Opening
A thirty-year-old unnamed Narrator, a postman with a dry sense of humor, learns he has a week to live—and then meets his exact double in a Hawaiian shirt, the Devil. The Devil offers a cruel bargain: for every single thing erased from the world, the Narrator gets one more day of life. What follows is a countdown that turns everyday objects into moral tests and every memory into a reckoning.
What Happens
Chapter 1: MONDAY: THE DEVIL MAKES HIS APPEARANCE
The Narrator receives a stage 4 brain tumor diagnosis and a prognosis of “at most, a week.” Numb, he fixates on small errands and loyalties—a stamp card for a free massage, the bulk-pack toilet paper he just bought—until he returns to his apartment, collapses, and is nudged awake by his cat, Cabbage. A voice answers him from the room: his exact double lounges there in a loud shirt and shorts, introducing himself as the Devil—soon nicknamed Aloha.
Aloha treats death like a joke. He sneers at the Narrator’s “10 Things I Want to Do Before I Die” list, then snaps them into a skydiving trip that terrifies rather than enlightens. Back home, Aloha gets to the point: the Narrator is scheduled to die tomorrow. But there’s an out. In exchange for erasing one thing from the world, Aloha will grant one extra day of life. With that, the novel directly poses questions of Mortality and the Meaning of Life and Loss, Memory, and Value: what is a day worth, and what do objects carry beyond their use?
Aloha insists he alone chooses what disappears. He first picks chocolate, then rescinds it after tasting a Chips Ahoy cookie and falling in love. He lands on telephones. Before wiping them out, he grants the Narrator one final call. As the Narrator scrolls through contacts, he realizes he has no one he can truly call in crisis—an aching portrait of Human Connection and Relationships. He finally remembers the number he never saved: his Ex-Girlfriend. He calls, they agree to meet tomorrow, and then, on his signal, phones vanish from the world.
Chapter 2: TUESDAY: A WORLD WITHOUT PHONES
He wakes feeling physically better—proof the bargain is real—and finds his phone gone. In the quiet, he thinks of his Mother, who once rescued Cabbage and a previous cat, Lettuce, and who used to say, “In order to gain something, you have to lose something.” The morning moves slowly and cleanly: the tram is calmer, passersby seem more present. Still, the cost surfaces when he arrives an hour early to meet his ex at a clock tower with no way to check the time or message her.
When she arrives, he tells her he’s terminal. She responds with clear-eyed calm. He admits he wants to revisit their past to test whether his life meant anything. She rattles off his annoying habits, yet also reminds him of their long, passionate phone calls about movies and music. They trace their breakup to a trip to Buenos Aires, where they befriended a traveler named Tom who later died in a bus accident. On the 26-hour flight home, they sat in silence, unable to name their grief; the rupture never healed, ushering in a long arc of Regret and Acceptance.
He walks her home to the movie theater where she lives and works. She invites him to a private screening of his favorite film tomorrow night and leaves him with a challenge: remember her “favorite place in the entire world.” After she goes, he realizes the answer is the theater itself. He reaches for his phone to tell her—then doesn’t have one. Forced to carry the thought alone, he holds onto her a little longer. Aloha reappears, teases him about his “date,” and points at the movie house: next, he declares, movies will disappear. The Narrator collapses at the announcement.
Character Development
These chapters crack open the Narrator’s carefully managed detachment, exposing how convenience and avoidance have insulated him from honest connection. Aloha’s bargain becomes both a literal countdown and a mirror to the Narrator’s choices.
- The Narrator: Shifts from numbed practicality to raw introspection. The last-call crisis exposes the hollowness of his social circle, pushing him to seek meaning in his past with his ex.
- The Devil (Aloha): Appears as a gleeful, hedonistic double whose flippancy masks ruthless control. He functions as provocateur and judge, forcing choices that entwine survival with sacrifice.
- The Ex-Girlfriend: Emerges as the Narrator’s most meaningful bond. Her candor—equal parts critique and care—anchors the story in shared history and complicated love.
- The Mother: Present through memory. Her maxim about gain and loss becomes the moral lens of the bargain; her rescue of cats frames the home as a site of tenderness and responsibility.
Themes & Symbols
The bargain reframes existence as trade: to keep living, the Narrator must let the world grow smaller. Mortality—once theoretical—becomes transactional. The loss of phones shows that value lives not only in function but in the webs of memories they carry: late-night talks, saved numbers, the ease of saying “I’m here.” With phones gone, silence expands, and the Narrator has to show up in person, risking missed connections and misread times. The story insists that meaning requires cost, and that memory is built from the friction of inconvenience as much as from convenience itself.
Human connection sits at the center. The Narrator’s struggle to choose a last call reveals loneliness that contact lists and pings once disguised. Revisiting his breakup shows that technology cannot substitute for grief-work; the 26-hour silent flight prefigures a world without phones, where only vulnerability bridges distance.
Symbols:
- Phones: A double-edged tool—connection and amnesia—that, once removed, exposes who we truly reach for.
- The Clock Tower: A pre-digital rendezvous point that reinstates patience, uncertainty, and the embodied act of waiting.
- The Movie Theater: A sanctuary of shared stories and the ex’s “favorite place,” poised on the brink of erasure, testing what communal art means to a life.
Key Quotes
“In order to gain something, you have to lose something.”
The Mother’s credo becomes the novel’s moral hinge. It dignifies sacrifice, reframing each disappearance as a clarifying exchange rather than mere diminishment—and complicates the Narrator’s willingness to accept the cost.
“10 Things I Want to Do Before I Die”
The bucket-list phrase signals the Narrator’s initial shallowness and the cultural cliché of performative living. Aloha’s mockery exposes how spectacle and novelty can distract from the harder work of meaning.
“Favorite place in the entire world”
Her challenge invites the Narrator to remember the relationship as a geography of feelings rather than a set of facts. Recognizing the theater as the answer shows he still knows her—connection surviving even without a device.
“Date”
Aloha’s taunt trivializes intimacy while revealing his power to target what the Narrator values most. By calling it a “date,” he frames love itself as something he can wager against time.
Why This Matters and Section Significance
These chapters establish the novel’s engine: a man trades pieces of the world for borrowed time. The first disappearance—phones—demonstrates the bargain’s complexity, producing both serenity and loss, presence and isolation. Introducing the Ex-Girlfriend shifts the story from thought experiment to lived stakes, insisting that meaning is tested in specific memories, not abstracts. Framing the Devil as the Narrator’s double sharpens the conflict into an inner debate—what part of himself would barter beauty for breath?
Ending with “movies” on the chopping block raises the stakes from tools to culture, threatening the very stories that help people live with grief. The countdown tightens, and each next day promises to cut closer to the heart.