Bruce, a recent MIT graduate in electrical engineering, and his ex-girlfriend, a graduate student at Indiana University, have separate conversations about the problems over the course of their former relationship that are spliced together. It seems Bruce's conversation is with a therapist.

Bruce keeps a picture of his ex-girlfriend, which he keeps protected with him at all times in his car and often kisses. He enjoys kissing the picture more than he enjoyed kissing her. He felt silly kissing another human being.

His ex-girlfriend broke up with him because she felt there was something missing in their relationship, dumping him for a statistics student she met during a long period when Bruce seemed disinterested. The two knew each other growing up. When Bruce had attended MIT, he persuaded her to move to Cambridge, but then became distant, sometimes not coming home for long times, and slept with another woman. When she left to move back to Bloomington, Indiana, he shortly thereafter followed, apologizing and getting back together with her. However, soon, she says, he became as distant as before—which was when she dumped him for the statistics student.

Bruce is convinced that "art as literature will get progressively more mathematical and technical as time goes by—that the subjectivity of language will be replaced by direct and objective symbols. He had arguments about this with his ex-girlfriend, who appreciates poetry and thinks this won't meaningfully convey and provoke emotions in the way that language as it functions now does. He sees himself as welcoming her into a great intellectual movement; she thinks he often treats her condescendingly and as if she is stupid.

After their breakup, Bruce drove to his aunt and uncle's house in Maine. However, he had once taken his girlfriend there, and now associated her with the place. Over time, his aunt and uncle's house became more of a "here" and less of a "there." Bruce plunged into a deep depression and "began to feel as though [his] thoughts and voice here are in some way the creative products of something outside [him], not in [his] control." Earlier, in an argument with his ex, he had expressed the idea that people are in control of her emotions, rather than vice versa.

Bruce has a mental breakdown while trying to fix his aunt's stove, culminating in his revelation and confession that he's "afraid of absolutely everything."