Summary

The unnamed narrator looks back from an unspecified time to the summer when he was 19 and the world as was known came to end. When it happened he was chasing a girl and admits to being stupid about not heeding the early warnings about the strange outbreak he calls “Le Negrura,” or the “Darkness” already spreading through the Haitian relocation camps. The narrator’s mother had become infected with an organ-rupturing virus the year before and had rented out the family house in Brooklyn so she could go back to her ancestral home int he Dominican Republic and benefit from the country’s lower health care costs.

When the narrator finishes is semester at Brown, ongoing drought conditions and global economic collapse prevent him from finding a work opportunity in the states, so he follows his mother to Santo Domingo where he plans...