A teacher named Ilka opens her Conversational English for Adults class with an invitation to her students to attend a University symposium centered on the question, “Is there a statute of limitations on genocide?” Ilka then proceeds with the lesson, and encourages the class to articulate their personal histories. A Viennese woman starts to narrate her flight from the Nazis, and a Japanese man named Matsue follows. He explains, haltingly, that he worked for a Munich company that was charged with soundproofing ovens at the Dachau concentration camp, and confusingly, that they made "tapes" there. The class does manage to grasp the later parts of his story: namely, that he returned to Japan in 1946 to collect "Hiroshima tapes," and then came to the United States to work as an acoustical consultant. Indeed, he has designed the sound system for the University’s New Theatre — where, incidentally, the symposium will take place. Matsue tells the class he is prepared to return home to Japan now that he has finished work on the “reverse bug...a device whereby those outside were able to relay into a room what those inside would prefer not to have to hear.”  The already choppy lesson is continually disrupted by a Bolivian student named Paulino. The “simple” Paulino speaks over his classmates, and recites clippings of various government documents pertaining to the disappearance of his father, who was a Nazi war criminal captured by Israel. The next day, at the symposium, Paulino is again disruptive, and reads his clippings aloud during the moderator’s presentation. Once Paulino is forcibly removed from the auditorium, a horrible howling pervades the space. The moderator accuses Paulino of causing the disturbance, and Paulino claims that it is the sound of his father screaming. Ilka disputes this theory, however. Thinking back to Matsue’s “reverse bug," she argues that the screams belong to those who died in the Holocaust and from the atomic bomb. Specifically, she suspects that Matsue arranged for the tapes he collected at Dachau and Hiroshima to play through the "reverse bug" and interrupt the conference. The University sends Paulino to a sanatorium and hires a number of experts to find the “reverse bug,” with no success. They must ultimately take apart the auditorium and bury the stage deep in the desert, where it goes on howling.