It’s old and broken and dusty and dirty now. My father brought me this thing from his only business trip abroad. I was a teenager in the early post-Soviet era, and this Sony tape recorder was really my window into the open world of music and music sharing. It has two decks, and you can record music from night radio shows or from other cassettes, so I recorded mixtapes for me and my friend (I didn’t understand in those days that the feelings I had for this person were not friendship but desire). Those days were like today: everything was collapsing, but completely different, because the world was opening then and the world is closing now.