In the 1990s, at a bar in Key West, Hemingway Professor John Baird meets con-man Sylvester Castlemaine. Castlemaine gets to know John and realizes that he is a Hemingway scholar writing an article about Hemingway’s stolen manuscripts. Baird mentions that people have not stopped looking for the stories. Castlemaine says that perhaps the finding of the stories could be planned, I.e. the stories could be forged and passed off as the lost manuscripts. While there would be millions of dollars up for grabs, Baird says that that would be impossible because Hemingway scholars can differentiate between true Hemingway’s and forgery. Castlemaine notes that this may not be the case if a scholar writes that fake stories. Baird dismisses Castlemaine because of the immorality of this scheme and the fact that it would destroy an academic’s career.

A disembodied voice describes a ripple in the Hemingway channel in the 1990s.

Baird continues to ponder the idea before telling his wife, Lena, about his encounter with Castlemaine. Lena is tired of living a low-income lifestyle and wants to meet Castlemaine, though she feels Baird will not go through with the plot because of his moral conscious.

The three meet up over dinner. John goes to bed and Lena and Castlemaine share a private conversation and become acquainted. Lena creates a way for John to pull off the Hemingway hoax without it being illegal. She says he will write an imitation piece and turn it into an exegetical piece for academia about writing in Hemingway’s style. Baird will write the fake Hemingway story, tell publishers about the book, have publishers send just the imitation story to uninformed Hemingway academics for an opinion without telling them it is part of an exegetical book to create buzz, and then reveal that it was all a hoax when the book is published.

Baird agrees and begins to work on the project in Boston and the Northeast. He encounters a mysterious figure in a typewriter shop that disappears quickly. During this time Lena and Castlemaine become intimate and plan to have the manuscript passed off as true Hemingway and take care of John by seducing him with a woman, Pansy. John is unaware of this and continues to work on the writing.

On a train back to Florida, John drinks absinthe and sees Ernest Hemingway who tells him to stop writing the false manuscript or he will kill him as the forgery will disrupt the omniverse. John is in disbelief and Hemingway kills him in this Universe. John wakes up in another Universe and the pattern continues through the characters are slightly different. Hemingway constantly appears and kills John but is unable to kill him across all universes. Pansy seduces John in the new universe. Across each Universe, John continues to do the writing but wakes up and is more like Hemingway in terms of Hemingway’s biographical life. Hemingway says that if he stops writing the story, he will take him back and time to see the actual manuscripts get stolen in Paris. John eventually agrees and sees Hemingway steal the stories. Hemingway the entity and John get separated then. John wakes up in a universe where Castlemaine is a serious conman and tries to kill Lena and John. Lena, John, Pansy, and Castlemaine are all involved in a shoot-out. John wakes up in another universe, presumably he has become intertwined with Hemingway and finishes the story.