Annual Review of Contactless Door Check
A person has been checking whether they closed the door without touching the handle. This has been happening for thirteen months.
Annual Review of Contactless Door Check
She bought the elbow hook in March 2020.
The hook attaches to the door handle and allows the door to be operated without direct hand contact. It cost eleven dollars. It arrived in a package she wiped down with a disinfecting cloth before opening. She has not thought about this in a while.
The hook works. She uses it every time. This is not what the story is about.
The story is about what happens after.
After she leaves the apartment she checks, through the closed door, that she properly closed the door. This takes three seconds. She has done this before the hook. She has done it after. She did it in the fourteen months before vaccines and she is doing it now, in April 2021, with one dose in her arm and a second scheduled for three weeks from now.
The door is closed. It was closed yesterday. It was closed every time before that. None of this information has been retained.
She walks to the elevator. Halfway there she turns around.
The door is still closed.
She has read about this. The brain's confirmation pathway is disrupted by distraction during the action, so the action is performed correctly but not encoded as a memory, which means the uncertainty is real rather than anxious, which means the check is technically rational behavior, which is not how it feels.
She walks to the elevator. She presses the button. The elevator arrives. She does not turn around.
She checks the door. The door is closed. She was going to do that anyway.
The elbow hook is still attached. It was never the problem. It was never going to be the problem. She knew that and bought it anyway because it was eleven dollars and March 2020 and she needed to do something with her hands.
She gets in the elevator.
Downstairs, outside, the air is different than it was a year ago. Not chemically. Just the way it lands. She walks the same route she walked during the worst months, past the same closed restaurants, several of which have reopened, and she notes which ones.
At the corner she stops. Thinks about the door.
It is closed.