Lance Olsen: 10:01

FRED QUOCK’S thoughts refuse to walk in a straight line. A pudgy pilot for Northwest Airlines, Fred sports a vestigial salt-and-pepper mustache and vestigial mouth. He is here to pass a palmful of hours before his flight to Atlanta. On the balcony overlooking Camp Snoopy, Fred phoned his wife, Carla, in Salt Lake City, to tell her he loved her. Fred and Carla were high-school sweethearts. For more than thirty years, they conceived of each other less as husband and wife than socially adept friends. When this flick is over, Fred will meet Pablo Tati, a flight attendant twelve years his junior, in America’s Original Sports Bar. They will share several syrupy drinks, then take separate shuttles to the Country Inn and Suites where Fred will rent a room on the fourth floor, don a Snagglepus outfit, and boink Pablo senseless. Fred never feels as alive as when dressed as a Furvert, his life rich with secrets and deception. He is feeling exceptionally alive today. Besides imagining Pablo’s cute doughy potbelly that reminds him of an enormous plucked chicken breast, Fred is busy gloating about winning an all-expenses-paid trip to the Happy Trails Dude Ranch near Bozeman, Montana. He doesn’t remember having entered the twenty-five-words-or-Iess contest, but he enters ones like it all the time. What Fred doesn’t know is that Gordo Jarmush, his ex-lover, is playing a prank on him to punish Fred for being such a sadistic, insensitive bastard. The Happy Trails Dude Ranch closed three years ago. Fred will soon learn how little there is for a weekend cowboy in pressed jeans, bolo tie, ten-gallon hat, and sharp-toed rattlesnake boots in Bozeman other than wandering the dull main drag, waiting for the next three minutes to pass away, and then waiting for the next three minutes to pass away again.

CLAUDE AND MOUCHE MÉliÉS, the couple directly to Fred’s right, give the impression of being faintly bewildered inhabiting this theater. Last July they invited over a colleague of Mouche’s at the University and his wife for drinks. Claude and Mouche only glanced at each other when the man and woman showed up carrying overnight bags. Claude cheerfully ushered them into the living room while Mouche fetched scotch-and-sodas. The first hour slow-faded into the second. Next, it was half past eight and no one had mentioned dinner yet. Feigning casualness, Mouche slipped into the kitchen, rifled through the fridge and pantry for foodstuffs, and returned to offer everyone club sandwiches. Afterward, the woman excused herself and disappeared upstairs. The man found a novel on the bookshelf in Mouche’s office, took a seat in her leather recliner, and read. If Claude remembered correctly, it followed the thoughts of a number of people watching a musical extravaganza until, unexpectedly, a bomb went off in the playhouse near the end and everybody died. Eventually Claude, who had been washing dishes, set out in search of Mouche to discuss their options. Instead, he discovered the woman sprawled on their bed upstairs, dress hiked over her waist, sleeping. Her overnight bag was open on the oak armoire. Claude backed out and continued his search, after some time finding Mouche snoring lightly on a couch in the guest bedroom. He undressed and lay down on the rug on the floor beside her. Next morning, he awoke to the scent of pancakes. The man had made a delicious breakfast. That afternoon and evening wafted by, but the man and the woman didn’t leave. A week evaporated, then two. July blanched into August. More than once Claude and Mouche had to confess privately their guests were pleasant housemates, the atmosphere generally cordial. They celebrated Labor Day together, collected before the TV to watch the Thanksgiving’s Day parade, drove into the country to cut down a bushy tree for Christmas. This morning Mouche awoke with a slight sinus cold and remained indoors while Claude shoveled the accumulating snow off the back patio. When he tried to enter the house at lunchtime, he found the side door locked. Puzzled, he walked around front. That door was locked as well. He rang the bell, waited, rang again. No one answered. He tried several windows. No luck. He cupped his hands and peered in. The house was dark. He heard footsteps behind him and turned. It was Mouche. She walked right past him, saying over her shoulder: “Come on, let’s get going.” “Get going?” Claude asked, looking back at the side door. “It’s locked,” Mouche said. “The windows, too. I’m hungry.” And so, after a slight hesitation, they cut through the yard, climbed over the fence, and, hand in hand, strolled up the street past many houses in the neighborhood that had been taken over and some that had not. Before long, they found themselves here. They haven’t seen a movie in six months. Between them they possess fewer than a hundred dollars. They don’t know where to go. They don’t know what to do. They feel like candles. They feel like someone is trying to blow them out.

ELMORE NORMAN takes another sip of Mountain Dew and is transported to a faraway desert land. A crusader on horseback, he slays a dragon the dimensions of a school bus. The dragon is covered with shimmering scales, each comprised of a three-dimensional photograph of a possible future. In a cave guarded by genie, Elmore comes across an exact tiny silver replica of his own house among piles of gold. In the replica, tiny versions of Harriett and him watch a tiny big-screen television set. They are sitting side by side on a tiny couch, sharing a tiny bowl of ice cream. They look overweight and they look bored. After solving a complicated riddle posed by the genie, Elmore marries a firm-breasted Nubian slave and fathers eight children by her. He grows old. Two of his children are killed in an earthquake, one by pestilence, one by war. His Nubian wife leaves him for another woman. His friends in Minneapolis forget him and move on with their lives. Elmore loses his possessions when he bets the sun will rise the next day, but it doesn’t. Beaten down, his health declines, his organs give out, disease makes a meal of his body. Lying alone on his deathbed in a dark tent stinking of rotten canvas, Elmore’s vision dims. Somehow he always thought the end would be a lot worse than this. It is bad, certainly, but somehow he always thought it would be a lot worse. Closing his eyes for the last time, aware that every man begins his life as many men but dies as only one, he swallows, and is back in his seat in the multiplex, sipping his Mountain Dew. It strikes Elmore Norman that million-to-one odds happen nearly nine times a day in Manhattan.

A NEW THOUGHT arrives behind the considerable forehead of Leon Mopati, the Unitarian minister occupying the seat just in front and to the right of the one occupied by El-more. Every culture, goes the thought, gets the architecture it deserves. Leon looks like a black Vincent van Gogh with both ears still intact. Born and raised the second son of a diamond baron in Botswana, Leon came to America eighteen years ago to study theology at the University of Minnesota, fell in love with the foliage and snowblaze, and never looked back. Saada, his wife, a lawyer, is presently shopping. What a terrible place to be, thinks Leon: shopping. Unending space crowded with an excess of sameness. Makes you feel lost even when you’re not. Distracted. Unmoored. Like on that hot white day among the broken stones. Whiff of baked dust in the air. How signature structures bare a society’s what. Lusts. The for example. Pyramids of Giza. Cheops a thirteen-acre rock garden to the sun. Or the skeletal luminescence of a Parisian train station at midday, hosanna to the Mechanical Age. The street enters the house. The house enters the future. The future moved from Paris to Rome that spring. Walking the ruins of the Forum with her. The hot white day, the shadeless solid chronicle. How happiness happened between one footfall and the next. First mall, really, if you stop to think about it. Nine-hundred-year old center of commerce, faith, and politics the Middle Ages turned into a cow pasture. Nice work, guys. Her floppy white tourist hat turned her into a beekeeper, every step they took an act of imagination among the maplessness. But ours? Fritz Lang’s nightmare, only in color. The corrugated ceilings. The blah beige. The jade. The cinnabar highlights. Slackfaced teens hunkering against banisters playing with their taffy gum. Whose home? Farewell to an. How we touched hands simply because touching hands was the right thing to do. On the path among clicking cameras, chattering tourist guides, those low rails to keep you from the valuable rubble. Irregular manhole-cover rocks felt like walking on frozen waves. Reminding, trying to remind, of a white that was different. There we were in Italy one day in the light of an aging afternoon among the gnarly nearly leafless trees. Olive. Olive or fig or what olive or fig trees should resemble in the mind’s eye. Narrow leaves. Stalky like bamboo. But here? The great Schulzian omphalos. His very own cathedral. Our Blessed Cartoonist of the. No wonder F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in this place. Where else could he have turned up? How we blinked and were in Rome, my beekeeper and me, the light working like atomic bleach upon the bone stones around us. Sitting to catch our breaths on a broken column. It was let us call it April. April or May. Not a travel brochure in motion, not a commercial for something or other, not a preview up there. No. Just some dumb visuals for the Xbox. Certain devices we use every day, that is, having become supernatural. September 24, 1896. That’s it. Get a couple of gigs under your skin, and all you want is more. F. Lang Fritzgerald Day. Snug human scale tucked into a vast, fast, rattling hive. Paul Bunyan in drag. Saint Paul, mythic matherfother of Midwestern clearcutters, unmoved mover of our hygienic fountains and blindbright atriums, stained glass and raggybaggy costumes. Our belonging. Our community. Like the story. That one. You know. The Great Lakes boy whose family transplanted him early one autumn from one burb to the next. Every day he mounted his little red bicycle to pedal the concrete seas five miles to his favorite mall. Because that was home, you see. His being a part of. The Penelope. The place. Same principle with any musical you simply have to see more than once: ritual sing-along to the same singsongs everyone else in the audience rituals to: excess of sameness: videlicit home . Because sleep is our reward for having to stay awake so long. Twenty years for him, wasn’t it? Ithacant. Ithacan. Ithaca. Our mindwharf. Because Leon Mopati believes he may have read somewhere the film which is about to commence will contain musical bits in it, but oddly. Over five-hundred stores. Minnesot-ah! Bow Wow Meow. Count Your Blessings. Your what? But not one label in the Forum explaining where the hell you were. Just thingless names on baby plaques. Julian Basilica. Temple of the Vestal Virgins who kept the sacred flame fired. Had to remain chaste for what was it thirty years. Or else. Buried alive. Dirtmouths. Where did language go when our backs were turned? The lullaby. The lament. The requiem. Farewell to an idea. The hot white day. The broken stones. The conjuring. The surprise Leon Mopati feels at least once every week, the one he is feeling right now, that he fell in love with his own wife for the first time during that uneventful stroll among the ruins after almost a decade and a half of being married.