Hai wakes on Grazina’s couch to Gene Pitney blasting from the record player and immediately joins the reality she is living in, with Hai as “Sergeant Pepper” and Grazina as a young refugee still trying to reach America. When Hai sees it is 3:40 p.m., only minutes before social services is due, panic replaces playacting. Desperate to outwit the people Grazina imagines as spies, Hai pulls her out of the house, helps her onto the motor scooter, and drives into the fog with Maureen’s R2-D2-shaped plaster penis tucked between his legs.

On the ride, Hai turns Grazina’s confusion into a final story that might carry her through the handoff: the house becomes a chapel on an ocean liner, and America is just ahead. Grazina slips between ages and histories, asking whether she is old or still in the war, while Hai tries to hold her inside a usable narrative about survival, family, and arrival. When the scooter reaches the dead end, Hai sees the patrol lights already waiting. As Lucas, a nurse, and a Hamilton Home guard close in, Hai tells Grazina that Lucas is the “door” to the new world, and Grazina, still in the fantasy, offers Hai money hidden in a cookie tin as payment for bringing her across.

The guard stops the scooter, and Lucas and the nurse guide Grazina into the van while she mutters in Lithuanian. Hai understands her transfer as another passage into “America,” a system that promises safety while confining and monetizing the elderly. Lucas tells Hai that Grazina is unwell and says Hai is clearly sick too, mocking the plaster sculpture in Hai’s arms and dismissing whatever bond Hai formed with his mother. After the van leaves, Hai can only call after it with one practical, loving detail: Grazina likes Stouffer’s Salisbury steak with the brownie and rainbow sprinkles.

Hai then walks alone through town in a dazed, almost visionary state. He notices spring returning, swallows the rest of his pills, and heads to HomeMarket because work at least offers structure and human presence. There, Sony is back for a cash shift, and Hai, realizing he has lost Noah’s jacket, his glasses, and the remnants of his room at 16 Hubbard Street, asks whether Sony will truly be okay. Hai opens the hollow base of the plaster statue and gives Sony a bundle of cash made up of his emptied bank account and the money from Grazina’s cookie tin, telling Sony it should be enough to free Aunt Kim and help them get an apartment.

While Sony runs inside to share the news, Hai slips away into the abandoned lot, climbs into a dumpster, and lies among the garbage feeling, for the first time, strangely held. His mother calls, asking about school and when he will come home, and Hai lies that he is in a medical lab dissecting a donated body. As he talks, the narration opens outward: Hai imagines the future paths of Sony, Maureen, BJ, Grazina, and others, with Grazina dying seven months later in an Alzheimer’s facility in Rhode Island. Finally, Hai admits to his mother that he is afraid of the future; she tells him life is good when people do good for one another. Drifting in the dumpster beneath the darkening sky, Hai feels himself falling at last and hears the distant screams of slaughtered hogs inside him, sounding terribly human.