Summary

Prologue. First person, present tense narration lists things that the speaker / narrator will never forget, including her “made up birthday … the dark of the Hospital at night. [Her] mother’s face, when she was young” (3). In a separate paragraph, the same narrator lists “things other people will forget: … what is a beginning and what is an end” (3).

Book 1, Chapter 1. In first-person, present-tense narration, Joy describes looking out the prison-barred window of her assigned floor at the Hospital [sic] at people gathered outside. They are, she says, the latest in a procession of people that a couple of the other patients (Sam and Christopher, referred to as the twins) in the Hospital have named “pilgrims,” because the black hats they wear resemble those of the pilgrims they remember learning about in school. Joy comments that the twins, like all the other patients in...