John Furriskey tries to make sense of his existence. He feels hungry, though he has never eaten before. A strange, steam-like supernatural cloud seeps into the hotel room and begins to talk to him.

The student loses the part of the manuscript that describes the conversation between Furriskey and the voice emanating from the mysterious cloud. However, instead of remembering the lost passage of the manuscript, he remembers when he found Brinsley in a billiard hall and read him the passage in question. Brinsley compliments the passage, in which the voice told Furriskey that he had been created as a womanizer and a reprobate. The voice tells Furriskey that he must dedicate himself to this “mission of debauchery” (37). The cloud fades away, and Furriskey exits the hotel room. He finds Paul Shanahan and Antony Lamont, “men of his own social class who were destined to become his close friends” (38). The men are also fictional characters, and they explain their situation to Furriskey. Shanahan tells a story about meeting his own creator, the recently deceased William Tracy, and playing his role in the competing stories of the writers who use him in their novels.