00:05:38:05
STUART NAVIDSON checks his Palm one more time for good luck. Another email is waiting for him. Enjoy the movie, it says. Stuart’s head jerks up. There doesn’t seem to be anything out of the ordinary about the people sitting around him watching the trailers and commercials with mildly empty interest, and Stuart realizes, his veins filling with soda water, he should have told Valerie right away. He should have sat her down at the kitchen table and confessed everything. He should have told her about his stupid month-long middle-aged mistake with Brittany Laroche, the receptionist from Macalester with those wildly erotic braces. How the only thing he gained from the affair was, briefly and unrewardingly, the sensation of being minimally less old. Stuart can imagine the fight they would have had. It makes him cringe. But they would have survived. They always did, no matter what. They’ve been surviving for nineteen years now. Inhabiting the same life with another human being for that long is like watching yourself age in a mirror. Stuart stands, resolving here and now to phone her from the lobby. He will tell her the whole story. She will cry, naturally. She will cry, and she will shout. Stuart doesn’t blame her. But he will close his eyes, shove forward, and, in the end, she will forgive him. Stuart is convinced. She’s Valerie. That’s all there is to it. Stuart slips his Palm into his jacket pocket, stands, and looks around him. He sits. He feels like he is falling violently upward. He lowers his chin. He squeezes his armrests. One thousand and one, nine hundred eighty-nine, nine hundred seventy-seven, Stuart intones under his breath, trying to concentrate on each numeral as if it were a reason for hope, nine hundred sixty-five, nine hundred fifty-three, nine hundred forty-one…
00:05:55:05
KENNETH JEHOVAH Vrooman loves trailers because they are just like movies only shorter. He does not love the man standing up on his left and then sitting down again and beginning to count backwards under his breath with very large numbers. When something like that happens Kenneth has to think. This is related to how after the trailers Kenneth will return home without seeing the movie and microwave a creamy meatball dinner. Kenneth’s older brother, Billy Aloysius Vrooman, left his body with nine hundred and thirteen other human beings in Jonestown, Guyana, on November 18, 1978. On the anniversary of that date, Kenneth buys twenty-one gerbils from different pet shops around the city and brings them home in small cardboard boxes. That’s one gerbil for each year Billy was not External to His Body. Kenneth tugs on his rawhide gloves, lifts a gerbil out of its box, and applies gentle but steady pressure to its chest until its heart stops. He props the little corpses in doll chairs around a long polished mahogany doll table surrounded by polished mahogany doll chairs, raises a Dixi-cup of grape Kool-Aid in their honor, and drinks a toast. Kenneth would enjoy himself more at these celebrations if he wasn’t sure he is suffering from a disease in which tattoos are spreading across his internal organs at an alarming rate. Most are based on the cabala. He knows he has to hurry to complete his lifework: writing the perfect critical study of Julia Ward Howe, the minor nineteenth-century poet who accomplished nothing of note in her ninety-one years except composing the remarkably shallow lyrics for “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” for The Atlantic Monthly for five dollars. Kenneth has been laboring at his lifework since February 14, 1979. He is still on chapter one.
00:05:56:12
SUSIE CARBONARA, the softly plump ash-blonde in the floral-patterned blouse two seats to Ed Bergman’s right, wishes she had a less pronounced tushy and that part of her nose back they removed last year because of sun damage. Ronny, her husband, is a dentist who wears Hawaiian shirts even in winter. Ronny and she have two great kids, Tyler and Taylor. Every day Susie sends God a teensy prayer of thanks. In her mind her prayers look like greeting cards with small feathery white wings. Several times a week Susie volunteers at the Presbyterian Church. Not long ago she became involved in sponsoring a cute little Nicaraguan maid named Juanita Chamorro. Juanita arrived in Minneapolis three and a half weeks ago. Until now, she has never visited a mall or seen a movie in a real movie theater, but she vacuums like an angel and her meatloaf is nummy. Susie and Ronny put her in the spare room in the basement next to Ronny’s shop. It will take Susie another forty-five minutes to realize she is in the wrong movie. She wanted Juanita to see the one about the cute little Mexican maid who falls in love with the cute Manhattan billionaire who discovers he is dying of a rare blood disorder and gives away all his money. It might offer Juanita a jim-dandy lesson about what America really stands for. Backward countries hate us, but that’s only because they don’t understand how we really just want to help them so they can be more like us. Even after it dawns on Susie she is in the wrong theater, she will decide to stay. You never want to show the help you can make silly mistakes. Susie Carbonara knows very few facts about the Mall of America, but she knows this one: the Chapel of Love has married more than two thousand couples since it opened in 1994. Susie thinks that is just so neat.
00:05:56:19
UNTIL NOW, JUANITA Chamorro has learned almost everything she knows about American culture from attending a bake sale in her honor at the Presbyterian Church and watching Hollywood Squares every morning while cleaning. Her favorite player is that funny black lady with those dreadlocks and teeth. “Secret Square!” Juanita Chamorro chants to herself as she dusts. “AI Roker! Al Roker! Al Roker! …Bull-funky!” She does not know what any of these words means, but they seem to carry special significance for gringos, and so she feels it a good idea to learn them by heart. Juanita worries the family that brought her here does not smell like humans. They smell like flowers and cleaning agents. Their hair is frightening. They never raise their voices. They smile without parting their lips. Their food has no taste and their children are fat and lifeless. Juanita finds herself suspecting they might be automatons. When they go into their bedrooms at night, maybe they do not sleep. Maybe instead they plug themselves into the wall sockets and stand there with their eyes open, recharging. Once you have an idea like that in your head, it is very hard to forget. In the pocket of her new camelhair coat, Juanita carries the shrunken head her great grandfather gave her as a good-luck charm the afternoon she started off down the path to catch the bus and a new life. His grandfather received it from his grandfather’s grandfather who received it from Jorgre Sanjines, a Spanish explorer without a left hand, on his way back to Mexico City from a dangerous journey up the Amazon many generations ago. Juanita prays the leathery talisman will protect her spirit from the people the color of things that live under rocks.
00:05:57:06
RYAN MOODY CAN feel his brain cells sparkling and dying out, one by one. It is not a disagreeable sensation. After the rave began to unravel shortly past sunrise, Ryan drove over here for breakfast, a stroll, and a flick before heading back to his apartment to crash for the day. Ryan is still experiencing too much tribal tenderness to be alone just yet. Silver threads of love are filamenting over him like electric spider webs. The last glints of E winking away between his ears remind him how, on an average night, more than one hundred million pieces of interplanetary debris enter earth’s atmosphere and burn up. That’s what his brain cells feel like. He pictures each one flickering into a parallel universe as it expires. In infinite space even the most unlikely events transpire somewhere. That means there are infinitely many inhabited planets. That means infinitely many of them possess people with the same appearance, name, and memories as Ryan Moody. Those Ryan Moodys are experiencing every possible permutation of this Ryan Moody’s life choices. When Ryan Moody’s brain cells wink away on this planet, they assist in the production of other Ryan Moodys on other planets. Conversely, when the brain cells of those Ryan Moodys wink away, some of them replenish the ones this Ryan Moody is losing. It is all about the touch of skin upon skin and mathematics and the conservation of matter, believes Ryan, but mostly it is about love. Somewhere Ryan Moody is crying. Somewhere he is bending over and picking up a smooth stone by a pond on a planet whose atmosphere fizzes like pink champagne. Somewhere he has a girlfriend. Somewhere he is a girl. And somewhere Ryan Moody has already forgotten what all the other Ryan Moodys are about to think next.