Tony Pellar, a man of former style and fading beauty, has fled to the subway tunnels beneath New York. There he makes an even more perilous interior journey convinced the key to his sanity lies in retracing the events of his North Carolina childhood. As Tony gradually remembers, the stories of both his childhood friend Mikey, and of Agatha, a complex woman with a disfigured face, interweave with his own. All three stories finally come together against the backdrop of the civil rights movement and a heartrending and haunting climax.