Footsteps. Moving away from the microphone. Four, five, six steps, and then a door — I was certain it was a door, the sound was unmistakable — opening and closing quietly.
Someone had been in a room with my recorder. They had sat and read and said my name and then left.
I had been in the park. My recorder had been in my pocket.
I have no explanation that satisfies both of those facts simultaneously.
What I have, instead, is this: three weeks after the recording, I transferred the next file from the recorder to my laptop. This one was from a Saturday afternoon at the old covered market — crowds, vendors, the bright noise of a busy indoor space. A recording I was present for from start to finish, fifty minutes, nothing unusual.
The file on my laptop was fifty-three minutes long.
I played the first fifty. All normal. All mine.
I have not yet played the last three minutes.
I have been sitting here for an hour, cursor hovering over the timeline, trying to decide whether knowing is better than not knowing. Marc says delete it. The sensible part of me agrees.
But there is another part — the part that records sounds for the pleasure of hearing what I missed — that needs to know what was in the room.
And there is a smaller part still, the part I trust least and listen to most in the dark, that wonders whether what I hear in those three minutes will be a room at all.
Or whether this time it will be closer.
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