Summary

In Chapter 1, a narrator called N, was in the break room at the university where he worked when a young woman named Kirstie entered, dressed in athletic clothes and sweating from a run. Noticing the newspaper spread out before N, she asked him to read her horoscope, which said that she should stop wasting her time on a “dead end” (4). She looked taken aback by the words. N looked at his own horoscope, which read in part, “The path between events that may seem unrelated will soon become clear...you will find yourself uniquely positioned to set things in motion” (5). N found this phrasing to be surprisingly apt, appearing as it did on the day he would attend the open house of his father's former home. N explains that he and his late father were never close. He recalled a dream he had...