Halfway down I grind my palm against the rail. Four white bars.
They asked me to price a word. A number for the board.
My son is six. He counts for pleasure. Will not count these stairs going down.
A word costs what it costs to keep. Keeping is compression. The fare is the length of the shortest description. Uncomputable.
I wrote that on the form.
The clerk tapped NUMBER. Plain words.
No machine can find the correct price for every word.
She tapped again. Office glue held her split nail.
In spring: two hundred and forty. Three hundred next year. No rule takes one to the other. A resolution.
The register certifies its consistency. Nothing strong enough to count, if consistent, can prove that about itself.
Every Thursday it says.
Three of us. One crossing. Three rankings. No rule combines them and keeps every promise. We voted anyway.
At the assessment they offered a wager on my mother. Double for each year she stays. A plan. Her mouth held on the screen between two sounds. Their expectation was infinite. Nobody pays infinity. Everybody pays something.
DO YOU ACCEPT?
Will my account ever close?
No procedure answers for every account. One answers for mine.
No.
No, you don't accept?
No, it won't close.
The clerk selected the first no. I kept saying the second. My mother's mouth moved.
I count down. Seventeen. Again. Nineteen. My hands say twenty-three.
My son passes me going up.
Twenty, he says.
Today?
He looks at my feet. Going up.
One of these is a fact. I have three hands.
Halve the queue. Again. Always at the front of your half. My father arrived. I saw him.
At night my heart does the stairs. Seventeen, nineteen, twenty-three. The tap runs below. My mother's plan doubles. Two hundred and six against two hundred and forty. Minus thirty-four. Minus nine when I started. Eleven years.
My son sleeps with both feet outside the blanket.
Proof.
Assume the world can be understood. Assume they still pay me.
Then there is a shortest true description.
Add this sentence. Longer. Still true.
Contradiction, I write.
Therefore.
Therefore.