You have just received a piece of paper with Oriental characters while on the trolley and as you look around you realize your leg is bleeding. Your vision disappears in a “kaleidoscope of color” and “an artery in your brain bursts.” Someone hits you and you fall to the floor, which smells like ashes and leather and has “smudges of black and gray and yellow-brown.” You are unknown as you die in an unknown city.

It is clear that the person had a brain aneurysm with impaired vision and when it burst it was fatal. This may have been a natural aneurysm that ruptured with the change in blood flow after the leg was cut, or the person may have been poisoned to form an rupturable aneurysm.

In response to Jen’s struggle with an ordinary life, Eric states We can’t demand a particular outcome; we’re not entitled to any particular outcome. it’ the expectation that makes us so miserable when things go wrong. This is one of the more poignant statements Eric makes in the novel. At a later time, he also addresses the fact that there also very unexpected outcomes, such as writing in a book with a stranger and getting into a lot of trouble.

In response to the line, “You weren’t quite unknown enough, were you?” Jen talks about how she was not careful in her research and how they left many traces going back to them. This implies that if you were “unknown enough,” then you would never have been caught or even had reason to be suspected of something.

hard to imagine anything VMS would be less likely to do
You don’t believe FXC here?
I don’t believe FXC anywhere
He sounds sincere to me.