A man gets diagnosed with dementia. His daughter comes over to give him the news that her family will be moving to California, and the man refrains from telling her about his diagnosis. She becomes frustrated with his ramblings, presumably connected to a history in which he wasn't a particularly attentive or present father. She packs up her childhood belongings from the attic in silence. All of this is interspersed with snippets of sci-fi that are extracts from the man's work as a novelist. At the end of the story, one of his characters—who claims all his work created a parallel universe where the characters he wrote actually exist—comes to sweep him away to another dimension before his dementia sets in.