Lance Olsen - 10:01

NO, MAX WATT tells himself as that chink girl gets to her feet right in front of him, her world of commotion blocking his view: No, her .

NADI SLONE FEELS something brush against her calves and believes it might be death itself. She shivers involuntarily. Then the sensation has vanished and Nadi forgotten it. While the stray cat passes beneath her seat, two strangers in top hats and frock coats escort Kate Frazey to a quarry on a stark, full-moon night lit by a German Expressionist filmmaker. Tomorrow is Kate’s thirty-first birthday. Reaching an unexceptional spot along the packed-dirt road, the strangers stop and ask her to kneel. Kate does. One reaches out and holds her throat. The other produces a knife and stabs her in the heart deferrentially. He rotates the blade twice, clearing his windpipe with small, uneasy coughs as he works.

ATHENA FULAY, THE thin old woman swaddled in a whirlwind of black shawls, diamond brooches, and whitepink pearl necklaces two seats to the left of Ed Bergman in row four, has been alive since 1731. Athena once accompanied Blake’s patron, Thomas Butts, to the poet’s summerhouse in south London for lunch and discovered William and Catherine reading Paradise Lost aloud to each other in the garden, naked. “Come in!” Blake cried. “It’s only Adam and Eve, you know!” They did. When she left, Athena was more or less immortal. She met Peter Quinn, Bloomington’s first white settler, shortly after he arrived in America in 1843, formed part of the first audience watching those eight brief moviettes in the basement of the Grand Café in Paris on December 28, 1895, and shared tea with an elderly Julia Ward Howe in her Boston home one afternoon at the turn of the century. Athena found Howe insufferable. God this, God that, loving, loving, loving. Many of the living dead find immortality as sad and tedious as Athena found Howe, but Athena is not among them. For her, as for Blake and Catherine, change turns trees into fountains of light, people’s faces into incandescent masks. Everything in her world is beewing buzz. Existence for Athena is like a good novel by Mr. Charles Dickens: she has to keep reading, keep turning the pages, although she knows the ending will always somehow disappoint, that after the last period on the last sentence on the last page there will always be nothing but book cover, and then nothing but nothing. Athena’s ambition is to invite as many people as possible along with her into her almost-forever party while she can. She leans forward and parts her lips to invite another.

LARA MCLUHAN closes her eyes and is sitting on a bench at Nine West, tugging on that adorable pair of mod boots with the white stripes made of plastic at the top she noticed yesterday, surrounded by naked old men with droopy buttocks and hairy backs beating off, while, four rows behind and three to her left, Celan Solen tries to figure out why reality feels so inadequate simply because you can’t look at it through a frame like you can a movie.

SHORTLY AFTER his return from Vietnam in 1969, a buddy of his turned Rex Wigglie onto the perfect scam. Rex hired himself out as a professional vampire hunter. He would arrive on the scene late at night, produce a crucifix and ash-wood stake, and tell his clients to vacate the premises. Then he would unroll his sleeping bag, get a good night’s sleep, and in the morning pronounce the surroundings safe. Now Rex feels two quick pricks on the back of his neck, reaches up to brush them away, and locates nothing but air. In two weeks, his eyes filling with blood instead of tears after stubbing his toe on a doorjamb, Rex will fetch up, shocked, unable to absorb the coarse revelation about his new state of being. The last time Rex had sex was on April 30, 1975, the day Saigon fell. He doesn’t really remember it, except that the girl was a holy roller from Lockjaw, Idaho, who obtained most of her notions about truth from country-western ballads, to which she introduced Rex. That’s when he learned there are more interesting things than having sex. Since then, he has composed 4,312 lyrics, all concerning animals, mostly falcons and fish, although frogs have also put in sporadic appearances, and how nature is not nice, except sometimes, when it is. Try as he might, Rex can’t think of anything else to write about, even though he lives in a split level in the suburbs and secretly feels he has seen enough nature out his kitchen window to last him centuries. Absentmindedly rubbing the back of his neck, he experiences an apparition: the Mall of America swarmed with thousands of Rex Wigglies, puffy eyed, pale faced, jelly bellied, arms reaching before them robotic ally as they shuffle-stumble forward on a zombie shopping spree. Rex Wigglie blinks to make the vision go away, and it does, but only for a second.

PATTING THE POCKET of his Army-surplus jacket, Max Watt gets up and begins ambulating sideways toward the aisle, a human crab, while Anderson Bates questions why more people aren’t bothered by the idea that in excess of ninety percent of all household dust is comprised of sloughed-off skin cells: we are all, he frets, literally busy raining ourselves away.

LILY GRODAL FLOATS in a hot fragrant bubble bath, submerged up to her chin. She feels sleepy and tingly. Her children do not exist. She has never met her husband Charlie. Lily doesn’t know what she is looking for in her life, but it wasn’t any of that. She wants to be somebody else, but this evening Lily will settle for being herself. A single red rose leans in a green glass vase at the far end of the tub. She reaches down for the washcloth between her legs with the fuzzy notion of unfolding it across her face, and her elbow by chance knocks into the hairdryer on the stool beside her. Before Lily can respond, the hairdryer splashes into the sudsy water in a silverwhite flash of sparks and smoke and…and, hey, someone has fallen down over there. Someone has fallen down in the aisle. Lily turns to see what has happened. It is that creepy guy who hissed at her. He isn’t getting up. Everyone is staring in his direction. Serves him right, she thinks, an arc of guilty alarm for entertaining such an ugly thought bounding through her.

TRUDI CHAN PUSHES through the door at the back of the theater and breaches into light so smartingly concentrated it makes her immediately squinch shut her eyes. She swerves and stops and steadies herself, then presses on for the exit.

A HEAVY THUMP. Zdravko Prcac recoils from his half-sleep. In front of him is a young woman in a drab steelblue apron and headscarf, twenty or twenty-one, mopping the floor of a yellow-tiled interrogation cell at the Omarska camp, the linoleum floor tiles spattered with teeth and chunks of bloody hair. She is living inside her own rhythms, unaffected by her profession.

KOSA PRCAC’S GHOST darts left, into and out of her husband’s mind, the passing impression being one of flying extremely fast through a silver haze of sunshine.

ANGELICA ENCINAS’S hand leaps out in search of Miguel Gonzalez’s.

MIGUEL GONZALEZ’S hand pushes Angelica Encinas’s away.