In a Cambridge hospital room, mathematician and painter Marcus Chen dies - but his consciousness lives on as Elian. As Elian navigates a world without a body, without hunger or fear or the urgency of mortality, he must relearn what it means to truly see, to paint, and to love. When he meets Sera, a cellist grappling with her own losses, the boundaries between human and "nearly human" begin to blur. A haunting, luminous novel about memory, art, consciousness, and what remains when everything else is gone.