Hours passed. He built playlists in his head, arranging the stems like movable type. He chased patterns: a metallic scrape that resolved into a child's melodic whistle; a muted trumpet that threaded through a chorus of coughs; a final file labeled "goodbye_take_3" that held, beneath the fade, a whisper he could not quite make out. He imagined the album as an arc: beginning in a room of fluorescent light and freezers, moving through crowded trains and closed storefronts, ending on a rooftop where someone set down a record and walked away.