How It All Goes Down
Remembered
- After the implantation of the prologue, the soul wakes up inside her body, "twined […] inescapably into its ever breath and reflex until it was no longer a separate entity. It was me." (1.4)
- As she's struggling to adapt to all these new senses—sight, sound, taste, smell, uncontrollable desire to eat Cheetos—she experiences her first memory, the memory of her new body's last few minutes.
- The narrative shifts to present tense (and a sans-serif font) to show us this last memory, a memory of a woman pursued. She throws herself down an empty elevator shaft instead of letting her pursuers catch her.
- Back to the present: our narrator is thinking about what she just remembered (chapter title alert!) when she's hit with another memory. This one is brief, but powerful: a face.
- She doesn't know the face, but she knows the face, if that makes sense. (It doesn't, but it will, don't worry.)
- Also, even though she doesn't know what studliness is, she knows this man she's seeing is a Grade-A hunk.
- Right before someone comes into the room, our narrator hears a voice. It's a voice inside her head, and it's not her own. "Mine," (1.51) it says. Creepy!
- Our narrator fights back, but in a two-year-old-fighting-over-her-favorite-toy kind of way: "Mine […] Everything is mine." (1.54)