As reclusive Professor Emeritus George Gordon Bombazine rises at dawn on his seventieth birthday, he plans to kill himself that night. He lives with his old dog Argos; his wife has left him for another professor; his estranged son and sister despises him, and he's been diagnosed with prostate cancer. He knows precisely the time and place he'll suicide, yet hopes that something might happen today to make him want to go on living. As the day progresses, things do happen—sex, love, friendship, forgiveness, even a chance for a movie screenplay. But do they happen in time, and will they be enough?