On Counting, and What Happens When You Stop

The cafe was wrong. Not dramatically wrong — not tilted or sinking or anything that would make you leave — but the tables were spaced in a way that made the room feel both cramped and hollow, and the light from the single overhead fixture hit the tiled floor at an angle that turned every coffee cup’s shadow into something slightly longer than it should have been. I had chosen it because it was close to the hotel and because the menu in the window was handwritten in a way that suggested someone cared. I realized, sitting down, that I had confused care with compulsion. The handwriting was too even. Every letter was the same height.

Shirley Jackson arrived first, which surprised me. She sat across from me and spent a full minute studying the ceiling before she said anything. She was wearing a dark cardigan buttoned all the way up, and she ordered black coffee without looking at the menu.

“The floor in this place slopes,” she said. Not to me, exactly. To the room.

“I hadn’t noticed,” I said.

“You had. You sat on the uphill side of the table.”

I looked down. She was right. My chair was slightly higher than hers. I had chosen it without thinking — or I had thought I’d chosen it without thinking, which is a different thing entirely.

Mariana Enriquez came in carrying a tote bag with a bookstore logo I didn’t recognize and a pack of cigarettes she set on the table with the resignation of someone who knows she can’t smoke indoors but wants the option visible. She was younger than Jackson, obviously, and she sat down with the directness of a person who does not arrange herself for comfort. She ordered a cortado and looked at both of us and said, “So. A building.”

“A wrong building,” Jackson said.

“All buildings are wrong,” Enriquez said. “Some are wrong in ways that kill you. Some are wrong in ways that don’t. The interesting question is the ones that are wrong in ways you can’t categorize.”

I had wanted to start more gently — to ease into the territory, to talk about atmosphere and tone. But they were already there. This is something I have noticed about writers who work in horror: they do not require warm-up. The thing that frightens them is always close to the surface, and the only question is which door to open first.

“I want to talk about a building that has one too many steps,” I said. “A stairwell where the count is off by one between certain floors. Not broken. Not damaged. Just — more than it should be.”

Jackson set her coffee cup down. “How do the other tenants respond?”

“They don’t. Or they do, but not the way you’d expect. They skip the extra step. They’ve adjusted.”

“Good,” she said. “That’s the horror. Not the step. The adjustment.”

Enriquez was shaking her head, not in disagreement but in the way a person shakes off a thought that is too close. “In Buenos Aires,” she said, “a building collapsed in Constitución three years ago. Four dead. The neighbors had been complaining about the cracks for a decade. The municipality had inspected and signed off. When it fell, everyone said it was a tragedy, which is the word you use when you mean it was predictable and no one did anything.”

“That’s a different kind of story,” Jackson said.

“It’s the same story. Your extra step — it’s not a ghost. It’s not a curse. It’s a structural fact that no one will acknowledge because acknowledging it means admitting that the building they live in does not follow the rules that buildings are supposed to follow. And if the building doesn’t follow the rules, then neither does the rent they pay to live in it, or the government that collects taxes on it, or the city that issued the occupancy permit.”

“I wasn’t thinking about the government,” Jackson said, and there was an edge to it, the quiet sharpness of someone whose territory has just been expanded without her permission.

“You were thinking about the woman who counts the steps,” Enriquez said.

“Yes.”

“So am I. But the reason she counts the steps matters. If she counts because she’s losing her mind, that’s one story. If she counts because counting is the only evidence she has that something is wrong in a place where everyone else has decided nothing is wrong — that’s a different story. That’s a political story.”

I said, “Can it be both?”

They looked at me. Jackson’s expression was patient in a way that made me feel I had asked the wrong question. Enriquez’s expression was patient in a way that made me feel I had asked the right question badly.

“Explain,” Jackson said.

“The woman counts because the counting is all she has. She’s new. She moved from somewhere else. She doesn’t have the —” I searched for the word. “The calluses. The other tenants have been there long enough that they’ve stopped noticing, the way you stop noticing a bad smell if you live with it. She’s still smelling it. But the longer she stays, the more she wonders whether the smell is real or whether she’s the one who’s wrong.”

“Unreliability through environment,” Jackson said. “The building makes her doubt herself.”

“Not the building. The other tenants. The normalcy.” I was getting somewhere, I thought, or I was getting nowhere in a useful direction. “If one person tells you the floor is level and your feet tell you it’s tilted, you believe your feet. If everyone tells you the floor is level and your feet tell you it’s tilted, you start to believe your feet are wrong.”

Enriquez pulled a cigarette from the pack and turned it between her fingers without lighting it. “In Argentina we have a phrase: hacerse el boludo. To play dumb. To pretend you don’t see what you see. It is the national survival skill. You walk past the police and you don’t look at the person they are beating. You live in the building with the cracks and you don’t ask about the cracks. You ride the bus and you don’t comment when it takes a route that doesn’t exist on the map. Playing dumb is how you get through the day. It is also how buildings fall on people.”

“That’s what I want,” I said. “A protagonist who refuses to play dumb. Who keeps counting.”

“And is punished for it?” Jackson asked. There was something in her voice — not eagerness, but recognition.

“Not punished. Not rewarded. Just — separated. She counts and the counting makes her different from the people around her and the difference is its own kind of isolation.”

Jackson nodded slowly. “The loneliest woman in Hill House was the one who noticed the angles were wrong. Everyone else saw a house. She saw what the house was doing.”

“Eleanor,” I said.

“Eleanor noticed. That was her gift and her curse. She could not stop noticing.” Jackson picked up her coffee. “Your protagonist — she catalogs things. Professionally. She describes damage. Water stains. Foxing. Spine separation. She names what is broken.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” I lied. I had thought of something adjacent to it — a woman who worked with broken things — but Jackson had made it specific in a way I hadn’t managed. The library. The damaged books. The comfort of damage that has a name.

Enriquez said, “Put her in San Telmo.”

“Why San Telmo?”

“Because San Telmo is where the city shows its bones. The tourists come for the tango and the antiques. They don’t see the buildings south of San Juan that are leaning into each other, held up by habit and neglect. A woman in San Telmo who notices that a building is wrong — she would be surrounded by wrongness. The whole neighborhood is wrong. The question is why this particular wrongness bothers her when the general wrongness doesn’t.”

“Because it’s her home,” Jackson said. “You can tolerate wrongness in the world. You cannot tolerate it in the place where you sleep.”

There was a silence. The cafe’s espresso machine hissed and clanked. A man at the next table was reading a newspaper with a seriousness that seemed performative, as though he wanted us to know he was not listening.

“I keep thinking about the hallway,” I said. “Not just the stairs. A hallway that turns a corner and the second half takes longer to walk than the first, even though they measure the same. The tape measure says six meters forty. Your legs say something else.”

“Measurement versus experience,” Jackson said. “That’s old. That’s as old as houses. Every house I have ever lived in had rooms that were the wrong size. Not by the tape measure. By the body.”

“The body knows,” Enriquez agreed, and it was the first time they had agreed without qualification. She seemed to notice this, and added: “But the body can be trained. That is what poverty does. It trains the body to accept spaces that are not meant for it. A family of five in two rooms — their bodies learn a geometry that a family in a house never has to learn. The extra step in the stairwell is just another accommodation. Another adjustment the body makes because the body has no choice.”

“So the neighbors skip the step,” I said.

“The children would skip it. Children learn these things faster. They would run up the stairs and their feet would hit the fourth-floor landing as though the seventeenth step simply didn’t exist.”

“And the protagonist counts seventeen.”

“Every time.”

Jackson said, “What does the building want?”

Enriquez looked at her. “Buildings don’t want.”

“Haunted buildings want.”

“This building isn’t haunted. It’s wrong. Those are different things. A haunted building has a reason — a death, a trauma, a history that left a mark. A wrong building is just wrong. It was built wrong, or it became wrong, and no one fixed it because fixing it would cost money that no one has.”

“Or it was built right,” Jackson said, “and it became something else. Buildings change. They settle. They shift. They develop personalities.”

“Personalities.”

“A word you don’t like. Fine. Tendencies. Patterns. My house in Vermont had a door that opened by itself every night at two in the morning. Not a draft — I checked. Not a mechanical failure — I had it examined. The door simply opened. Every night. At two. After six months I stopped getting up to close it. After a year I left it open at bedtime so it wouldn’t have to bother.”

“You accommodated,” I said.

“I lived with it. That’s what people do with houses. They live with them. The question for your story is not whether the building is wrong. The building is wrong. The question is what happens to a person who insists on measuring the wrongness when everyone around her has stopped.”

Enriquez was turning the cigarette again, faster now. “There should be a woman who has lived there for thirty years. An old woman. She has absorbed the building into her body. She is the building, in a sense — she has been shaped by its wrongness the way a tree is shaped by wind. When the protagonist tells her about the extra step, she should not be surprised. She should not be frightened. She should say something that sounds like an explanation but is actually just a description of how things are.”

“‘Buildings settle,’” I offered. “‘Everything settles.’”

“Too neat,” Jackson said.

“It’s what someone would say. Not because it’s true but because it’s the thing you say. It fills the space where an answer should go.”

Jackson considered this. “All right. But don’t let the protagonist accept it.”

“She won’t. She’ll keep counting.”

“And the counting will isolate her.”

“Yes.”

“And eventually —” Jackson paused. She looked at the ceiling again, at the light fixture that was slightly off-center, casting its uneven shadows. “Eventually the counting will be all she has. The counting will be her relationship with the building. The thing that separates her from the woman who lived there for thirty years and died in her chair with the television on.”

Enriquez put the cigarette down. “The old woman should die. In the story. She should die quietly, the way old women in these buildings die — with the television on and the door open and the ambulance that takes forty minutes because this is not the kind of neighborhood where ambulances hurry.”

“And after she dies?” I asked.

“After she dies, the stairwell changes. Or — no. It doesn’t change. It was always what it was. But the protagonist starts to count correctly for the first time. Seventeen steps between every floor. Not just between the third and fourth. Between all of them. As though the old woman’s presence had been — I don’t know.”

“Insulating,” Jackson said. “The old woman had absorbed enough of the building’s wrongness to keep it contained. To keep it on one floor. When she dies, the wrongness spreads.”

“That’s too supernatural,” Enriquez said.

“Is it? Or is it just that the protagonist’s perception changes? She was willing to believe one stairwell had an extra step. That’s an anomaly. She could contain that. But when every stairwell has seventeen steps, the anomaly becomes the rule, and the rule is that the building does not conform to the geometry she was taught, and she has no framework for that.”

I watched them disagree without disagreeing. They were circling the same drain from different angles — Jackson from the inside of the protagonist’s dissolving certainty, Enriquez from the outside of a system that makes dissolution rational. The building was wrong. The protagonist knew it was wrong. The question was whether that knowledge was power or poison.

“There’s a cat,” I said.

They both looked at me.

“She has a cat. The cat knows. Cats always know about houses. The cat paces the apartment and pauses at a spot on the wall and stares, and the protagonist presses her ear to the wall and hears — not plumbing, not wiring — the building itself. A sound like breathing.”

“Every building makes sounds,” Enriquez said.

“But this one has a rhythm.”

Jackson smiled. It was not a warm smile. It was the smile of someone who has been handed something she can use. “The cat is the only honest character. The cat cannot accommodate. The cat cannot play dumb. The cat responds to the building the way a body responds to a disease — by refusing to pretend it isn’t there.”

“And then the cat stops eating,” Enriquez said quietly.

We sat with that for a while. The man with the newspaper turned a page. The espresso machine went through another cycle. The shadows from the overhead light shifted as someone outside walked past the window and briefly changed the angle of whatever secondary light was coming through.

“I keep coming back to the ending,” I said. “Or the non-ending. She stays. She has to stay. The rent is cheap and there’s nowhere else and this is what poverty does — it removes the option of leaving. She stays and she counts and the counting is the only thing that separates her from the old woman who died.”

“Don’t say that in the story,” Jackson said. “Don’t explain what the counting means. Let her count. Let the reader figure out why she can’t stop.”

“And the building?”

“The building continues to be what it is. Buildings don’t end. People end. The building was there before her and it will be there after, and whoever moves in next will learn its geometry or they will count, and if they count they will be where she is, and if they don’t count they will be where the old woman was, and neither option is survival. That’s the story. That’s the only story a building like that can tell.”

Enriquez picked up the cigarette one last time, put it back in the pack, and snapped the pack shut. “There’s something you’re both missing,” she said.

We waited.

“The airshaft. Every building like this has one. A narrow vertical channel that goes from the roof to the basement — it’s meant for ventilation, for light, but in practice it’s just a hole. A void in the center of the building. The bathroom window opens onto it. You can look down and you can’t see the bottom.”

“Because it’s dark,” I said.

“Because it goes down farther than a five-story building should require.”

Jackson leaned forward. “You don’t drop anything into it.”

“No. You never drop anything into it. Because you’re afraid of how long it would take to hear it land.”

The check came. Enriquez paid. We walked out into a street that was level and ordinary and measured exactly what it should measure, and I did not count my steps, but I was aware — for the first time in a long time — of the distance between the cafe door and the corner, and the number of strides it took to cross it, and the fact that the number seemed right but I had no way to verify it, because I had never counted before, and now I could not stop.