A man moves to San Francisco to start a landscaping business with his cousin, and though he does his best to signal people that he doesn't want conversation, his neighbor on the flight starts talking to him. She is a middle-aged woman from Slovenia who tells him that she is fleeing from the Earth, but also New Jersey. The man, though aware of his fallacy, thinks of the news he'd read in the paper that morning of Bosnian immigrants being investigated for potentially having been complicit in the violence against Bosnian Muslims and Croatians in the 90s. His neighbor stops his line of thinking, however, when she tells him that she is running from the consequences of her affair with her sister's husband. Her sister had tried to kill herself, and so she had left. She plans to go to the other side of the country. The man finds San Francisco to be a strange place to live—the weather and the people included. He starts trying to date again, using dating apps that feel foreign and stilted to him. He thinks of the time he saw the Jersey Devil, a man-like animal, and thought that it looked lonely.