01 Spooling

• I had known for a long time that whenever we were abroad our telephone was tapped and bedrooms bugged. Everything I said was monitored by the local authorities, which made me grow up: self-conscious.
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• Just imagine the hours… days… weeks … of tapes spooling up behind the walls of our house — or rather: of our “diplomatic residence”. They’d be analyzed for any trace of Cold War intelligence, though the signal-to-noise ratio must have approached zero.
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• You know, it was a long time ago that some of these thoughts were originally written & recorded. It was during one of my brief stays in another of those official residences I’d grown up in (this one in the Bucharest of Nikolai Ceaucescu and all his secret police).
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• But now that makes me wonder:
• Could there be a surveillance tape, since declassified, that contains a separate recording of my original piece? And wouldn’t that second tape be the more authentic version of what I was after? What we’re still after?