Allison's plane lands in New York on a wintry November afternoon in 1998, where she will begin a MA in philosophy at Columbia University. In New York Allison reconnects with an old friend, Nava, who introduces Allison to her brother Hooman. Allison strikes up a friendship with Hooman. Allison had begun to experience strange altered mental patterns that she feared could be an emerging madness, but with Hooman's help she eventually finds rhythms of convergence in her life within a mystical framework of ideas hidden within old Egyptian funerary texts, like the Book of Gates, and mystical texts written by Bahá¿u'lláh, the prophet founder of the Bahá¿í Faith. Together, Allison and Hooman come to realize that the world they knew never existed to begin with; a new world, both disturbingly beautiful and sublime, rises up to meet them, and they will never be the same again, connected as they are through time and space.