In February 1984, Arash Shirazi, an uneducated, unmarried young Iranian man, is conscripted into the Iran-Iraq war. He reflects on the impossibility of avoiding service, the zealots who hijacked the revolution, and his own status as a 'zero soldier'—expendable, which he finds oddly liberating. While getting vaccinations, he watches a woman berate a soft-handed boy for enlisting, and imagines his life as a pianist. His mother shaves his head while quietly weeping; she gives him an old family photograph that includes his younger sister Roya.

At a hastily built training camp in the Alborz mountains, Arash is sorted by height and assigned the number 11, which becomes his name. Around watery stew, fellow recruit 137 tells the story of Alireza, a man who took his dead brother's name to advance in school, served the brother's conscription, then was forced to serve his own under his real name—and died in a training accident. Arash sees the tale as a story about how time flattens everything.

Interwoven with the camp scenes, Arash recounts a childhood memory of taking seven-year-old Roya to a frozen pond. She challenged him to a hand-in-hand race down the hill toward the water; the first to let go would be a coward. Arash slid to a stop and let go, while Roya plunged triumphantly into the icy pond and disappeared. Before Arash could act, she resurfaced laughing, calling him a coward and a dog.

Arash reflects on his inability to cry, envying men who weep openly, and on language as humanity's broken superpower—the invented categories (Iraqi, Iranian, officer) that send men to kill each other. He describes the rituals of training camp: 4:30 wakeups, wuzu, fajr prayer, the absence of mirrors, and his fantasy of water dissolving him down to whatever 'is' lies beneath.

Returning to the pond memory, Arash recalls his fury at Roya's invincibility—wanting to make her feel the fear he couldn't access. He gave her his coat, smuggled her past their mother by uncharacteristically chatting in the kitchen, and listened as Roya, upstairs, sang and laughed in the warm shower.