In 2003, a boy’s father disappears from Detroit. His father is a Turkish immigrant who came from the ruins of Miletus. He has degrees in physics, which are useless in this country, and is undocumented. He does not talk much. The only exception is when the father leads the boy to a field on their way from the store, where he talks about his emotions as well as his past. The boy has heard about his father’s past before, but it is the first time his father had ever spoken to him about how he feels. The boy realizes that his father is not lecturing him, but trying to seek his approval and be his friend. The boy is unable to reciprocate and shortly after, the father disappears. Afterwards, Detroit feels empty to the boy. The boy himself feels empty, trying to learn what he is by cutting parts of himself. The boy passes the time shooting at pheasants living in the field where his father spoke to him. As he does this, he hears voices coming from a nearby warehouse. He recognizes the voices as classmates and goes to investigate. He finds two boys at a rusted archway. A third boy named Marcus joins them. One of the boys claims that anything that goes through the archway will vanish. Marcus puts this to the test by tying a rope around himself and launching himself though the archway. He survives thanks to efforts of the other boys and tells them that all there is is the pit. The boy believes that something is wrong with him because he does not feel that other people actually exist. He finds it difficult to understand how everyone exists at the same time. When he goes back to school, he realizes Marcus has changed, becoming more erratic and violent. The narrator believes Marcus is having trouble at home. The narrator begins to wonder if his dad fell through the archway into a portal and if there are many of these portals that are all interconnected, as if a vacuum is created by a mass exodus. One night, Marcus and two other boys go back to the warehouse. The boy whose father disappeared is also there watching from a ledge. Marcus attempts to go through the archway, this time with no rope and just a backpack. He falls into the pit. The witnesses to this all scatter. His disappearance is reported a couple days later. The boy begins to believe that you are only able to carry certain things through the portal. He eventually comes to the understanding that his father was not ordinary and that if he wanted to come back he would have. He believes that the final conversation with his father in the field was a message to join him. The narrator decides to follow, holding onto hope as his only luggage.