Lance Olsen: 10:01

TAKE, FOR INSTANCE, fireflies, considers Trudi Chan. Fireflies share an internal metronome that sets the pace of their flashes based on what other fireflies in the vicinity are doing. And fads? Fads are nothing save flocks of people falling into step with each other without being told to do so. Even consciousness itself is the consequence of neurons firing in accord, a microscopic electrical symphony playing in ideal time behind our eyes. Unresponsive to points of historical interest, museums, or scenic views, whenever she finds herself in a new city Trudi vectors for the nearest mall. The outside strikes her as too disturbingly nineteenth century. She genuinely appreciates the glass doors at most mall entrances are purposefully tinted dark to make it seem continuously gloomy outside. Trudi wants to witness unsoiled concord in action. She wants to watch people dance a dance they don’t even know they’re dancing. She is interested in how these places concentrate our culture’s favorite socially acceptable addictions — seeing, eating, and buying — beneath one roof in a single, collective, complexly meshed instant. How the drab exteriors announce nature’s irrelevance. How malls have become the postindustrial equivalent of Japanese gardens: everyone wants to find out what’s in the next shop, around the next comer, up the next escalator. The more you look, the more you see. The more you see, the more you want. The more you want, the more you look. Malls are the only utopias that actually work, believes Trudi, spaces about promi… The hollow sound of heavy breathing interrupts her reflections. She glances over her shoulder and spots two teens going at it three rows behind her. Trudi Chan’s brain blanks.

WHAT SLUART Navidson failed to tell both the police and his wife is that he is almost positive whoever broke into his house also rearranged the poetry magnets on his refrigerator from PUPPET OPENS RED DOOR UPON WOLF SKY to WOLF PUPPET OPENS SKY DOOR UPON RED.

IN A FAKE GOATEE, tiny round wire-rimmed glasses, and schlumpy Irish tweed walking hat, Josh Hartnett kills time in the dark, wishing someone would recognize him. How famous can you really be, the idea nags and nags him, if you can throw people off this easily? The most important role any star plays is himself. He is known precisely for his well-knownness. So how much of a star can Josh Harnett be if no one around him can tell Josh Harnett is Josh Harnett trying not to look like himself? Tomorrow he will meet his buddy Matt Dillon less than a mile from Stuart and Valerie Navidson’s cabin on the shore of Lake Superior to start shooting a murder mystery. Josh will playa serial killer with a sensitive, caring side revealed through his relationship with his paraplegic older brother, played by Matt, whom Josh will ultimately euthanize by feeding him into a giant wood chipper in an homage to that scene from Fargo , only with Matt still alive, saintly expression upon his face, as Josh, torqued by guilt, hefts him into the yowling, spitting maw. Guillermo Arriaga wrote the screenplay. Matt will direct. This will be Josh’s most psychologically complex and demanding role so far, and one he hopes will confirm once and for all his wide range as an actor for those dubious critics out there — even though, honestly, he has some issues with Matt playing his sibling, what with that horse jaw of his and head too big for his body. Born and raised in St. Paul, Josh has only lived in Hollywood for a couple years. He misses his parents and looks forward to hanging out with them and some of his old high school buddies during breaks from the shoot, and…hey, what’s that smell? Josh raising his chin. Sniffing tentatively.

THREE BLACK teenagers sag in their seats two rows from the screen. “Girl,” the first, Lakeesha Johnson, is saying on her cell phone, eying the lightshow before her through substantial glasses. Some wack shit is going down up there involving a skinny-assed whiteboy in some phat-up silks dangling off the bottom of a train. The train is speeding through countryside somewhere in one of them places with mountains and shit. “I’m here , girl. No. Uh-uh. I ain’t there, those I gonna be there but I ain’t yet. Uh-uh. I be on my way there soon this thing done. Now I be right where I’s at… “Her friends Chantrelle Williams and Desria Brown aren’t paying attention to her conversation. They are acting on the instinctive urge they feel to anticipate this trailer’s plot and save that foo up there fore he gets hisself into some real trouble. “Yo, yo, check it out,” Chantrelle instructs him, right hand raised limply, forefinger and pinkie pointing. “You got to work harder, bitch, else you dead . Come on now. That right.” The skinny-assed foo struggles under the carriage where he locates an unlocked trap door that magically leads him up into this juice first-class cabin. Rising, weary yet somehow sweatless, hair unspoiled, he pats himself off, relieved, unaware of the remarkably large blockish bro in a fly zoot suit all bling-bling with a meat cleaver in one hand looming in the shadows behind him. The bro steps forward. His teeth are gold. “Watch you back , fag!” Desria shouts. “Yo, what you thinkin’? You turn round or you be in some serious shit now, aw-ight? That nigga gonna OJ you ass. What he thinkin’, Chantrelle, baby? What. He. Thinkin’?” “Fuck if I knows, girl,” responds Chantrelle Williams. “Fuck if I knows…”

PIERRE, THE MAN in the black mackintosh sitting directly behind Chantrelle, row three, seat six, caught immortality from a mosquito in the Szeged train station one humid summer evening in 1942. There is one insect in the world that carries the virus and, unlike others of its species, it is iridescent, immortal itself, and blinks into existence on Mondays and Wednesdays. The rest of the week it resides in a parallel universe where it dies every sixteen hours. Pierre was on a mission for the French Resistance to eliminate a high-ranking German officer passing through Hungary when the mosquito bit him. Pierre can no longer recall his own last name because it has been so long since he used it. Back in Paris, his job was to wait on a street corner at night until another man in a black mackintosh identical to his own approached him and whispered a coded message as he strolled past. Pierre then walked to another street comer several blocks away where another man in a black mackintosh was waiting for him, and Pierre, strolling past, would reiterate verbatim what he had heard. Sometimes the messages were vitally important. Sometimes they were gibberish. Pierre never knew which were which. Feet aching like a pair of upset hearts, he sometimes waited rainy hours for his contact to appear. Pierre believes people are expecting him somewhere in the mall this very minute. He believes he should be somewhere he isn’t, although he doesn’t know where that place is. He knows he has nothing to tell the people waiting for him. No one has approached Pierre with a message, coded or otherwise, in more than sixty years. Every morning he wakes feeling anxious he has nothing to tell anyone anywhere on this loose planet.

THE STEM OF Miguel Gonzalez’s brain becomes an electrical squall as his fingertips contact the crevice forming the intersection of Angelica Encinas’s upper thigh and lower groin. The soft, miraculous nexus is damply warm. A centimeter more, and Miguel encounters the resistance of her cotton panties. He has imagined this instant hundreds of times over the last month and a half. It is just how he imagined it. He slips his forefinger beneath the hem and meets the first stiff curls of pubic hair. He brings to mind all the occasions he has pictured slipping his forefinger beneath this hem and closes his eyes to savor the sensation fully. Then there is an explosion on the screen so loud Miguel tastes tinfoil. Angelica, hot palm on Miguel’s crotch, recoils.