Michael Durbin spends his first nine years with Maron Halvorsen, an aging religious fanatic who has decided that he is retarded and that God wants her to isolate him from the world. They live with Johann, her husband who is in the final stages of Parkinson's. As Michael gets older, he escapes to the second-floor where Maron, crippled by arthritis, cannot reach him. In the dark filthy second floor of the house, behind windows glazed by soot and dirt, he invents his own world, chants snatches of conversations he overhears, Bible verses, prayers. When Maron dies, he is discovered lying in a nest...