Synopsis:

(Warning: Contains spoilers.) William Blake of Cleveland has been given the job of accountant in a factory in a town called Machine. His parents having recently died and his fianace deserted him, he has nothing left to loose. On the first part of his journey, by steam train, he meets an array of characters who leave and enter the train while he dozes. At one point the fireman leaves his post and sits opposite William, asking him strange and rather personal questions, to which it seems he already knows the answer.

Eventually William reaches Machine, the end of the line and walks through the main street to the factory. He quickly realises that he is in a strange world as he witnesses examples of Machine's depraved and soulless existance. At the factory, he is told that as he is a month late in taking up his position, someone else was appointed. He is laughed out of the factory.

William spends his last remaining coins on drowning his sorrows. As he sits, lost, alone and destitute, he sees a pretty girl pushed into the mud by a drunken lout. Of course, he helps her, the only knight in the revolting town. She is Thell, a prostitute who is trying to make a living in selling the paper roses she makes instead of selling her body. Thell takes William home with her and shows him her collection of roses. As they lie in bed, Thell's ex-fiance Charlie arrives with a gift for her. He seems to take William's presence in Thell's bed rather well, until she tells him that she never really loved him after all. Her remark wounds him to the heart and he retaliates by shooting her, also through the heart. The bullet passes through her and into William's chest, fatally wounding him and killing Thell. William finds Thell's gun that she kept beneath her pillow, and shoots Charlie. He is not a good shot and it takes him several attempts to kill poor Charlie, who does not try to escape his own fate. Then William gathers up his clothes and jumps out of the bedroom window. He falls, surrounded by Thell's paper roses. He steals a horse and races away from Machine.

William wakes in the morning, out in the wilderness, to find an Indian bending over him, trying to cut the bullet out with a knife. The Indian pokes and prods until giving up as the bullet is far too close to William's heart. The man never once tells William to follow him, but that is what he does. They ride on through the wilderness, with the Indian spouting bizarre quotes from poetry. That night, they swap names. The Indian is called Nobody, as his real name, Xamichee, means "he who talks loud say nothing", or liar. He was given that name after he returned to his people, after long years spent in England, going to school and learning European ways. During his time at school, he was impressed by the poems of William Blake and now believes that his new friend is the earlier version, reincarnated. He cannot understand why William is unable to remember his own poetry. He refers to William as being already dead, since the wound in his chest will kill him. Nobody has taken it upon himself to guide William to the sea, where he can enter the world between life and death.

The journey to death seems to involve William taking as many people with him as possible. Charlie's father, the eccentric Dickinson, has sent a trio of bounty hunters after William and has had the word put out that there is a reward for William's capture, alive or dead. William is accused of having murdered Thell and Charlie in cold blood and stealing Dickinson's pinto; Dickinson being more aggrieved about the latter crime than the death of his own son. The bounty hunters argue between themselves and one of them picks the other two off along the way. In the meantime, William has met and killed a strange trio of drifters and two marshalls. As the total deathcount continues to rise, one bounty hunter is left trailing after William and Nobody.

Eventually William and Nobody reach a trading post, run by a bigoted though religious man who hates Indians. When he recognises William, the trader is added to the total of the dead. While William waits outside the trading post, he is shot by another man and though wounded in the shoulder, manages to kill him too. Nobody puts William in a canoe and they sail down the river. (The pinto seems rather sad to see William travelling on without him!)

By now William is fading fast. Nobody had seen a portent of William's death in a vision and painted his friend's face to reflect the skull underneath his skin. His glasses have gone too and yet he seems to see more clearly. The Indian village that Nobody takes him to, makers of sea canoes, mirrors the town of Machine. As Nobody negotiates with the leaders of the tribe, William drifts in and out of conciousness, watched closely by the curious villagers. He wakes up, wrapped in a robe and lying on the shingle beach while Nobody prepares the canoe William's last journey. Finally everything is ready. William is laid in the canoe with branches underneath him and a little photograph of Nobody resting on his chest. As he drifts away on the calm ocean, he sees Nobody, trading gunshots with the last remaining bounty hunter. At the moment that Nobody dies, William lies back in the canoe and with the last ties to life cut, he dies.