Lance Olsen: 10:01

SOMEWHERE BELOW the soul of Remedios the Beauty, a secondary explosion, then silverwhite light flocking toward her through the ventilation system. In the instant before it arrives with a fiery kiss, she remembers the day her great-grandfather, Jose Arcadio Segundo, having vanished for years into the jungle in search of a waterway connecting Macondo to the sea, unexpectedly floated into view on the river in a rickety steamboat filled with prostitutes. Since he did not succeed in finding the course he had been questing for, he decided to celebrate his failure instead. That evening he threw a Festival of Disappointment on the Street of Turks. Remedios the Beauty was crowned queen, not because of her looks (she had shaved her head with a dull razor that morning), but because of her wondrous cinnamon-and-orange scent. As the master of ceremonies lowered the rusty clothes hanger standing in for a coronet onto her head, a rival queen in a magnificent white lace dress and abundant veil came into sight at the far end of the block. An enormous entourage of nuns flooded around her. A wary hush swelled through the revelers. Even the prostitutes ceased laughing. One of the nuns shed her habit. In her place stood a soldier with a rifle. He raised the weapon above his head, shouted something Remedios the Beauty could not comprehend, and the holy entourage turned quickly into an unholy platoon. With that, the Banana Company Massacre commenced. When a bullet took off José Arcadio Segundo’s kneecap twenty-two inches to Remedios the Beauty’s left, and her great-grandfather crumpled into a pile of useless old clothes beside her, Remedios the Beauty felt something tingle in the bottoms of her bare feet for the first time in her life, and realized her future would be nothing if not curious.

“HANG IN THERE, people!” Josh Hartnett shouts, scrabbling over chunks of fallen concrete, rebar, upturned seats. “I’m Josh Hartnett, the actor! Help’s on the way!” His eyes sear. He has a hard time catching his breath. But he scrabbles forward searching for survivors. In his mind’s eye, he is Staff Sergeant Matt Eversmann in Black Hawk Down and his mission is to boost his men’s morale no matter what. They are pinned down in the streets of Mogadishu. They are taking heavy fire. It’s up to him to get them through alive. He closes his eyes, knowing he has to concentrate. This is no time to let his attention drift. This is no time to mess up a good thing. Only he can’t figure out why no one has showed up to lend a hand yet. The exit doors remain shut, the lobby silent. Where is everybody? Emergency personnel should be thronging this place by now. Josh can’t figure it. Then he notices he is holding something in his right hand. Knotty, bristly, wet. He glances down. Through the dust and smoke, he sees his soggy Irish tweed walking hat and fake goatee. Something in him liquefies. Shit, man. Shit. This isn’t a stupid movie. He’s no Army Ranger. This is the real deal, and he’s just Josh Hartnett, the schmuck with really nice eyes. He drops his hat and goatee. “Help us!” he screams. “Oh, god, help us! Help us! We’re all gonna die! Stand by to crash! Help! Help us! HELP!”

FIRE CRACKLES. The alarm cycles. Susie Carbonara sobs quietly to herself beneath debris, waiting to die. She is thinking about how she lived a super life with Ronny and Tyler and Taylor, how she always tried as hard as she could to be a good Christian. She made mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes…even if she can’t quite call up any particulars at the moment. Isn’t that funny? Nor can she fathom this is where it will end. After all the work she did for the homeless, all the daily greeting cards she posted to Our Maker. Hope, Susie decides, sobbing, is a joke. Everyone is trapped here. Everyone is doomed. This evening Sophia Choi on CNN will refer to what happened as a terrible tragedy . Susie finds it harder and harder to catch her breath. Her sole wish is that time will speed up now like in one of those movies, her world quickly become a what’s that word jump-cut to the final credits. Close by, Juanita makes whimpering noises. Susie attempts reaching out her hand to comfort her, but touches something knotty, bristly, and round instead. She retracts to find a shrunken head gawking back at her from her open palm. Susie Carbonara shrieks in terror.

THE EXIT DOORS smash open. They don’t. Firemen flood in. Ropes spaghetti down the edges of the cavernous hole in the ceiling. S.W.A.T. teams rappel, semi-automatic Heckler and Koch MP5’s blazing. The smoke. The dust. Or it is something else. They do or they don’t. One or the. Because in the gray absence above, a copter leaps into view, snow swirling in its downdraft. No, wait. That’s not right. The copter doesn’t leap into view. Everything is as it was. Everything is. What? A Sunday afternoon at the movies. Then the fat man slowly stands and slowly turns. He remains seated. The audience watches. The exit doors. The firemen. Is this another commercial? Anything’s possible. The S.W.A.T. teams rappel. But next. After that. Subsequently. It’s hard to say what. The second bomb, the one under that man’s mackintosh. A firestorm whooshes out from him. Maybe. Maybe not. Another section of roof. The Mall of America is under attack. Yes, that’s it. Other suicide bombers, other floors. You can hear them. You can hear the screams. The dynamics of metaphor. Chaos in the atrium. And then: a ruptured waterpipe. Sections of floor gape open. People, seats, chunks of concrete disappear. A magic act. Use your. No. Imagination. Wait. That’s not right. How can you imagine such things? But afterwards, it’s something else. It’s one thing and then it’s another. In the course of time. If you don’t use it, somebody else will. And so. Next. Later on. As things worked out. It’s the. What? Listen. Machinegun chatter. The rush of flames. The panicked shouts. The harsh cold wind blowing. Only that. None of it. All. Next the. And after that? What happens after that? And then what? What then?

MILO MAGNANI, one of the assistant managers of the Mall of America, loves watching trailers for disaster movies. But he loves watching his clients watch trailers for disaster movies even more. This is why two minutes ago he slipped unnoticed behind Byron Metnick during his, Milo’s, afternoon walkabout and took the first seat in the very last row. From here, Milo can enjoy the view, not of the screen, but of the crowd sprinkled before him enjoying the view. Milo turns fifty-seven today. These next few minutes are a small birthday present to himself. Arms crossed above his generous belly, American-flag bowtie knotted beneath his chalky shaven wattle, Milo loosens his hold on his thoughts and finds himself back in Edina, Minnesota, site of Southdale, the first enclosed, multi-level mall in the United States. Milo’s mother took him there for his eighth birthday in 1956, two months after its grand opening. Milo understood what he wanted to be when he grew up the second he walked through the entrance and saw the awesome sight of seventy-two stores stretching out ahead of him. It felt like a series of signposts to the future. Southdale was the creation of a man named Victor Gruen, an Austrian-born architect who, fleeing the Nazis, arrived in this country with eight bucks in his pocket and the belief that for communities to work well they needed to provide spaces for people to exist together. The advent of the automobile and suburbs had effectively blocked that possibility, so he invented a new kind of zone for human activity. People wouldn’t only want to enter it to shop. They would want to enter it to be —stroll, sit, eat, chat, browse, play games, take simple pleasure in the rush of data and the presence of others — just like they used to do in the pedestrian arcades back in Europe. And look at where Victor’s vision has led. You could fit seven Yankee stadiums into this place. Seven . Shortly after that visit, Milo came to understand something else about himself: that, if he relaxed just right, loosened his hold on his thoughts, he was sometimes able to slip behind the foreheads of those who had recently opened themselves up to the prospect of diversion- a gift that has provided him with a consistent edge in his business. Right now, Milo is sliding into the cold hazy awareness of the old guy in the wheelchair at the far end of his row and apprehending that the sad, agitated ghost of his wife has just stopped by there for the last time, leaving behind a small residue of love, like a gold earring, before going away forever. The teenager in front of him is named Miguel Gonzalez, and Miguel Gonzalez is wondering why humans possess souls, if this is an example of what having one feels like. The girl beside him is feeling guilty Miguel paid so much money for a lousy afternoon with her. In row eleven, a cop named Sid Munsterberg scratches his burning toes through the scuffed-up leather of his cowboy boots, theorizing people go to movies because they feel they are actually buying the time to watch them. An unshaven young man in sunglasses touches his back pocket, all of a sudden aware his wallet is missing — but that’s all right, he figures, because he has made $27,987.53 on the New York Stock Exchange since entering here an hour ago. Vladislav Dovzhenko stealthily reaches up and cups his own left biceps as if cupping the breast of a teenage girl from San Diego. In row ten, an anorexic woman kisses Cary Grant through her surgical mask, and Cary Grant whispers gently into her ear that he prefers men, which she knows immediately is a lie. “We were just playing,” Fred Quock tells his shocked father, “honest,” to which his sister Leni adds hastily: “He made me do it, daddy. Freddy made me do it.” Claude Melies loves his wife almost undetectably more than he did four seconds earlier. Mouche sniffles beside him, her slight sinus cold having escalated into viral sloppiness, and thinks: halcyon . Vito Paluso assumes Mouche is sad, not sick, and feels sorry for the couple for the fight they just had. In row nine, Celan Solen resolves to drop in at Mona’s apartment after the film because she told him she was going to be busy doing exactly nothing special all day. Next to him, Betsi Bliss experiences another slight dilation around her, reality a gleaming pulse, and reaches up to massage the flesh between her shoulder blades, anxious to see what her body’s language has to say. Nadi Slone observes herself leaning uncomfortably against the window of a 747 thirty-eight thousand feet above a nighttime Atlantic, trying to sleep, and failing. Elmore Norman stands over his grill at Malaysian Madness, staring down at the veggies sauteing before him, mind blank as a burgled bank vault. Jerry Roemer leaps across his dewy backyard beneath a moonlit night like Baryshnikov in Swan Lake , fifty years younger and wearing nothing but pink socks and blue sneakers. Betty Roemer sits by her phone at 4:42 a.m. in her room at the Adoring Care Retirement Home in Sarasota, Florida, lamenting there is no one left alive in her solar system to call. In row eight, Moira Lovelace looks forward to introducing biquadratic polynomial expressions to her junior math class tomorrow. Leon Mopati coughs discreetly into his palm and on the spot loses the train of thought he has been riding for several minutes. Giuseppe Rosi taps the send icon on his handheld and his threatening message to Stuart Navidson blinks into the electromagnetic fields around him. Thirty feet above, the mouse skittering through the warm darkness of the ventilation system stops dead in its tracks, sensing the presence of a cat somewhere below, then hurries on its infinite way. The cat, having already forgotten the pain in its side, wanders beneath Garrett Keeter’s seat and eases onto its haunches, unaware as it licks its right paw that by crossing the highway in two hours and forty minutes it will force Garrett’s car into a deadly skid. Garrett sees Jaci’s and his silver BMW start gracefully and inexorably easing across the lanes into the sparkling lights of oncoming traffic, then jerks out of his doze, thinking: stupid dreams . Jaci smiles at nothing, catches herself, and stops. Ryan Moody the lesbian actor sits with a cold towel wrapped around her face in her dressing room in an alternate universe, crying lightly over her lover who just slammed the door behind her in a fit of hormonal pique. In row seven, Jeff Kotcheff crunches down on a handful of chips hard as he can, hoping to annoy the jewboy slumped in front of him. Josh Hartnett huffs to himself in unconditional anonymity and places slightly more weight on his left buttock than his right. Anderson Bates contemplates how, if you look across the Grand Canyon, you are really seeing the other side as it appeared about one ten-thousandth of a second earlier. In row six, Ida Jarboe devotes her full attention to a furuncular anomaly she has just discovered behind her left ear. Johnny Ray stands in the middle of a field of pot plants at night, waving at a bright triangle in the sky that grows smaller and smaller until it winks out of being, experiencing for the first time in his life what real loneliness feels like. Arnold Frankenheimer finds himself all at once unnerved, trying to remember whether or not he wiped that file of the college freshmen and the German shepherd from his hard drive before turning off his office lights and walking. Stuart Navidson stops counting backwards. Kenneth Jehovah falls in love with Julia Ward Howe’s astonishing intellect once again. Lying beside Christopher or Brian or David after making missionary love in the dark, Lara McLuhan says in her little girl’s voice: Tell me again, daddy. Tell it to me one more time . In row five, Lewis Smoodin surreptitiously slaps himself stingingly across the face and in a flush of shame prays no one noticed. In row four, Lily Grodal catches herself wondering briefly how big her neighbor Anderson Bates’s cock is, reddening in embarrassment, disbelief, and alert interest at the idea. Athena Fulay passes a stranger’s blood back and forth over her tastebuds while a gentle affection inflates inside her for the man seated before her. Ed Bergman attempts to restrain himself from reaching forward and fingering the rubbery fabric of the black mackintosh twenty-two inches away. Susie Carbonara strolls through Camp Snoopy, reveling in the cotton-candy snowdrifts and wishing she could be that creative. Juanita Chamorro decides she will begin her long hike back home tomorrow morning. In row three, Kate Frazey is a limp puppet piled on the side of a dark road. Pierre searches his shirt pocket for his package of Juicy Fruit gum only to recall he left it in his other pair of khakis. Rex Wigglie decides his next lyric will involve both a falcon and a fish, then grins at his lyrical acumen. In row two, Lakeesha Johnson runs out of things to say to the no one on the other end of her cell phone and brings to a close the conversation that never took place. Chantrelle Williams’s stomach burbles and she steals a glance over at Desria to see if she heard. Desria Brown stands with her hands in the pockets of her hooded sweatshirt, cold air leaking from her nose and mouth, watching a crumpled-up Starbucks coffee cup skip down the windy sidewalk in front of her, hop off the curb, and spin farther and farther up the vacant street. Milo Magnani glows with quiet pride, gives their thoughts back to these people, and, straightening his bowtie unnecessarily, rises to depart. Around him, throats clear, feet scrape, candy wrappers crinkle. The world grows brighter and brighter and brighter. Milo inhales and exhales. He waits. The film begins.