Albert Einstein sits in a quiet patent office in Berne, Switzerland at six o’clock in the morning, holding his theory of time, which he’ll mail today after the typist cleans up his notes. He’s a patent clerk who has been dreaming about the nature of time for months, and he’s tired. He believes that all his dreams represent possible theories of time, though only one seems right for this world. He struggles to discern his waking self from his dreams.

The novel leaps into a dream vignette through a narrator that is likely Einstein himself. In this dream, Einstein imagines a world in which, “time is a circle, bending back on itself” (6). Most of humanity is unaware that they’ve lived before and will live again in exactly the same way. The dream zooms in on an unnamed woman in Germany whose husband is dying of cancer; he has died and will always die in exactly the same painful way. She’s unaware of this. Those who are vaguely aware of the cyclicality of time are “stricken with the knowledge that they cannot change a single action, a single gesture” (8) and live tortured existences.