How many miles does a person have to log before someone asks which direction they were logging them in.
The treadmill lived in the spare room, three feet from a blank wall.
The rubber and dust smell rose as it warmed.
The same click of the safety clip.
The same hum settling into rhythm.
The same wall waiting where it had always waited.
The display kept better records than any diary he had tried.
Speed.
Distance.
Minutes.
Calories to the tenth.
By the third month the console read forty miles in a single week.
Forty miles.
The same hairline crack in the same plaster, always at eye level.
He trusted the numbers because numbers rarely lie.
They did not lie.
They had no opinion about the hallway behind him.
They had no opinion about the kitchen light left on past midnight.
They had no opinion about the door at the end of it.
The power cut once, mid stride.
The belt dragged to a stop under his own weight.
In the quiet he noticed the machine had been bolted to face that wall since delivery day, only because that was where the outlet happened to be.
Nobody had chosen the wall.
The wall had simply arrived first.
Everything after it had just agreed.
Every mile logged that year had been real.
Forty miles, and the door had never once been in front of him.
He unplugged the machine.
He dragged it forty five degrees toward the hallway.
He stood on it without running, just to see the angle.
It seemed finished.
It was not.
Within a season the armchair had crept back an inch at a time, making room for a winter coat.
The treadmill's nose drifted, unnoticed, back toward the plaster.
The numbers still accumulate on their own.
Someone still has to turn the machine toward a door.
Then check, later, that it is still facing it.
He started marking the angle in pencil on the baseboard, the way a person marks a child's height against a wall.
A door, once found, still needs a second look to stay found.
He checks the angle now the same morning every month.
The pencil mark is still there.
So is the door.
And when he steps onto the belt, he can see both.
Same instinct appears in The Finished Puzzle, where completing the picture never proved it was the right picture.
