The narrator gets a phone call and boards a flight, arranged for him, to another country. After getting refreshments from a flight attendant in another language, the narrator watches a movie playing on a portable DVD player used by the man sitting beside him. After a flight attendant screams on board, the narrator finds out that the man beside him had been dead all along. When the flight lands, the narrator contemplates having left this country twenty-six years ago, a time when he knew everyone.

The narrator, with a bus ticket in hand, takes a taxicab in order to get to the bus depot. He talks to the taxicab driver as he is taken there. They talk about the recent strike led by taxicab driver due to fuel tariffs, the death of a child which happened during civil unrest, and the response of the politicians who eventually curbed the fuel tariffs in question. The narrator then shares his own story of having been a taxicab driver in America, and he recalls one particular experience where he experienced racism from two white customers who assaulted him with slurs and didn’t pay him for his service. The taxicab driver then talked about how after the recent strike ended, he got into a car accident, after which he was sent to prison and hit with serious fines. The narrator then talked about how his brother had heart problems and could only afford medicine with the narrator’s help.

At the bus depot, the narrator has two hours to kill, so he goes to an internet cafe nearby to check his email. He reads emails from his wife, as well as his brother, who talks about his declining health and asks for either a U.S. entry visa or two thousand U.S. dollars for his healthcare. Upon leaving the internet cafe, the narrator finds out that his luggage has been lost, and nobody at the bus depot has seen it. He takes the bus, and when the bus stops in a small town, he gets off and meets a woman at a food vendor. The woman, an aid worker, talks about her vision of an ideal world and how unfortunately impoverished this country is. Back on the bus, the narrator and the woman talk about national politics, after which the woman presses the narrator on his family life. The narrator truthfully yet reluctantly tells her about his son, as well as the time that the narrator went to prison.

Off of the bus, the narrator stumbles upon a good-looking man and an average-looking man arguing about the natures of history and capitalism. The narrator struggles to pinpoint which of them he agrees with. The good-looking man eventually talks about a family tragedy involving his father’s brother, a revolutionary who was arrested, imprisoned, and thus separated from his family. Meanwhile, the father has been sick, to which the father’s brother has been financially supporting him from afar. Eventually, the good-looking man sought to contact the father’s brother and ask him to visit this country. In the end, the good-looking man considers his father’s brother to be a fundamentally selfish person. However, he admits that his father’s brother has suffered greatly. When the good-looking man and average-looking man see the narrator, they ask him to sit, but he walks away, uninterested in their personal conversation.