I took the headphones off and put them on the desk and did not touch them for a long time.
I thought about the recorder. I had taken it out of my jacket at approximately the twenty-two minute mark, pressed record, held it for a moment before dropping it back in my pocket. The case was sturdy — the recorder wouldn’t have accidentally started or stopped. I had checked the battery and memory card before I left the flat that morning. Everything had been in order.
I thought about the park. Meridian Park was open and well-lit at seven forty in the morning. I had seen a man with a dog at the entrance and a woman running on the far path. Otherwise I had been alone, which was why I chose that time — early enough for quiet, late enough for daylight.
I had not sat down. I had not placed the recorder on any surface. I had kept moving for the entire walk.
Whatever had been recorded in the second section had not been recorded by me.
I called my friend Marc, who worked in audio production and could be trusted to approach strange things practically. I sent him the file and asked him to listen to the last twenty minutes without telling him why. He called me back forty minutes later.
“The first section is ambient exterior,” he said. “The second section is interior. Different acoustic signature entirely — low ceiling, hard surfaces, small space. Like a bathroom, maybe, or a narrow room.”
“It was recorded outdoors,” I said. “In a park.”
A pause. “Anna, that’s not possible. The room signature is very clear. There are walls. Close ones.”
I told him about the voice. He was quiet.
“Play it to me again,” he said. “The part with the voice.”
I played it through the phone, holding it near the laptop speaker. When it ended he was still quiet.
“It says your name,” he said.
“I know.”
“The short version.”
“I know.”
Another pause, longer. “I don’t know what to tell you,” he said. “The file is internally consistent — nothing’s been edited, no splicing, the metadata shows a single continuous recording. But the acoustic environment changes completely at the forty-four minute mark. That shouldn’t be possible.”
“It also shouldn’t be possible for someone to say my name,” I said.
He agreed. We stayed on the phone in silence for a moment.
“Delete the file,” he said finally. “And don’t go back to that park.”
I did not delete the file. I am aware this was not the rational choice, but I have found, in the weeks since, that rationality is less useful than I always assumed when the thing you are trying to think through does not obey rational rules. Instead I kept listening. Not obsessively — not every day — but carefully, the way I listened to all my recordings. Going back over it with attention, trying to hear what I had missed.
There were things I had missed.
In the breathing section, underneath the page-turning, a sound I had initially filed as background noise: a clock. Steady, mechanical, the particular tick of an older analogue clock, the kind with a visible movement. I did not have a clock like that. No one I knew had a clock like that.
And in the final thirty seconds, after the voice said my name, a second sound I had missed entirely in the first dozen listens. Soft, sequential, almost below the threshold of perception.
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