Summary
After a week off work, Anders returns. His boss says, “I would have killed myself. If it was me.” Anders shrugs. The two men work out separately in the empty gym. The narrator comments that Anders is well-known in the gym as “doc” because he has developed a knack for helping rehabilitate injured clients. He feels people staring. He feels self-conscious as he tries to act normal.
Oona spends the day working at the yoga studio. She is in demand as a young instructor with the type of body people ascribe legitimacy to. Yoga teaching was meant to be a side job, but she hasn’t figured out what her main job ought to be. She stopped posting images of herself online after her brother died, giving up on the idea that she could be internet famous as a yoga influencer.
At home, Oona’s mother complains of pain, but they both agree they won’t treat the pain with strong painkillers because of what strong medication had done to Oona’s brother. She runs her mother a bath, helps her in, then massages lotion into her hard feet when her mother is in bed. Instead of going to bed herself, Oona drives to Anders’s. She wants company; to sit with him and simply be. She is almost dissuaded when she thinks of what has happened to him, but she proceeds to his house. Inside, she thinks it strange she has had sex with this strange dark man. They smoke pot and listen to music. She tells Anders a story of catching tadpoles with her brother when they were little, and how they would hope to watch them become frogs only to see them die. She is surprised not to feel tears on her cheeks. She leaves Anders “with a small wave of goodbye.”
There is a story in the news of a man who shoots himself because he has changed. Initially it is assumed that the dark-skinned man lying dead with the gun is a home invader, but after an investigation, it is discovered that the dead man is the homeowner. Anders notices the mood in town changing. Bare shelves, abandoned roads. Shorter and cooler autumn days. Anders is quieter at work, more peripheral. He is excited to hear that a long-standing client has also changed. But when the client arrives at the gym, recognizable only from his jacket, the man looks around and leaves without a word, as though he’ll never return.
Oona’s mother, who is active online and listens to radio and watches the news, suspects she is among the few people who understand “the plot against their kind” that has been in development perhaps for centuries. She knows there are not many of their kind left in the country now. She has faith that there remain people who will protect her, but she needs to buy provisions. Oona tries to dissuade her mother, but when she accompanies her to the bulk store on the edge of town and sees the others buying up supplies, Oona is alarmed. She feels less confident that her mother is wrong, and is less able to say that there is no great and terrible storm coming.
Oona and Anders go for a walk. Oona talks about the hoarding her mother has been engaging in and suggests that maybe he should stockpile too, in case of disruptions. Anders says he hopes it will all blow over, but he doesn’t know. They walk by a stream that brings back pleasant memories of being young. Anders says he no longer knows if he is the same person under the changed appearance. He also comments on how he has been thinking about engaging more with the dark-skinned cleaning guy at the gym, who he has always kept at a polite arm’s-length distance; he feels the man may be able “to tell [him] a few things” that Anders could stand to learn.
Coinciding with flare-ups of violence in town, pale-skinned militants appear on the streets. They are dressed like hunters or soldiers, always visibly armed. The police make no real effort to stop them. Oona stops biking and starts driving instead, frightened of the militants. Oona’s mother is on a jolly high though, less worried and more optimistic.
Anders goes out to visit his father on a chilly day. He hasn’t been threatened yet, but he conceals himself nonetheless, wearing a hoodie, gloves, and sunglasses. His father, who has become more physically broken-looking, gives Anders cash, supplies, and a rifle and shells, insisting he take them. He waits until Anders stops resisting and accepts the situation for what it is.
At home, Anders wonders if the rifle makes him safer. He suspects that it is better to be non-confrontational, and that being armed would put him in greater danger if people came for him. Anders sits thinking about how he will lose his father soon, the inevitability coming up quickly. He is relieved when Oona arrives. Oona feels a difference in herself, no longer resistant to Anders. They talk and kiss and have sex, slowly and languidly.
Analysis
As reputable news sources report on more people undergoing the same transformation, Anders is emboldened to leave his house and attempt to resume life as normal. Hamid builds on the themes of white privilege and racial prejudice with Anders’s boss’s crass and insensitive comment that he would have committed suicide if he’d been in Anders’s place. With this statement, Anders’s boss suggests that, in their implicitly white-supremacist country, is better to be dead than brown.
In response to his boss’s crude pronouncement, Anders shrugs off the comment; after a week of being brown, Anders has realized the difference between his past and current selves is merely superficial. Nevertheless, Anders is conscious of how white people at his gym might be staring at him and judging him. With this heightened awareness of how he is perceived as different, he finds it impossible to behave with the naturalness he once unconsciously enjoyed as a member of the racial majority.
The theme of mortality arises with the narrator’s commentary on how changed people are killing themselves rather than living their lives with dark skin. Societal collapse returns as a theme when Anders notices the first signs of a dramatic change coming as people stop taking part in society to hide out in their homes. Oona’s mother is among the people who believe it is necessary to hoard supplies to prepare for the racial reckoning about to occur. While Oona usually dismisses her mother as an easily manipulated crackpot, she finds herself swept up in the widespread panic.
Although Anders hopes the paranoia will subside, the next sign of societal collapse is the formation of armed white militant groups who exercise influence on the town without interference from the police. As a young woman, Oona immediately perceives the militants to be a menacing force she does not trust. By contrast, Oona’s mother sees the same men as noble protectors of white people and culture. Having been manipulated into believing that her “kind” is being replaced because of a sinister plot, she is primed to excuse the violence of actually sinister people purportedly acting for her benefit.
The theme of mortality returns when Anders accepts a rifle from his father and is prompted to consider whether he would defend his life against militants, if it came to that. If anything, the fact of having a weapon might put Anders in greater danger because he is liable to provoke the militants’ fear. With this question put in Anders’s and the reader’s minds, Hamid sets the tone for the escalating violence of the winter.
