Equilibrium

Morning arrives, and with it, the reminder of my appointment with the nutritionist, a futile attempt to chart the mysterious tides of this body’s weight. But first, I need 13’s workshop. I need to translate the echoes of my nights in the cold, the flashback that had detonated in the darkness: small hands planting devices, the vacant stares of toddlers at train windows. Operations built on the invisibility of children.

I seek confirmation. Or contradiction. Or simply the silent data of 13’s presence.

The workshop welcomes me with its familiar scent, dried reeds and old wood, the olfactory signature of all our guarded encounters. Hats and woven creations lined the walls, each bearing 13’s distinct geometric language. I pick one up, and my gaze fall upon the large, antique mirror, strategically placed to catch a customer’s appreciation.

A subtle shift in perception.

From 13’s seat at his workbench, the mirror isn't just for vanity; it is a window. A means of observing the entire room without seeming to.

I sit the hat down with a carefully measured casualness and cross to his stool. He is immersed in chair caning, his movements a study in methodical precision.

“Busy morning?” I ask, tuning my voice to the frequency of harmless small talk.

“Always work to do,” he replies, not looking up.

We fall into our familiar choreography, him weaving, me watching, our words a neutral currency that traded in nothing of substance.

The door creaks open.

A woman enters, her clothes marking her as a pilgrim, her accent foreign. She moves with the exhausted determination of someone on a journey whose purpose had been lost to the road itself. Her eyes locks onto me, as if I were her predetermined destination in this room of two.

“I am a pilgrim,” she announces. “I look for place to sleep.”

“There’s a hostel, ” I begin, but she is already extending her phone toward me. “You call? For me?”

The hostel’s number glowes on the screen. My hand moves almost autonomously, finger rising to initiate the connection.

Then, a memory, sharp and cold. The PC game. Organizations weaponizing neurodivergent gesture recognition. A touch here, a detonation elsewhere, in settings I could never access.

My hand redirectes in mid-air. I pass the phone to 13. “Maybe 13 can call.”

The woman’s face transforms. Her mouth drops open. “IT’S A MIRACLE! IT’S A MIRACLE!” Her shouts are violently out of place, a seismic event for such a trivial transfer.

I stare, my expression settling into one of pure, clinical assessment: this person is unhinged.

She advances toward the ancient, fragile chair 13 was repairing, a piece clearly not meant for bearing weight. “NO!” The word leaves my lips with more force than I know I possessed. She freezes, hand suspends above the splintered wood.

“Also a miracle,” she declares, as if pronouncing a sacred truth.

Then she turns her unsettling focus back to me, her hand thrust out. I take it. Her palm is warm, slightly damp. The contact lasts a second before she spins away, vanishing through the door as abruptly as she had appeared.

Silence seeps back into the room, thick and heavy.

I turns slowly, my gaze now scanning the workshop with new purpose. The paintings on the walls, I’d seen them, but never truly looked. Stylized figures arranged in narrative tableaus. Scenes woven from cord and straw, each one a story compressed into fiber, waiting for a key I did not possess.

“Do you have anything to tell me, 13?”

He didn’t look up from his weaving. “No, nothing.”

His answer hangs between us, a thing of substance precisely because of its absence. It is neither true nor false, but a third state: information offered through explicit withholding.

I am at the door when his voice catches me.

“You know, when you have children…” A pause, perfectly timed. “You have to provide for them…” The rhythm of his work never falters. “Life is hard.”

“Sure,” I say, and step outside.

The January light is crystalline, rendering the world in sharper focus than it deserved. My feet carry me on autopilot toward 14’s shop. He and 26 are outside, basking in the thin sun.

“You look worn,” 26 observes, his tone laced with a concern that knew its boundaries.

“Lost weight,” 14 adds.

“Apparently not. Gained three kilos last time.”

They exchange a glance, that silent, fluent language of eyebrows and tilts I could perceive but not decipher.

The nutritionist’s office is a temple of sterile precision, its walls charted with the cartography of ideal bodies. I step onto the scale platform. The digital readout stabilizes.

Down three kilograms.

“But I expected more,” I say, gesturing to the loose fabric at my waist and hips. “You measured in centimeters. The difference is obvious.”

He frowns, recalibrates the scale. The numbers hold firm.

“I bought a different protein powder,” I mention as he notes the figures. “Online. The pharmacy ones taste like chemical punishment.”

His expression tightens, not with anger, but the specific irritation of a protocol being challenged.

“That’s not advisable.”

“Amino acids are amino acids.” I produce both containers, setting them side-by-side on his desk. “Same quantities. Same residues. What’s the actual difference beyond the branding?”

He launches into an explanation of certifications and manufacturing oversight, a stream of bureaucratic language that holds no molecular weight. I listen, watching his face arrange itself around justifications that never touched the core of my question.

We part with a mutual, unspoken acknowledgment that we had reached the edge of understanding.

23’s shop stands as it always does, metal shutters raised, cigarettes displayed like soldiers. I enter with a purpose that had been crystallizing since the thought had pierced me yesterday: you are never late for commitments, either you honor them, or you avoid them entirely. This time you are late…

“Debt,” I say, placing the money on the counter.

“Settled.”

The word hangs in the air, dense with a meaning that transcended finance. It feels like the closing of a circuit, the final click of a lock that allowed some new, unknown mechanism to engage.

I walk home through streets that are visually identical to yesterday’s, yet felt fundamentally altered. It is as if the village had shifted overnight into an adjacent configuration, its surfaces unchanged but its underlying frequencies now humming at a different wavelength.

Alone, I let the day’s accumulations settle upon me: the pilgrim’s manufactured miracles, 13’s coded confession, the weight that defied measurement, the amino acids that were and were not the same, the debt that was both settled and eternally outstanding.