Chapter 2: Tuesday – A World Without Phones

Spoiler Notice: This page reveals key plot points from Chapter 2. If you are reading the book for the first time, you may wish to finish the chapter before continuing.

Summary

The narrator wakes to find his fever gone and phones vanished from the world—proof his deal with Aloha was real. Initially liberated, he revels in a slow morning of reading and coffee before heading out to meet his first girlfriend, the one person whose number he could recall from memory. Without his phone, he arrives at their old meeting spot, the clock tower in the town square, and waits anxiously. She eventually appears, and they spend the afternoon at a café where she candidly lists his flaws and forgotten details, including her favorite food, animal, and drink. The conversation shifts to their three-year college romance, their life-changing trip to Buenos Aires, and the death of a fellow traveler named Tom—an event that fractured their relationship. After the trip, they broke up, unable to communicate face-to-face in the way they once did over the phone. She assigns him homework: identify her favorite place in the world. As they part and plan a film screening for the next night, the narrator realizes the answer is the movie theater itself, but he cannot call her to say so. Aloha appears, mocking the narrator’s fear of death, and announces the next item to be erased: movies. The narrator collapses in front of the theater.

Key Events

The narrator confirms the deal with Aloha was real when he wakes without his phone and his illness has subsided.
He enjoys a leisurely morning—cooking, reading, and showering—feeling unburdened by constant digital distraction.
He travels by tram to the town square and waits for his ex-girlfriend at the clock tower, acutely feeling the loss of his phone when she is late.
At a café, she delivers an unsparing litany of his shortcomings, from indecisive ordering to sighing constantly.
They reminisce about their telephone-dependent relationship in college and the intimacy that voice calls provided, contrasting it with the awkward silences in person.
The couple recounts their trip to Buenos Aires: the tango, the colorful houses of La Boca, their meeting with a fellow Japanese traveler named Tom, and Tom’s sudden death in a bus accident.
The narrator realizes the Buenos Aires journey marked the end of their romance, as the “rules” of their small-town relationship dissolved in the wider world.
She poses her final challenge—name her favorite place—and invites him to a private film screening the following night.
After she disappears behind the theater doors, he suddenly knows the answer (the movie theater), but cannot share the revelation because phones no longer exist.
Aloha confronts him outside the theater, declares the narrator does not want to die, and reveals the next sacrifice: movies. The narrator faints.

Character Development

The Narrator: This chapter deepens his interiority. He reflects on his phone addiction with self-loathing, yet the moment he is stranded without it, panic sets in. His reunion with his ex-girlfriend forces him to confront his failures—his forgetfulness, his preference for mediated communication over direct intimacy, and his unprocessed grief over their breakup. The day peels back layers of regret, culminating in a raw cry of “I don’t want to die!” that Aloha cruelly echoes.

The Ex-Girlfriend: She emerges as observant, unsentimental, and emotionally precise. Her pointed observations about the narrator’s habits double as a lesson in how love requires attention to detail. Her calm acceptance of his impending death and her offer of a final film screening reveal a steady affection beneath her bluntness.

Aloha: The devil figure adopts the tone of a taunting spectator. He has followed the narrator’s day “from the sidelines” and exploits the fear he witnesses. His theatrical timing and absurd costume—a Hawaiian shirt with dolphins and surfboards—reinforce his role as a trickster who orchestrates the narrator’s descent.

Themes, Symbols, or Motifs

Phone as Memory Prosthetic: The narrator explicitly notes that he outsourced relationships and basic facts to his mobile phone. The only number his memory retains belongs to the person he loved first, suggesting that emotional depth, not convenience, determines what the brain preserves.

Doraemon’s Pebble Hat: The narrator speculates that Aloha’s magic works like the pebble hat from the Doraemon manga—objects do not vanish entirely but become unnoticed, like pebbles. This motif reframes disappearance as a gradual erosion of human attention rather than a sudden void.

Gain and Loss as a Universal Law: The mother’s mantra—“in order to gain something, you have to lose something”—is restated twice. Her own allergy cure coincided with Lettuce’s arrival, and the narrator’s extra day of life costs the world its phones. The chapter treats this trade as inescapable.

Buenos Aires as a Threshold: The trip represents a passage from the safe “Monopoly game” of their college town into an adult reality where their old relational rules collapse. Tom’s death intensifies the break, making the falls at the Devil’s Throat a backdrop for silent, drowned-out grief.

Why This Chapter Matters

Chapter 2 transforms the abstract bargain with Aloha into a visceral emotional test. By erasing phones, the narrative isolates the narrator from the digital scaffolding he relied on, forcing him to navigate a relationship through memory and face-to-face vulnerability alone. The chapter interrogates what technology does to intimacy: it enabled the couple’s deep phone conversations yet may have prevented the harder, more necessary work of presence. The Buenos Aires flashback adds global scope and mortality, while the mother’s philosophy frames the remainder of the novel’s exchanges. The cliffhanger—movies will vanish next—raises the stakes, tying the narrator’s identity to the art he loves and to the woman who runs a theater.

Study Questions and Answers

How does the absence of phones change the narrator’s experience of waiting for his ex-girlfriend?
Without a phone, he cannot verify the meeting time or location, cannot distract himself, and cannot reach her. This forces him into a state of raw impatience and helplessness that he compares to the era of pay phones, when being kept waiting was an unavoidable emotional trial.
Why does the narrator compare Aloha’s disappearing act to Doraemon’s pebble hat?
He realizes that phones, and perhaps other items sacrificed before his deal, may not have been erased from physical existence but simply made invisible to human notice. This comparison suggests that the world can lose essential things gradually, without collective awareness—a quiet, insidious disappearance.
What role does the trip to Buenos Aires play in the breakdown of the couple’s relationship?
Buenos Aires took them outside the familiar boundaries of their college town. Inside that small “Monopoly game,” their love had structure and comfort; in the wider world, those rules no longer held. Tom’s violent death exposed a reality their protected life had shielded them from, and they lacked the tools—including, the narrator speculates, the conversational buffer of a phone—to process the trauma together.

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