While walking home from work, Thana, a mute seamstress in New York City's Garment District, Manhattan, is raped at gunpoint in an alley by a mysterious, masked attacker. She survives and makes her way back to her apartment, where she encounters a burglar and is raped a second time. Thana, her name an allusion to Greek god of death Thanatos,<ref name=xo/> hits this second assailant with a small sculpture then bludgeons him to death with an iron, and carries his body to the bathtub. She goes to work the next day, and after encountering working with an iron, watching her boss Albert rip a shirt off a mannequin, she goes into Acute stress reaction, which worries her co-workers. However, when she looks at the trash bin at her office, she decides to dismember the burglar's corpse and throw the parts away in various locations of the city.