The narrator’s question prompts a flashback about Anisa. During his junior year, Mia spent a semester in Granada and fell in love with a man named Andrés. When she phoned to tell him, the narrator had a mental health crisis and spent 10 days hospitalized over winter break. Back on campus, he encountered Anisa, Mia’s roommate, who gave him a detailed account of Mia and Andrés’s life together in New York, including details about their apartment, Andrés working with Mia’s father, plans to transfer to Columbia. Devastated, the narrator was surprised when Anisa invited him to their house on Waterman Street, where she held him while he wept in the kitchen.

The two became close friends. Anisa kept him updated on Mia’s life, and he used each new detail as a gauge of how much his grief had receded. The following spring, they visited the glass flower exhibit at the Harvard Museum of Natural History. The collection housed thousands of botanically precise glass models depicting flowers in bloom and fruit in states of decay. The narrator was astonished. He experienced a recurring perceptual flip, seeing the objects as organic one moment and as manufactured the next. This allowed him to choose to perceive whether something was natural or artificial at will. He came to call this technique “fiction.” He also imagined the delicate structures as sensitive recording instruments, registering every sound that had ever occurred in their presence.

The narrative returns to the present. Chloe tells the narrator that Anisa is in Atlanta, working as a dean at a private high school. He then walks to Thomas’s house on Governor Street, detouring past the Waterman Street house where Anisa and Mia once lived.

He knocks despite being told to let himself in, then enters and calls out. Thomas, whose movements are quick for a man his age, emerges from the kitchen carrying a tray of coffee, cream, and French cookies. The narrator had expected dinner. While Thomas briefly leaves the room, the narrator surveys the walls, dense with paintings, prints, and collected objects, but cannot settle into looking; the compulsion to check his phone keeps pulling his attention away. When Thomas returns, the narrator describes a student play in which his friend Arjun played a professor who repeatedly spilled water on overhead projector transparencies, erasing the projected text until the repetition became unexpectedly moving.

Thomas mentions he will soon travel to Switzerland, then asks after Mia and Eva. The narrator raises Eva’s school-related anxiety, explaining that she has recently lost her best friend to another girl and that she is worried about climate disasters and political turmoil. He steps away to use the kitchen phone. On the way, he finds the dining room table set with an incoherent spread: smoked salmon, rolls, asparagus, cheese, visibly moldy strawberries, and an open wine bottle. In the kitchen he notices further disorder, including an ironing board against the oven, half-consumed cups on the counter, a stove clock stuck on 12:00. He calls Mia twice and reaches only her voicemail. Returning to the living room, he finds that Thomas asks him the same question that he asked about Mia and Eva before the narrator stepped away.

The narrator suggests they talk informally tonight and conduct the formal recording the next morning. Thomas resists, saying he turned the music off precisely to begin now, and adds that one cannot know what a new day will bring. When Thomas asks if the narrator is recording, the narrator lies, setting his dead phone face-down beside the lamp. Thomas smiles and likens it to a black box. He mentions having dreamt the previous night of the filmmaker Werner Schroeter.

The narrator asks whether any subjects are off-limits. Thomas says he does not discuss his son, Max, in interviews, not out of resentment but because he does not want to speak for him. He also mentions that his granddaughter, Emmie, has been experiencing disordered eating but is improving. He fetches the wine bottle from the dining room and pours the narrator a full glass, drinking none himself.

Thomas begins speaking about the radio as his earliest memory, framing it as a return to the primal experience of voice without a body. His first sound memory is Adolf Hitler’s voice on the radio, rising endlessly in pitch, which he connects to the Shepard tone, a musical scale that gives listeners the impression that it is ascending without limit. He suggests that because of the radio, he came to believe that the world is full of invisible messages. He likens the world to a film in which an invisible radio appears in every scene and supplies its score while the characters around it remain unaware of it or a painting with an angel none of the human figures can see. He describes his father as a man who absorbed his convictions from the radio and joined the Nazi party early. Thomas thus describes his father as someone whose beliefs were not formed but received.

Discussing his parents’ eyes leads Thomas to mention Virginie, Max’s mother. The narrator then recounts his dream of the Paris school in order to describe the woman in the headscarf who stopped him from picking Eva up. He wonders whether the woman might have resembled Virginie. Thomas reinterprets the dream as his own or Max’s: the woman, in his reading, is Virginie delivering a message to Thomas through the narrator, warning Thomas not to go to Switzerland. When the narrator reminds Thomas that he had dreamt of Schroeter the previous night, Thomas denies it, claiming he has not recalled any dream since recovering from a serious illness.

Thomas grows agitated when the conversation dwells on Virginie, insisting they had agreed not to discuss her while recording, even though his only prior stipulation was about Max. He continues to co-opt the dream’s narrative, placing young Max as the child waiting in the school courtyard and himself as the perpetually late father. When the narrator objects that his dream was clearly set in the present, citing the fact that everyone carried phones, Thomas dismisses those elements as incidental, arguing that phones function to screen out the dead and the distant, while dreams allow them to appear.

Thomas then insists he had invited the narrator to accompany him to Switzerland and accuses the narrator of making a false claim to never have been there. He describes in precise detail a trip they took together in 2004 to make a short film about the filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard: a dinner in Geneva, a walk through a cathedral, a view of a blue lake, a sighting of a kingfisher. The narrator concedes he must have misremembered and apologizes. Thomas grows more agitated still, comparing the narrator’s daughter to Virginie and accusing the narrator of leaving a struggling child at home in order to cause him pain. He questions why the narrator is trying to erase the memory of Switzerland, where Thomas plans to go. Thomas specifically mentions a place in Zurich called Dignitas. During this outburst, Thomas directly refers to the narrator as his son. He tells the narrator to stop the recording and call his daughter, asking pointedly whether the device still has power.

The narrator has another flashback set shortly after the visit to the glass flowers. Walking toward downtown Providence at dusk, the narrator spots Mia outside the Providence Athenaeum. He steadies himself and approaches. They speak briefly and he asks about Andrés, referencing Anisa’s detailed updates. Mia is baffled: Andrés has never set foot in the United States and is still in Granada. She has been living at home, commuting to campus to help care for her grandmother. She cannot explain why Anisa told him otherwise.

The narrative returns to the present. The narrator performs the gesture of stopping the recording, pretending to tap his dead phone and pocketing it. Thomas’s agitation stops immediately. He smiles, briefly takes the narrator’s hands, then heads upstairs, humming.

Alone, the narrator reflects on the mental health crisis he had in college, during which he experienced two kinds of auditory hallucination. In the first, his thoughts would occasionally break out into audible speech, which he would hear just to his right. In the second, ordinary noise would briefly resolve into words before dissolving again. He recalls how Thomas helped him to resolve these hallucinations. Thomas was then collaborating on an electronic opera with a musician named Anna Bartosz. He brought the narrator to a campus recording studio, had him listen several times to a full recording of Bartosz singing “The Internationale,” then had an engineer convert the file to MIDI, stripping out all vocal content. Listening to the file played back on a virtual piano, the narrator could still make out ghostly traces of Bartosz’s voice. Thomas explained that the brain, primed by the earlier listening, generates the voice it expects to hear. Hence, hallucination is a social phenomenon, rather than a private disorder.

Uncertain whether to follow Thomas upstairs or leave, the narrator goes to the dining room and eats. The word “dignity” surfaces oddly in his mind, which he traces back to Thomas’s mention of Dignitas. The narrator assumes Dignitas is a small museum and resolves to look it up the following day. He goes to the kitchen and dials Mia’s number. Eva answers. The tinny quality of her voice on the old telephone fuses in his mind with the memory of his own six-year-old voice speaking to his father on a similar phone, collapsing past and present into a single moment. Eva tells him he should put his phone in rice. Separated from her image, her voice sounds ancient to him, as if it has journeyed through time to reach him. He thinks he hears a faint click on the line and imagines that Thomas has picked up the upstairs extension. He further imagines that his mentor is somehow conducting the whole experience, crossing wires and layering voices the way he once orchestrated sounds in that recording studio.