The point is to simply lift the right foot just a few centimeters off the floor, push it through the air until it comes in front of the left, and in that distance, however much it is, a lot or a little, make it come down. That's all there is to it, Elena thinks. But, although she thinks it and the brain gives the command, the right foot does not move. It does not lift. It does not move forward through the air. It does not come down again. It does not move, it does not lift, it does not move forward through the air, it does not come down again. That's all there is to it. But it doesn't do it. Then, Elena sits and waits. In the kitchen of her house. 

She has to catch the ten o'clock train to the capital, she knows it; the next one, at eleven, won't do, because she took the pill at nine, so, she thinks, she has to catch the ten o'clock train, shortly after the medicine manages to make her body execute the brain's command. Soon. Not the eleven o'clock one, because by then the effect of the medicine will be almost gone and she will be the same as now, but without the hope that the levodopa will act.