A House Book
Fiction
The record shop arrived inside the house at eleven seventeen.
It occupied the wall where the house had been reasonably certain it kept a wall.
There was a narrow door, a dusty window, and a painted sign:
RECORDS
Underneath, in smaller letters:
WE BUY NOTHING.
WE HAVE ENOUGH TROUBLE SELLING WHAT WE LOVE.
The house checked behind the refrigerator.
The wall had not gone there.
Dustin stood in front of the window.
“Was that here?”
“No,” said the house.
“Are we going in?”
The house looked at the opening hours.
WHEN THE OWNER GETS HERE.
From inside came the noise of somebody dropping a box and then trying to persuade the contents that this had been intentional.
Dustin opened the door.
A bell rang.
“Closed,” called a voice.
“The door was open.”
“A recurring problem.”
Behind the counter stood a woman in a green cardigan. She had a pencil behind each ear and was looking for a pencil.
The house pointed.
“Yes,” she said. “But those are for other things.”
The shop contained four record bins, one chair, and a turntable with its lid propped open by a wooden spoon. A small fan turned toward the ceiling. There were no records.
Dustin looked into the nearest bin.
Its label said:
THINGS PEOPLE NEARLY BROUGHT IN
The next one said:
THE GOOD VERSION IS AT HOME
The third said:
YOU HAVE TO UNDERSTAND WHAT I WAS TRYING TO DO
The fourth had no label.
“What goes in that one?” asked the house.
“Records.”
“Why is it empty?”
The woman spread her hands.
Dustin put his hand in his pocket.
The house noticed, but found something else to look at.
There was an excellent crack in the ceiling.
The record was smaller than the house expected.
Dustin placed it on the counter between two pale rings left by old coffee cups.
A handwritten sleeve said:
BIRDSONG CALL AND RESPONSE
The woman lifted it carefully.
“How long?”
“Forty-three seconds.”
She checked the clock.
“Plenty of time.”
“It’s a little—”
“Does it play?”
“Yes.”
“Then we’re ahead of most of the stock.”
She slid the record from its sleeve.
The house moved closer. Dustin moved half a step back.
The woman lowered the needle.
For a moment there was the soft, expectant noise a room makes when it has agreed to listen.
Then the music began.
In this shop, music had weight.
The first notes settled lightly on the counter. Others crossed the floor in uneven little steps, passing beneath the chair and coming out the other side. A phrase rose to the ceiling and lingered near the crack the house had been admiring.
The woman stopped searching for her pencil.
Dustin watched the turntable.
At forty-three seconds, the needle reached the middle.
Outside the shop window stood a man holding a bag of oranges.
He had stopped walking.
Nobody inside moved.
Then the man adjusted his grip on the bag and continued down the hall.
“Well,” said the woman.
Dustin looked up.
“The turntable works.”
The house had been preparing a much larger statement. It put it away.
The woman returned the needle to its rest.
“Would you like it in the window?”
Dustin looked at the four empty bins.
“Just that one?”
“It’s the one you brought.”
Displaying the record required a stand.
The woman had several.
One was too tall. One leaned backward. One was designed to hold a plate and regarded the change in profession with visible resentment.
The house offered to become a shelf.
“You’re already a building,” said the woman. “Try delegating.”
They chose the plate stand.
It held the record at a slight angle, as though the music had arrived with a question.
The woman found a blank card.
“What should I write?”
Dustin considered this.
The house considered this.
Behind them, something began assembling itself.
It started as a small desk.
Then came a second desk, a noticeboard, three lamps, and a person in shirtsleeves carrying a stack of forms.
“Release strategy,” he said.
Another person appeared with a tape measure.
“Audience development.”
A third arrived rolling a large whiteboard.
“Before we decide anything, we should define success.”
The record shop became difficult to stand in.
The house found itself pressed against a bin of nonexistent jazz.
“Where did you come from?” it asked.
“Somebody put a song in a window.”
The person with the tape measure extended it across Dustin’s shoulders.
“What are you doing?”
“Estimating reach.”
The woman in the green cardigan took the tape measure away.
“Out.”
“We haven’t established the campaign.”
“Correct.”
“The work needs a story.”
“It has a sleeve.”
“A sleeve isn’t a story.”
“It has a back.”
She opened the door.
The three people went out, taking their furniture with them. The whiteboard caught briefly on the frame.
“Forty-three seconds is a challenging length,” its owner said.
“So is this conversation,” said the woman.
She shut the door.
Dustin laughed.
The house felt the laugh move through a floor joist it had believed was only there for structural reasons.
The woman picked up the card again.
“How about the title?”
“Yes,” said Dustin.
She wrote it.
Underneath, she added:
ASK TO HEAR IT
Then she placed the card beside the record.
The first customer was a bird.
It walked through the open door at twelve oh six.
The house had opened the door because the shop was warm. It had not expected the weather to send a representative.
The bird inspected the floor, the counter, and a small screw near the skirting board.
Then it looked up at the window.
“That’s a bird,” whispered the house.
“I see it,” said Dustin.
“Should we do something?”
“Like what?”
The house had several ideas, most of them involving bowls.
The bird hopped onto the chair.
From there it flew to the counter and stood beside the turntable.
The woman lowered the needle.
The music played.
The bird turned its head.
Halfway through, it pecked at the pencil beside the till.
At the end, it relieved itself on a receipt.
The house stared.
The woman tore off the affected portion.
“Critic?”
“Customer,” she said.
The bird took the pencil.
It was much too long to carry through the doorway horizontally. There followed a short practical demonstration of determination failing to replace geometry.
Dustin opened the door wider.
The bird rotated.
It got through.
They watched it disappear down the hall with the pencil extending on either side of its head.
“Do you think it liked the song?” asked the house.
“I think it liked the pencil,” said Dustin.
The woman nodded.
She took the pencil from behind her left ear and put it beside the till.
For the first time since they had arrived, she knew where one was.
By one o’clock, four people had listened.
A delivery driver heard eleven seconds before his phone rang.
A child listened twice, then asked whether the turntable could play a cracker.
An elderly man stood with his eyes closed. When it ended, he asked the price of the chair.
The fourth person was the man with the oranges.
He came back without the bag.
“I heard something earlier,” he said.
Dustin pointed to the window.
“That?”
“I think so.”
The woman put the record on.
The man stayed near the door. He wore a dark coat with one button replaced by a button that did not match. His hands were red from the cold.
This time, he heard the whole thing.
When it ended, he nodded once.
“There’s a place in the middle,” he said.
Dustin waited.
The man moved his fingers slightly, searching for the shape.
“It goes a little longer than I thought it would.”
He stopped moving his fingers.
“I liked that.”
Then he asked whether there was somewhere nearby to get a sandwich.
The woman gave him directions.
After he left, the house looked at Dustin.
Dustin was still looking at the door.
The house wanted to preserve the moment. It looked around for something suitable.
There were sleeves, cards, a cash register, a cupboard, and a small drawer marked STRING.
The house opened the drawer.
Inside was string.
It found this unexpectedly unhelpful.
“What are you doing?” Dustin asked.
“Nothing.”
“Were you going to put that in a drawer?”
“Possibly.”
“How?”
“I hadn’t reached that part.”
Dustin sat in the chair.
The chair creaked.
From outside came the sound of the man asking somebody to repeat the sandwich directions.
At two thirteen, Dustin picked up the record.
The house’s windows tightened.
“Something wrong?”
“I could change a few things.”
The woman looked over her glasses.
“You could.”
“There’s one part.”
“There usually is.”
Dustin turned the sleeve over.
The back was blank.
He studied it for a while.
The house waited. It was getting better at this, although waiting remained easier when somebody provided an oven timer.
“Could I bring another version?”
“Yes,” said the woman.
“What happens to this one?”
“What would you like to happen?”
He glanced at the turntable.
The house remembered the man’s fingers hovering in the air.
It also remembered the bird with the pencil.
Neither memory seemed qualified to make the decision.
Dustin put the record back on its stand.
“This one can stay.”
The woman reached under the counter and produced a second blank sleeve.
“For later,” she said.
He took it.
It weighed almost nothing.
Toward closing, the shop began shrinking.
The house noticed when the far wall moved inward by the width of a biscuit.
“Is that supposed to happen?”
“Rent,” said the woman.
The bins folded themselves flat. The fan unscrewed from its stand and settled into a drawer. The chair remained stubbornly a chair.
Dustin helped carry it out.
The record stayed in the window.
“Won’t it get crushed?”
“The window stays.”
“What about the shop?”
“It’ll be here when someone asks.”
The house disliked this answer from an architectural perspective.
The woman put on her coat.
She removed both pencils from behind her ears, counted them, frowned, and put them back.
At the door, she handed Dustin a small brass key.
“What’s this for?”
“The player.”
“I thought that was yours.”
“It comes with the window.”
She stepped into the hall.
For a moment she seemed about to say something else. Instead, she adjusted the collar of her coat and went toward the stairs.
The house watched the narrow shop draw itself inward.
The counter became a ledge.
The turntable settled beneath it.
The empty bins folded into the depth of the wall with the soft sound of cardboard being put away after a move.
Then there was only a window, a record, and a little brass keyhole.
The house checked its floor plan.
It would have to make a correction.
Dustin pulled the chair over and sat down.
“Play it again?”
The house would have said yes immediately, but the question had been addressed to no one in particular, and it wanted to leave room.
Dustin turned the key.
The music began.
The house listened from the kitchen, the doorway, and the small place behind the refrigerator where nobody ever looked unless something had gone wrong.
At the end, Dustin kept sitting.
A pipe clicked.
Outside, a car went past.
Then came a faint tapping at the window.
The bird had returned.
It was holding the pencil in its beak.
“Oh,” said the house.
The bird laid the pencil on the sill.
For one grand, foolish second, the house thought it understood everything.
Then the bird pulled at the edge of the handwritten card.
It wanted that too.
Dustin laughed and opened the window.
“Leave the title.”
He tore a strip from the blank sleeve the woman had given him.
The bird accepted it.
It flew away with the paper trailing behind.
Dustin watched until it was gone. Then he set the pencil beside the player and turned the key once more.
This time, while the song played, he went to make himself a sandwich.