Cova made tea when the researcher arrived, partly from habit and partly because having something to do with your hands helped people who were nervous about the geometry. Most people who came from the Institute were nervous about the geometry. She was not nervous about it. She had lived in the house for twenty-two years.
He had brought a notebook and a recording device and he set both on the kitchen table, then looked at the ceiling, which was perfectly ordinary. People from the Institute always checked the ceilings first.
"I want to understand habituation," he said. "At what point does living with paradox change how you experience it."
"I still experience it," she said. She poured the tea. "I know the staircase is wrong. I know the east door loops. I'm not confused about any of it."
"But it doesn't disturb you."
She considered this. "The east door is useful," she said. "I keep things in the loop when I don't need them immediately. They come back around. The staircase takes longer going up than it should, so I leave earlier when I need to be upstairs quickly. It's like any structural feature of a house. You learn it."
He wrote something. "What about the back room?"
"Storage. It holds more than it should. That's useful."
"Doesn't it disturb you that the room is physically impossible?"
Cova considered the question. She had been asked versions of it many times and had never found an answer that satisfied the person asking. "The room was impossible before I moved in," she said. "It was impossible after I moved in. I didn't change it. I just learned where the shelves went."
They talked for an hour. He filled four pages. At the end he thanked her and stood, and she watched him walk to the east wall instead of the front door. He opened the east door and stepped through into the hallway he had just left.
She called from the kitchen: "Front door is on your left."
She heard him find it. She heard the front door open and close. Through the window above the sink she watched him walk down the front path, consulting his notebook, and turn into the street.