A novel. The story moves from the psychotic jungle of a New Jersey prison for the criminally insane to a Vietnamese monastery devoted to the obliteration of the self.  In this journey through madness and self-destruction, the life of a politically committed woman reported missing on a peace mission to Vietnam criss-crosses with the lives of four men:
 
One, a disillusioned psychiatrist and her former fiancée, now temporarily brain-damaged with memory loss from an attempt on his life; the second, a vulnerable and self-destructive journalist seeking to rescue and repay her for saving his life; the third, a ruthless paranoid killer who escapes from the prison; and the last, a soldier who creates a pagan mythology around the missing woman to enlist the aid of Montagnard tribesmen to find her.
 
It is 1967-1968 and a strange redemption is at hand, an awareness of something beyond the nihilism of the times, something on the other side of good and evil.
 
Who will survive to tell of what took place in a dark time?