Dennis Bright is an imaginative six-foot-four freckled and bespectacled redhead who lives in two worlds. In the public world he works as a watchman in the Scepter Roast Coffee Factory in Somesuch, New Jersey. In that world he avoids catching thieves and he makes the rounds, carrying a clock that doesn't keep time. In the private world of the mind he accompanies Robert Derrick, his handsome alter ego, on the grim progression that leads from North Carolina to the Gettysburg battlefield. The clash of worlds is complicated by a coworker's obsession with the inanities of professional wrestling, by the ghostly presences of generals Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant, by the emergence of a fictional character into reality, and by Dennis's life-altering crush on the beautiful Julie Hanks. Looming over both worlds is the threat of the coffee heist of the century. It will take all of Dennis's resources to guard the factory. And it will take all his resources to overcome competition from an unlikely source and land in the arms of a woman who, like divinity, supplies life in the same instant she takes his breath away.