The story centers around Sam, an obviously distressed homeless man, who wanders the streets of an unnamed city speaking mostly in odd quotes and sound bites. As he wanders, he has flashes into the lives of poor and struggling Americans, and injustices as they happen all across the United States. He searches his memory trying to pinpoint the moment where the dream he once had for the country went wrong. His mind flits through the darkest moments in American history, from the Assassination of John F. Kennedy to the Indian Wars, to slavery, lynchings, the Civil Rights Movement, the Dust Bowl and the Andersonville death camp during the Civil War. Throughout his wanderings, he occasionally encounters a woman named Bea, whose relationship to himself he cannot quite remember. It is implied that he was once an ordinary man who left his home to fight in the American Revolutionary War.