Robert Lukens

And we shape them in a way so that we can go on, whether that's go on with our lives or just go on living with ourselves.

I think so.

I think that's part of the contract when you open the cover of a novel is that you take in good faith the first few pages building up a novel.

And I tried to do a little bit of layperson's research into this, and it seems to be based on people do have versions of this.

I don't know if it's quite as precise as losing your memory every 179 days, but I think it's, like I've thought before, it's so absurd that it must be real.

He does.

The dominoes.

The dominoes.

We hear a lot about the dominoes in this novel.

So I suppose the dominoes project, it's something that was given to him by his past self that our current Robbie doesn't really understand, but he comes to view it as something that's created by his past self,

completed by his present self and then passed on to his future self.

So I suppose it's his way of trying to cross these divides between what comes to be known as the forgetting, which is that this day that's going to come when, like we said, that goes back to factory settings.

And so he has 83,790 dominoes.

And he spends all day, every day, turning his living room into this enormous multi-level domino sequence.

So the entire floor is covered in lines and spirals all the way up to the walls.

And then the walls themselves are covered in wooden shelving that he keeps mounting to get this great operation going through the whole living room.

And this is his full-time occupation.

And he doesn't quite understand why he is doing this, but he is absolutely compelled to do it.

And it's his great project in life.

Yeah, beautifully described.