The narrative centers on a man who observes his therapist with a careful, almost ritualized attention that borders on ritualization. In the quiet interval after he rings the bell and before the door opens, time seems to stretch. Ten seconds become ten heavy steps, each echoing down the corridor as if gravity itself had decided to slow the moment for him. The speaker counts from the other side of the door, tracking the distance between a living room threshold and a waiting doorway with the clinical precision of someone tracking a countdown. Yet one day the pace shifts. The same route is traversed in seven steps, as if the years of slowness had finally loosened their grip. He attempts to capture this change in real time and voices it to his therapist, a gesture that feels both intimate and absurd. And then she laughs, a sound that somehow makes the moment lighter even as it reveals the fragility of this little measurement game.
-What you normally do in ten steps, you did in seven steps.
I heard her laugh and the sound carried with it a certain ease, as though a boundary had been crossed without ceremony. “Don’t tell me you counted my steps,” she says later, brushing off the seriousness with which he had leaned into the detail.
“I’m telling you all,” he replies, trying to fix the moment in a broader sense of truth. This need to disclose every tiny observation is not merely a quirk; it becomes a way to gauge reality itself. He explains that he counts his fingers several times a day, a habit born from a moment when he mistook a number for certainty. One time the count came to nine, and he wasn’t reassured because he suspected the number had misled him. He counted again, and the result remained stubbornly nine. Fear followed, a chill that suggested the mind could wander into dangerous territory if he let it go unchecked. He recalls the cinema, the simple act of stepping out of the screen-lit room to count his fingers in the glare of the hall. Ten people sat there, and the memory of that count becomes canonical in his personal universe.
-What else is important?
-I’m telling you everything. Yesterday I had dinner at a friend’s house and used his bathroom. I counted the tiles on the walls, each one a small, self-contained universe of square precision, a grid that seemed to offer a remedy against the chaos outside the doorway.
-All?
-Yes, all of them. All tiles, all rooms, all surfaces that could bear witness to his habit of measurement.
Out of curiosity, how many were they? The question lands like a probe, forcing a boundary back into view. He admits a reluctance to divulge the exact total, fearing superstition or bad luck in revealing the full ledger of his findings. Yet he also acknowledges the rough certainty that he knows the number of steps leading from the portal to this floor and carries that number with him as a compass against confusion.
-Walk?
-Always to check if none is missing.
-What will you do if one day is missing?
-Tell me. The notion lands with a crisp, almost urgent clarity, as if revealing a plan to survive a potential rupture in the structure of reality.
-What if they’re still missing?
He finds himself at a loss for speech, realizing that such an irregularity could threaten the very coherence of his world. The fear that rises is not merely about stairs or numbers but about the possibility that the order he trusts could dissolve into an uncountable void. He remains silent, counting his fingers as a way to anchor himself in the present, while the image of ten people at the cinema anchors him to a shared moment that once felt ordinary. The fear eases only slightly as he considers the possibility that the structure could be altered beyond repair.
There is a strange, stubborn relief in the return to routine: the mind settles, if only momentarily, on the familiar sequence. So, counting his fingers, he allows the conversation to drift toward a quieter terrain. The moment resolves, but not without leaving a trace—an awareness of how fragile certainty can be when measured against the human appetite to count, to categorize, to know. He walks down the stairs, tests the staircase again for stability, and, in a ritual of small victories, ends the day with a quiet celebration at a nearby bar, where the ordinary acts of drinking a beer and watching strangers drift by feel like a gentle rebirth after an hour spent wrestling with numbers that refuse to stay in place.