Opening
After his father’s death, Marcos Tejo stops drifting and starts acting. A night of whiskey and a shattering dream cracks his numbness into fury, propelling him to defy his sister, confront his bosses, cut off his wife, and reject the society that demands his silence.
What Happens
Chapter 36
Driving home with the urn filled with sand from the zoo, Marcos ignores his phone until his sister, Marisa, finally gets through. She barks logistics—dates, flowers, guests—as if grief obeys a calendar, insisting she needs the urn immediately. The “stone in his chest” presses down, and he refuses, flatly and finally.
He seizes control of the service on his own terms. When Marisa scolds his tone and excuses him because he’s “going through a difficult time,” he hangs up. The act is small and seismic: the first clean cut away from her performance of mourning.
Chapter 37
Marcos gets home late, checks that Jasmine is asleep, drains a bottle of whiskey, and passes out in the hammock. Morning arrives with a pulsing headache and a dream that screens itself in his mind. He stands in the zoo’s aviary before the Transition; birds hang midair like glass. A hummingbird shatters at his touch, a butterfly turns to dust, and a nightingale emits a cry so pure with hatred that he runs.
The scene shifts. The zoo fills with infinite, naked versions of himself. One kills others just by speaking; another hugs him until he can’t breathe. The aviary becomes a forest where eyes, hands, ears, and babies hang from branches. He reaches for the babies, but they vanish, smoke, or already rot beneath blankets of human ears. The stone in his chest slams against his heart. He howls like an animal—and wakes to a real, human scream. The nightmare pours out his buried Grief, Trauma, and Desensitization, forcing him to face fragility, complicity, and the loss of his son.
Chapter 38
Steadying himself after the scream, Marcos tends to Jasmine, then calls his boss, Krieg. Calm and unbending, he says today is his last visit to Valka Laboratory. When Krieg pushes back, Marcos threatens to resign; the push stops.
At the lab, Dr. Valka performs her usual triumphant tour. He witnesses conscious vivisections, psychological torture of mothers and infants, and live men strapped into crash tests—an industrial cathedral of Dehumanization and Objectification. But Marcos no longer plays along. He withholds praise, pokes at her euphemisms, and, noticing caged animals, needles the premise itself—are they trying to cure the virus? The implication hangs: the foundation of this world may be a lie. His dry questions and unreadable silence infuriate her. After he undercuts her treatment of an assistant, she dismisses him, promising to send the order directly to Krieg. He leaves whistling, lightened by the refusal to participate.
This chapter also exposes the Power of Language and Euphemism: words like “specimens” and “nullify” lacquer atrocity with a scientific sheen that Marcos refuses to accept.
Chapter 39
Outside the lab, his estranged wife, Cecilia, calls. She offers condolences, then admits she misses him. The confession arrives too late. She senses he has changed—colder, farther away. He responds with tired clarity, asking if she expects him to wait forever. Their brief exchange acknowledges a bond already dissolved. He hangs up, closing the door on the life they shared.
Chapter 40
Marcos readies Jasmine, even running a portable ultrasound to check the pregnancy, then drives to Marisa’s. Her frantic calls go unanswered. The house buzzes with chatter and canapés, not mourning. Guests comment on the falling price of “special beef” as servers circulate. At the center of the buffet lies a roasted, filleted human arm, praised as “exquisite”—a tableau of Complicity and Moral Corruption.
In the kitchen, he finds Marisa’s prize: a living FGP woman—a “domestic head”—locked in the cold room. On the counter sits Domestic Head: Your Guide to Death by a Thousand Cuts, a manual for turning torture into a family pastime. Something inside Marcos breaks. He confronts Marisa publicly, calling out her hypocrisy, her neglect of their father, and her mindless conformity. When she tries to stop him from leaving, he threatens to expose her. He walks out, leaving the urn behind. From his car he watches her, terrified of virus rain, scurry inside clutching an urn of worthless sand—an emblem of the emptiness she mistakes for meaning.
Character Development
Marcos’s grief mutates into resolve. The dream punctures his detachment, and action follows: he refuses Marisa’s control, rejects Valka’s lab, snaps the thread to Cecilia, and condemns the banquet of polite barbarism.
- Marcos: Moves from numb compliance to volatile clarity; asserts boundaries, challenges euphemisms, and abandons rituals he sees as lies.
- Marisa: Reveals herself as the polished face of cruelty—status-obsessed, performative, and eager to make atrocity domestic and fashionable.
- Dr. Valka: Embodies institutional evil, wielding clinical language and authority to normalize torture; her power falters when Marcos refuses to play the audience.
- Cecilia: Represents a past he no longer inhabits; her call affirms the finality of their separation.
- Jasmine: Becomes the sole tether to a possible future, the only relationship Marcos protects with tenderness amid the rot.
Themes & Symbols
The section deepens the critique of Dehumanization and Objectification by showing its full pipeline—from sterile lab “innovations” to the living pantry in a family kitchen. The industrial cruelty of Valka’s experiments slides seamlessly into domestic leisure; society not only tolerates atrocity but curates it.
Marcos’s dream is the raw interior of Grief, Trauma, and Desensitization. Shattering birds and multiplying selves visualize the fragility of innocence and the violence of complicity. Language itself becomes a weapon under the Power of Language and Euphemism: “specimens,” “nullify,” and “domestic head” convert people into consumables. At Marisa’s party, Complicity and Moral Corruption thrives as good manners and market chatter lacquer the grotesque.
Symbols:
- The Dream: A map of Marcos’s psyche—fragility (glass birds), self-violence (clones), and irretrievable loss (vanishing babies).
- The Urn of Sand: A beautiful lie standing in for grief; leaving it behind is Marcos’s rejection of hollow ritual.
- The “Domestic Head”: Atrocity as lifestyle brand, proof that moral collapse has gone private.
Key Quotes
“stone in his chest”
This recurring image translates numbness into weight and pressure. When it “shatters,” Marcos’s repression gives way to action—he no longer absorbs harm; he expels it.
“specimens” / “nullify”
Clinical vocabulary sanitizes torture. Marcos’s refusal to echo these terms punctures the spell, exposing how language props up violence.
“exquisite”
Guests use the language of connoisseurship to praise a roasted human arm. Refinement becomes a mask for barbarism, indicting everyone who treats atrocity as taste.
“Domestic Head: Your Guide to Death by a Thousand Cuts”
A manual turns cruelty into a hobby. Its cheerful instructional tone is the most chilling part: culture itself teaches people to perfect their dehumanization.
“special beef”
A market euphemism for human flesh. The casual price talk at the service shows how the economy routinizes horror until it becomes small talk.
Why This Matters and Section Significance
These chapters mark the turning point of Marcos’s arc from internal resistance to external rupture. The dream detonates his numbness; the lab visit, the call with Cecilia, and the confrontation with Marisa are its immediate aftershocks. By rejecting institutional cruelty, domestic barbarism, and ritualized mourning, he isolates himself from a world built on euphemism and appetite. What remains is a stripped-down moral line and a single fragile bond—Jasmine—setting the stage for the novel’s final reckoning over what kind of future he will claim or destroy.