

On the Cedar Gates Conference Center (CGCC) construction site, Dutch comes into contact with some black slime from the newly broken ground. He hallucinates that Bob (whose wife is sleeping with Dutch) and several others are chasing him down in bulldozers until he trips and is impaled on some exposed rebar— his death is attributed to drinking. A year later, an ecological conference is being held at the newly opened CGCC, led by the Episcopalian priest Father Douglas Middleton. He meets CGCC manager Symes and event coordinator Khali Spence.