Summary

After the untimely death of his father, twenty-three-year-old Frank abandons his comfortable middle-class background, and chooses to live a kind of fringe existence, working as a paramedic on the violent night shifts of a Harlem hospital. Shuttling between the lower East Side and Harlem, Frank retrieves the sick and the dead and also photographs the misery and suffering he sees on the streets. Frank's actions antagonise his older brother who is a respected surgeon at the same hospital, but who also feels a strong sense of guilt for not being able to stop their father's slow disintegration, despite his medical training. Just as Frank seems set on a dangerous downward spiral of self-destruction, he meets a woman, Emily, who offers him a chance at redemption. Their relationship is by turns both complex and surprising, but it is through this connection that Frank begins to recover his ability to see the beauty of life and considers turning away from the gritty streets of ghetto New York.