1907: In a sanatorium in Temperley, on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, Doctor Quintana falls in love with Menéndez, the head nurse--of whom he knows almost nothing, not even her first name. Motivated by this love--which he shares with his colleagues--by money, and by the promise of transcendence, he carries out a cruel and misguided experiment that investigates the threshold between life and death. The premise is that a human head stays alive and conscious for nine seconds after being severed from the body. 2009: A celebrated artist and ex-child prodigy decides to "bring the monster alive," converting his own body, and the bodies of those he loves, into art objects. The halves of the book are held together by a shared interest in the human pursuit of transcendence through bodily intervention, first as it relates to the scientific or pseudo-medical and the positivism that marked the beginning of the twentieth century, then by way of a radical and absurd artistic vision.