Quir is a humanoid alien who could pass for a human — In The Enclosure is his diary of his imprisonment, along with a few hundred of his kind, on Earth.  Humans imprisoned his people when they landed, tortured them, and dangled promises of eventual freedom.  The aliens have no memory of  their homeworld and why they were sent out to Earth.  They’ve also discovered that they have no ability to prevent their immense technological secrets from falling into the hands of the humans.  They conclude that they’ve been conditioned to divulge their knowledge.  But no one knows the reason.  

The paradox is brutal — mankind’s problems (overpopulation, disease, the inability to develop space travel, etc) are solved while their saviors, the aliens, remain imprisoned, tortured, and subjected to continuous questions from their “therapists.”

Quir and his people do remember the journey to Earth.  They adhered to rigorous hierarchy, they had a master of rituals which reinforced the hierarchy, but even that feels arbitrary, constructed, artificial….  That skeletal framework of a system crumbles entirely in the enclosure.  Quir, scared from the experience and the inability to remember his own pre-voyage past retreats into himself, preying on female aliens in the hallways, ruminating on the reasons for the imprisonment.

The therapist’s questions are relentless.  The life tedious — blank hallways, scraps of outside newspapers proclaiming great technological breakthroughs.  The sex momentarily meaningful but ultimately meaningless.