What Happens at Night

An unnamed couple endures a days-long journey by plane, train, and ferry to reach a small city near the Arctic Circle. They have come to adopt a baby from a local orphanage. The wife is gravely ill with cancer, has undergone chemotherapy, and has had a hysterectomy. Her hope is that adopting a child will give her husband a family so he will not be alone after she dies; she expects to live perhaps a year.

When their train pauses at a tiny, snow-covered way station, the man leaps out to confirm their destination. The train begins pulling away with his wife still aboard. She throws their bags out and leaps into his arms just before the platform ends. A taxi takes them to the Borgarfjaroasysla Grand Imperial Hotel, a cavernous, faded establishment. Their fifth-floor room is freezing, with fake brick walls and gold shag carpet. After the wife bathes, she emerges looking almost healthy, and they share a tender moment in bed, the first genuine physical closeness between them in a long time.

Unable to sleep, the man goes to the hotel bar, where he meets Livia Pinheiro-Rima, an elderly, flamboyant former actress who claims to have been one of the Isadorables, the child protégées who danced with Isadora Duncan. She introduces him to the local lichen-based schnapps and tells him about Brother Emmanuel, a healer people travel from around the world to visit. Overcome with emotion about his wife's illness, the man begins to cry, and Livia places a warm hand on his back. She lives in the hotel and performs piano and vocals in the lobby five nights a week.

On his way upstairs, a large Nordic businessman accosts the man, insisting they met in New York and making suggestive remarks implying a prior sexual encounter. The man denies knowing him and returns to his room, only to find his wife missing. He discovers her weeping in the lobby, wrapped in Livia's Russian black bear coat. She had woken alone, panicked, and run outside in her underwear. She tells the man she saw a spectral woman emerge from the closet and stand by the bed before vanishing. She demands to see the baby immediately, but the man calms her, carries her upstairs, and holds her through the night.

The next morning, their taxi delivers them not to the orphanage but to the home of Brother Emmanuel, a bald, thin young man in a black floor-length tunic. His helpmate, Darlene, a tall Black woman in a brightly patterned dress, welcomes them into a warm sitting room with a fireplace, narcissi, and a parrot named Artemis. Brother Emmanuel suggests their arrival may not be a mistake, but the wife angrily rejects this. When they finally reach St. Barnabas Orphanage, a nurse tells them the director, Doctor Ludjekins, is away and that they cannot see the child without him.

The following day, they return and see their baby for the first time. He is plump and blond with large, soft eyes and a purple birthmark on his thigh. The man picks him up and holds him against his chest, deeply moved. The wife stands back with her arms crossed and does not touch the child, later explaining she felt no connection. Livia subsequently admits to the wife that she told the taxi driver to take them to Brother Emmanuel's, believing the wife needs healing more than a baby. The wife insists Brother Emmanuel is a fraud and explains the adoption is meant to give her husband a family after she dies. That evening, the businessman takes the man to dinner at a local restaurant, where the man is attacked and mugged in the basement restroom. The businessman carries him back to the hotel and tends to his wounds.

The next morning, the wife is transformed. Wearing a velvet Balenciaga dress Livia gave her, she declares Brother Emmanuel has cured her. The man is skeptical, but he notices she no longer flinches from his touch, something she has done for months. At Brother Emmanuel's, Darlene explains that the wife's sensation is a "therapeutic delusion," a common phenomenon in which the desire to be cured creates a false sense of healing. The couple visits the orphanage again, and the man begins calling the baby Simon. That evening, they argue. The wife says she no longer wants the adopted child; if she is truly cured, perhaps she can become pregnant miraculously, even after her hysterectomy. The man grows frustrated, but they eventually reconcile and make love.

The wife goes alone the next morning to the orphanage, where she feeds the baby and speaks to him quietly, telling him he cannot be hers but will belong to the man, and asking him to love and not judge his father. She then goes to Brother Emmanuel's, where she has an emotional and physical collapse and stays the night. Livia tells the man the nearby bridge has collapsed, stranding them, a claim later revealed as a lie to keep the couple in place. That evening, the man gets very drunk with the businessman. In the businessman's dark hotel room, the two men have a sexual encounter. Afterward, the man kicks through his hollow hotel door and punches the fake brick wall, injuring his hand.

At Brother Emmanuel's, the wife sees the spectral woman again during the night, then walks out of the house into the vast snowy field. She lies down in the snow and cannot get up. A warmth envelops her. She is found in the morning and cannot be revived. When the man arrives, Brother Emmanuel kneels before him and tells him his wife's "soul is free." She wanted her ashes placed in the bowl of narcissi. The man sits for a long time alone.

Livia accompanies the man to the orphanage to claim Simon. The man wears the three-piece suit his paternal grandfather wore in a photograph taken days before the grandfather died by suicide. Doctor Ludjekins insists a baby cannot be released to only one parent. Livia claims to be the man's mother and Simon's grandmother, but the man admits the truth. Livia sends him outside while she speaks privately with the doctor and secures the baby's release, though she refuses to say how. Back at the hotel, the man holds Simon and speaks to him quietly about his wife, promising to love the child double.

The next morning, Livia accompanies the man and Simon to the train station. In the taxi, she speaks about intimacy and connection, saying quiet moments like theirs matter more than people realize. The man asks her to come to New York with them, but she declines. As the train carries the man and Simon south, it stops at the way station where the couple first arrived. On the bench sits a woman in a black bear coat. The man steps out and discovers she appears to be his wife, her bare hands seemingly fused to the coat. She tells him she is "just waiting" and declines to come with him. He gets back on the train. As it travels south, the sun appears on the horizon, casting warm golden light across the snow. The man wakes Simon and holds him up to the window so the child can see the sun before it disappears.