The action of the novel covers the period from the sixties of the last century to the present. The central character of the work is Ivan Zakharovich Metelkin, who has gone through a difficult and not always clear-cut life. After graduating from a rural school, fate connected him with the children of the city outskirts with all the characteristic features of that environment - frequent drinking bouts, hard physical work. The dream of becoming an engineer seemed to have collapsed forever, but common sense and the desire to overcome marginal principles in himself forced Ivan to graduate from a technical institute and become a manager at the installation sites of a city under construction. But then the so-called perestroika struck, and everything changed radically: his favorite job was gone . In a small town, it is impossible to get a job with someone else, and so, using old connections, Ivan Zakharovich gets a job as a security guard in a sanatorium, in this park area, where the main events take place...