When the planetoid known as "The Cheesegrater" slams into Earth's moon, sending it on an implacable path into the gaseous atmosphere of Jupiter, humanity seems doomed, yet, people survive much the same as they always had and The Moon seems to be forgotten but for a few people who cannot escape its memory. Among these we find the anonymous writer of the hit song "You Don't Know What You Got Till It's Gone (And Baby I am as Gone as Anyone You Ever Seen)," Clarence Monk, and his future lover, Jill Saragosa. Clarence and Jill find themselves living in an abandoned mega hardware store in the middle of an uninhabited part of downtown Los Angeles. As Clarence begins to empty the building of walls of brick and wood, replacing the structure with the super strong "Synth Glass," he also begins to reveal his and Jill's lives to the prying eyes of the desperately melancholic city. All of this time, Jill is planting an incredible garden on the roof of the building, making a new Eden of their home. One day Clarence looks up to see Jill's garden roots crawling against the glass roof and he finds his obsession (the work of not one lifetime but many thousands) is to now write the song in which the drums of hollow logs seem to sound out the heartbeat of humanity and the jungle floor is carpeted with more layers of roots. Layer after layer of root that he knows lay beneath his thought of the song, but then he sees that above those roots are the trees and the monkeys and the strange jungle birds. Above those roots, above those trees, above the clouds, above that sky, past that Moon (for it truly still exists if only in the human heart), into that universe, there are more roots holding the tree of that universe to the firmament of God. And, there, God moans the song, the root of all songs. And Clarence searches for it amongst all of the other songs that tangle themselves into the untraceable heart of humanity, the heart of the song that he has promised for Jill.