This is the story of an extremely obese, rather immature, yet very bright and talented young man, and of his world and the people in it... mostly homeless young adults... who refer to their lives and where they live as their individual "planets," and everyone else as "refugees." But there are problems in his world, where a talent for the piano has been reduced to playing Chopin on a piano that has had the strings cut by his mother out of frustration at his incessant practicing... the same mother who now requires him to be there to administer her insulin shots. Still, because he is a 'good boy', he plays on the soundless piano, and takes weekly lessons from a piano teacher so eccentric that she will only allow him to strum out the notes on her dining room table... until, like real planets when other bodies get too close, he finds himself pulled and moved in a different direction.