The fugitive starts a diary after tourists arrive on the desert island where he is hiding.[2] Although he considers their presence a miracle, he is afraid they will turn him in to the authorities. He retreats to the swamps while they take over the museum on top of the hill where he used to live. The diary described the fugitive as a writer from Venezuela sentenced to life in prison. He believes he is on the (fictional) island of Villings, a part of the Ellice Islands (now Tuvalu), but is not sure. All he knows is that the island is the focus of a strange disease whose symptoms are similar to radiation poisoning.
Among the tourists is a woman who watches the sunset every day from the cliff on the west side of the island. He spies on her and while doing so falls in love. She and another man, a bearded tennis player called Morel who visits her frequently, speak French among themselves. Morel calls her Faustine. The fugitive decides to approach her, but she does not react to him. He assumes she is ignoring him; however, his encounters with the other tourists have the same result. Nobody on the island notices him. He points out that the conversations between Faustine and Morel repeat every week and fears he is going crazy.
As suddenly as they appeared, the tourists vanish. The fugitive returns to the museum to investigate and finds no evidence of people being there during his absence. He attributes the experience to a hallucination caused by food poisoning, but the tourists reappear that night. They have come out of nowhere and yet they talk as if they have been there for a while. He watches them closely while still avoiding direct contact and notices more strange things. In the aquarium he encounters identical copies of the dead fish he found on his day of arrival. During a day at the pool, he sees the tourists jump to shake off the cold when the heat is unbearable. The strangest thing he notices is the presence of two suns and two moons in the sky.
He comes up with all sorts of theories about what is happening on the island, but finds out the truth when Morel tells the tourists he has been recording their actions of the past week with a machine of his invention, which is capable of reproducing reality. He claims the recording will capture their souls, and through looping they will relive that week forever and he will spend eternity with the woman he loves. Although Morel does not mention her by name, the fugitive is sure he is talking about Faustine.
After hearing that the people recorded on previous experiments are dead, one of the tourists guesses correctly they will die, too. The meeting ends abruptly as Morel leaves in anger. The fugitive picks up Morel's cue cards and learns the machine keeps running because the wind and tide feed it with an endless supply of kinetic energy. He understands that the phenomena of the two suns and two moons are a consequence of what happens when the recording overlaps reality — one is the real sun and the other one represents the sun's position at recording time. The other strange things that happen on the island have a similar explanation.
He imagines all the possible uses for Morel's invention, including the creation of a second model to resurrect people. Despite this he feels repulsion for the "new kind of photographs" that inhabit the island, but as time goes by he accepts their existence as something better than his own. He learns how to operate the machine and inserts himself into the recording so it looks like he and Faustine are in love, even though she might have slept with Alec and Haynes. This bothers him, but he is confident it will not matter in the eternity they will spend together. At least he is sure she is not Morel's lover.
On the diary's final entry the fugitive describes how he is waiting for his soul to pass onto the recording while dying. He asks a favor of the man who will invent a machine capable of merging souls based on Morel's invention. He wants the inventor to search for them and let him enter Faustine's consciousness as an act of mercy.
