Nine years before the bulk of the story takes place, New York University student Myra; her future husband, Alfred; and their friends witness the accidental death of Myra’s then-boyfriend Liam after he falls off a fire escape. In the present, Myra and Alfred have a stagnant marriage; things are especially uneasy of late due to Alfred’s cancer diagnosis and Myra’s announcement of her intention to go to Canada to find her father’s grave. Myra feels that the trip is a necessary part of her research to understand a phenomenon she calls “the cry—a sad, strange form of silence….She did not know what the cry was, but she felt it had to do with her father.” Her father’s death is something of a mystery—seemingly the result of an accident at his oil company job—and her family disapproves of her quest. But as Myra journeys deeper into the wilderness, some very unusual things occur—including Myra waking up in a motel room in a new body. Pahl’s sometimes-surreal story features some majestic phrases, including its very first sentence: “The streets were flooded with twentysomethings—with shining, distracted bodies and faces like bells ringing at noon.” As the journey comes to an end, without closure, the protagonist gazes at the “silence and the blankness” of a cemetery headstone, hoping that “on the void would appear the sweetness of a crude sign.” Early chapters enjoyably drop in philosophical queries while pursuing a straightforward plot. The final pages, however, lose this sense of structure and become overwhelmed by incoherent ponderings: “The deft cohesion that earlier flood the world, allaying chaos, assuaging heaviness with rapture, is washed away, like a patch on the surface of a flowing river that in one moment seems netted together through mystical affinity then in the next disperse in the uncoordinated mass of the waters.”