A nameless young man makes a living extracting people from cults using a drug he calls the Elixir. He and his friend Naomi used to steal people’s luggage from airports, and one day he accidentally grabbed the wrong case, in which there were bottles of a mysterious powder and a play. They injected the drug and Naomi disappeared, but the man discovered that it makes people obey commands and new narratives. Now, four years later, he receives a new assignment to extract a woman named Regina from a famous cult called Ex Libris, a cult run by creative writing professor Marble based on reshaping one’s identity. He injects her with the Elixir in order to reprogram her out of the cult mindset, but she resists the drug and injects him with it instead, escaping.  The man tracks down Regina’s husband, Professor Resley, but he refuses to answer any questions about why he asked for his wife to be removed from the cult. He goes to the professor’s office instead and finds the French Play, the book that had initially accompanied the Elixir in the stolen suitcase. He sits down at the desk to read and instantly falls into a dream in which he and Regina are acting out the play. She tells him that she’s meant to kill Professor Marble, and when he wakes up, he sees Resley sitting on the couch next to him with his face cut off. He runs from the scene and heads towards where Marble is giving a speech to his followers, but the cult bodyguards catch him and bring him to their leader. Marble explains that he means to become a martyr, a living god, using a body double, who Regina will kill, and increase cult fanaticism. The man falls into another dream where he and Regina are in the play again, running from a faceless man who tries to kill them as they attempt to escape to a faraway city. The man pushes Regina hopefully to safety and awakens again in a car with Professor Marble, the faceless man, and a bodyguard. The faceless man explains that he was the original owner of the Elixir suitcase stolen years before, and that the man has been unwittingly helping him create more by injecting it into his clients. The Elixir takes over the brain and recreates itself inside until the mind eventually turns to mush. As he watches, the faceless man extracts Elixir from the man’s own brain and tells him that he has made himself into a production factory for the drug. They drop him off at his motel with one last dose of the Elixir, and he decides to remake himself into a new man and forget his past - except he leaves a copy of the French Play nearby, so he has a chance to burn it when he awakens.