Sharon didn’t send Klay into the field. She put him on ice. He spent his days reorganizing his office, attending conferences, reading. He labeled and filed the hundreds of documents that overwhelmed his tiny office. He wiped off his whiteboard, though some of the ink had bled in and refused to go. He opened a desk drawer and exhumed the pile of voice recorders that had accumulated over the years. They were nearly all Olympus brand, little black or silver jobs that ran on two AAA batteries. At fifty bucks, it was easier to buy another one than to upload, label, and file what was on them. He smiled as he spilled two dozen recorders across his desk.

It had started as a grade school English project, going out with a cassette recorder the size of a schoolbook and recording family and neighbors’ oral histories. Klay began recording people the way a photographer might snap shots of strangers. He loved the rhythm of people communicating across geographic or ethnic space, between social classes, over generations of time. Funerals were a time of gathering. A dead person’s diaspora returned. He met mourners from Paris, Sicily, Nigeria, Staten Island. He took snapshots of their voices and studied them. He was writing short stories then. Ear was good, but not enough. To get sound onto the page, you had to be perfect.

He continued the practice as a journalist, well aware that secretly recording a subject carried risks, not admitting he had recordings unless Legal pushed back on something in one of his stories. In those cases he might say, “You know, my phone might have been on during that exchange,” or some other excuse that didn’t make sense, but would nevertheless be accepted if his material was juicy enough, everyone compromising just enough to go to print.

Klay picked up recorders at random and began listening. He was surprised how much he’d forgotten. He couldn’t recall many of the people he’d taped, or even be sure of the country where some of the recordings had been made. After a week he looked at the list of audio files he had created—manager, voodoo market, Togo, 2004; dry goods and dog smuggler, Mongolia, 1999; colonel, AU-RTF, Central African Republic, 2014—and realized none was likely to be of any use to him in the future.

He looked at the pile of Olympus recorders he had yet to upload and decided his memories, whatever they might be, weren’t that important, either. He snapped a few in half and tossed them into his trash, felt bad about it, plugged in his headphones, and listened some more.