Lance Olsen: 10:01

Eyes shut, chin on chest, suspended on the whorling rim of sleep, Zdravko is semi-dreaming of his dead wife Kosa, to whom he was married far fifty-five years. When Kosa passed after a long battle with a disease that turned her memories into water, it felt as if a surgeon had visited Zdravko in the night and extracted his lungs. He stopped eating, but his nurse brought him to the hospital where the doctors attached a tube beneath his collarbone to keep him away from her. These days Zdravko’s main goal in life is to leave it. This is proving more difficult than he anticipated. In the meantime, he strives to remain invisible. A Serb charged with atrocities committed at the Omarska camp, Zdravko fled through Hungary to Austria in the final days of the war, from Austria to America. He became eight different people along the way, and is frightened he might have caught immortality from a mosquito in the Szeged train station one humid summer evening. Zdravko believes in certain international officials’ eyes he still matters, but is mistaken. At the back of the theater, he semi-dreams he is sitting in his old living room with Kosa, reading the newspaper after work. It is winter. The electric fire is glowing. The heavy drapes are drawn. Kosa is knitting, only backwards. With each stitch she undoes, another memory drops away from her, a tuft of glassy milkweed.

BYRON METNICK, the scrawny usher scanning the audience from his post at the rear exit, doesn’t like movies. He considers them serious wastes of time. They make him think too much, for one thing. Plus he read somewhere the majority of steady film patrons are between the ages of seventeen and twenty-nine with bachelor’s degrees either in sight or in hand, and Byron despises everyone of them. Last April, two months before graduation, he dropped out of Kennedy High, having learned exactly zip there except maybe how to type. Byron is totally down with his job here, though, because once a flick starts he gets to duck into the last row and catch a quick nap. After work, his friends and him cruise over to the park and smoke weed on the swings or in their cars and chill. Byron can’t get baked at home because he still lives with his rents and his rents possess a veritable shitstorm of rules. Fridays and Saturdays, Byron sleeps late and returns to the mall in the afternoon. He gets high in his fourth-hand Dodge Colt in one of the parking structures, buys a Coke and jumbo fries at Malaysian Madness in the food court, and people-watches. After a while, everyone at the mall starts looking stunned like they’ve seen too much. If he waits long enough, one of his friends eventually drifts by with news about where the best party will be that night. Byron then cruises over and smokes weed and chills until he finds himself nodding off in front of Road Runner cartoons in the basement. Meanwhile, Byron just likes looking. He finds the kids riding the Mighty Ax at the very point their sense of enjoyment wanes (eighty feet in the air, upside-down, teetering at the cusp of a plummet) particularly fucking hilarious. The way their eyes go all big. The way their jaws brace for impact.

LYDIA LARRABEE carries a furry insect at the end of her name because that’s how she remembers it and Lydia is this many old and her eyes are shut because there are boys and girls all over the world who see only with their fingers but Lydia went peepee and stepping out of the stall couldn’t find her mommy in the crowded restroom and stepping out of the crowded restroom couldn’t find her daddy in the crowded lobby and now she thinks maybe she turned right thinking right was left but they went to Camp Snoopy this morning and splashed down the Log Chute into a cement mountain filled with puppets and in Cereal Adventure her favorite breakfast foods Cocoa Puffs Lucky Charms Trix came to life and Lydia petted a real live stingray in the petting pool at Underwater Adventure and this place smells like grownups’ bottoms but if you squint just right it only looks like your eyes are closed but really you can see and her daddy told her there were thirty thousand plants and four hundred trees in Camp Snoopy and the world’s biggest working LEGO clock in the Imagination Center was so pretty Lydia wanted to buy it and there was a red LEGO dinosaur with a gray belly and brown back and green blinking eyes and a baby LEGO dinosaur at its feet so cute she wanted to buy that too and this theater smells very small like grammy’s apartment on winter mornings when the radiator is running and this wall feels very gray like a rug and Lydia stands by it wishing she was blind and her hair long like a princess’s and full like golden smoke.

JEFF KOTCHEFF is engaged in an act of loathing. He pictures his seat, situated in the precise center of the theater, a foxhole, and the colorful boxes of candy, plastic container of chips and cheesy dip, cardboard carton stuffed with hot-dog, jumbo-sized tub of buttered popcorn, and super-size Coke surrounding it sandbags. He has raised his armrests to accommodate his existence because when he concludes one meal his first thought is what he will have for a snack before the next. Jeff lives alone in a farmhouse on two-point-five acres of hilly land an hour and a half northwest of the city because he enjoys occupying space. That’s what the universe is for, in Jeff’s opinion: filling. He fists a wad of soppy popcorn into his mouth, takes a considerable slurp of pop, pushes his aviator glasses up on his nose, and glowers at the back of the head of the jewboy who just sat down in front of him. Jesus H. Christ. Six-fifty for a matinee and they remind Jeff of those extreme what do you call it bioforms he saw on the Discovery Channel last week that live in thermal vents at the bottom of the what do you call it Mariana Trench. This is why guns are so wonderful, but not as wonderful as small personal incendiary devices. Live and let live, believes Jeff, so long as you leave my view corridor the fuck alone. When Jeff chomps down on his hotdog, relish and mustard ooze out the butt-end and glop onto his flannel shirtfront. Jeff is acutely indifferent. He is looking forward to a good love story with maybe Sarah Michelle Gellar or Gwyneth Paltrow in it. He could really use a first-rate romantic weeper right about now. Jeff Kotcheff wants to feel his heart tear. Jeff Kotcheff wants to cry his goddamn eyes out.

THREE ROWS BEHIND him, Vito Paluso chooses an aisle seat. That way he can easily reach down and shift the position of his crutches should someone want to get by. Manipulating his bent bad legs into place, he begins daydreaming about the video he is making. Vito works as a security guard in the mall, sitting in a cramped concrete room observing a wall of surveillance monitors. When he locates a disturbance, he phones his superior who walkie-talkies down to his crew on the floor. Vito also secretly scans the monitors for what he calls S.L’s (pronounced sighs ), or Special Instants: those during which tourists photograph each other. Or not precisely those, but rather the ones immediately following them, when people slowly stop smiling after the shot has been snapped and you can actually see their public masks soften and melt back into everyday blandness, a gesture almost always accompanied by a slight lowering of the head in a miniature act of capitulation. Vito wants to capture a hundred such moments, gray and grainy, slo-mo and soundless, in a montage called Where the Smiling Ends . Once a week, he dubs footage onto a VHS tape he takes home, downloads it onto his computer, and edits. For Vito, montage isn’t a formalistic technique. Continuity determined by the symbolic association of ideas between shots rather than literal connections in time and space is a philosophical principle. Vito believes living is nothing if not a series of dissolves, superimpositions, odd juxtapositions, and unexpected cuts. He would give anything to know someday his short will be shown at a film festival, except he is terrified by failure. He will therefore never finish the seven-minute-and-forty-four-second work that has already burned through nearly two years of his life.

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