At a carpeted Swiss compound I am treated to an hour of noise and mayhem by my coworker's favorite experimental band. Throughout I am distracted by my uncle's attempts to divide the family along aesthetic lines. On the hovering public drone back to my armored subdistrict, along the grimy waterfront, I run into my coworker who says he saw the band rehearsing before the show. He convinces me to duck into a massage clinic to steal a factory-sealed pair of Grado headphones from a table on which they have been left out for clients. At home, as I recline to read the collected fictions of a Panamanian socialist realist, I come under sniper fire. As I try to communicate this danger to The Narrator by reading a revealing passage aloud, I see a blood stain leap into of my field of vision. I have been shot in the head. When the shock wears off I go on reading.