Lance Olsen: 10:01

MLDAFTERNOON in a movie theater in the Mall of America. Glary lights before the show make everything seem stark and unfinished to Kate Frazey, a bony aerobics instructor relieving herself of her shocking-pink ski jacket, bunching it on the folded-up seat beside her, and sitting in row three, seat nine, seeing herself as she does so as if from a crane shot among these other filmgoers filtering in and settling down around her. Kate, blond hair so dark it is almost the color of high-fiber breakfast cereal, is Franz Kafka’s great-great granddaughter, although she carries no awareness of this within her. She doesn’t know her great-great grandfather once had an affair with another bony woman, Grete Bloch, friend of Felice Bauer, to whom Kafka was briefly engaged. Kate doesn’t know Grete had a son about whom Kafka never learned, nor that his son was supposed to have died while a child, but was adopted by a Jewish businessman and his wife, and brought to New York in the thirties. Whenever Kate dreams, it is about the plots of Kafka’s work, which she has never read because she believes there are already too many stories in the world. Kate dreams that two strangers in top hats and frock coats are always knocking at her door, wanting in. That she is a ninety-pound weight-loss artist dissolving in a cage full of hay in the town square in Prague. That she is a muscular hare darting through a wet field at night and that, no matter how fast she runs, no matter which direction she chooses, the beautiful hounds sleeping within the castle miles away will awaken the next day and chase her down. This is why Kate doesn’t sleep unless she has to. This is why she hasn’t slept for two nights, why she leans forward now, elbows on knees, concentrating very hard on keeping her glistery brown eyes wide open.

THREE ROWS BACK sits Stuart Navidson, plumping gynecologist with a small practice in Minneapolis. Heart a hummingbird, Stuart hunches over his Palm, reading email, oblivious of the factoids flipping up on the movie screen in front of him. He doesn’t care that in a zip pan the camera moves so quickly the image in between the original subject and its successor is blurred, nor that the first film fan magazines appeared in 1912. Monday afternoon at the office, he received an email with no subject heading and fake sender address. Eat shit and die , it said. Spam, Stuart thought. Tuesday morning Stuart walked out of his house to find a small note stuck under the windshield wiper of his metallic-shale Audi saying, simply: Bastard . When their friends Austyn and Jed Jacobsen stepped out of a Szechwan restaurant with Stuart’s wife Valerie and him after a nice dinner Wednesday evening, Stuart found a second not-so-small note stuck under his windshield wiper. What next? it inquired in a red scrawl. He balled it up and chucked it into the slushy street before Valerie could catch up with him. “Stupid advertisement,” he told her when she looked like she might inquire about it. They spent Friday and Saturday at their cabin up on the shore of Lake Superior near Beaver Bay and returned two hours ago to discover their house had been broken into while they were away. The only thing missing, so far as they could determine, was a single pillow from their bed. After the police left, a shaken Valerie headed off to keep a lunch date. Stuart drove here to calm down, clear his mind, and reflect. It isn’t working. A new message has just appeared on his PDA. Are we having fun yet? it asks. Stuart is quite confident he knows the answer.

…DORK WITH THE handheld thinking? Lara McLuhan, nibbling her thumbnail, finds herself wondering four seats to Stuart’s right, just sure someone’s going to walk into a shoe 5 store and purchase a pair of whatever those are without a man in a clown mask holding a gun to your head and threatening your children. Lara works at Forever 21 on the second floor and takes her role in what she conceives of as The Great Retail Drama with thin-lipped earnestness. Sixteen and two months, if she puts on enough makeup and a tight sweater, and if the lighting is fluttery, Lara can pass for eighteen. She was born in Bloomington and will die there. This knowledge fills her with extraordinary pride because she knows her city is home to more hotel rooms (6,800 of them) than downtown Minneapolis and Saint Paul combined. Outside you’re always rushing to get somewhere, Lara feels, yet when you’re strolling through the Mall of America there’s so much to look at you relax. Someone tried to make a mummy out of that lady over there, wrapping her in eight thousand layers of black shawls, and those things are rhinestones, and the grottily zitty guy in the navy-blue what is that a McDonald’s uniform with cap three rows behind her is wearing Converse All-Stars. In certain situations Converse All-Stars have their rightful place in the social fabric, but not when the fashion irony is totally lost on someone unaware he is living in a state of fashion irony. Lara leans back, surreptitiously evaluating her fellow filmgoers, the necessity for people like her in the world clear in her mind as the oceanfrost blueness of Nick Carter’s scandalous eyes every time he sings to her from that awesome video, only her, about how the real story in every human relationship is the story of loss.

MLGUEL GONZALEZ and Angelica Encinas wait neither for the glary lights to dim nor the trailers to flash awake before beginning to feel each other up. They are fourteen and have snuck into the next-to- back row on their first date. A chant is cycling through Miguel’s head: Just my hand on her thigh, just there, just like that, look, just my fingers moving beneath her skirt, just the tips, just the slowness of them, just the heat of her skin, just that and nothing else, just the way she smells, peppermint shampoo, just these things, just these and nothing more, just here, just like this, just my fingertips moving . Angelica, eyes closed, is far away from Miguel’s hand. She is imagining an establishing shot in her very own private documentary: there Miguel and Angelica are making out among all these people settling in to their seats and the camera is panning back and there is the AMC theater in which they are sitting on the fourth floor of the Mall of America tucked among thirteen others in which hundreds of other people are settling into their seats and the camera is panning back and there is the mall itself frantic with thousands of other people frantic with Christmas with dangling pink angels with cotton-candy snowdrifts and the camera is panning back and right through the roof and the parking structures are receding through the graywhite blizzard and the city park and the hotels and the feeble car lights trembling and it is Sunday and here they are here Angelica and Miguel are and there could be other ways to express a beginning but this one is as good as any and these touches as good as any and so this must be desire sure why not this must be what they mean when they say that word.

AT THE BACK OF the theater, in one of the seatless spaces reserved for the handicapped, slumps Zdravko Prcac in his motorized wheelchair. Zdravko is wearing a baggy red, white, and blue jogging suit with matching sneakers. Beneath it he is wearing a one-piece style Depends with an absorbent pad in the crotch area and no belts, tape, or buttons.