Dr Erdmann is a not-yet-retired physicist teaching at university when he's not at his medicalised residence. The first time he experiences a kind of stroke that's not really a stroke, he blames it on his old age. But when it happens again, and seems to happen to other residents, he starts to think that something else might be afoot.
This is a novella touched with Sci-fi and the fantastical, taking place in a medicalised residence in which the imaginary things happen to old people. It reminded me a bit of the retirement home section in Cloud Atlas - a panel of different characters confronted with something threatening, but here the focus isn't so much about the fact that the staff won't help or believe them. We know from the start that there's something more to the cases touching the residents, only we don't know what. And at the end the novella can be read quite differently depending on your state of mind: a metaphor for grief, a Sci-fi exploration of consciousness, etc.