“Everyone was alive and breathing. Everyone but me. I was just pretending.”

Nash Morgan feels dead because of his post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of the shooting that nearly killed him. The novel tracks his recovery, with the help of Lina, by using the metaphor of resurrection—eventually, he too will rejoin the ranks of the “alive,” but he begins the novel as a “zombie,” going through the motions of work without effect.

“I wanted to move, to thrust into that heat, using her body to bring myself back to life […] I wanted to be buried inside her so deep that she’d take me with her, hear her whisper my name in that husky, sex-soaked voice. This was more than a crush. What I felt teetered on the line of uncontrolled craving.”

The vocabulary is full of resurrection imagery. The scene, in which Lina helps Nash rescue a stray dog from a drain pipe, suggests how from the moment they meet, everything they do and say is charged with sexual urgency. Nash feels that his attraction to Lina might be key to bringing him back from his emotional death.

“We share a wall.”

Lina and Nash are neighbors in the apartment complex, but this comment about their shared wall is laden with innuendo. It is a reference to the fact that Lina can hear Nash masturbating while yelling out her name; it is also a metaphor for the fact that Nash and Lina are only as close as their emotional and psychological walls will allow.