One morning in late September a few years ago, Phyllis Fletcher dies in her living room of an autoimmune illness, surrounded by Carl, Marjorie, Ruth, and a hostile hospice worker. Ruth manages the aftermath, calling Nathan, Jenny, and the rabbi, then repeatedly trying to reach her middle child, Beamer, in Los Angeles.

Beamer, forty-two, is at his standing Tuesday morning appointment in room 816 of the Radisson Airport Hotel, hog-tied and being degraded by two sex workers, Lady and a new woman in a red wig. He has taken six pills with vodka and is chasing the blackout he depends on to function in his ordinary life. He ignores his mother's repeated calls.

The drugs aren't working. Beamer's mind keeps spiraling: his agent hasn't returned his calls in days, suggesting his screenwriting career—anchored to a fourth installment of the action film he wrote two decades earlier—is dying. His wife Noelle, a repressed Presbyterian, has been giving him a silent treatment he interprets as terrorism, and he becomes convinced she is going to leave him. He recalls coming home the previous night to a wife pretending to sleep, and that morning, her sneaking out before he came downstairs. He thinks of his children Liesl and Wolfie, his housekeeper Ludmilla, his nanny Paulette, his fractured partnership with former writing partner Charlie Messinger, and the couples therapy that isn't working.

Beamer struggles to focus on the degradation he engineered—licking the carpet, having an acrylic-nailed finger inserted in him—because his anxieties keep intruding. He reflects on his appetites, his Chimera Syndrome eyes, and his lifelong inability to be satisfied. As Lady commands him to lick toes, the hotel room door opens. A man in gray corduroys and running shoes enters. Beamer recognizes him as Drexel Abraham, who tells him, "You're coming with me, Bernard," and produces a burlap bag for his head. At that moment Beamer finally ejaculates and collapses into a blackout.