Suffering severe abdominal pain, a woman is rushed to the emergency room. Her soaring temperature, her deepening distress, her body’s resistance to medicine confound her doctors, who operate repeatedly.

Drifting in and out of consciousness, she endures a fitful fever dream in which the boundaries between wakefulness, memory, and delusion blur then totally break down. Old friends appear to her, comforting strangers materialize by her bedside, and her sense of self, of being an “I” who acts rather than a “she” who is acted upon, begins to slip away. Gurney rides through the hospital corridors become fantastic travels through the hallways of hell. Remembered snatches of Goethe’s Faust and “Upbuilding” Communist propaganda provide a running commentary on her predicament. The scene, half real, half hallucinated, is the former East Germany, a country of secrets, silences, and unexplained disappearances. The time: just before the fall of the Berlin Wall.