New York City is the everyday urban setting of Mr. West’s story, grounding its strange events in the routines of an accounting job, an apartment, and the news. From this familiar base, a disturbance associated with a building across the street coincides with voices that direct his decisions; after they stop, reports in the city’s newspapers and on television draw him toward a distant religious colony in Peru.

Urban Setting and Everyday Life

Mr. West is a large, glum, secretive employee of the New York accounting firm Adwell, Gipper and Gascoigne. His apartment is across the street from the newly constructed Conglomerate Building, where engineers test generators during the week when his usually reliable inner Voice system begins to falter. The city is presented through these concrete surroundings rather than through a broad description of its streets or neighborhoods: office, apartment, construction, and media form the ordinary framework against which the anomalous events unfold.

The City During the Voices

The generator tests coincide with unusually high sun-spot activity, a ten-year maximum in cosmic-ray output, and a temporary four-degree shift in the Van Allen belts. In this setting, Mr. West’s Voice-in-head system—his chosen alternative to divination—becomes entangled with the decisions occupying him. New York City thus serves as the local scene for a disruption whose stated circumstances extend beyond the city, linking an apartment-bound experience to technological and cosmic disturbances without establishing a single cause.

News, Distance, and Departure

After the Voices stop, Mr. West encounters a succession of reports through New York media: an item in The New York Times about a policeman in Rio Grande do Sul who follows a message in his head to Martin Bormann in Manaus; news that the Smithsonian has been destroyed; and magazine accounts of an art exhibition and a new lamination method. The reports widen the story’s field beyond the city while leaving Mr. West physically anchored there, reading and listening.

A New York Post feature about a religious colony on the northern slope of Mount Alluci becomes the decisive report. Two dozen Americans have followed Elihu Littlejohn Carter, known as the Last Prophet, to await the end of the world. Mr. West feels numb and disoriented, then calls Pan Am and books a flight to Lima for the following day. New York City is therefore both his point of departure and the place where scattered reports acquire enough force to redirect his life.