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The city's in the grip of a bad-moon heat wave, on fire, and swarming with street-corner preachers. In this sickly sweet season, the lives of four damaged misfits come together at Ferdousine's Zoo, a pet shop on the Upper West Side. Kate Root, a lapsed visionary, minds the store. Anna Crow, when not belly dancing at Sheherazade's Middle Eastern Cafe or delivering Verse-o-Grams to suicidal poetry lovers, lives upstairs. Willie D, a man in love with his shoes, fantasizes about opening a topless car wash in the Bronx. And finally there's John Joe Maguire, a black Irishman whose distinctive birthmark places him at the very center of this profane inferno. Although their needs and obsessions are so profoundly intertwined as to seem aspects of a single soul, each is consumed by a private hunger as collectively they are driven toward their fate. Meanwhile, far below the subways, members of the Black Swans - a cult inspired by a sixteenth-century slave - have gathered to await the last days.