In a long email to Pascal and the Moulinards, responding to a question about the Resistance and the French Communist Party, Bruno Lacombe begins not with politics but with his earliest memories. He recalls being three at a clinic when his older brother Maxime broke his arm; doctors inserted a metal plate that later served to identify Maxime's body at Buchenwald, where Bruno's mother and fourteen relatives also perished.

Bruno explains that in 1942, his Communist parents sent him and Maxime separately to the countryside to escape Nazi roundups. Five-year-old Bruno was hidden with an elderly widow in a red-limestone village in the Corrèze, unaware of his Jewish heritage or his parents' Resistance activity. His father was arrested by the Gestapo in 1943 and died at Fresnes Prison in 1944. Bruno spent the war years in relative idyll, roaming with other boys, ignorant of his family's fate.

After German troops rampaged through and retreated, Bruno and the boys discovered a dead German soldier in the woods. They scavenged his belongings; Bruno took the helmet, marked "Blutgruppe 0," and the boys chanted "blood type O" as a victory mantra, oblivious that their own family members were dead. Bruno frames this as a screen memory in the Freudian sense, displacing the trauma of his family's murder.

The helmet's lice migrated to Bruno's scalp. He turns this into his central metaphor: lice as transmigration, metempsychosis, the chain of genetic inheritance linking the living to the ancient dead. He embraces ancient DNA research as material proof that ancestors leave marks on the genome, traveling from the many to the one along a "transmigrational highway." His grandmother treated him with kerosene that failed to kill the lice but permanently damaged his peripheral vision, leaving quavering vertical pleats at the edges of sight. Bruno reads these crimps as glimpses of a critical point between seen and unseen worlds, a riddle of history and a dream of a future that does not negate the past. He briefly references having raised three children, which the narrator notes is his sole acknowledgment in these letters of his lost daughter.

Sadie, reading the email, recognizes Bruno's visual disturbance as ordinary ocular migraines, which she also experiences. Where Bruno extracts cosmic meaning, she dismisses them as a vascular event her doctor told her to ignore.