The man goes to prison after interrupting two cops trying to arrest the woman on a drug charge. In trial, the man’s mother says he has a learning disability. However, her evidence is deemed inadmissible, and the man is sent to prison at Rikers Island. There, he is raped and abused by inmates and consistently placed into solitary. Every so often, the woman visits him and expresses her gratitude for him saving her.

After a year of incarceration, the man beats a nurse who refuses to give him water. His sentence is extended by five years. The man’s mother then remarries, and her husband prevents her from visiting her son as often as before. The woman also visits less, as she has a new job in another borough. One day, the man is told by a kingpin that he will be bullied less by the other inmates if he helps with a drug deal. He then calls a friend of the woman who sneaks Oxycontin in and also gives him his first sexual experience, though it causes him to get eleven more years in prison.

One day, a new con gives the man a shank in order to defend himself from his daily beatings. Because he failed to bring in drugs for others, he gets beaten until he one day uses the shank on the kingpin but fails to kill him. During his trial, a new public defender comes in and helps him get moved to a minimum-security hospital on the extenuating circumstance of his mental health. While moving him there, the public defender gives him cigarettes, saying that they’re currency in there.

At the minimum-security hospital, the man meets a friend whom he gives cigarettes to in order to win his favor. For weeks, they get to know each other. They spy on a therapist who hooks up with another patient and even masturbate together. They talk about their respective conditions, how the friend has a chemical imbalance that prevents him from refusing. The friend then says that there’s a building called Miller’s Mine in Detroit, a place of talented people, and that he should check it out, but the man doesn’t catch the reason why.

One dinner, the friend is beaten to death by someone whom he made fun of. The man tries to save him, running across the table to get to him, but he is much too late. Later, he talks to the psychiatrist about the incident and claims self-defense. As a result, he isn’t moved, and he is released from lockdown. In his relative freedom again, he goes to check on a door that the friend told him about, which will guarantee his freedom. From then on, he tries to break the door’s lock, as he knows he will either be in the minimum-security hospital forever or transferred back to Rikers Island. Meanwhile, he learns from the psychiatrist that he has a perfect memory and can recall anything and everything he has ever seen or heard.

One night, the man escapes his dormitory and breaks out of the door just in time before the others catch up to him. The security guards try to chase him, but he tumbles down a hill outside of the minimum-security hospital, at the bottom of which is the woman in a car, whom he called right before to pick him up. They drive, stay in motels, and get sexually intimate on their way to Detroit, where he asked her to drop him off. The man asks if the woman is his girlfriend now, but she says they’re just friends.

In Detroit, the man tries to find Miller’s Mine. He sees a loinclothed guy on the street, waves him over to the woman’s car, and asks him its whereabouts. The loinclothed guy tells him where, and they go. They head inside, and the woman hesitantly follows. Once at a door, the man says the correct phrase—as his friend told him—after which two people come out with weapons to interrogate them. The man rapidly shares his story of why he came here, and both the man and woman are taken in for further questioning.

Inside Miller’s Mine, the man and the woman meet the not-leader and the blind sage. The not-leader calls the man forward to speak with the blind sage, after which he is asked if he has a talent that can be useful for the mine. The man says that he never forgets a single thing. The woman asks what the leader’s talent is, and she says hers is birthing twins and triplets. She says that the purpose of Miller’s Mine is to create an underground community of talented people who can share their powers together. The woman asks the not-leader if she’s a leader, to which she says that she’s not a single leader, that there are many.

The not-leader asks the man to tell her about the history of the United States. He remembers and recalls everything that he’s been told all throughout his schooling. He delivers an impressively long lecture, and soon enough, hundreds of people from Miller’s Mine gather around him to listen. At the end, someone asks him if what he said is true, and the man says that he doesn’t know. Right away, people question how useful his faculty is if it doesn’t contain truth. One individual in particular says that he is merely a fountain of misinformation and therefore must be sent away to die.

The woman defends the man by saying that his ability to capture information is useful, as it allows him to recall all the available facts and claims for other people to process, such as in the case of a courtroom where a lot of information is circulated, or in the case of a contract full of terms and conditions. Everyone seems to agree.

The man is accepted to Miller’s Mine, the community of underground tunnels under Detroit with hundreds of citizens, on the basis that he can be useful in overhearing trials, speeches, classes, and so on. The loinclothed man that he and the woman saw earlier is also a member, and he eventually marries the woman, which makes the man sad, as he was in love with her. One day, the not-leader asks the man if he’s ready for love, and he explains how he was in love with the woman all this time.

After a few weeks, the Detroit police infiltrates and wreaks havoc through Miller’s Mine. Some people escape and form a new political society from its ruin. Years later, the man is the not-leader’s secretary. The woman suddenly appears before him one day, and she says he misses him and wants his forgiveness, but he doesn’t know what she means. He says they can’t be friends because there’s too much pain.