Asterios Polyp, as well as being the bearer of one of the most verbally unwieldy names in the American educational system, is a Professor of Architecture at prestigious Cornell University in upstate New York. He has both Greek and Italian heritage and both of these storied architectural ancestries are present in the buildings he also designs. He lives an unremarkable life that he very much enjoys, happy in his insulated educational bubble, until the day when his apartment building burns down as a result of a lightning strike.
With nowhere to live, and nowhere to go, Polyp also comes to realize very quickly that being a professor is not a particularly transferrable skill when it comes to finding a job that will make him a quick buck or two. He gets on a Greyhound bus, riding as far as his fare will take him. This turns out to be Apogee, Arizona. There, he decides to take a job as an auto-mechanic. While he is riding the bus he daydreams; there are scenes from his past that his brother, who was a stillborn baby, narrates for him, with both good and bad memories from his childhood. He also thinks about his marriage, which wasn't happy and ended badly, and sometimes, he gives in to sleep, and dreams. When he wakes, he realizes his dreams have been trying to tell him that he is a flawed human being, but that his brother is trying to tell him that it is not his fault; the gods decided long before he was born that he was going to be made that way.
