A first-person narrator who possesses involuntary clairvoyant and precognitive powers describes a life of increasing alienation: childhood tenderness followed by emotional isolation, a medical prognosis of early death, and a compulsion to foresee others' thoughts and futures. Those gifts bring unwanted knowledge, erode relationships, and produce obsessive fixation on a woman whose engagement to the narrator's brother provokes jealousy and despair. The narrative traces attempts to control or escape prophetic insights, explores themes of privacy, free will versus determinism, and the psychological cost of privileged knowledge, and culminates in the narrator's foreseen final moments.