San Francisco, 1986 – a city where Dionysian liberation is beginning to pall beneath the first shadows of a strange new darkness. Bill Ticino’s fruitless and numbing marriage finally breaks up. Plagued by insomnia and spiritually lost, he believes that finding a tenant for his Pacific Heights home will serve as a temporary solution. A handsome, charismatic Portuguese man named Peter moves in, along with his pet bird, a hoopoe. Bill soon finds himself drawn into a world of magical storytelling, charms and ritual.(...)