Sheffield describes Renée's falling in love in a language inextricable from the terminology and qualities of cassette technology. Describing his first night in Renee's room, Sheffield writes: “Melting, touching something warm, something that warps you in drastic and irreversible ways that you won't be able to take stock of until it's too late. That night I felt myself melting in Renée's room” (63), and “I could already tell that deep inside me irreversible things were happening. Is there a scarier word than "irreversible"? It is a hissed word, full of side effects and mutilations” (63). In the first passage, Sheffield goes on to compare his feeling of melting to the childhood experience of touching matches to plastic six-pack containers and watching them shrivel and burn. In the second step, the “hissing” of the word “irreversible” is linked to serious damage to the tire. However, these signifiers slip from their local pivots and wrap neatly around the cassette: tape hiss, reversibility, fusibility, and even “side effects” are all typical of tapes. But the tape imagery works more dramatically in Sheffield's text when Renée dies: "It was irreversible" (144). If love and death are the irreversible sides of a tape, then Sheffield hopes for a kind of reversibility that can be imagined through the technology of a reversible tape recorder: “I count on music to bring me back – or, more precisely, to bring her back forward” (12), he says while listening to one of his old mixtapes. Sheffield's dream, expressed through cassette technology, is that the living can return to the past and that the dead can come forward into the present. He wishes that those on Side B could be brought back to Side A, and that those who never made it past Side A could somehow be brought back to Side B. The reversible cassette becomes the image of true heaven. The dramatic click of the tape vault