Lance Olsen: 10:01

MOIRA LOVELACE looks like a flautist in her fifties: short, prim, stringy. She reminds Leon, one seat to her right, of a cubist painting. Weekdays, Moira teaches algebra at Kennedy High. Looking out on her students, she sees a classroom crammed with space aliens. She cannot understand their lingo. She cannot understand their clothing. What they listen to too loudly through their headphones may be many things, but none of them is music. Every Saturday evening Moira stays at home and makes sex videos of herself in her king-size bed, sheets silk leopard like in spy thrillers from the sixties. Sometimes with one hand she employs a pink dildo that reminds her of a small pink torpedo. Sometimes she employs plastic bags and smeary makeup. The general impression is one of a messy clown asphyxiating, naked. Moira has learned a lot about cinematography over the years. How it is almost impossible to produce a movie single-handedly. How a whole evening can be devoted to a worthy sixteen-second clip. Every Sunday Moira stays in, making copies of her video, packing each in a plain brown envelope. On her way to school every Monday morning, she mails the envelopes to strangers across the country. Moira locates their names in phonebooks at the library. She thinks of her sex videos as love letters to the world. They put a crackle into lives of people she will never meet and punish her for creating them in the first place. A discreet grin tightens across her lips as Moira Lovelace pictures who may be thinking about her this very second in Omaha, Nebraska, and how.

EVERYONE ELSE laughs after that gal up there whomps that feller on the head with the teddy bear so Ida and Johnny Ray Jarboe laugh too cuz that must mean it’s real funny what the heck they’s here to have a good time. Saved two years drove all night from Pikeville Kentucky with Grammy and the kids in the back to whoop it up a little that’s just what they’s gonna do. After breakfast at Sbarro they drop Grammy at the Super 8 drop Little Johnny Ray and Betty Sue and Susie Lynn and Lynna Ann with her — rag-baby at Underwater Adventure give them a hundred bucks tells them to meet at the West Parking Exit in Tennessee at closing time don’t forget now Tennessee. Back home Ida works as a waitress at Bob’s Big Boy it’s okay nice people good tips. Johnny Ray is between jobs so he helps his Uncle Wilgus raise a little juanita in the woods back of his cabin. That’s where he done had his first visitation one night out harvesting all by his lonesome. Bright triangle appears outta nowheres and them voices start going at it in his head hens in a chicken coop Johnny Ray all dizzy like as if he’s walking on a slant. Turns out they’s got five things to say in our language just five that’s all and they says them over and over. Other side. Wooden song. Do it yourself. Sooner or later. Hammer . Johnny Ray he beelines fer home wakes Ida tells her what he done seen. She says that dog won’t hunt cuz you know women then she says maybe it will. Ida reckons the message may be some kinda secret code or whatnot like as they have in Mission Impossible. Sooner or later they’s coming to our plane to tell us something cuz we’s so god damn ignorant about most everything no shit got that straight. So us earthlings got to pick up a hammer build a do it yourself landing site to help guide them in which is what Ida and Johnny Ray are doing you bet. Only to get the coordinates they got to listen to a wooden song or you know music box anybody can figure that one out. Course Ida and Johnny Ray sorta thought it would be plain when you walked into the San Francisco Music Box Company with them spacemen running a covert operation down there on behalf of their alien empire which particular music box was the right particular music box but they was skunkpiss wrong. Mind you over the years Johnny Ray come to understand them voices ain’t got just those five things to say in their native language neither no way. They can chaw about all manner of things if they wants to sure who can’t only they speak when they’s got something to say and they’s got something to say maybe three four times in their entire lives. Otherwise they’s fine jes thinking to each other with their brainwaves only not too much cuz communicating as they see it is nothing except a invasion of privacy. So here Ida and Johnny Ray sit watching a show waiting for another sign. That’s what’s so great about this great country of ours. Body can walk three miles inside the Mall of America and never step into a store can spend ten minutes in each and three days later you know what? Three days later you’s still ambulating no finish line in sight what a thing ain’t nothing like it in the whole wide world nope that’s the Lord’s honest truth sure is.

FASTIDIOUS ANDERSON Bates, the prematurely gray contract lawyer in row seven, seat two, wishes the crackers in front of him would at least wash their hair. He can smell it from here. Anderson works out of his split-level in Wood-bury. To stretch his legs, he sometimes rises from his desk and wanders from room to room in his house, parting the curtains and studying his neighbors’ homes for signs they are out: empty driveways, drawn shades, unclaimed mail. Anderson keeps careful records. Hands in pockets, he then casually strolls over (Ellen, his wife, volunteers at the local library four mornings a week), lets himself in, and has a poke around. He wears surgical gloves. He almost never takes anything. If he does, he makes sure it is an object no one will miss. A cheap pen. A handful of AAA batteries from a kitchen drawer full of them. He will often tidy atomizers and trays atop an armoire or products on a refrigerator shelf. Often he just likes to look. Anderson envisions himself an anthropologist interested in how other tribes live. He is especially drawn to bathroom cabinets. The information housed in pill bottles, spray cans, and salves makes Anderson’s head light. On occasion he likes to touch. He likes to feel other people’s property in his palms, knowing hours later his neighbors will handle the same objects he just handled. He likes to rearrange things so his neighbors can’t tell whether they have been rearranged or not. He imagines the slight sensation of disorientation his neighbors will feel and believes it will do them good. Those crackers in front of him break into laughter again and Anderson finds himself speculating about why toenails grow. They accomplish zero in life except the ceaseless increase of proteinaceous contamination. But why?

BETTY AND JERRY Roemer, retired middleschool teachers in matching pale blue jogging suits, have been members 30 of the Mall Walking Club for Seniors since Monday, August II, 1992, the day the doors opened. They assume the teens gathered in discrete herds throughout this place are making fun of them behind their backs for being old and odd looking as they power-stroll by. Betty and Jerry are right. Of course, it’s only natural. No teen can connect the dots leading from his or her own flesh to Betty’s and Jerry’s. To keep their brains breathing, they are taking a continuing education course on the history of movies at Normandale Community College. According to their professor, the film they have come to see deals with the fluidity of subject positions . They have no idea what the fluidity of subject positions means, but are looking forward to finding out, so long as it doesn’t involve violence, nudity, foul language, or subtitles. Although the attitudes of their bodies suggest they may not know each other, they are participating in the identical thought: the comforting thing about malls is the comforting thing about fastfood franchises: they are essentially the same wherever you go. Absentmindedly kneading his earlobe with thumb and middle finger, Jerry sees himself lose balance next week and tumble down the stairs in their duplex. It won’t hurt. For a second it will feel like gliding, then it will sound like a wetly cracking pencil. And then the lights will go out, just like that. Betty will follow three months later in her sleep because of what she will perceive as a violation of a fundamental filmic principle: the common sense philosophy implied by edited shots transitioning smoothly from one to another. Betty will brook none of it, none whatsoever.