Lance Olsen - 10:01

RIBCAGE THROBBING, the stray cat dashes back into the insanity of legs.

MAX WATT DOESN’T know he is taking a tumble until the left side of his face hammers the carpet. Then Max and Max are walking with their father through spindly woods behind their beat-up trailer in northern California. Max is eight and Max is eight. It is raining lightly. Max hopes the opal droplets will help explain the world to him. Their father, a bison in overalls, is carrying his whipping belt in one hand and holding the brothers’ wrists in the other. He is going to make them do a couple of things. After awhile, they pause by a dead gray tree. His father tells Max and Max to drop their drawers. “We ain’t nobody’s children,” he announces, lifting his belt over his head. Max and Max barter looks. “I don’t want to, daddy,” Max says. “It don’t matter none, boys,” his father says, lifting, “it’s just the way things is. First you get born. Then you get whomped. Then you get whomped some more.” Next Max is up on his knees in the theater again, everybody using their eyes against him, and then he is scramble-limping up the aisle, through the door into the lobby, and she is nowhere, nowhere at all, and Max Watt is everywhere but here.

BETSI BLISS RECITES a little prayer to herself for that poor man who tripped and hopes he didn’t hurt himself too bad. That kind of thing happens to everybody. Nothing to be ashamed of. It’s just the Lord’s reminder to us all that we’re not quite as special as we sometimes think we are. Then Betsi Bliss’s back begins itching. Everything around her distends weakly, a few millimeters, and contracts again.

SOMETIMES THEY feel rubbery when they bump into your cheek, Lara McLuhan thinks, just like wet handballs.

VLADISLAV DOVZHENKO lunges and twists against the Shock Troops console in back of the arcade on the fourth floor. Lights strobe. Subwoofer explosions rumble. Each time he gets a kill, Vladislav can feel the electronics vibrating beneath his groin. Now he’s got an erection. He is already on level seven, deep into the enemy stronghold, some sort of dark, shadow-hectic, film-noir factory complex, bolts the size of bodies, gears the size of cars, metal catwalks crisscrossed over vats of black tinfoil fluid, and he can sense those baby mamas by the skeet-shooting game admiring his moves, and now he’s got an erection. They are American girls with long blond hair like California and David Lee Roth and they are wearing tight torn jeans and black leather jackets and they think Vladislav is a total stud. When he rolls a million, he makes up his mind, he will stroll over and introduce himself, chat them up a little, suggest they head down to the food court for a burger and fries together. They can’t be more than fifteen. How hot is that? But Vladislav has to concentrate. This is no time to let his attention drift. This is no time to mess up a good thing.

ARTIFICIAL WHITES and blues sputter over Byron Metnick’s face as on the screen automatic assault weapons clatter, tanks burst over barricades, and buildings implode in columns of dust and raining debris. From what Byron can tell, he is not just watching trailers for a war movie, but trailers for the sequel or prequel to a war movie, though he can’t figure out what war it is supposed to be, doesn’t think he saw the original version, and doesn’t in any case much care. He is still occupied with being impressed by how utterly that guy wiped out in the opposite aisle. Byron contemplates following him from the theater just to make sure he’s okay, but something on the screen tugs back his attention. The soldier’s face there in the background. Six GI’s are huddled in a bomb crater surrounded by ragged structures that might once have been an apartment block, bullets searing overhead, mortars slamming down around them. The faces of the five in the foreground are sweaty, warped with forebodings of doom. But the sixth one, the one belonging to the guy in the background, appears almost relaxed. Although he exists faintly out of focus, Byron determines he is not so much huddling as reclining on the sandy embankment, and he’s got something in his hands. Cards. He’s shuffling a deck of cards, playing what seems to be a game of solitaire with himself. And his face is familiar. Very familiar. It hits Byron precipitately he is looking at himself up there. “Hey,” he says to nobody, scanning the theater for corroboration and support, heart punching around blindly inside his chest. “Hey…um…hey…”

BLINDFOLDED, MOIRA Lovelace sprawls across a bare mattress, wrists and ankles tied to the bedposts by strips of torn pillowcase. The video camera’s black eye at the foot of the bed stares at her from its tripod. Three football players in gold and midnight-blue uniforms form a semi-circle on the far side. “We gonna teach you how to be a nice girl, Miss Lovelace,” says the first. “You wanna do that? Teacher wanna learn what a nice girl is?” Helmets tucked beneath arms, they check her out with ominous wonder. Then the reality of the situation edges up on the second player. “Yo,” he says. “Yo. Wait up. What the fuck are we doing here, guys?” “Don’t be a pussy, pussy,” says the third. His face slides into a smile. “I mean, jeez, Bobby. We just having a little fun, man, you know? Chill out. Bitch wants a lesson. We gonna give her a lesson. Ain’t that right, Miss Lovelace?” Moira’s wrists burn. She closes her eyes beneath her blindfolds and conjugates. “Cupio, cupis, cupit,” she says. “Cupimus, cupitis, cupiunt.” “Cupio, cupis, cupit,” the football players respond in unison. “Cupimus, cupitis, cupiunt.”

…BUT, LEON MOPATI considers, picture this: rather than angels, a great conspiracy behind our backs. That corpulent man slurping. That skinny usher talking to himself. That unlucky fellow falling in the aisle. Got up. Good. Made it. Sometimes the best revenge being simply to survive. Another premise: everyone who touches one of their unsteady lives has been paid to act her or his part. Why not? Disprove it. Go on. Let us call it religion. Well, you say, well: just ask them. Only don’t you see? The cinerati maintain all film history boils down to the not-so-short distance between the Lumiére Brothers and Méliés. Realism, documentary, mimesis: magic, vision, spectacle. Choose your side and take your Rorschach. Whatever they tell you, whether they affirm or deny it, is part of the script the fallen fellow’s not privy to, or the fat one, or the skinny. What did they used to? Photoplay . That’s it. Lovely language from the days when language was thought. Frolicking light . Film as architecture in motion. A luminous building that walks around you. Sneak up on them when they’re not. That’s the spirit. Hide in a closet. Shinny beneath a bed. Wait for them to speak when they think you’re not around waiting for them to speak. Adrift. In the brightness. What a terrible place to. The hot white day. Whiff of baked. But where is she now, my beekeeper? Saada sitting. Saada strolling. Saada shopping store to store. What is she thinking as I think What is she thinking? Sipping coffee in Dunn Brothers. Reaching for a bra in Victoria’s Secrets. Don’t you see? That’s merely part of the same script that affirms you’re hiding in the closet or beneath the bed. Okay: then Ockham’s razor, you say. Principle of parsimony. Plurality not to be assumed without und so weiter. Ciao. There goes God again, lugging His valise behind Him. Yahweh thumbing His way down the autobahn. Auf Weiderretten. Shalom. Don’t forget to. Right. Our sense of these things changing as they change because we begin life as one person and end it as many. Like that artist who did paintings of strangers, then called them all self-portraits. Except isn’t it. What? Except isn’t it more parsimonious to assume everyone is working off a script he doesn’t have access to than it is every man, woman, and child is running willy-nilly and topsy-turvy through a pluriverse, scriptless? Homeless. Scylla and. Wait. Nausicaa on the waterfront-what was her name? That book being, I mean. Her. Yes. Daisy. Daisy Buchanan. That’s it. West Egg, yolk of his story. I’ll always be Nick at heart, odd man out, Nick at night who wears his mind on his sleeve. He is sometimes happy just being older. Love among the ruins. The olive trees. The disintegration of a certain afternoon. Let us call it going to the movies. The silverscreen dock. Green residence of the head. Born Gatz, wasn’t he? Changing as we. The opposite being the opposite of breathing. Because it is such a public medium, celluloid, continuously about how we live together continuously. Like architecture that way, too. What we think, in other words, isn’t what we see. These difficult objects of the imagination, these angels continuing their laughs, lightmist issuing from their mouths. We are so nice to each other because our religions are not. What a strange. Why can’t we learn to live in pieces with each other? Is it therefore a coincidence that every person whose skull has been opened has had a brain inside it? Think. The opposite being the opposite. All other skulls are stuffed with. What? Not straw, say, but slategray snails. Our idea of the Paraclete. Why not? Prove me wrong. Go ahead. Please. No, really. Try. Because in this place lightmist is no angel’s breath but a clamor from morning to midnight. A filmic racket crazying the afternoon. Mouths breaking down popcorn. Milk Duds. Runts. Rasinets. Hot Tamales. Sweetarts. Gobstoppers. (What a word!) Almond Joy. Yes. Hosanna to the Mercurial Age. A-chew. Bless you. Sniffle. Merci. Those teens down front talking to the screen as if with twenty-foot friends. Childish Americans with their eyes shut against the. World. All they want is more. Hear no evil, see no. What do you suppose that sound…? Cellophane rip of candybox wrapping. Where did the kissing? The nothing that is not there and. Life Savers. Pack your own, rowing through the changing minutes homeward. Nice. A sermon there. And so back to faithful Saada. Here we are again. Nevertheless open up the head of someone you claim has jewelry in it, you say, and all you will find is another brain domiciled within. Sure. Of course. That’s easy for you to say. Proves my point. Once a skull is popped, chances are you will locate a brain in it. Tell me something I don’t know. Tell me, for example, how we touched hands purely because touching hands seemed the right thing to do. On that gravelly path. She loved me then. But does she love me now, picking through the sales rack at Casual Corner? Next to love stands the desire for it. When you’re young, you confuse the one with the other. Middling into age, you confuse desire and love with affection and reliability. Who would want it otherwise? And so if she sat next to me now, a stranger, would she care? Or would she merely watch the feature before her, our elbows unintentionally untouching, then rise and drift off to shop some more with someone more? The idea so fragile. Too immediate for any speech. Isn’t that. What? Sad. Yes. Yes, it is. Very. A moving picture. Changing as I. The opposite being the same, in some sense, too. Ditto with an x-ray. Thermogram. CATscan. Yet the next person whose head you crack open might just have a cranium stuffed with honey-scented blossoms, violets and camellias, mayflowers and monkhoods, snowberries and zinnias. In any case, that’s what you must keep believing. The fairytale you have to keep telling yourself. Everybody now. After me. Bluebottles and butterfish, geckos and newts. Sidewinders. Willets. Pewits, terns, and