A woman in a retirement home goes to another resident’s birthday party. On her way, she thinks about how everyone at the home had a life before they got there and how most of them don’t often mention these lives from before. To the woman, “it felt unseemly…self-indulgent, to dwell on one’s past life. What did it matter, for example, that Cynthia, from Ward 8, had been an actress who starred in the horror films that used be made here in Singapore, back in the sixties? Or that Hasmi, from Ward 12, had been a lawyer and was even rumored to have owned his own firm? They were all here now, Sunrise Valley residents one and the same.”

At the birthday party, the resident’s granddaughter gushes about how great her grandfather was in his prime. She’s brought a journalist from a local newspaper to commemorate the occasion. The resident doesn’t want his photo taken and tells her this harshly, but after she insists, he complies. Everyone’s a little startled by his outburst. The woman remembers how he was the first person who was kind to her when she moved into the home, how he was friendly to everyone who moved in. “Something about him made you sit up in your seat and want to prove yourself. In a place where people came to die, you felt—for lack of a better word—alive.” She worried he might become a “High-D” resident, like another resident the woman knew, who got advanced dementia and now was highly dependent on her caretakers.

The next morning, the woman sits with the man at breakfast. Someone brings the newspaper with his photo in it and asks for it to be read out loud, as it’s written in English, a language mostly unfamiliar to most of them. They ask what he did before that granted his birthday this kind of coverage. “Famous like Cynthia?” one person asks. “You also movie star?” The woman reads the newspaper out loud after the man says she should. He was an executioner.

The woman goes to lunch with her daughter, who’s stressed and seems bothered by the outing. The woman gently suggests that she move in with the daughter instead of living in the home, but her daughter quickly says that isn’t possible. She requires too much care. A rat runs across the restaurant they’re in, and when the woman doesn’t get out the way, it runs across her bare foot. She’s reminded of a kid she grew up with who mistakenly ate rat poison, thinking it was food. How horrible his body looked when he died.

The resident who used to be an executioner is much less popular now that everyone knows about his past. He says “[h]e had not intentionally kept it from them…No one talked about their lives from before.” Still, everyone feels betrayed. “And how did Hwee Bin feel about it? If there was one thing she had learned in her eighty-two years of life, it was that she could grow accustomed to anything, anything at all.”

Months later, the former executioner gets “night fidgets,” scratching his arms in his sleep. Eventually, he has to wear “a bed jacket.” And then, he is moved to High-D. But before all of that, the woman is deciding if she should sit with him in the cafeteria, now that he is an outcast. She’s thinking about how his life before is not his life now, and she’s thinking about the other resident who was sent to High-D because of her dementia, and she’s thinking about the rat that scurried across her foot, and thinking of all of these things, she comes to the realization that “[n]o one [will] save her.” She sits down with him. “‘Tell me,’” she asks, “‘what it’s like to die.’”