Finn is worried that his younger lover James is growing tired of him and looking elsewhere for affection. “The Intruder” is told by Finn, a university professor who is working on a documentary about gay pornography. She struggles with the realization that Tobias, once reliably liberal like her, has soured into a more conservative person she does not recognize. In “Beating,” a woman meets her husband, Tobias, at a bar after work and listens as he obsesses over the Rodney King beating. As the daughter awakens from her coma, her father wonders at the parallel nature of her and her mother’s behavior. He slowly realizes that she was also having an affair, and was returning from a tryst in a motel room when she was hit. As family moves in and out of the room, the father learns more about his daughter, things he did not know. He contemplates how the family, long divided after his wife’s adulterous affair and their subsequent divorce, slowly comes back together in the wake of this emergency. In “Vigil,” a man sits by his daughter’s bedside after a car accident leaves her in a coma. In the end, he chooses to value the clarinet more than his own child. When his girlfriend mentions the seventeenth-century book that gives the story its title, however, he does not see the parallels between a book concerned with demons and unseen monsters and his own struggles with his subconscious.
As he narrates his attempts to locate the clarinet and navigate his feelings for his girlfriend and their potential baby, he deconstructs his own prose and thoughts, offering savage and brutal critiques of his literary delusions and use of symbolism.
In “The Wonders of the Invisible World,” an unnamed man deals with a possibly pregnant girlfriend and his lost clarinet, a valuable instrument.
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