Finn is in the grip of middle-age and on an enforced break from work: it might be that he's too emotional to teach history now. He is living in an America hurtling headlong into hysteria, after all.

High up in a New York City hospice, he sits with his beloved brother Max, who is slipping from one world into the next. But when a phone call summons Finn back to a troubled old flame, a strange journey begins, opening a trapdoor in reality. It will prompt a questioning of life and death, grief and the past, comedy and tragedy, and the diaphanous separations that lie between them all.