The first thing Ode's aunt said to her when they stood together in the front yard was: don't try to draw a map. The second thing was: you'll understand it better when you're in it. Both things turned out to be true.
The paradox of the house is specific. If you enter through the front door, you arrive in the hallway that runs along the north wall. If you enter through the back door, which faces south, you also arrive in the hallway that runs along the north wall. The hallway is not a large hallway. It occupies one particular space in the house. Both doors open onto it from opposite sides of the building. This is not illusion. It is not a matter of perspective or disorientation. You can stand in the front yard, watch someone open the back door, and hear them arrive in the hallway, which is behind you.
The stairs have eleven steps. Coming up: eleven steps. Coming down: eleven steps. But the landing is four inches lower than the bedroom you just left, which means you descended while climbing. Ode measured this in her first year with a spirit level and a tape measure. She has not measured it since. The instruments agree with each other and disagree with what she experiences.
She has three notebooks from her first two years in the house. They are full of attempts to draw maps of the interior. The maps do not work. She kept trying to make them work by changing her assumptions about which room connected to which, and eventually she had to stop because she was changing the rooms to fit the maps rather than the other way around, which felt dishonest.
After that she gave up mapping and started attending. She walks through the house the way she navigates a familiar conversation: she knows what comes next without knowing exactly where she is. When she needs to be in the kitchen, she goes to be in the kitchen, and she arrives in the kitchen. When she needs the study, she goes to the study. The house cooperates. It is only the cardinal directions that refuse.
She teaches mathematics at the local college. People sometimes find this funny, given the house. She does not find it funny. Mathematics does not require the world to be reasonable, only consistent. The house is completely consistent. It simply cannot be represented.
At the end of a Tuesday, she comes home. She enters through the front door. She arrives in the north hallway. She hangs her coat on the hook that is there. The house is quiet around her in all its usual directions.