Phil, too old for coming-of-age ordeals and too young for a midlife crisis, can’t seem to keep it together. He’s the nerdy oddball out at work and seems to be losing his artist girlfriend, Hermia, to a salesman named Gus. His life advisors include the madcaps and mystics of the New Age culture in which he moves, not the least of which is his big brother, Magnus, charismatic, congenial, and a very powerful spiritual guide. An episodic tug-of-war between these characters dramatically changes when Magnus suddenly tells Phil that he has murdered Maggie Leblanc and asks for sanctuary. After accommodating Magnus for a time, Phil’s inner torment reaches a breaking point and he prepares to meet the police. The deeply intuitive Magnus flees just in time – with Phil’s girlfriend, Hermia. After some wrangling, Phil (white) and Gus (black) form an uneasy pact and follow the fleeing duo through small town Louisiana. Misfits among misfits, their developing bi-racial bond generates more than a few comic and poignant moments, as they are all oil-and-water on the surface but becoming deeply connected below. Rolling through the country, they find racism, madness and unlikely friendships, but lose the trail of Magnus and Hermia. Empty-handed, beaten down, and deep within the swamps, they meet a old black mystic, Madame Peychaud, with a psychic edge and an instinct that turns the wheel of the story’s inner arc. The two men return to New Orleans with no leads on the missing couple, but with some new ideas about life and the future. In his last attempt to track Magnus, Phil dons Magnus’s elaborate Mardi Gras costume, dressing slowly and methodically in a way that calls to mind the Homeric “arming of the warrior” and the epic hero of old. Since Magnus is always a high-profile celebrant of Mardi Gras in the French Quarter, Phil hopes someone will recognize the costume and mistake him for Magnus, and that the ensuing discussion might yield clues about the real Magnus and Hermia. In the French Quarter, Phil is surrounded by the phantasmagoria of mock-identity and excess that is Mardi Gras, but no sign of anyone who can help. But the one person he does find, in the shadow of the Cathedral, is the living, breathing Maggie Leblanc! Thus begins a rapid discovery sequence that brings Madame Peychaud back and leaves Maggie dead, Magnus ambiguously dead or “in India,” and Phil and Gus setting up shop to sweep the New Age markets with Magnus’s memoirs and notebooks, which they have received from Maggie in sealed boxes with instructions from Magnus “to my brother, who will be ready for this when he receives it.”