People in my line of work learn the city by its scars. I walk it for a living—building inspections for a risk assessment firm that every insurance carrier in the metro eventually hires when a claim smells wrong. The map in my head is a tangle of burned parcels, flooded basements, soft ground, and bad decisions. That’s why, when a client asked me to verify an address on Nadelaguram Street and sent a photo of a buckled storefront with a hairline fracture like a smile running up the brick, I should have said no.

I had never heard of Nadelaguram Street. That alone was strange. I keep directories for every ward; I’ve memorized more cul-de-sacs than most people know restaurants. But there was an invoice—a real one—sent from a “Nadelaguram Street Hardware” to a developer who swore they’d never shopped there. Someone had billed them for thirty-eight industrial door closers and seven exit signs, all installed supposedly in a warehouse that didn’t exist. The developer’s lawyer wanted proof: either the store was real or the invoice was fraud. “Take pictures of the facade, get the house number, collect a card,” he said. “Easy.”

The coordinates they gave me fell between Tenebre Avenue and Latimer Court—a seam of light industry and half-finished condo bones. At street level the air smelled like wet pallet wood. I parked next to a shuttered coffee shop with a blackboard sign still pleading with no one to try the orange-cardamom latte. The sky had that late-afternoon bruise to it, winter light slanting off frost-stiff weeds in the chain-link.

My phone’s map showed a narrow spur: Nadelaguram St. It wasn’t in any printed atlas—just a thin gray line like a pencil mark someone forgot to erase. It started at Tenebre and ended at Latimer, a straight thread. I looked up, expecting a street sign. There was one: white-on-green, standard city font. NADELAGURAM ST. Someone had stuck a strip of reflective tape along the pole, the adhesive yellowed and puckering. No traffic. No footprints in the sheen of ice on the sidewalk. But the pole cast a shadow where it should. The city had at least paid for hardware.

The thing about empty streets is that they carry your sounds back to you, edited. My boots clicked, then clicked again, a fraction of a second later, softer as if under floorboards. The buildings were brick boxes with their windows painted black from the inside. A barber pole hung still as a bone. I counted addresses like a rosary: 102, 106, 110, 114, odd numbers on the opposite side. The odd numbers were higher than the evens by two digits. That happens sometimes in old neighborhoods, so it didn’t bother me until I walked twenty yards, looked up, and saw 102 again.

I stopped. Turned. Behind me, the barber pole, a stack of pallet wood, the coffee shop neon reflection in a dark window. Ahead, 106. I took out my phone and opened the compass app. The red needle jittered, spun, and then pointed at my chest as if my heart had become north. I laughed, alone. I told myself it was a bad magnet in the street sign. I put the phone away and photographed the door of 102: scuffed paint, a knotted rag in the mail slot, that crack in the brick like a smile.

“Afternoon,” said a voice.

I jumped. An old woman stood in a recessed doorway across from me, beneath the odd numbers. She wore a long gray coat that might once have been someone’s expensive wool and shoes whose leather had learned her feet. The coat’s buttons were all black except one, which was white and sewn on with blue thread that crossed itself like veins. She held a paper bag, grease darkening one corner.

“Do you know,” she said, as if we had been talking already, “if the bus began again?”

“What bus?” I asked.

She tilted her head toward the Tenebre end. “It used to come by when the bakery was open. The driver would nod—” She mimed a nod, twice, solemn, the kind you give to a problem you’ve decided to live with. “It hasn’t come since the bakery closed. Have they built a bakery somewhere else?”

“I’m… not sure,” I said. I reached for my wallet, halfway to offering cab fare, then stopped because every gesture here felt like a trigger. “I’m looking for Nadelaguram Street Hardware.”

Her eyes brightened without warming. “Hardware,” she repeated, tasting the syllables. “They always keep the door closers on the third shelf. Ask for Bram. He’s the one with the hat.”

“Bram,” I said, because names anchor you. “Do you live here?”

“Do you?” she asked, and smiled in a way that made my mouth dry. “Careful which question you answer first.”

I thanked her and moved on, feeling watched by the blank windows and the paint that wasn’t paint. At 110 there was a side door with a window of rippled glass. I cupped both hands to see. Behind the glass, the corridor was too long, a perspective problem—three doorways on the right when there should have been two. Fluorescents hummed faintly. I knocked, and the sound went on knocking for a while after I stopped, the way an echo keeps falling down stairs you didn’t climb.

“Closed,” said a voice from the other side of the door.

“I just need a business card,” I said. “Nadelaguram Street Hardware? I’m doing verification for—”

A shadow passed behind the glass. Not a person’s shadow: something taller, a lamppost through water. The knob turned. The door opened two inches, stopped against a chain. A hat’s brim appeared in the gap. Trilby, gray felt, a pinch that had been pinched half a million times.

“We didn’t call you,” the voice said.

“I’m not here to collect,” I said. “Just to confirm you exist.”

The hat tilted. “Look down,” he said.

I looked. My boot prints behind me had already glazed over, healed by the thin sheen the street breathed out of itself. Ahead of me, in the two inches of open door, the floor was clean in a way that wasn’t cleaning. No grit. No scuffs. The cleanliness of brand-new things and of things never used are not the same. This was the third kind, and I felt it in my teeth.

“Bram?” I asked.

The chain slid off with a metal cough, and the door opened. The man wore a gray suit so neat it might have been drawn on. He was older than his hat but younger than the corridor. “If you’re collecting, come back when there’s more to collect,” he said, already turning. “Otherwise, come quick.”

Inside, the corridor smelled of hot dust on tubes and oil from a bicycle that had never seen new light. The floor was poured terrazzo embedded with chips of green bottle-glass. On the third door’s frosted panel: NADELAGURAM ST. HARDWARE, at a slant, hand-painted, the brushstrokes thick as scabs. Bram hung his hat on a hook that wasn’t there a moment ago and walked behind a counter that managed to be both wooden and not.

“Card,” I said, trying to sound like a person ordering coffee. I took out my phone to photograph the interior. The camera app showed the room, but the shelves were shifted: in the screen’s version, the top shelf held door closers; in the room, it held jars of screws with labels in an alphabet that had too many elbows.

“You don’t need a card,” he said. “You need a receipt.”

He produced one with the casual assurance of a magician palming scarves. The receipt paper was thin enough to doubt. It said what my client’s invoice said. Same items. Same totals. The bottom: PAID. Beneath that: a rubber stamp with the address, 114 Nadelaguram St., and a phone number whose last four digits repeated themselves. I lifted the paper and felt, with the bare skin of my wrist, the weight of it—the way some pieces of paper want to be believed.

“This is a lot of exit signs,” I said. “You could make a whole building leave.”

“Most buildings want to,” he said. “They’re tired of keeping quiet.” He rang an invisible bell: a triangle’s hum without the triangle.

“Are you open every day?” I asked.

“Depends on the day,” Bram said, and looked past me to where the door should be. “Depends on who’s counting.”

“What are you counting?” I asked.

He smiled without teeth. “You’ll have time to count everything,” he said softly. “That’s the problem.”

When I stepped back outside, the sky was the color of the inside of an eyelid. I walked toward Latimer, the end shown on my map. I counted addresses. 116. 118. 120. With each door, a variation on the same: too-long corridors; rooms that admitted they were rooms only when watched; the faint sense that my footsteps were being entered in a ledger. At 124 a brass plaque read DR. JOSEPH—no specialty, no hours. At 130, a laundromat whose machines had door windows full of dry, slow churning. At 134, a florist with no flowers, only water in vases, labeled with sticky notes: LILY, ROSE, FORGIVENESS.

At the corner, the green of a street sign: LATIMER CT. The sidewalk turned. I turned with it, relieved to be back among known names. The relief lasted one breath. The sign on the far pole—white-on-green, standard city font—said NADELAGURAM ST.

I stood there an indecently long time, feeling like a trick that had discovered itself. The old woman had moved closer without moving. She was at the bus stop now. The bus schedule was a rectangle of glass with nothing behind it.

“Does it end?” I asked her, not sure which it I meant.

“Everything ends,” she said. “Some things only end later than you expect. Some things end earlier. And some,” she added, patting the paper bag, “make an end of other things.”

“What’s in the bag?” I asked, because a normal question can break a spell if you time it right.

“Bread,” she said. She opened it and showed me the absence inside, rolled shut with care. “I bring it for the birds.”

“There are no birds,” I said.

“That’s why,” she said, and closed the bag.

I tried the other way. Tenebre. Same buildings, reversed; I’d always suspected cities only had one face and you were merely allowed to see it from different angles. At 101—the first odd number, opposite my first even—someone had taped a photograph to the glass: a street like this one, but crowded, the barber pole spinning, the florist vases full. The caption in block letters: OPENING DAY. No date. The people in the photo were smiling as if someone had just told a joke that would be less funny later.

I took forty steps. At 103, a hand-lettered sign: WE’RE NEW HERE; at 105, WE’RE STILL NEW; at 107, WE’RE ALWAYS NEW. At 109, a mirror in the window reflected a street that wasn’t mine—awning stripes I hadn’t seen, a bus with a route number that was a word: HOME. In the glass I didn’t appear. Or rather, I appeared a second later, as if I’d been thinking whether to be there.

When my phone rang I nearly dropped it. UNKNOWN CALLER. I answered. A man’s voice: “We received the photos. Thanks.”

I hadn’t sent any.

The voice continued. “The receipt is perfect. Paired with the vendor record, we can clear the invoice.” He paused. “You did speak to the old woman, didn’t you?”

“We’re done,” I said. “I’m leaving the street now.”

“Good,” he said with relief like static. “Don’t go past zero.”

“Zero what?” I asked.

He hung up.

I didn’t realize I’d begun counting until I hit 140 and my mouth formed the sound of the zero all by itself, like a child’s. The numbers had been a consolation; the neat increment promised an exit. 142. 144. The polished brass of 146 showed my face the way water shows a sky. 148 had no door, just a placeholder doormat imprinted with WELCOME in a font you see on brochures.

At 150, the address plaque had no numbers, only an O. The next building had nothing at all, just brick. The one after that was a vacant lot with a bent fence and a sign on a post: 0.

Zero didn’t look like an end. It looked like a mistake you forgive because you understand. The sidewalk—if it was still a sidewalk—kept going, a narrow gray belt under a sky whose bruise had ripened to something else. The air smelled like when you open a drawer you didn’t know was part of your desk and find a letter you wrote and never sent.

I took one step into zero. The sound of my boot didn’t come back.

There are, I’ll tell you, ways streets end: at water, at walls, at property lines brittle with bad history. Zero was none of those. Zero was the inside of a thought the city had decided not to think. The buildings along zero-side were missing details you don’t notice until they’re gone. No house numbers. No seams between bricks. No vent covers or nail heads. The corners of the structures were too sharp, like paper kept under glass. The barber pole, when I glanced back, was facing the other way. The old woman at the bus stop was standing now. The bag of bread had collapsed on itself.

The first person I saw in zero was me.

He—my mirror, my lag, my unkind future—stood a block ahead, half turned, phone in hand, raising it as if to photograph me. I lifted my own phone in the same second. The screen remained black. His didn’t. He raised his other hand, slow. Behind him, further down, another form turned its head, and another, all wearing my clothes, at different stages of wear. A long corridor of me, accommodating.

I pivoted and walked back toward 150. The numbers resumed like a metronome. 150, 148, 146, 144. The brass at 146 now showed my face before I arrived, checking itself for me. At 140, the phone rang again.

“Did you leave?” the voice asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Good,” he said. “Don’t answer if she asks twice.”

“Who?” I asked, but he’d hung up again.

The old woman had crossed the street without moving. She stood in front of 134, the florist. The vases were still labeled with sticky notes, but the water level had risen as if the glass were remembering what flowers weigh. She held her paper bag in both hands like a sacrament.

“Will you carry this for me?” she asked.

“What is it?” I said.

She smiled. “You already know,” she said. “It’s what you’ve been bringing me.”

“I haven’t brought you anything,” I said.

“You brought me your steps,” she said, and my mouth filled with the taste of wet pennies. “And now you’ve brought me your end.”