Excerpt from Notebook 4: "Interview with J."

A few days ago I went up to J. and interviewed him about the incident with the haunted house, when he was a kid. The one that T. was also involved in. I said it was for a scrapbook project or something like that. He was really reluctant; he doesn’t like talking about it and he doesn’t like me very much, either. But I’ll transcribe what little I got out of him. T. is probably going to be mad.

So what do you think it was?

J: What do you mean? It was a dog, it was the guy’s dog.

Did you ever see it after that?

J: No, obviously I never wanted to go back to that house. T. didn’t, either. My dad went there to talk to the owner after it happened and they almost got into a fight, T.’s dad was involved, too. Dad was really, really angry about the whole thing at the time. He said he was going to poison the animal. But I don’t think he ever actually saw it, either.

He said he was going to poison it?

J: Yeah… You know, he was just really angry because my mom was really shaken up about it. But eventually the guy moved and we all forgot about it.

What about all the other strange things, though? T. said that these people did some kind of screaming therapy, and that they kept these strange birds around.

J: Those were peacocks. I think the couple wanted to turn their property into a sort of expensive countryside inn for foreign tourists, and they wanted to have a sort of petting zoo area, with exotic animals like peacocks.

How do you know that?

J: Well, years after the whole thing I asked around the neighborhood about the couple. They were just a regular European couple with no children, but they got a lot of visits. Apparently the husband was a member of one of those Mason-type groups. You know, like the Lions Society, but not the Lions Society. I think they mostly did charity work but they are also kind of New Age.

Maybe the Clan of Adoration?

J: Maybe. That sounds of kind of weird. I honestly don’t remember the name, it was a long time ago. Is that it?

Do you think your dad actually did anything to get back at the man?

J: What? No, of course not. What are you even saying? You know he’s in a wheelchair now, right?

[end]

L.B.'s Considerations

I know next to nothing about J., but I do remember learning that his father suffered an accident which left him a paraplegic some years ago. Apparently it was a fall from a second-story window or something.

Excerpt from Notebook 1: "Origin / Crawl Space"

Many things have bothered me in the past, like “haunted houses” and “creepy” dolls, but when you’re a child it’s easier to forgive (and forget). There was a particular time when I realized that the things chasing me and reaching out for me in the night would never give it up.

I must have been twelve or thirteen. School was out and it was the hottest summer the city had seen in decades. Some of my friends were jumping rope in the plaza, trying to crank open a fire hydrant or something. Back then the streets were safer and I was allowed to wander about within the constraints of my neighborhood, wearing a nice summer dress and sandals. I was a cute kid.

Do you remember Alex? He left our grade somewhere between middle and high school, he wasn’t a very stand-out kid. I remember the others teased him because he was poor and apparently his parents had to borrow money from extended family to pay for his tuition or whatever. His father actually ran a clinic out of his house, you know. The first story was the clinic and the second story was their home, it was this little apartment complex they owned. On this particular summer day I went to visit that particular boy, because we had established a previous appointment to do so.

Alex had something to show me. I always told him my stories, the ones about big dogs that roam about in the nighttime and about Monic, and about the ghosts I see shuffling about my home while I’m trying to sleep. I was making a conscious effort to creep him out, because at that age that was my favorite pastime with boys, but he was remarkably interested. He said that similar things happened in his house. Apparently I had found a kindred spirit.

So I walked some eight blocks over to his place, the run-down little clinic where a tired secretary fanned herself behind a counter, and sure enough he soon came skipping down the stairs to greet me at the entrance. He was wearing an old Thundercats t-shirt, I think, with worn-out jeans and white sneakers. I offered him a chocolate I had stolen from my mom’s jar. He invited me in. 

As I have it understood Alex’s family was in deeper financial troubles than any of us knew or cared to assume, and his grandparents lived with him. They came from the countryside and were appropriately superstitious; one of his grandma’s favorite pastimes was interpreting dreams (apparently they were always ill omens), and on one occasion she told me a thing or two about mine, but that’s a story of its own.

Alex took me to the basement of the two-story complex, which was really a cramped hallway. Apparently it was leftover space originally used for insulation or perhaps as part of a larger design; according to my dad that building was part of a larger complex or something along those lines. It was accessible via a rotting wooden door about the height of a cupboard in the back room which also doubled as the storage for various medical supplies. We had to sneak around his dad and the disgruntled secretary, as the adults didn’t like him going in there.

Had I been even mildly claustrophobic I don’t think I would’ve made it. Even for a kid my age I had to wiggle along on all fours, groping around a damp, winding concrete path with the rickety sounds of the house over my head. I feared that everything would come down collapsing on us. Alex had stolen a lighter from his father before entering, but he was in front of me and the meek light it produced did little to reassure me. After insecurely moving along the path for a minute or so, we arrived at a dead end, at which point he said that we could stand up. He was right; we now had to shimmy along a far wall, I assumed we were right on the edge of the house, between the outer and inner walls. I could hear the sound of a television somewhere, although it was playing something that sounded really old.

Finally, Alex said, “Look.” He pointed the lighter at some point in space in front of him. I had to squint to look, and even then I didn’t really see anything in the dense darkness, so I swiped the lighter from him and used it myself. That’s when I managed to make it out.

It was… well, sort of a hole in the wall, I guess. Opposite to where we were standing was this big indentation in the far wall, roughly egg-shaped, with cut-off wiring and steel frames sticking out of the edges, as if a little meteorite had crashed in there. I could only make out the vaguest contours in the dark, but I could see markings on the inside, which were murky brown in color, amorphous in shape.

Alex told me that, according to his neighbor, the man who owned this house in the distant past left his son to die in that hole when he discovered that he was the product of his wife’s affair. The baby eventually starved and nobody ever found out. He related this tale with mild fascination, with the same tone as a tour guide describes a slaughter that took place hundreds of years ago so it no longer carries emotional weight.

I kind of nodded and stood there for a while. Eventually we crawled back out, played some cards for a while and then I left (his mom offered me lemonade, she was very nice, but looked very tired). I remember telling A. and B. about the adventure and they said that Alex had probably made the story up on the spot just to impress me. Then there was the requisite teasing and taunting about how the two of us would get married and have babies but Alex would be too poor to support them. I swear that year when my teacher said that girls mature faster than boys I felt like life in its entirety had been explained to me.

In all honesty I think that Alex just wanted to be friends with me, because his family, his clothes and his country bumpkin appearance repelled most of the kids at our school. I only went back to his house once, like a week later. It was an equally hot day and I walked there once again. I remember back then there was the whole scare about the Dog Killer and how children were advised to stay at home, but I didn’t pay it much mind. This time Alex came running down the stairs to tell me, with bated breath, that I REALLY had to see something.

We went back in that crawl space. A minute of groping around blind, some thirty seconds of sidling along some insulation, and we were there. This time Alex said, “Look,” with an almost diabolical expression, and took out a flashlight, which was quite an improvement over a measly lighter.

Now I could see things more clearly. The hole looked about what I imagined it did on my first visit, but now I could make out those smudges inside. They were amorphous brown stains that could have very well been made with feces or something equally unpleasant. Together they created some vague shape. Alex told me to take a step back. He said that the figure looked like a baby—he started pointing out the facial features and body as he saw them—but I didn’t really see anything. Just a bunch of smudges and marks. I rolled my eyes and said that we should get back out.

And as soon as I said that there was this sound, like all the air was being sucked out of the house, it was kind of like the sound a river would have made if it were flowing under our feet. The sound intensified, began to shake the planks and loosen bits of paint and dust from the roof. And suddenly we heard this crash, like a refrigerator had been dropped from the top story, and we thought the whole thing was coming down on us, collapsing, so we screamed and ran blindly back where we came from, back into the crawl space, frantically wiggling out towards freedom.

When we got out we found Alex’s mother standing there, arms akimbo, looking at us disapprovingly. We were coated in white paint flakes and dust. She had probably heard us screaming like idiots, and was particularly mad at Alex, who she had warned not to enter that place again. She said she would have the entrance boarded up by tomorrow.

I didn’t get the chance to go back to Alex’s house after that. He was grounded for the rest of the summer, apparently, and once school started it became evident that we weren’t in the same crowds and quickly drifted apart. As I said, he moved to some other part of town a few years later. I’m pretty sure the guys remember that. Oh, and according to his mom the big crashing sound we had heard had been a garbage truck outside, though at the time I didn’t buy it.

What is really weird and makes this entry deserving of being in the notebooks is that, well, I’ve passed that apartment complex where Alex lived several times while coming back from university. His father closed down the clinic when they moved and now it’s a private residence; it’s been remodeled substantially. But I have passed that place and I have looked at it from every conceivable angle, and I have gone over the memories in my head with great care, but it still doesn’t fit. The crawl space, I mean. There is no place in that house—no space—for that passage, and the wall with the insulation space, and the hole. It simply doesn’t make sense. And I’ve asked a friend in Architecture what purpose would a structure like that serve and she said that it would be completely out of place in a building like that, and for that matter it would probably be out of place in any building.

Has anyone gotten in touch with Alex?

[end]

L.B.'s Considerations

Not much to say, honestly. I think it's fairly clear that this was written by T., but this Alex person is a mystery to me. I asked my parents if there were any clinics around T.'s neighborhood in past years, but they couldn't answer.

Excerpt from Notebook 1: "Origin / Multiple Births"

I think that the determining moments in your life are not seen as such until much later. You can only weigh their importance once they are in the past, and maybe that’s the great tragedy of time.

The children’s section of our school library housed a very small video compendium, mostly consisting of documentaries and bad films. When I was a boy, at the end of every semester the class would hold a pizza party where we would watch movies and relish in the knowledge that we were at the doorstep of summer vacation. Our teacher would ask for a certain kids’ movie—usually a Charlie Brown special or one of the Clifford the Big Red Dog tapes—and before long, the video lady, as she was called, would arrive.

The video lady was slight and always looked tired. She had big hair and spent all her time in the video room. I don’t know why I was fascinated with that place, maybe it was because something was always playing. They always had the news on, playing on one TV, with multiple other movies, recorded news from the past, or documentaries playing at the same time. The place was littered with cameras, costumes used by the Drama club, and shelves stacked with tapes. It had come to serve as storage for the entire school. The concept of spending your days working away in that room, surrounded by the past and the present in video form, connected with this fictionalized account of reality, vastly appealed to me. That I was already so nostalgic and taken by such things at that age is a little preoccupying.

The video lady was cordial and patient, and often I made up excuses to spend time in that room. Usually I was running errands from teachers that I had invented. In one of those many excursions I came upon a couple of cardboard boxes tucked away under a bottom shelf, crammed with old tapes. Pulling the box out released the pungent smell of dust. All of these tapes had cryptic labels. I distinctly remember “DOME”, “FUSE BOX” and “TWELFTH FLOOR”. I took one that was labeled “MULTIPLE BIRTHS”. Not sure why.

I hid it under my jacket and then stuffed it in my backpack when no one was looking. Seeing as the tapes were apparently forgotten, I figured that nobody would miss it.

Back then my parents had a big old Betamax sitting in their room, which they seldom used. My grandfather had brought it for them from America, I think. Back then everyone brought everything from America because our country, in its current state of disarray, could barely supply necessities, much less tapes of romantic comedies. So all we had were a handful of bootlegs, most of them badly-recorded from foreign signals intercepted by local pirates.

Handling the old thing was a hassle. My parents were at some wedding or cocktail party and wouldn’t be back until past midnight. So I put the tape in and sat down to watch.

It was grainy and the image had decayed, but it wasn’t hard to make everything out. It was filmed on a camera standing on a tripod, facing the shore. By the color of the gray skies and septic hue of the sea, not to mention the various empty bottles strewn about the sand, I could tell that this was a nearby beach. At the very beginning you can see the shadow of a person adjusting the lens, then they move out of the frame and are never seen again. The footage is simply a long recording of the thunderous back-and-forth of the waves, with cold wind howling in the background. In fact, just watching the tape made me feel chilly; even though I’m pretty sure it was summer at the time.

I sat at the foot of my parents’ bed and watched. I was prepared to see something disturbing—at the time I wasn’t sure of how childbirth worked, after all—but all I saw was the sea. About ten minutes in, an emaciated, stray dog walks across the sand, sniffs a discarded bottle and walks back out of the frame.

All in all the footage lasted about twenty-five minutes. I remember almost nodding off but forcing myself to stay awake. Then there’s that final minute.

After almost a half-hour of recording the eternal motions of the sea, you notice something different. At first they seem like three black spots some ten meters away from the shore. Like three buoys in the water. Then they begin to move forward, closer to the sand. As they do, they begin to emerge. I realized that they weren’t buoys. They were heads, sitting on necks, giving way to shoulders. Three full-grown men emerging from the cold water. The distance, the quality of the video and the lighting make them look simply like black silhouettes. I think they were naked. They begin to walk out of the water. They move in unison, almost taking steps at the same time. They are very tall. The water is only up to their knees and they’re walking towards the camera in this arrhythmic gait when the footage ends. Whoever was filming cut it off right there.

It’s hard to trust my young and impressionable mind on this, but I’m quite sure that the footage was one continuous shot with no cuts.

At the time I didn’t know what any of it could mean. I guess I still don’t. I removed the tape—almost forcefully—and put it back in my backpack. The next morning I tossed the tape into the basket where students leave books that they’re returning to the library. Obviously the video lady must have known that somebody retrieved that tape from the room.

Apparently she never suspected me, though. The next time I saw her she gave me her usual tired-but-polite stare and asked me what I was here for, a cup of steaming coffee between her arthritic fingers. I’m fairly sure that the cardboard box with the other tapes disappeared.

It seems funny to say now, but I think that was the beginning of my obsession.

Excerpt from Notebook 5: "The Children of District 11"

This is just a small incident that occurred to me a few days ago. I'm not sure if it merits being written into the notebooks, but I figure some of you will get a kick out of it.

Now, you've all been wondering what the hell I've been doing since I dropped out. The answer is not very exciting: I've just been doing odd jobs for my parents. Ever since I left university they've been on my back about making money in some way or another. Since mom has the whole catering business getting off the ground, I help her with that. But the other day Dad asked me to run an errand for him; he wanted me to leave a parcel at [#], [____] St., in District 11.

I don't know if you've ever been there, it's in the far north part of town, where everything is more quiet. It's mostly just suburbia, kind of a nice and tranquil place. During winter like now it gets covered in fog, and I mean that, you can't see three feet ahead of you. I got on a bus and rode it all the way to [____] Av., from there it was like thirty minutes of walking to the house.

The parcel that Dad gave me was a small box wrapped in newspaper and tied with a string. I didn't see what it was, it didn't seem interesting at the time. It wasn't heavy and something inside it moved around when I shifted its weight, I think it might have been a toy or something. Maybe a present.

The house where I had to leave this package was your typical suburban home in an affluent neighborhood; nice, clean, a bit boring. It was in front of a park, though I couldn't see much else because of the fog. I was also pretty cold and wanted to get back home as soon as possible. I rang the doorbell like three times before someone answered.

That someone was a child, he couldn't have been older than ten, he was this skinny, blonde kid who rubbed his eyes periodically, like he hadn't slept. I didn't get a good look into the house because he only opened the door enough for his face to peer out, but I heard the TV on inside, I think he was playing some video game. It was a school day, mind you, so it was weird that he was home.

I asked him if his parents were home. He vehemently shook his head. He said, "This isn't my house, I'm just using it". That admittedly struck me as weird. I figured maybe he was a friend of the kid who lived here. I asked him if anyone who did live here was home. He looked at me as if I had asked him something nonsensical. We stared at each other for like a minute. Then he shut the door and I heard him calling someone's name inside.

I stood there like an idiot for what must have been five minutes. I heard dogs barking in the distance and what must have been children playing in the park, but again, it was hard to tell with the fog. Eventually the door opened again. It was another child, this one had dark hair, he looked a bit like A., actually, though that's not important. He also kept rubbing his eyes like he hadn't gotten any sleep.

He asked me what I was here for. I asked him if he lived here. He looked like he was considering lying to me, but finally nodded. I said that I was sent here by my Mr. [____], my Dad, to deliver a package, and if his parents were in. To this he shook his head emphatically. He looked interested in what was in the box, which I was holding behind me.

I was getting a little exasperated with the whole thing, I just wanted to go back home. The district, with its fog and lack of people and apparently sleepless children, was starting to annoy me a bit. So I asked him when his parents would be home, and he said he didn't know, but "probably not today". I gave him a quizzical look. He just kept staring as if everything were normal. So I said, fine, look, I'm supposed to deliver this package here (I double-checked the address at this point to make sure I hadn't gotten the wrong house), so just take it and give it to your parents when they get home.

He nodded, as if finally understanding what I was doing here, and reached out his arms. I considered withholding the parcel and coming back tomorrow, or later, but the notion didn't appeal to me much. So I reached closer to the door (the kid kept the door only half-open, staying inside the house) in order to hand it over to him. At this point I got a look inside the house.

I was looking into what appeared to be the living room. It was full of kids, there were about a dozen of them. They were all sitting around, watching television, but the second I stuck my head in they all turned around to look at me. It kind of felt like when you look at a pack of stray dogs as they're in the middle of eating some dead cat, and they stop to look at you, to make sure you're not going to interfere, and then as soon as you divert your eyes they get right back to business. That's what it felt like. All these kids were fixated on me, including the one who had opened the door the first time. And the TV? It wasn't playing anything. Just static. The jingles and music I had heard was coming from somewhere else in the house.

I stared at the children and they stared back at me for what felt like whole minutes but was probably just a few seconds. I felt a chill run down my spine for some reason. I handed the kid the package. He shut the door. I started walking, half-jogging away from the house. Inside I heard the indistinct yelling and cheering of different kids.

During the bus ride back I replayed the whole incident in my head, and kind of regretted not looking to see what was inside the package, or withholding it and coming back later, when there were adults, if there are ever adults living that house. When I came home Dad asked me if everything went well and I nodded. He gave me a look, like he was expecting me to say something else, but I just went back into my room and listened to music. I couldn't get the image of the children out of my mind, it was like something out of a storybook.

And well, that's all. I did ask Dad yesterday about what the package was, and about who lived there, and he said it was just "a present for a friend". I didn't inquire further. You have the address of the house, so you can go there if you want, but, I don't know. I wouldn't advise it. At least not when there's all that fog.

[end]

L.B.'s Considerations:

I don't have much to say about this story. However, I do know that F. dropped out of university around 2004, as it was a matter of discussion among my brother and his friends at the time, so I think he wrote this story. District 11 is indeed known for its dense fog, which rolls in on winter mornings.

Excerpt from Notebook 2: "Miranda Cassette Exchange"

One morning, E. and I decided that we were going to skip class. For the most part we didn't do things like that. E. was pretty serious about her marks, which was a change from her usual apathetic response to everything. We spent most of the morning at my house (my parents were away on their second honeymoon at the time, so I guess this was in '97), watching really stupid infomercials and re-runs of game shows, and talking about all sorts of things. I didn't really hang out with E. much, she was more of D.'s friend, I guess. But I wanted to ask her about her parents. In the end I didn't. I felt a little embarrassed.

It was already noon or so when we decided to leave the house and find somewhere to get lunch, first E. changed out of her uniform at my place, I gave her some clothes, they weren't exactly her style, as you can imagine, but she was okay with them. We drove down to the little Chinese place at [____] St., the one behind the Miranda there. [Note: Miranda is a widespread supermarket chain here.] The food sucked, by the way, and after that E. had to go to the bathroom so we went into the Miranda and I waited outside, looking at some magazines.

So I was waiting for her outside of the ladies' room (I'm not the kind of girl who does the "oh let's all go to the bathroom together" thing) and suddenly I heard this sound like she was trying to pry something off the wall. I started to wonder what the hell she was doing in there but kept quiet, you know, because E. was a pretty private person. And suddenly she comes out of there, she's practically hyperventilating and can hardly manage to form words. She says something like, oh my God, you won't believe what I found in there, come in, come in right now, take a look for yourself, and from the look on her face it was like she had found fucking Santa Claus in the ladies' room, so I obliged.

First thing I noticed was this plastic thing lying on the floor. It was this big roll of toilet paper, you know, they put them in these plastic casings and you push a lever and pull out some of the paper to dry your hands with, you know what I'm talking about, right? It was hanging on the back wall of the bathroom. Anyway, where it used to be hanging there was a hole. Apparently E. had heard some sort of scratching or shuffling behind it, and, in a moment of poor judgment decided, to pry it off the wall. Behind it was a hole in the wall through which you could see the insulation and other crap, I figured that they had made it accidentally or found it there and decided to cover it up as conveniently as possible. There was something else in there, of course. It was a cassette tape labeled "EXCHANGE".

Back then everyone here was still using and buying cassettes for everything, which was very convenient for us because, as we would find out later, they were one of our safe mediums. Not anymore, of course. Now we're reduced to vinyl and handwriting. Pretty pathetic.

Anyway it was your pretty standard cassette which you can buy in bulk, it had a label on it saying "EXCHANGE", written crudely in marker. E. was like, what is that? Who do you think left it there? I didn't really know what to tell her. Needless to say it was pretty weird. I think that at some point some other girl came into the bathroom, saw us peering at the hole in the wall, turned on her heel and walked right back out. We're pretty lucky none of the staff caught us tearing their bathroom down.

We couldn't play the tape there, as we had no way of doing so. I was ambivalent about taking it, this wasn't my first experience with "Weird Shit", and, although this wasn't particularly weird, I had a very potent feeling that it could become so. But E. was determined to take it and find out what was in it, for some reason. The cassette was unmarked other than the label. So we took it, tried to get the paper roll back on the wall, sort-of succeeded (it was hanging, lopsided), and drove back to my house.

Back at my place, which was empty those days, I didn't have a radio or anything with a cassette player for some reason. I dug out my Walkman but I didn't have batteries and I doubt it would have worked either way. So we ended up having to climb into my Dad's car to use the built-in cassette player. It was a pretty funny scene, the two of us sitting there in anxious expectation.

So we sat there and listened to most of it. It was really bad quality, you might not remember that tape hiss was already pretty annoying but on top of that it sounded like it had been recorded from a distance or something, like it was a recording of a recording of a recording. Anyway, there isn't anything particularly weird about that tape. It's just a mixtape of sixties psychedelia. There some stuff from Kaleidoscope on there, mainly Tangerine Dream, and there's some Beatles, obviously, and there's other stuff, but E. and I weren't really into that genre so we didn't listen to it all the way. Later on, on my own, I would listen through the whole thing out of curiosity, but as I said, beyond the quality of the recording, there's nothing special about it.

But this is when we realized that, since the tape was labeled "EXCHANGE", maybe we were supposed to leave something in return. You know, leave something in the hole in the bathroom, for whoever it was that left this there. The idea struck us as silly. But by that time school wasn't over yet, and we didn't have anything better to do, so, armed with one of my many mixtapes, which are sort of a hobby of mine, we drove back to Miranda.

We talked to each other on the way back there and speculated on what kind of person might be leaving these tapes, and whether she (we assumed it was a she, since it was the ladies' room after all) really expected someone to find them in that hiding spot. We wondered if it was some college student's social experiment; actually, that's what I thought for the most part. E. had her own theory. She thought it was some desperate woman, living a lonely life imposed upon her by her family, who had no form of expressing herself, and, in this desperation, reached out to strangers by leaving cassettes tapes hidden in public places throughout the city, checking back every week, hoping that some equally lonely soul had found one of them and given something back in return. I'm pretty sure she was projecting.

We got back to the supermarket and, happily, none of the people working there seemed to recognize us, Miranda is usually pretty busy at that time of day. We both walked into the ladies' room again. Luckily, the canister or toilet paper holder or whatever you wanna call it was still hanging on, albeit only slightly. We picked it up with care and put my mixtape, which, now that I think about it, was mostly grunge (God, that's embarrassing), in the hole. We figured that maybe we should leave a message. So we ripped off a piece of toilet paper and scribbled onto it, "THANK YOU", quite crudely, and we left it in there along with the tape. We put the canister back in its place—we had sort of gotten the hang of getting it to stay there—and left, mostly laughing about the whole thing. Later that day we met up with the rest, but didn't tell them anything, figuring it would be more fun for now if it was our secret.

The next day E. and I debated over whether we should go back to Miranda and check if there was a new tape. I mostly wanted to forget about the whole thing, because frankly I didn't think anyone was actually checking that hole to see if someone had responded. I figured it was a fluke, or something that had been left there years ago, and whoever had done it had forgotten it about it. E. didn't buy it, though. She was certain that whoever had left that tape was actively checking back. I managed to convince her that we should go back next weekend, because even if her theory was true, I doubted that our hypothetical swap partner was checking the Miranda bathrooms every day. Then again what do I know. Maybe he was some pervert looking to get in touch with schoolgirls via public bathrooms.

The rest of the week went by rather slowly, A. was fully into whatever he was doing back then, I think it was Muay Thai or Valetudo or whatever it's called, it was some kind of martial arts thing, so we didn't see much of him. B. and F. were off doing their own thing, and anyway we didn't want to tell anyone about it. So we just hung out at home (I think we ended up skipping three out of those five days of school, it was terrible), watching movies and talking.

I actually ended up learning a lot of stuff about E. back then (much to F.'s pleasure, who was totally crazy for her at the time), but she kept her mouth shut about her parents for the most part. On Friday we drove back to Miranda upon E.'s bequest and went in there again. Sure enough, our mysterious correspondent had been very busy.

The mixtape we left had been taken alright. In its stead a new cassette had been left, the exact same model as the previous one. This one had a label that was really long and badly-written, and inside that dingy bathroom we couldn't read it for shit, so we went back to the car. This time around we had taken my Dad's car in anticipation, since that way we could play it immediately on the way back home. We got in the car and rolled down the windows, E. took the opportunity to light a cigarette. She put the tape in and read the label out loud, not without some effort:

"Soundtrack to a Manic Night of Preparation Before an Important Challenge"

She looked at me, shrugged, and I pushed play. This time the tape was a combination of New Wave stuff, I especially remember "Bizarre Love Triangle" because, although I probably wouldn't admit it to anyone, I love that song, and then there was also really quiet folk. It went something like this: Bombastic New Wave --> Folk --> Silence --> Folk --> New Wave again, and so on. All in all it lasted about 25 minutes per side. We finished listening to it at my place and were mostly unimpressed.

As with the previous tape, this one had a terrible recording quality. Again, it was like a recording of a recording of a recording. We could recognize most of the songs, and for the ones we couldn't, we usually knew the artist. Later I asked B. about some of them, without directly telling him about the whole cassette exchange thing, and he confirmed most, I think. The most interesting parts were the silent ones.

In between folk songs there were these tracks which were mostly silence and tape hiss, but you could hear some shuffling and moving things around as well, and in one of them you can hear a voice. It's really faint, but I'm pretty sure it's female. And there are these hints of musicality to them, like very softly you'll hear a sax in the distance play for just like ten seconds and then it's gone. I'm not sure if those were live recordings or more recordings-of-recordings. And then in another "silent track", if you listen really closely, you can hear someone talking steadily in the background, I'd say it's an older man, he sounds like he's answering questions, but the quality is too bad for me to make out a word.

E. was really excited about the whole thing regardless; just the fact that the person had actually responded was great to her. Admittedly I was surprised by that as well. E. said that the exchange was still going, and we should leave something else for the person the next time we went there. We decided that "next time" would be tomorrow.

This time we put a lot of thought into what kind of tape we were going to leave in return. We speculated about whether leaving different kinds of music resulted in getting different things in exchange. Whoever was doing this was putting so much effort into it, we figured, that surely she(?) must be listening to our stuff as well. I found a bootleg of a band I used to like, they never got big, so it's not like the tape was worth anything, and its sentimental value to me was gone after a certain incident. So I decided we would do that. We weren't very creative, and we didn't consider the tape to be a "Soundtrack" to anything, so we just wrote "Here's another one" on the label. Nice, I know.

We drove back there, it was a Saturday morning and again we went in Dad's car, though I'm not sure why. We went into the bathroom, took the canister out, and in the middle of doing this, some girl walked out of one of the bathroom stalls. We were incredibly embarrassed. She gave us a weird look, washed her hands and walked out. She looked a bit older than us, probably a college student, wearing jeans and a black shirt. She gave us kind of a dirty look, really. But as soon as she left we got right back to business. We left the tape, drove back, and talked some more.

I guess I should leave for the record—although I don't really want to—that by this point E. sort of opened up to me and told me some stuff about her parents. Apparently her Dad owed a lot (a lot) of money to some group. According to her, her Dad had done nothing illegal, he had simply parted with what rightfully belonged to him, but the other members were angry and his entire family had been sucked into a slow-moving legal mess that had been going on for years. E. was really shocked about what had happened to X before, though, because she never thought things would come down to violence. F.'s theory at the time was that E.'s dad was with the mob, which I don't think is true. Whatever it was, her dad was in deep shit, and I guess that's at least part of why she left so suddenly only a couple years later.

E. and I went back like three days later and we found another tape. This one was labeled "Soundtrack to a Night of Peaceful Dreams". It had a lot of Sinatra in it, which I thought was nice, but not really a guy you fall asleep to. The recording quality was the same, though, which gave the songs a distant quality, kind of nostalgic, and that felt different. Again there were also "silent tracks", and again you heard moving and shuffling, and in one you could hear a dog barking. By now we were getting a little bored of the whole thing an decided we'd leave one more tape.

We kind of wondered what would happen if we left something of our own creation for our correspondent to enjoy. Not that E. or I knew how to play instruments. We just imagined we would leave a small greeting or something. But we had nothing to record stuff with, it was still all at F.'s place at the time, he had needed it once he started hearing that shit in D.'s garden, but that's another thing, anyway. So I looked and finally came across an old tape which is a combination of songs my Dad liked in the eighties and recorded on tape, and, on side two, me, as a young kid, reading out some story. I guess he thought it would be cute and then forgot all about it and taped over it or something. We decided we would leave this, with the label "Something different", and we drove there.

It was nighttime on this occasion, in fact Miranda was almost closing down for the day, and we sneaked into the bathroom. The lights were off, E. tried them several times but apparently they weren't working, so we had to grope around in the dark to find the canister. E. removed it carefully and I felt my way around, left the tape, and we got out of there quickly.

Now that I think about it, I think I saw that girl, the one who caught us in the act last time, the one with glasses, browsing one of the aisles close to the bathroom as we walked out. I looked at her but I don't think she saw us, or pretended not to. We just left. The next morning we would return to find the final message from our mysterious correspondent.

The last time we visited Miranda for our cassette exchange was on a school day, which we also decided to skip. This had become an alarming habit of ours at the time and our friends had started to wonder about what we were doing. I guess we got a little obsessed with the whole thing, even though we didn't realize it.

We walked in, Miranda had only been open for an hour or so, the cashiers looked at us expectantly. We just went right past them and into the ladies' room, which must have looked weird. We opened the door and went right for the canister, but not before checking the stalls to make sure there was no one else in there, just in case.

E. wanted to do the honors for this one—we had already decided that we wouldn't continue with the exchange anymore—, and so she grabbed the canister by both sides and lifted it up, and out came this wave of insects.

The hole in the wall was just crawling with spiders and bugs and a few cockroaches. A bunch of them fell onto the floor, along with a cassette, and there were dozens more of them squirming around inside. E. and I both had to grab on to each other to avoid screaming. We took three giant steps back, E. still holding on to the canister. I whisper-yelled at her that we should just get the fuck out. She stared at the cassette, and, after arming herself with courage for a few seconds, grabbed it and we ran out, not even bothering to put the canister back in its place.

On our way out the other people looked at us weird, probably because they had heard sounds coming from the bathroom, we didn't even bother to act like we cared and speed-walked straight out of that place, into my dad's car, and back home. E. was grabbing the cassette by its edges, covering her hands with her sweater sleeves. I started to wondering how the hell had that hole filled up with vermin practically overnight, although now that I think about it there are several possible explanations for that. She struggled to read the label on the tape. Frankly it is practically illegible, so to this day, we're not sure of what it says, but our best guess is:

"Soundtrack for a Cancer Cell as it is Born in the Center of Your Brain"

For a few moments we were silent. Then I joked that she must not have liked our last tape. E. asked if she should play it. I said no, it had been covered in bugs, after all, although in reality I didn't want to hear it anyway, the label had given me a bit of a chill.

That was the end of the Miranda cassette exchange. We never went back in that bathroom to check if someone was still leaving new tapes in the hole. According to A.'s brother, who stopped by that supermarket for entirely unrelated reasons some days later, both bathrooms had been closed for sanitary reasons, and apparently the whole place was due for fumigation soon. So I'm not sure of what became of that.

If you're wondering about the three tapes we got out of the exchange, well, sometimes I play the first one, the one about preparing for a challenge. I kind of figured I would play it while studying for exams, I tried it out during midterms a couple years later. It's kinda nice! Or at least I think so. Helps you get in the zone. I ended up giving the second tape to a friend who had trouble sleeping, without telling her about its origins. She said it helped a lot, weird as it was.

I personally never listened to the third and final tape. E. took it home on that day. Many weeks later, after we had put the whole thing behind us, I happened to ask her if she ever worked up the courage to listen to it. She said yes. She said it was just "thirty minutes of noise", and that it "kind of sounded like being inside a sewer".

She took the tape with her when she left.

[end]

L.B.'s Considerations

There is certainly a Miranda supermarket located where this incident took place. I don't know if it was ever scheduled for fumigation, and I've never heard any rumors or stories about the bathrooms, other than that they are used for casual sexual encounters. That kind of goes for every public bathroom in certain districts of the city, though.