Late November 2008, Louis O’Connor, a doctoral student of linguistics at George Washington University, stops by a new day care center located in a former bank branch to give a talk on languages to the children, many of whom spend an unusual amount of time sitting in front of the vault looking into its empty interior. He listens to liberal radio commentator Hudson Elsmere Pembroke joking about the inauguration, then goes to workout at a gym with new friend Chad where talk is about the terrorism of the rich, has dinner with his husband Larry at a restaurant on the Potomac, all the time unaware that two NSA officials are obsessed with Louis’s anti-war views and plan to plant a listening device in his car.

In December, the day care parents listen to the zine broadcasts of the money-obsessed Wall Street insider who goes by the name Nicholas III. Literary minded as always, Louis shops for books and learns from Chad about the dishonesty in the world of retailing. Day by day, Pembroke’s radio talks offer an oasis of reason.

One evening while discussing their personal lives and the zine antics of Nicholas III, at their home in northern Virginia, Louis and Larry help a Serbian immigrant, Dimitrije, whose motorcycle crashes on the street outside and who informs them that the “Free Language Institute” in Maryland where he studies English also is obsessed with money and appears to be a front for the NSA.

Louis and Larry go shopping for the holidays, even look at some mansions on the Potomac since Larry is heir to a large trust, while the NSA tries to recruit Dimitrije to spy on Louis and the day care center has become a Church of the Dollar, with the first service showcasing a gold-plated dollar atop the altar.

Calvin and Mark, two friends of Louis living in Worcester, endure the power outage during the December ice storm and meet two anti-globalization legends who advise them to beware the “dialectical terrorism” of the rich and the plots of the oil giants to destroy the environmental movement.

Pembroke continues to satirize American life on the radio, Louis’s half-brother Habib in Iraq sends greetings, and Louis and Larry attend the premiere of an experimental play by Karim al-Din Muhammed about the first showing of a cinema in Saudi Arabia in thirty years.

Christmas Day, Louis and Larry talk about the world of languages, go to help at a Washington DC soup kitchen, listen to Pembroke’s poetic Christmas message, and give thanks for their many blessings.

The novel concludes with the Church of the Dollar quite open about its worship of money, the two NSA agents give up on surveillance of Louis - for the time being - and Louis and Larry come to realize that whatever the world brings, the cure is time: time for love, time for others, time to grow as human beings.