An American odyssey in miniature, Pike and Bloom maps the trajectories of three characters—Pike, Bloom, and Clytie—as they spiral through "the serious blues of Indianapolis," attempting to construct meaning from the absurd.
Pike, a paranoiac everyman, lays confined in a hospital bed, convinced that the medical staff conspire against him. He flees into the city streets to seek the root of the plot, certain that he is followed. Meanwhile, the romantic, meandering Bloom attempts to make sense of his own conflicting impulses toward both chaos and order. Bloom’s wife Clytie, who suspects her husband of infidelity, follows him from their suburban farmhouse into the refracted, unified field of the city center.
Together, Pike, Bloom, and Clytie navigate the city’s circling and crisscrossing pathways in their attempts to find out what is real.