My corporality is asexual.
-- Narrator (Me'Med)

Importance: While having a heart attack, Sem lies on the bed in his apartment and considers the way the paramedics regard his naked body. He realizes that what discomfits him about the experience is not inherently his proximity with death, but that the medical staff sees him as an object instead of an individual. Suddenly his illness, and the closeness of death, has voided him of his spirit, and thus his identity. In this passage, the author introduces his thematic interests in the relationship between the mind and the body, and the ways in which an encounter with death obscures the individual's sense of self.

All the people I meet today disappear.
-- Narrator (Me'Med)

Importance: At the hospital, a young couple helps Sem move between floors on the elevator. Suddenly the couple is gone without him noticing their departure, and Sem begins meditating upon erasure and disappearance. As a refugee...