and finally, the cocked out the pride
Speaker 1: of the once rich iron merchant guild pins the whole
Speaker 1: structure into a rather wind batter unity. When I toured
Speaker 1: my first volunteer shift, Missus Eckart, the head archivist, swept
Speaker 1: me through the ground floor in a bustle of precise
Speaker 1: instruction and half affectionate jibs about keeping up. She is,
Speaker 1: in her own way, the Hull's best map, A straight
Speaker 1: batwoman with clipped hair, reading glasses on a chain that
Speaker 1: swing perilously over yellowed index cards. She has a mind
Speaker 1: like a steel trap. A steel traps were powered by
Speaker 1: fiend and sharpened decades of self expectation. Jonahs, the facility manager,
Speaker 1: is her informal opposite, jovial, always pausing for chat, hands
Speaker 1: forever in his pockets, and keys rattling like a percussion instrument.
Speaker 1: The volunteers of whom I was the latest and possibly
Speaker 1: the most transparent about my need for routine span the spectrum.
Speaker 1: Anna and lucas young and practical, kept mostly to the
Speaker 1: unromantic New West wing, bright insulated offices with uniformed doors
Speaker 1: and modern signage. I had the odd sense they regarded
Speaker 1: as sea, swring loyalists as creatures of habit or nostalgia,
Speaker 1: or both. The building exceeds a blend of old and new.
Speaker 1: It lived in contradiction that until now felt more charming
Speaker 1: than suspect. The town's people seemed to love its quirks
Speaker 1: at doorway and knee hide off the service stairs, a
Speaker 1: tiny barred window opening over the chief Accountant's desk. Plaques
Speaker 1: in three languages, two now extinct. But there is alongside
Speaker 1: this affection a prevailing faith in order. The Calendar Committee's
Speaker 1: minutes must be filed by the tenth. The west wall
Speaker 1: polished before Foundo's date. The bell rung precisely at noon
Speaker 1: and five. My own pride, I must confess, followed this template.
Speaker 1: I did not volunteer to relive my old fiefto more
Speaker 1: maintain power, but for the pleasure, yes, pleasure of keeping
Speaker 1: things ship shaped, accounted for and functioning, even if at
Speaker 1: a loving removed from policy or politics, sorting delivering recording clarity.
Speaker 1: As the weeks kept pace, I found myself watching the
Speaker 1: wall maps more closely. Each landing, each hall was sported
Speaker 1: its own, not always matching version of the plan. A
Speaker 1: gradient of changes, some subtle some plainly inexplicable. I'd see
Speaker 1: the east wings outline blue tapped beside a fire extinguisher,
Speaker 1: but walk the length only to find a window misplaced,
Speaker 1: or the restrooms distant stretched above the doors to the
Speaker 1: main archive engraved on a strip of heavy brass, stretched
Speaker 1: the enigmatic maxim scribed to the original architect clockmaker time
Speaker 1: reveals the true shape of passage. No one seems to
Speaker 1: read that inscription any more. Perhaps I was the last
Speaker 1: to find it, and perhaps I only let myself notice
Speaker 1: because of what followed. That first anomaly with the corridor,
Speaker 1: the route elongated underfoot sat as a little bur in
Speaker 1: my mind. I considered forgetting it. But the next morning,
Speaker 1: with a ledger of oddities barely cold, I made a
Speaker 1: point of retreat my steps from archievetof for seventeen with
Speaker 1: exaggerated care, timing myself against my wrist wash, not my phone,
Speaker 1: for such occasions demand analog's seriousness. The journey took me
Speaker 1: thirty eight seconds, not the thirty I remembered from my
Speaker 1: first trips, nor the seven minutes of the previous day. Confuse,
Speaker 1: I paused at each intersection, I made notes. There again
Speaker 1: was the same odd kink but this time it seemed
Speaker 1: less pronounced. I marked my route with the small pencil
Speaker 1: decks at each turn, referencing the copy of the municipal
Speaker 1: hall diagram provided in my volunteer packet. Yet as I
Speaker 1: moved a stocking slowly, now suspecting some fault in myself,
Speaker 1: I registered more alterations. The stairwell around the corner from
Speaker 1: the archives should appear after the wide window overlooking the square. Instead,
Speaker 1: I found a glass double doll leading to what appeared
Speaker 1: briefly to be a screening room, though the space behind
Speaker 1: the glass was empty and dark as a closed eye socket.
Speaker 1: I stopped in the hallway, debated my own credibility, and
Speaker 1: returned to the archive. Turning the route over in my head,
Speaker 1: I sketched the shape from memory onto a note bed
Speaker 1: five turns, two corridors, one landing, repeating the walk again
Speaker 1: in an hour later, this time with a folder under
Speaker 1: one arm. As an impromptu navigation test, I counted off
Speaker 1: the steps, noting the length of time it took for
Speaker 1: three different routes. To my growing bafflement, none of my
Speaker 1: three attempts produced the same configuration. Sometimes, the painted out
Speaker 1: to way lund up after a mere eight pieces sometimes
Speaker 1: not until at least twenty The number of doors facing
Speaker 1: the corridor shifted, first two, then three, one a marked.
Speaker 1: On the third attempt, the double doors vanished, replaced by
Speaker 1: a new stretch of painted well hung with an uncharacteristically
Speaker 1: modern poster about recycling town of Cartridges. By Friday, I
Speaker 1: had begun keeping a log, scribbling times and turn counts.
Speaker 1: Some trips took just under a minute, others stretched past five,
Speaker 1: even when I paused to listen to mark out every feature.
Speaker 1: As I passed, something would jump, a gap, a door
Speaker 1: would shift, a window would offer a view of the
Speaker 1: same square at a new angle. Knock quite as I recalled.
Speaker 1: Seeking reassurance, or perhaps the gentle correction of another adult,
Speaker 1: I confided in a roundabout way the problem to Jones.
Speaker 1: He chuckled, Oh of the old, long and short of it.
Speaker 1: That corridor has been playing tricks since my apprentice days.
Speaker 1: As the mayor says, he wants a rout fifteen minutes
Speaker 1: early for a meeting by accident. But that's just old buildings,
Speaker 1: isn't it. I did not argue, but inside I recoiled.
Speaker 1: I'd spend years persuading students to attend to the world
Speaker 1: as it was, not as they fancied. I couldn't accept
Speaker 1: that my mind, unaided supplied this much trickery. So I
Speaker 1: timed and diagram again and again. Convinced now of some
Speaker 1: external force a playwether in architecture, maintenance or human habit
Speaker 1: that weekend. Unable to let it rest, a recruited misserse Ekkhark,
Speaker 1: Queen of thousand inflappable composure, for a practical experiment. We
Speaker 1: met early Monday, before any bustle could interfere the plan.
Speaker 1: Each of us would walk independently from arcover to Office seventeen,
Speaker 1: recording both time and route, circling familiar landmarks on a
Speaker 1: printed map I'd borrowed from a staff guide book. We
Speaker 1: agreed on three trips, one together, when each solo, swapping
Speaker 1: notes only. At the end. Missessekhark, never won to be rattled,
Speaker 1: took her notebook with a small half, wagged her glasses
Speaker 1: at me, and declared, let's see what ghost you've stirred up.
Speaker 1: Then first we walked together. The route felt mostly as expected,
Speaker 1: to two straight corridors, brief cove passed the infamous Mayor
Speaker 1: Garret in his tilted fray, and through the short archway
Speaker 1: and into office seventeen. We finished in forty five seconds,
Speaker 1: side by side. See she ain't hone, and I felt
Speaker 1: heap prick on my cheeks. But then we each walked
Speaker 1: it alone. My solo journey, moving with intentional, measured steps,
Speaker 1: took nearly two minutes. At one point, I passed what
Speaker 1: I was sure was a new alcove with a vase
Speaker 1: of plastic daffodils I had never seen before on Messess.
Speaker 1: I cut solo attempt. She emerged just after me, alarmed.
Speaker 1: Did you see the stained glass window with the foxes,
Speaker 1: she asked. I frowned that there is, or should be,
Speaker 1: no stained glass window on that route. We compared our
Speaker 1: marked maps. House included the foxes, my map had the
Speaker 1: vase alcove, and both featured a shore corridor that did
Speaker 1: not exist on the guide plan. Reviewing the official building plan,
Speaker 1: we realized neither of us had followed the path as
Speaker 1: it appeared on paper. Determined now we Fesjonas asked him
Speaker 1: out right what was his preferred route. Amused, he pulled
Speaker 1: out a tattered maintenance map and drew a surprisingly direct
Speaker 1: line from archive through the staff lounge, then down a
Speaker 1: stair well that, as far as I recalled, had been
Speaker 1: closed for years. He used to be quicker before the renovations.
Speaker 1: But if you know the right angle, sometimes you find
Speaker 1: it again. I've passed him to show me. We set
Speaker 1: out together, and for one weird moment I lost my bearings.
Speaker 1: Jonas seemed certain he'd found the short cut, but half
Speaker 1: well long, we landed in a corridor lined with all
Speaker 1: paper's faces. I didn't recognize, nor did he. When we
Speaker 1: doubled back, we ended up blipping into the hole we
Speaker 1: just outside the west wing, a eater I could not
Speaker 1: have taken by accident. That afternoon, emboldened or perhaps desperate,
Speaker 1: I tested an observation made in passing the day before.
Speaker 1: A window which I recalled offering a sunny view over
Speaker 1: the bakery now looked out on an unfamiliar little stone
Speaker 1: square dominated by dry mossy fountain. Perhaps you misremembered, missus
Speaker 1: Eckhart ventured when I described it to her. We returned together.
Speaker 1: Now the window overlooked recycling bins and a loading duck,
Speaker 1: and congruously and tied fetching Anna and Lucas from the
Speaker 1: west wind. In case eth or novelty offered insight. I
Speaker 1: tried to sound casual. Have you ever noticed oddities in
Speaker 1: the buildings? Lay it? I no, last thumbed her phone.
Speaker 1: My GPS never gets a fix in hib always say
Speaker 1: as I mustside in the car park. Lucas more Earnest
Speaker 1: told me the walking distance charts he'd been given for
Speaker 1: orientation didn't match the actual measured steps. This place is
Speaker 1: bigger on paper than it is in my legs, he concluded,
Speaker 1: by way of summary. When I said none of my
Speaker 1: rats aligned with the map, Anna shrugged. Maybe someone updated
Speaker 1: a building without updating the plan. But her eyes lingered
Speaker 1: a half beat too long on the floor, as though
Speaker 1: she sometimes doubted the explanation herself. In the weeks that
Speaker 1: followed my routine acquired a new appendage, a navigation journal.
Speaker 1: Every day I recorded not just the time and steps
Speaker 1: between the ark having room and Office seventeen, but changes
Speaker 1: in landmarks, distances, and the flavor of each journey. Hurried
Speaker 1: or relaxed, deliberate or distracted. New inconsistencies became the norm.
Speaker 1: Some days the wrought rank on others it expanded with
Speaker 1: uprime or reason. I found myself hoping or not without
Speaker 1: ironed as some one else would soon complain the silence
Speaker 1: of the others fell at moments more troubling than any
Speaker 1: single shifting wall. It was after a week and a
Speaker 1: half of this shouting columns and lines of my own
Speaker 1: idiosyncratic data, that a shop a pattern, if you could
Speaker 1: call it, that began to resolve among the thicket of notes.
Speaker 1: The discrepancies I gradually noticed obeyed a principle outside mere
Speaker 1: architecture or error. It wasn't which corridor I took, or
Speaker 1: even whether I was tired or alert. Rather, at the
Speaker 1: distance seemed to shrink When I walked slowly, focusing on
Speaker 1: each step, rushing distracted by mentalists of the urge not
Speaker 1: to be late for the morning record's review. He elongated
Speaker 1: the route and unexpected ways. I began suspecting the building
Speaker 1: responded to me, or more precisely, to my state of mind.
Speaker 1: On days of reflection or common tension, the walk between
Speaker 1: Nuciva and Office seventeen would compress, sometimes featuring new shortcuts
Speaker 1: or a familiar door in an unfamiliar place. Unhurried, scattered days,
Speaker 1: the corridor complicated itself, kinking, twisting, protracting the journey, all
Speaker 1: without my conscious assent. Intreatment, I confess delighted in the puzzle.
Speaker 1: I revisited my navigation journal in search of confirmation. At
Speaker 1: the top of the table for Monday two minutes four doorways,
Speaker 1: Wednesday forty seconds three next day nearly six minutes seven
Speaker 1: doors detO through the portrait corridor. The variance was not random,
Speaker 1: but almost participate. On a quiet Thursday, I was startled
Speaker 1: to discover an old pamphlet while sorting town meeting records.
Speaker 1: At first glance, I thought that an accidental inclusion. Its
Speaker 1: yellowed paper and looping script marked it as older than most.
Speaker 1: But the title saw Clear's inc A guide to our
Speaker 1: town Hall for new clerks, with notes by the architect.
Speaker 1: I read, heart bumping a page of the clock maker
Speaker 1: architect's own hand among the scattered suggestions, never run in
Speaker 1: the gallery, think kindly of the south stairs. He had
Speaker 1: scribbled a passage here, copied verbatim. Rooms approach as one
Speaker 1: draws nearer in mind, let no map bind vision and
Speaker 1: nearly passage is a function of intent and purpose. What
Speaker 1: on earth did that mean? Was this simply the airy
Speaker 1: philosophy of an eccentric cotmaker, or a practical warning disguise
Speaker 1: as poetry. I hurried to the archived desk summary in hand.
Speaker 1: Missseeka turned the pamphlet over thoughtfully when assured her the
Speaker 1: line he built half the east wing as an experiment
Speaker 1: in arranging focus. She said, I always thought the walls
Speaker 1: know if you have a purpose, or at least that's
Speaker 1: what Jonas says. I challenged her. Surely that's just saying
Speaker 1: buildings aren't conscious. She paused, lips first, then shrugged. Maybe not,
Speaker 1: but people are more involved in the surroundings than they realized.
Speaker 1: Just because its art doesn't mean it's supernatural. You know.
Speaker 1: Perhaps the building is in a monic amaze meant to
Speaker 1: keep you awake. Her words made sense, but nothing about
Speaker 1: this felt that tidy. The more I tested, the less
Speaker 1: confident I became that my confusion was entirely self made. However,
Speaker 1: the following days, my challenge evolved from simple mapping to
Speaker 1: a kind of mental piloting experiment, and consciously with how
Speaker 1: my attention altered the walk. On mornings, when I rehearsed
Speaker 1: speeches or shopping lists in my head, the corridor stretched.
Speaker 1: If instead, I worked with quiet focus, adding the mission
Speaker 1: of carrying files be my only concern. The way grew
Speaker 1: short and gentle. I started to think of the building
Speaker 1: as a living system, at bone, shifting to accommodate, or
Speaker 1: perhaps reflect, whoever wound threw them. One chilly afternoon, just
Speaker 1: as the town bell was wavering into the three o'clock chime,
Speaker 1: I found myself drawn toward the baes of the Club Tower,
Speaker 1: a spot I seldom visited unless the arcads required a
Speaker 1: stack of city council minutes from decades ago to day,
Speaker 1: though the corridor's geometry, or maybe my own curiosity, nudged
Speaker 1: me that way. Past the long arch of the old
Speaker 1: finance offices, a feint taking became audible, a different kind
Speaker 1: of ticking from the official clock, which was currently being serviced,
Speaker 1: and whose silence had come to notice almost as much
Speaker 1: as its usual brass regularity. The quiet pulse was neither
Speaker 1: perfectly even, nor I thought, in any way mechanically normal.
Speaker 1: Sometimes it quickened, sometimes it stretched like a ground for
Speaker 1: the clock's pendulum. At the mercy of some one else's
Speaker 1: notion of time, I approached a small alcove at the
Speaker 1: cradle of the tower, a spot generally empty except for
Speaker 1: an assuming bench. The tick seemed to thicken around me.
Speaker 1: If I stood near the far wall. The sound washed
Speaker 1: up in double strokes, distant, then rashing, then distant again.
Speaker 1: I tested its riddum against my watch, unable to match
Speaker 1: it to any quarter hour. Without warning, Jonah's materialized behind me,
Speaker 1: jangling his keys. You've found the spot, he said, as
Speaker 1: if congratulating me on a puzzle box opening. I half laughed.
Speaker 1: Why does a tick like that? It depends when you're listening.
Speaker 1: When I was a kid, my uncle would walk me
Speaker 1: here after hours, said, if you stood on the right
Speaker 1: patch of tile, you'd feel the building's hot beat instead
Speaker 1: of the cocks some folk call at the clockmaker's short.
Speaker 1: But the way you can get where you're headed, without
Speaker 1: knowing how or why. I tried to find it again
Speaker 1: last winter, but it's gone, or I am He leaned
Speaker 1: on the wall, expression suddenly more thoughtful and jovial. The
Speaker 1: staff talk about the whole shifting sometimes usually you only
Speaker 1: notice if relate. I listened. It must have been trick acoustics,
Speaker 1: the echo playing off stone and memory. But for a moment,
Speaker 1: standing still as January branches, I felt something unsteady about time.
Speaker 1: My own breathing slowed. The second seemed to swirl inside
Speaker 1: my chest, long and contracted. At once. I told journers
Speaker 1: about the notation in the pamphlet of the architect's pronouncement
Speaker 1: about intention and passage. He chuckled. I never met the man, obviously,
Speaker 1: but silent about bride for an old eccentric still, and
Speaker 1: here he shrugged away the rest, as though some things
Speaker 1: should remain between stones. Later that day, craving order A
Speaker 1: requested authorization to review the buildings are cut. Four plans.
Speaker 1: The custodian vestry battered portfolios from, he said, obstinate decades
Speaker 1: when the building reinvented itself. Each was a thing of beauty.
Speaker 1: In discord, the plans from the early nineteenth century made
Speaker 1: sense at first glance, then goard with impossible proportions. The
Speaker 1: nineteen twenties copy showed wings and court juds that had
Speaker 1: never existed, were at least never simultaneously. The most recent
Speaker 1: plan had entire wings crossed out and new annotations scrolled
Speaker 1: in deaf in incs. I paid carefully for amendment after amendment,
Speaker 1: a puzzle box of changing intentions and claims. Notes by
Speaker 1: former building managers reconciled the plans with the dry finality
Speaker 1: of bureaucracy. South's Stowe realigned see Amendment be minus four
Speaker 1: archery to be left in place, despite engineer objections. Per
Speaker 1: council decision, each correction seemed to authorize some gentle eccentricity,
Speaker 1: never quite a race in what came before. Sitting late,
Speaker 1: the street lights outside just starting to color the square,
Speaker 1: I stared at the three plans and scentsed with mounting
Speaker 1: certainty that the inconsistencies of sand a space of memory
Speaker 1: were not simple quarks. They had been noticed, justified, even codified,
Speaker 1: cross generations. To each new staff or builder, the wholes
Speaker 1: blend of the known and the unpredictable was understood not
Speaker 1: as a fall, but as part of its unspoken contract.
Speaker 1: By the end of that day, my sense of the
Speaker 1: building and my place in it had tilted into a
Speaker 1: quietly perilling on certainty the hall was not only unpredictable,
Speaker 1: but intentionally so, a kind of participatory system, responsive perhaps
Speaker 1: to the mind itself. I lay in bed that night,
Speaker 1: listening to the familiar night quiet of my house, wondering
Speaker 1: what exactly I had stumbled into. Not a haunted place, No,
Speaker 1: that wasn't it. For curiosity, not fear bloomed in my chest,
Speaker 1: but a place made for the quietly unsettled, for those
Speaker 1: willing to pay attention, who sensed that their own intention
Speaker 1: might fold a few meters of corridor out of the day.
Speaker 1: What else in my life, I wondered, had been quietly
Speaker 1: shifting around me, making way for whatever story I needed
Speaker 1: to walk at the time I worked the next morning,
Speaker 1: oddly reluctant to leave my house, less for fear of
Speaker 1: what I might find in the municipal hall, more for
Speaker 1: what I might now expect to or overlook. The corridors
Speaker 1: of the building had lodged themselves into my mind, replaying
Speaker 1: with the same loving uncertainty as a dream. Only half
Speaker 1: a cold, every decision to rise but an assured tie
Speaker 1: walking shoe. These felt transparently like rituals, but I did
Speaker 1: them more carefully, more deliberately, as though in anticipation of
Speaker 1: being observed or quietly responded to. By mid day, I
Speaker 1: found myself at the town hall gates, the sunlight picking
Speaker 1: out the clash of viers in the brickwork, the upper
Speaker 1: windows glaring down like coded eyes. I imagined absurdly that
Speaker 1: it waited, considering which version of itself to reveal, depending
Speaker 1: on how I chose to enter inside. The building was humming,
Speaker 1: not physically, though the old radiators thumped in their own
Speaker 1: syncopated rumble, and some one was shaving the pocket with
Speaker 1: the wet mop ner reception, but in its undercurrent of life.
Speaker 1: Staff bustled through the lobby. Anna and Lucas debated with Missus.
Speaker 1: I caught about a misplaced in his folder. Joonas, pausing
Speaker 1: long enough to wink at me, retreated with a tool
Speaker 1: box into the closet under the stairs. Everyone seemed comfortable
Speaker 1: in their own routes. I searched our faces for the
Speaker 1: mild side on and ease I felt, but saw only
Speaker 1: the ordinary preoccupation. Yet, as I passed through the main hall,
Speaker 1: catching the faint brascal end of the clockmaker's maxim time
Speaker 1: reveals the true shape of passage, I hesitated mid stride,
Speaker 1: seized by a new question. Was I there only one
Speaker 1: who felt these changes as disruption? Did everyone have their
Speaker 1: own building slightly to the left or right of mine
Speaker 1: and simply choose to ignore the gaps. Urged by this suspicion,
Speaker 1: I resolved to test it over the next two days,
Speaker 1: during tea breaks and under the guise of routine chatter,
Speaker 1: I began a gentle care pain gathering colleagues and visitors
Speaker 1: one by one, asking what's your way from arcove to
Speaker 1: Office seventeen, or which short could do you prefer from
Speaker 1: reception to the old council chamber. Some indulged me, readily
Speaker 1: mapping visible paths in the air with pen or finger.
Speaker 1: Others caught up were suspicious, answered politely, but with the
Speaker 1: whiff of his ASID digitization survey the bet their tone. Enna,
Speaker 1: for one, described a blue tiled passage she always used
Speaker 1: between the ochous and the copy room. How let's pursing.
Speaker 1: As she realized I didn't recognize it, she directed me
Speaker 1: with cheerful certainty, you go past the coat hut by
Speaker 1: the old cloak room throo, a blue towled bit even
Speaker 1: older than the clock tower, makes the light weird. That's
Speaker 1: the quickest I intrigues, tried to follow her instructions twice
Speaker 1: of a lunch, never succeeded in finding anything but a
Speaker 1: brown tailed washroom, smelling faintly if disinfectant. Yet Anne swore
Speaker 1: it was there and even offered to walk me through
Speaker 1: the next time schedule. Sink Jonas meanwhile, held forth in
Speaker 1: the supply closet, regaling me and Lucas with stories over
Speaker 1: the breakfast windowed at Tulsash that, according to Jones, faced
Speaker 1: east and caught the smell of rye bread from the
Speaker 1: bakery each morning. If you pass at first thing, you'll
Speaker 1: reached the record stacks before the coffee gets cold, he said. Lucas, frowning,
Speaker 1: shook his head. That's impossible at this time of year.
Speaker 1: The sun's on the wrong side, the bakeries west, not east.
Speaker 1: Even Stranger's male carriers. The mayor himself, taking a slow
Speaker 1: loop in search of lost documents, offered confident directions that
Speaker 1: clashed with every version I'd map or wondered. May Kalb
Speaker 1: once told me that if you don't pass at least
Speaker 1: two doors which hip pay before the elevator, you've taken
Speaker 1: a wrong turn. But no such doors appeared on my rub.
Speaker 1: The contradictions delighted as much as they un settled. Again
Speaker 1: and again, I compared sketches and warped timings, marveled at
Speaker 1: how each person's ordinary rut bore no resemblance to another's
Speaker 1: or to the official diagramds posted at each stairwell. It
Speaker 1: did not seem to bother any one most supposed it
Speaker 1: was simply an old buildings misphaving geometry, or what you
Speaker 1: get when you update without tearing the whole place down.
Speaker 1: Some like Jonah's seemed to relish the uncertainty. Others like Anna,
Speaker 1: shrugged off the discordances as unremarkable, the way one accepts
Speaker 1: the changing weathers. Beyond complaint, I sought out more senior
Speaker 1: perspectives and hopes of extracting some history that would clarify matters.
Speaker 1: Missessekard arranged for me to meet hen and cel, A,
Speaker 1: retired to an architict known for his dogged pragmatism, who
Speaker 1: now cared for his garden and allegedly still lecture the
Speaker 1: pigeons in the square about the dages of ill planned renovations.
Speaker 1: Here and cell listened to my careful questions, his heavy
Speaker 1: eyebrows folding into a look somewhere between sympathy and amusement.
Speaker 1: Every year someone tried to fix the plan, he said,
Speaker 1: and every year we needed to adaminents Dorama's place. Stairwell
Speaker 1: ends in an attic wonder whether there shouldn't be one.
Speaker 1: If you asked me, then I'd say it was laziness,
Speaker 1: just city records lagging behind the builders. But I always
Speaker 1: fed the new blue prints over the old, and well,
Speaker 1: nothing lined up quite right, so we'd adjust. That was
Speaker 1: our job to make the paper fit the walk, even
Speaker 1: if neither was quite real. He shook his head at
Speaker 1: my questions about tearing down the unpredictable sections or breaking
Speaker 1: up on news rooms. There was a time they talked
Speaker 1: of strathening the East corridor, making it sensible, but every
Speaker 1: estimate came back by some odd margin temper set longer,
Speaker 1: five percent short of depending on the day measure. We
Speaker 1: just let it be. Didn't see the harm, did we.
Speaker 1: At lunch, Messseeka told me of elders who remembered actic
Speaker 1: playrooms that vanished with age, or offices that on alfter
Speaker 1: new partitions, but somehow fit all the same people. Maybe
Speaker 1: it's like childhood memories, she mused. Some rooms matter more
Speaker 1: than others, and some only exists when someone cares to
Speaker 1: look for them. She seemed perfectly at ease with the abstruction,
Speaker 1: But I felt the old agency return, a sense that
Speaker 1: if I could just pin down the right room door
Speaker 1: a plan, the logic of it all would emerge. In
Speaker 1: search of less alusive evidence, I requested access to the
Speaker 1: mat vault, a narrower climate control chamber beneath the newer
Speaker 1: west wing that sliding racks crowded with battered blueprints, sketches,
Speaker 1: and wreckers from every year of the town Hall's expansion.
Speaker 1: Messessachart achieved me a key in an arched warning, who
Speaker 1: don't re arrange the boxes. The system is older than
Speaker 1: dirt and more stubborn, and then left me to my
Speaker 1: own devices. The Archive was a visual tangle of rolls
Speaker 1: and sheets printed on Crisp vellon Yellown force gap and
Speaker 1: finally modern laser paper. Each bundle bora lineage, dates, signatures,
Speaker 1: the broad looping initials of generations of building commissioners. I
Speaker 1: spent a full afternoon comparing plans decade by decade. No
Speaker 1: too much, not precisely, not even for the same corridor.
Speaker 1: The eighteen seventy one plan listed Archive as a solarium,
Speaker 1: a high window sitting room supposedly flooded with sunlight. By
Speaker 1: nineteen twenty three it appeared as a filing room free
Speaker 1: The nineteen seventy four emergency maps labeled the same location
Speaker 1: as a store cupboard. The stowells in one plant split
Speaker 1: to the right and another to the left, a closet
Speaker 1: which on one blueprint was a restroom, appeared as a
Speaker 1: marshaling office on another. Entire wings sketched and faded pencil
Speaker 1: migrated across the centuries, sometimes officially erased, sometimes simply fading
Speaker 1: for annotation. Even the most modern map, fresh from the
Speaker 1: facility's office fell short. It omitted a window I had
Speaker 1: passed at very morning, and placed the vending machines in
Speaker 1: an impossible block of half way along a wall. What
Speaker 1: was this, I asked myself, Just bureaucracy up pacing itself,
Speaker 1: or something more deliberate. My story might call it a palampsus,
Speaker 1: a librarian, a book keeping overse But standing among the
Speaker 1: racks maps rolled out on the examination table, I wondered
Speaker 1: whether the structure be navigated day by day existed at
Speaker 1: doll except as a compromise between lion and intend, between
Speaker 1: memory and measurement. That evening, over soup and bread in
Speaker 1: the staff kitchen, lucasas if I had seen the other's staircase,
Speaker 1: the one that sometimes swapped sides of the corridor when
Speaker 1: he was in a hurry at a chimed in pairs
Speaker 1: with my blue passage. It's where I've tried to backtrack
Speaker 1: and find it again, and half the time it's just
Speaker 1: a janitor's closet. Their voices were unconcerned, even a little delighted.
Speaker 1: A stranger, perhaps, but no more so than the way
Speaker 1: your favorite park bend seems to travel to a new
Speaker 1: spot when you look away. I wondered where the building
Speaker 1: shifts an accidental legacy mistake fossilized across decades, or was
Speaker 1: the shifting deliberately built into its bones. The more I
Speaker 1: reviewed my navigation journal, the more the changes seemed to
Speaker 1: resist classification as mere error. Rutzflecks not only with my
Speaker 1: own mood of memory, but sometimes in tandem with companions.
Speaker 1: Anna might describe a window as we walked, only for
Speaker 1: me to see a bookshelf. Jonahs might recall a short
Speaker 1: cut past the old council gallery, only for me to
Speaker 1: find a dead end. It was as though the space
Speaker 1: were an unwritten language, each person composing their own versity
Speaker 1: instantly set out on a whim. I decided to formalize
Speaker 1: my experiments one morning. I performed three walks between the
Speaker 1: archives and the clock tower base. The first are my
Speaker 1: natural amble as on corners and cracks, nope, clutched as
Speaker 1: a makeshift compass. The rut was conventional, past the usual landmarks,
Speaker 1: expected forty seconds. The second undertaken at a distract of rush,
Speaker 1: rehearsing my grocery list as a traverse doubled to two minutes.
Speaker 1: The corridor kinked around and famili creve. The door to
Speaker 1: the record's room, usually half way along, pushed to the end,
Speaker 1: as if politely edging away from a Chellis visitor. The
Speaker 1: third walk, I tried to focus on the peculiar taking
Speaker 1: out felt near the clock tow days before. At each turn,
Speaker 1: I paused, listening, tuning myself to its pulse. To my astonishment,
Speaker 1: the corridor's length collapsed only twenty five seconds, and I
Speaker 1: passed the alcove bench almost instantly, as if space itself
Speaker 1: folded in round my intent bolster. I repeated these trials
Speaker 1: with company. Missus Eckhart joined me, skeptical, but game and Annatou,
Speaker 1: narrating their perceptions as we walked. Each reported different features.
Speaker 1: Anna noticed a red carpet I couldn't see. Missus Ecott
Speaker 1: couldn't find the shoe rack Ann insisted stood beside the
Speaker 1: second door. On their way back Anne glanced behind her
Speaker 1: and gasped. The fire extinguishers weren't there too? I saw
Speaker 1: only one, and on the opposite wall. Later, a retro
Speaker 1: transcribed section of the cockmaker architect's original notebook, preserved in
Speaker 1: the town Museum and kindly lent out for my investigation,
Speaker 1: phrase leaped out, what is a corridor off not a journey?
Speaker 1: What is a journey if not a measure of mind?
Speaker 1: Margin alias suggested the design intention was not simply to
Speaker 1: build walls or rats, but experience his intervals of perception. Thus,
Speaker 1: pressed by accumulative contradiction and possibility, I hunted for an anchor,
Speaker 1: since a fault lay at some indisputable blueprint amongst so
Speaker 1: many that would finally fix the reality of the place.
Speaker 1: I pinned old maps, new plans, and my own sketches
Speaker 1: to corkboard in the archives, each overlaying the last trace
Speaker 1: in common cuves and stubborn divergences. All fell short, even
Speaker 1: my own maps when I retraced them a few days later.
Speaker 1: Failed which plants had been present, which doors had been unlocked?
Speaker 1: The angle of light in the stowwell a fixed geometry
Speaker 1: eluded grasp, as if the building displayed just enough consistency
Speaker 1: to maintain the fiction of order, but never enough for truth. Increasingly,
Speaker 1: question bore down on me. Did the building shift to
Speaker 1: match its user's, comforting them with ways familiar and unique,
Speaker 1: or did it stop and elasticity teach us to trust
Speaker 1: only what we needed in each moment? And deeper at
Speaker 1: What did it mean if the reality of a place
Speaker 1: depended on how you moved through it? Or for what purpose?
Speaker 1: Turning to the past, I sought the clockmaker's philosophy in
Speaker 1: earnest The archive had a pamphlet of his musings, and
Speaker 1: Missus Eckhart tidy as Ever had cataloged council meeting records
Speaker 1: from the building's expansion a century before. As I poured
Speaker 1: over the pages in late afternoon light, a portrait of
Speaker 1: the man emerged, not the sterne Visigi in his painting
Speaker 1: over the entrance, but a wry, inquisitive mind obsessed with
Speaker 1: questions of time and perception. One draft essay described experiments
Speaker 1: in clock rooms with mirrors where the measured zechendce mashed
Speaker 1: no clock, only intention. Another reflected, is it so strange
Speaker 1: to let space oscillate if it might align with neat
Speaker 1: let time's andhabitation be rid upon the walls. Letters with
Speaker 1: later architects showed confusion and eventual resignation as irregularities or
Speaker 1: rows of filing rooms where stones were expected. East house
Speaker 1: facing west windows cut off from their natural light, as
Speaker 1: one wrote, but always to a sensible and even if
Speaker 1: not the one we'd plan. There were debates, heated then
Speaker 1: half hearted, about demolishing the east wing or forcibly correcting
Speaker 1: the plans. The council always deferred. No explanation resolved irregularities,
Speaker 1: only a tacit agreement to let the whole find its
Speaker 1: own best form. A local clock repairer Freulence, agreed to
Speaker 1: meet me over coffee in her shop beneath the shadow
Speaker 1: of the tower. I described the building's hesitations and digressions.
Speaker 1: She grinned, wiping oil from her hands. You know why
Speaker 1: the townspeople like our clock, she said, nodding up at
Speaker 1: the great brass isle, because it keeps time for all,
Speaker 1: but never quite the same way for any two. Once
Speaker 1: a child asked me if the chime MENI was different
Speaker 1: from eleven. I told her the clock keeps time with
Speaker 1: the tower, but the tower keeps time with the people
Speaker 1: inside it. She continued, more quietly. Maybe the building works
Speaker 1: that way too. It tells you the way you need,
Speaker 1: the way you expect, or maybe it listens to Most
Speaker 1: people only notice when they were late for lunch. This
Speaker 1: notion that time and space in the Municipal Hall were elastic,
Speaker 1: not by air, but by design stunned me, not haunted,
Speaker 1: not broken in experiments, still running with its users nwittingly,
Speaker 1: both map makers and mapped forever revising the plan as
Speaker 1: they walked. The ideas turned in my mind all evening
Speaker 1: and unsettled my dreams. When I arrived on Saturday from
Speaker 1: my usual shift, I proposed one final test to total traversal.
Speaker 1: I would go from ARCAVET with nothing but a single
Speaker 1: folder and my journal to the clock tower base, shifting
Speaker 1: my folks as deliberately as possible at each decision point,
Speaker 1: observing how the building responded. Would the rock contract elongate
Speaker 1: loop itself with my own intention right as it were,
Speaker 1: the map under my own feet. I set off just
Speaker 1: after sunrise, The building hushed before the sand of my
Speaker 1: shoes against the stone, and the distant flutter of paper
Speaker 1: in the high air vents. At each intersection. I paused,
Speaker 1: took my pulse, registered the shape of my intent at first,
Speaker 1: perhaps because I was turned too every detail the corridor shrank,
Speaker 1: passageways compassed to their tidest range. I breezed by the
Speaker 1: usual kink in the east corridor, slanting nearly to the
Speaker 1: entrance of the Antiquities Room. Then specting, I had some
Speaker 1: small control. I deliberately let my foscata, attempted to maltituss
Speaker 1: the way, as sometimes did on busier days. The corridor
Speaker 1: almost immediately elongated. A new stretch materialized between two doors,
Speaker 1: an unfamiliar patch of marble floor painting I didn't remember.
Speaker 1: Even the light seemed to soften and refract, as if
Speaker 1: wearing the fatigue of a longer journey. At the stair
Speaker 1: will leading up to the cork Tower base, I focused
Speaker 1: on the quiet heartbeat I'd learned to sense, tried to
Speaker 1: listen past the physical to the felt. The ticking was there,
Speaker 1: but inconsistent, leaping from slow to quicken, the space of
Speaker 1: a breath. As I climbed, it settled to a gentle,
Speaker 1: anticipatory throb. At the landing, the earthinned, the doors pressed inwards,
Speaker 1: the climb of brief but compacted effort. At the base,
Speaker 1: jonahs rounded the corner, arriving seemingly from nowhere, tool box
Speaker 1: hanging from two fingers. He grinned, as if we had
Speaker 1: planned it. If you walked away, you mean to, he said.
Speaker 1: Sometimes you get there before you leave. He wanted off,
Speaker 1: humming cheerfully, content with her or not, I understood. I
Speaker 1: made detailed notes at each step, marking times and features,
Speaker 1: trying to pin down how the changes were registered, and
Speaker 1: not just physically, but in the level of awareness and
Speaker 1: intent I carried. I repeated similar walks over that week,
Speaker 1: at different hours, sometimes alone, sometimes with company, always tracking
Speaker 1: the differences consistently. The more closely I timed and measured,
Speaker 1: the more unpredictable the journey became. If I surrendered to wonder,
Speaker 1: impatient or preoccupied, lips rose past tangled. When I walked
Speaker 1: with a quiet singularity of purpose, the undistracted fairy in
Speaker 1: of a folder, the care in noticing each foot full,
Speaker 1: the wake compressed itself, strange ends resolve into familiar doors
Speaker 1: in less time than logic should allow. What became clear
Speaker 1: was not that space bent to will, nor that the
Speaker 1: building wanted anything. No, it was subtler, stranger. The building's
Speaker 1: reality was a negotiation between what I intended and what
Speaker 1: it offered. Passage was never fixed, never truly detached from
Speaker 1: me as traveler. On those day, I sat in the
Speaker 1: wrecker's room, spanning table with all my journals, annotated maps,
Speaker 1: at a cluster of staff sketches for all the tangible findings,
Speaker 1: the diverging plans, shifting ruts, the mystery of the window
Speaker 1: and passage, which the common denominator was perception itself. In
Speaker 1: that moment, everything came together. The whull was not malfunctioning,
Speaker 1: not collapsing or supernatural. It was living in a sense
Speaker 1: of vast, quietly responsive experiment in the relativity of experience.
Speaker 1: The clockmaker's original intent forced and the ideas of subjective
Speaker 1: time in psychological spacing had been realized not only in architecture,
Speaker 1: but in social fabric. Experience of the whole space, just
Speaker 1: like the clock's peculiar chime, was irreducibly personal. Each traveler
Speaker 1: co altered the journey with their own mood, purpose, and attention.
Speaker 1: The structure was a record not of fixed geometry, but
Speaker 1: of how generations of townsfolk remembered, used and believed their
Speaker 1: way through it. Council debates and architecture resignations. These were
Speaker 1: simply signposts of a deeper communal willingness to let spaces
Speaker 1: not always obey the rules of paper and steel. Perhaps
Speaker 1: in a town built on trade and adaptability, people had
Speaker 1: always been content to let the whole become what its
Speaker 1: users quietly needed. A place where the distance between two
Speaker 1: doors could stretch for fold and contract for certainty, could
Speaker 1: morph to accommodate urgency or invite reflection. For the first
Speaker 1: time awe of retok frustration. It was as though the
Speaker 1: town hall, in its everyda oddness, should the truth of
Speaker 1: all familiar places, shaped as much by memory, intent, and
Speaker 1: perception as but breck and plan. The shifting passages bore
Speaker 1: witness not to confusion, but to a profound flexibility in
Speaker 1: how any of us inhabit spaces, each experience quietly adjusted,
Speaker 1: recorded in the walls, revised with every walk. In the
Speaker 1: days that followed, I noticed how my approach to the
Speaker 1: building change. I no longer sought to pin down every
Speaker 1: difference or fixed each and consistency. Instead, I adopted a
Speaker 1: mingle humility and delight, amused by the building's creativity, grateful
Speaker 1: for its gentle invitation to be alert, not complacent, at lunch,
Speaker 1: conversations among staff took on a light of flavor. People
Speaker 1: shared not grievances about confusing corridors, but short lived pride
Speaker 1: in having found their version of the swiftest way or
Speaker 1: the friendliest window. Anna and Lucas compared notes about which
Speaker 1: rooms appeared on days when one was especially focused, for
Speaker 1: Anne of a report dead lines, for Lucas forgetting his
Speaker 1: phone charger. When missssa cart walked me past the fox
Speaker 1: stained glass window again only here mondays before nyeen, she said,
Speaker 1: half grinning, I believed her, regardless of whether I saw
Speaker 1: it with my own eyes. I found myself more attentive
Speaker 1: outside the whole as well. Civic landmarks I had always
Speaker 1: moved through unconsciously, parks, shops, even my own kitchen felt
Speaker 1: alive with the possibility to some measure of the world
Speaker 1: adapts not only to our intent, but to the stories
Speaker 1: we bring to it, that the familiar is only ever provisional,
Speaker 1: waiting for the next walker to pass by and remember
Speaker 1: it a little differently. One quiet afternoon, near closing, I
Speaker 1: lingered in the corridor outside archive folder in hand, listening
Speaker 1: for the fugitive tick. The hole was empty, as if
Speaker 1: the building itself had drawn in a breath. I walked
Speaker 1: the path to the clock tower, timing myself with no
Speaker 1: hurry and no mission but curiosity. Sometimes this walk would
Speaker 1: take a minute, to day it lasted little more than
Speaker 1: a thoughtful pause. The rooms and turns, the doors and
Speaker 1: paintings all seemed to arrive in sequence, according to no
Speaker 1: rule but the one I silently brought with me Outside,
Speaker 1: the birds claimed the statue of the founder, children played
Speaker 1: in the square, and the world continued blidly, unaware of
Speaker 1: the building's secret negotiations. The holstood as it always had, stone,
Speaker 1: a memory, clockhand, and corridor a silent invitation for anyone
Speaker 1: curious enough to notice it. Whispered the world might be
Speaker 1: far more flexible and more personal than any ordinary mapcutural.
Speaker 1: I found myself wondering, not with impatience but fascination. How
Speaker 1: many places quietly answer us as we moved through them,
Speaker 1: And what stories and noticed lie beneath our feet, waiting
Speaker 1: for someone to walk them into being? And that is
Speaker 1: the end. Thank you for listening, and I will see
Speaker 1: you in the next one h