The square that is not a record

I got back from the coast a week ago and have not opened the notebook once. What I did instead, the first evening I could not sleep, was take the box down from the top of the wardrobe.

It came from Petropavlovsk in 2009 and has moved apartments with me twice since, taped shut both times. A tin of buttons. A folding ruler. Reading glasses in a hard case that still clicks shut the same way. Underneath all of it, flat against the cardboard, the black square.

I was nine when my grandmother died. My mother let me take one thing out of the apartment and did not ask why I took that one. There was amber in the room. There were cups nobody was allowed to drink from. I took the square because it was the strangest object there, and because it was not a record. I had checked, at nine, by holding it to the window and looking for grooves. There were none.

Eight inches across, black, soft in a way plastic should not be. A large hole through the middle, an oval slot, a small round hole beside it, and a gray paper sleeve gone furry at the corners. On the white label, in her hand, in ink: three initials and the year, 1989. Under that, in pencil, smaller and pressed harder, as though it came on a different day: не стирать. Do not erase.

I have a degree in computing. I know what a sector is and what a head does, and exactly what would have to be true for those two words to reach anybody. There is no machine within any distance I can reach with a slot that size. Not at the university. Not in this city. The instruction is perfectly clear and there is nothing standing at the other end of it.

I have been asking my mother about that coastline for twenty years and she has never given me a straight sentence back. I have never asked her about this. I did not ask this week either. She called, I talked about the ferry, and neither of us went near it.

The square is back in its sleeve and the sleeve is back in the box. The box is on the floor beside the desk now instead of on top of the wardrobe. That is the whole of what happened.