Lance Olsen: 10:01

SCANNING INDIFFERENTLY, Byron Metnick becomes aware of the cute little blind girl standing at the opposite end of row seven in the opposite aisle. She is feeling her way along the wall, obviously lost. Byron shrugs himself forward, shortcuts through a vacant channel of seats, puts on his professional nice-guy personality attributes, squats in front of her, and asks her where her mommy and daddy are. She opens her eyes, completely spooking him, and explains unperturbedly that she misplaced them. Exuding just the right mixture of responsibility and avuncularity, Byron takes her gummy hand in his and leads her out to the lobby where two anxious young parents, one fat and the other fatter, descend in a flutter of relief and guilt. On his way back in, he passes a huddle of overly enthusiastic theater personnel. In the center of the huddle floats one of those bald, wasted Make-A-Wish kids with her mother. Bald, wasted Make-A-Wish kids creep Byron out because they’re both really gross and really pathetic at the same time. Suddenly bummed, Byron lowers his head, pretending not to notice, wide-arcs around them, and lurches into the darkening theater.

THE EXIT DOOR behind Trudi Chan whuffs shut. The lights weaken. Trudi momentarily believes she is losing her sight. She crosses the left leg of her black business suit over the right, flicks off a fleck of invisible fluff, and exhales. She got into town late last night for a meeting near the airport first thing this morning. Afterward she took the shuttle in to pass a few hours before her flight to Chicago and another meeting first thing tomorrow morning. Trudi works for a private San Francisco aerospace firm run by a billionaire dot.commer researching malls to see what hermetically sealed one-stop living might tell us about how to construct orbital resorts in the future. Trudi Chan is in possession of a plethora of related arcana. She knows that the Del Amo Fashion Center in Southern California is larger than the principality of Monaco. That Tokyo boasts an underground shopping sprawl with forty-six movie theaters, fifteen hundred restaurants, fifteen discos, and six hundred ninety-nine mahjongg parlors. The mall in which she presently sits attracts more visitors annually than any other destination in the U.s., employs twelve thousand people, and can accommodate twelve-thousand-seven-hundred-and- fifty cars. Except Trudi isn’t calling up any of these bits of data right now. She is drifting in the soothing amniotic awareness that everyone around her is part of a much larger project than he or she suspects. This is because the cosmos, Trudi trusts, only appears chaotic, but is in reality an orderly place marked by harmony, synchronicity, and cooperation. All you have to do is look. All you have to do is pay attention.

THE EXIT DOOR behind the huddle of overly enthusiastic theater personnel whuffs shut. The light in the lobby remains brash, one full wall being a bank of windows that overlooks the crisscross of verandas comprising the food court and, beyond, Camp Snoopy, a seven-acre skylit atrium wearing its battleship-gray filtration system and stanchions in plain view as if the architect had decided to turn a building inside out. In the center of the huddle floats the Make-A-Wish child with her mother. But the sickly little girl, buoyant in this luminous flash of public love, isn’t really a sickly little girl. She is a twenty-eight-year-old dwarf named Magda Dorendorf who razors her head every morning, diets, wears cute pink skirts and cute pink sweaters with cute white cotton-ball clouds puffing across them, and smudges lilac eye-shadow beneath her eyes for that classic haunted chemo look. The tall thin woman standing beside her in a pair of scuba-goggle spectacles and platinum wig is Odele Krushnekov, Magda’s lover. They have been on the road since October, leisurely driving from their crummy apartment in Hoboken to Los Angeles, where Magda plans to enter films. They have scammed their way through thirty-eight states. Their favorite stop so far has been in Darwin, Minnesota, home of the world’s largest twine ball, a twelve-foot-in- diameter sphere weighing seventeen thousand four hundred pounds sheltered in its own Plexiglas-windowed hut. Magda doesn’t know a tumor the size of a pencil eraser really is growing just beneath her left aureole. Nor will she discover it in time to decelerate its black yawning. In despair, Odele will join a women’s religious cult whose members refuse to talk to other women, thereby boycotting their own gender and the pain it has caused them.

THE EXIT DOOR behind Elmore Norman whuffs shut. The lights weaken. Elmore momentarily believes he is losing his sight. Mustached, slicked-back black hair feathered gray, married for more than twenty-two years to a gal named Harriett, Elmore swigs his Mountain Dew, wondering why he can’t seem to get anywhere anymore. Elmore is up before seven every morning, at the mall by nine, firing up the grill at Malaysian Madness by ten. At one time or another he has cooked for eighteen people occupying this theater, although none would remember him. On his days off, he robs banks in the greater metropolitan area. What it is, is a guy’s got payments. Elmore dresses in women’s clothes and wig similar to Odele Krushnekov’s and meets his buddy Tony, also disguised as a woman, in Tony’s souped-up matte-gray Camero at the west parking lot. Neither of them owns a gun, so Elmore menaces the tellers with a crowbar he found in his basement. Elmore is lucky if him and Tony can split seven hundred bucks a pop. Two in three heists the greenbacks come with one of those hidden dye-packs that explodes as they jam, splattering the cash with indelible red ink. Elmore has robbed thirty banks so far. He doesn’t know the one he will attempt to knock off in two days will be his last. It will possess a lockdown bulletproof entrance that will trap him until the police arrive, crowbar notwithstanding. Tony, waiting across the street, will see what’s gone down and book. The only thing Elmore will be able to show for his efforts will be a big-screen RCA television set he got a good deal on from that dago Juan Fernandez, which isn’t fair, because Elmore already has one of those, plus the clicker doesn’t work. He bought it last April for Harriett’s birthday so she could watch her favorite show in style: Cops .

THE EXIT DOOR behind the furry white puffer fish of a stray Persian cat whuffs shut. The lights weaken. The cat momentarily believes it is losing its sight. This doesn’t especially trouble it. Nothing especially troubles it. In the course of its lifetime its name has been Buford, Bunny, Blanche, Bradford, Blossom, Boris, and Bathsheba. It has been unaware of them all, as it has of the fact it has enjoyed multiple owners, is a Persian, and once upon a time possessed something called a gender. Earlier today, as the cold atmosphere flaked away in silvery chips around it, it happened across an open door on a delivery dock and wandered through. At present it unknowingly sits beneath the seat of a bank robber, having entered a variety of perceptual stupor. A chemical randomly leaps a synapse behind its glacial blue eyes and it finds itself meandering into an aisle. Conscious only of its bladder plumping full in gradations, it halfheartedly scratches at the carpet, crouches, contracts some muscles, loosens others, and pees, forgetting in mid-act what it is doing, then remembering again. Done, it scratches at the carpet halfheartedly again, and, forgetting why it was scratching in the first place, finds itself meandering beneath the seat of a famous actor in disguise, ignorant that scientists from a parallel universe are trying to contact it tele-pathically from an invisible ship suspended three hundred miles over the Twin Cities. The scientists believe Persian cats comprise the most intelligent life form on the planet because they are plainly the most beautiful. This is one of the many reasons their civilization will collapse into rubble and fly wings in slightly fewer than three millennia.