Apollinaire, a doctor in his tropical African homeland, is working as a call centre agent in icy Toronto. Still seeing himself as a physician and hoping to obtain his licence to practise in Canada, he drives around at night in a borrowed taxicab, illegally treating the ill and injured, while leaving his loved ones behind. The people he visits include a violent countryman, an AIDS victim who uses a storm lantern for lighting, a former torturer who loves Scrabble, and a host of other characters striving to understand what life means in this new country which is now their own.