Lance Olsen: 10:01

MAX WATT IS nearly certain he has a blind identical twin brother back home that suffers from hyperhydrosis, the inability to stop sweating. Home is a beat-up trailer in the woods on the Canadian border. Before that, it was the backseat of his matte olive-drab 1973 Chevy Impala, which is where Max and Max first gave silence a leg up. The gums-macking salesclerk at K-Mart wouldn’t let them concentrate. All Max and Max was trying to do was choose an electric fan to drown out the voltage of night bugs. The girl just stood there rearranging merchandise and making mouth sounds. The brothers waited until after work, then bothered her shadow. “Are we property yet?” Max’s twin asked, sweating, slamming down the trunk on their Impala. “Buckle your mouth, honeybun,” said Max. Later, Max asked: “You think she’s cured?” “She’s cured, all right,” replied Max. Now Max is counting. He has given them three colored girls down front thirty-seven seconds to find peace within themselves or he will invite one of them home. In back of his trailer stands a tumbledown shed. In the floor is a trapdoor fastened with a padlock. On the other side of the trapdoor is a six-by-six potato cellar lined with cinderblocks that hold in the calm. That’s where Josie from Wisconsin lives. Josie used to have hair the tint of din. Now she don’t. Chatter is all Josie used to do, only the human tongue contains one major artery. On occasion Josie pisses herself spontaneously. After this movie Max will assemble dinner for her from dumpsters behind fastfood joints. Sometimes at breakfast Max’s brother asks, staring without sight: “How long do you intend to resist me?” “Life ain’t no dream, honeybun,” replies Max, reaching for his box of Count Chocola. “It’s a fucking seizure . Now give me my sugar.”

DIRECTLY TO MAX Watt’s left, directly behind Trudi Chan, sits Sid Münsterberg, an undercover cop, in row eleven, seat eight. Arms crossed, legs stretched before him, Sid looks like a young Jerry Garcia: upset hair, feral beard, beefy lips, aviator glasses askew. Despite the snowstorm whirling beyond these walls, he wears a washed-out jeaN jacket and pair of scuffed-up cowboy boots. Yesterday Sid received a phony tip from Ryan Moody’s ticked-off ex-girlfriend, Amanda Cocteau, alleging Ryan is a drug dealer. On Sid’s way to the rave where Amanda told him he could find Ryan last night, Sid stopped off at Walgreens to pick up a prescription for some terbinafine for his toenail fungus. The over-the-counter creams have so far accomplished exactly diddlysquat. The yellowgreen gunk, mildewy smell, and itchy burn are driving Sid insane. Two days ago it spread from his right foot to his left. Sid currently feels like a walking Petri dish. He doesn’t realize the Walgreens pharmacist, tired, distracted, and eager to enjoy his own Saturday evening on the town, inadvertently confused Sid’s pills with those of another customer. A cognitive limp has entered Sid’s perception. His world seems amplified. He can hear Ryan Moody swallowing four seats away. He can smell a mouse moving through the ventilation system thirty feet above him. He cranes back his neck and believes the screeching white projector light is the voice of Allah. With this, Sid inaugurates a new religion. It is based on the belief we do not think, but are rather thought through by the myriad fungal intelligences surrounding us. Sid Munsterberg’s new religion will last just under three and a half minutes, then pass into the annals of theological arcana, having changed no one, including the founder himself.

MOIRA LOVELACE abruptly recognizes the pretty teen sitting a few seats over and down, although initially she can’t quite place her. Maybe Moira passed her on her way to Dunn Brothers Coffee for a café au lait before coming here. Maybe she is a former student. Moira has a terrible time remembering former students these days. There have been oceans of them. She taught each the best she could, yet no matter what she did the stupid remained stupid, the nice nice, and their featureless faces pack a stadium in her uneasy dreams. Then it hits her: that’s the one on the video Moira downloaded last week from the Face Value Productions website. What’s odd is how difficult it is to place a porn star in real life. With their clothes and suburban expressions in place, they look completely unremarkable. Aside from an indistinct worn quality, this girl could pass for a college freshman. Moira recalls she had the same problem last summer when she passed Aurora Snow on a downtown street one afternoon. Later Moira learned from the newspaper that Aurora was performing at a local strip club that week. But in person she seemed like nothing more than an ordinary Midwestern teen with too much makeup on and a peculiar puffiness around the eyes, as if, somehow, too much sex leads to a kind of existential edema. Moira can’t remember this girl’s name, but she can’t forget how good she was in the video. She played a naive babysitter in glasses and she didn’t blink or flinch. Almost everyone blinks or flinches at the end. You can’t help it. But this one didn’t. Her crystalline green eyes radiated composure. Remembering how they met and held the camera during the final fade, Moira Lovelace sits up a smidgen straighter in her seat, a bolt of admiration flaring through her.

SUSPENDED IN unsuspecting Trudi Chan’s utereus floats a two-month-old fetus filled with his mother’s memories. How, on her thirty-second birthday, her husband, Carlos Metz, bought Trudi a beautiful bouquet of flowers, took her out to an elegant restaurant overlooking the San Francisco Bay, and told her he wanted a separation. Carlos said he needed to find himself. Trudi said she didn’t know he was lost. Carlos said that was part of the problem. Trudi said she could help him look. Carlos said he’d like to stay married, but he needed a vacation. Just a year or so, he said. Trudi could obviously see other men, too, if she wanted. They could have an open marriage. How did that sound? Trudi thought it sounded idiotic, but she said she supposed she understood. That night Carlos slept on the futon in the guest room. At dawn, unable to sleep herself, Trudi rose and went to his bed. They made love without speaking. After breakfast, Carlos packed and left. Trudi didn’t hear from him again, except in the form of divorce papers served five weeks later. Apparently he had found himself more rapidly than anticipated. Trudi decided to lose herself in her work. She arrived in Minneapolis late last night for a special meeting near the airport first thing this morning. It will be three more days before it strikes her how long it has been since her last period. Meanwhile, her fetus forgets a few of her memories every minute it moves toward birth. They peel off him like leaves peeling off an aspen in a dry autumn breeze. By the time he enters the world, he will have forgotten everything he once knew. His mind will have become a blank movie screen waiting for the man in the projection booth to reach over and flip the main switch on.

EYES SHUT, CHIN on chest, Zdravko Prcac watches himself at a party. It is difficult to tell where the party is because the place is so poorly lit. Possibly a basement room in Belgrade during the war. Kosa is sitting beside him. They are happy and drinking good vodka and laughing by candlelight with a group of well-dressed people they have never met. Eventually Zdravko gets up and wanders down a murky hallway in search of the bar at which to refill their drinks. He cannot find it, so he returns, makes polite excuses, and collects his wife to go. They feel their way up a staircase. Outside, the lights in the city are extinguished, the streets glistening under a full moon. Zdravko and Kosa locate their Citroen in a nearby alley and soon Zdravko is driving. Their house is in the countryside. It didn’t used to be there, as far as Zdravko can recall, but now it is. At the edge of the city, they confront a police barricade. Zdravko stops the car. Powerful flashlights blaze into the cab. Squinting, Zdravko looks over to make sure Kosa is all right. She is shaking. “What’s wrong?” he asks, trying to soothe her. “It’s just the police. Everything will be fine.” Then Zdravko realizes the woman sitting beside him is not his wife. The people at the party must have stolen Kosa while Zdravko was searching for the bar and replaced her with someone who only distantly resembles her. “I’m sorry,” the woman tells him. With that, the car door swings open and four policemen claw at Zdravko, dragging him onto the hard wet road.