Chapter 19, Hamburgers, Skyline, Deadline Summary

The Narrator and the Chubby Girl eat a fast-food lunch while he contemplates leaving his old satisfactory but routine life for a new unknown life—he accurately realizes he will never return to his previous life. He purchases some whiskey and drinks and then they return to the Chubby Girl's office and residence. They discover that it, too, has been completely searched and methodically wrecked. She finds a cryptic notebook and explains that it is kept in a cipher that only she and her grandfather—the Professor—can understand. After studying the notebook she informs the Narrator that he has only thirty-six hours remaining before something bad, noted by a simple 'X', will happen to him; they must find the Professor quickly.

The Narrator wonders why he, personally, is involved at all. The Chubby...