You are fanning yourself with something that looks like a very old, fragile, paper document - but don’t worry, it is only a copy. Karl does not seem to be bothered by the sticky summer heat. “The memory cards are resilient. It is not enough to overwrite them. It is not enough to format them. They have to be scratched, deeply. They have to be demagnetized, altering the magnetic alignment of the platters storing the data. They have to be run through a very expensive memory card shredder. They have to be hammered through with a nail. They have to be pummeled with a sledgehammer. They have to be cut into pieces using an angle grinder or dipped in a container of dilute hydrochloric acid.” He speaks fast but you hear every word.

“Even if you overwrite a memory card, the data is not gone. A computer simply does not know where the data is physically located on the memory card, because the location information is marked as unused.”

You are not patronized by his explanation because you know that he really just wants you to understand him. “The problem is that sometimes, I forget where I put things. Every time a new recording is created, another one seems to disappear, and I just can not find it. Sometimes it pops up, totally out of context, at work or during morning yoga and it doesn't make sense. It is just distracting, sometimes even paralyzing.”

A sad pause. An alert signal is beeping from a computer in another room, but nobody cares. “In order to keep living, I need to forget - but to truly forget something, I need to die.” His statement is confusing but it seems inappropriate to ask him to repeat it.