00:06:08:07
EYES SHUT, CHIN on chest, Zdravko Prcac watches himself at a party. It is difficult to tell where the party is because the place is so poorly lit. Possibly a basement room in Belgrade during the war. Kosa is sitting beside him. They are happy and drinking good vodka and laughing by candlelight with a group of well-dressed people they have never met. Eventually Zdravko gets up and wanders down a murky hallway in search of the bar at which to refill their drinks. He cannot find it, so he returns, makes polite excuses, and collects his wife to go. They feel their way up a staircase. Outside, the lights in the city are extinguished, the streets glistening under a full moon. Zdravko and Kosa locate their Citroen in a nearby alley and soon Zdravko is driving. Their house is in the countryside. It didn’t used to be there, as far as Zdravko can recall, but now it is. At the edge of the city, they confront a police barricade. Zdravko stops the car. Powerful flashlights blaze into the cab. Squinting, Zdravko looks over to make sure Kosa is all right. She is shaking. “What’s wrong?” he asks, trying to soothe her. “It’s just the police. Everything will be fine.” Then Zdravko realizes the woman sitting beside him is not his wife. The people at the party must have stolen Kosa while Zdravko was searching for the bar and replaced her with someone who only distantly resembles her. “I’m sorry,” the woman tells him. With that, the car door swings open and four policemen claw at Zdravko, dragging him onto the hard wet road.
00:06:09:10
THERE IS NO ONE on the other end of Lakeesha Johnson’s cell-phone conversation. There never has been. She is talking to a dead plastic mouthpiece because she wants her friends to believe she has friends. The reason possessing friends is so important to Lakeesha is that possessing friends isn’t very important to her. Lakeesha’s mama tells her it isn’t healthy to be happy without them, yet that is exactly when Lakeesha feels happiest: when she is up in her room, alone, lying on her bed, or when, like last June, she went to the public swimming pool all by herself and stretched out on her towel and pretended she was on a beach white as printer paper in Greece. Lakeesha loved the clatter chatter of other people at a distance. How it felt like the sun was sauteing her organs right through her skin. She imagined the beach was one of those where nobody wore clothes. She was there with her make-believe boyfriend, Darius, who had hazel eyes with yellow flecks in them and called her Baby Girl. Darius had fallen asleep beside her. Baby Girl stood, careful not to wake him. Without her thick glasses, experience arrived as a pastel smear. She shuffled into the surf and buoyed there, unaware of the muscular current nudging her south. Before long, she felt lighter, breezier. When she stepped onto the beach again, she discovered she was lost among an overgrown garden of blurred bodies. She stood several minutes, trying to focus on all that smudged nakedness. Then she sucked up her self-esteem and launched north, bending at the waist here, cupping her hands on her kneecaps there, examining the abundance of jointless thumbs reposing among dense curls in search of the one that would signal Darius’s presence. Pulling herself back from that reverie, she discovered she was no longer lying on her towel by the public swimming pool. She was lying instead on the bottom of it, wafting like a heavy jellyfish. Lakeesha had already taken her first breath of water. She didn’t think it would be as bad as everyone said it would be, but it was worse, and so she tried to pinpoint tranquility inside her. It was there and it was gone and it was there and it was gone and then her world erupted into foam and splashes and terrified shouts. A school of angry hands attacked her, grabbing at her, towing her, yanking her gorgeous black sea-anemone hair. Next she was lying on her left side on coarse concrete, being unsightly. Her sinuses and throat felt as if she had inhaled gasoline and lit a match. People were telling her things, but Lakeesha just lay there, refusing to open her eyes, refusing to listen to what they were saying, thinking very hard about not thinking and taking some pleasure in the stingy impossibility of it again and again.
00:06:12:03
KATE FRAZEY HAS lost her battle. She did what she could, but she has already been asleep seven seconds. In that time, she has been visited by three dreams. In the first, she stood watching the Sirens on a rocky gray beach littered with their victims’ bones. Perched among the branches of leafless trees, the Sirens lamented their clawed hands, vestigial wings, and sterile wombs. No matter how they tried, they were unable to prevent their lamentations from sounding outrageously beautifuL In the second, two men in business suits tenderly strapped Kate face down into a large elaborate medieval torture device resembling a loom. To be released, all Kate had to do was articulate her offenses. The problem was she couldn’t recollect with any clarity what those offenses might have been. As a dermal prompt, the torture-loom was busy etching them into her bloody bare back, upside down and reversed, in a language reminiscent of Arabic that Kate could not read even if she had been able to see it. In the dream she presently occupies, she is sprinting down lightless tunnel after tunnel in what she fears may be an infinite aluminum burrow. The Holy Spirit’s breath deafens her as she pushes forward. Exhausted, she does not believe she can go much farther. Little by little, the idea begins to coalesce inside her she is not a human being any more. She may be a mole. She may be a mouse. Something mayor may not be chasing her. Something mayor may not be catching up. And this, for better or worse, will be her life. Kate Frazey tries to force herself awake, but fails repeatedly. She tries to change the course of her dream, but it just keeps pouring in at her. Kate Frazey just keeps sprinting.
00:06:13:25
LILY GRODAL WAS vacuuming her living room carpet in her milky blue jogging suit and sneakers, frizzled bronze hair held partially in check by a tortoise-shell barrette, when she decided poop on this, she was going to a movie. It was Charlie’s weekend with the kids and she wasn’t going to waste it. She left the upright standing where it was, strode into the kitchen, tugged on her parka, swept her car keys and wallet into her pocket, and hustled out the back door into the furious snow. Her plan was to ask the person in the ticket booth what the very next film showing was and see that one. She would be home in plenty of time to finish vacuuming, take a nice hot bubble bath, and order in a large pepperoni pizza before Charlie dropped off the kids around seven. Danny is six, Russ eight, and Lily, who loves them both frantically, wishes several times a day she had had girls. The moment she entered theater ten she almost broke her neck stumbling over some poor guy’s crutches sticking into the aisle. She dropped her box of Dots. When she tried to apologize to the man with the crutches, some creepy sweaty guy one row back hissed at her. To avoid him, Lily felt her way down front, cut across the sticky no-man’s land between the first row and the screen, and took the only empty seat she could confirm was in truth empty in the sputtering lightdark. It is seat one, row four. Settling, she tugs off her parka, bunches it against her abdomen, and, quietly as possible, starts peeling open her box of candy. Slipping a lemon gumdrop into her mouth, Lily Grodal hears a woman’s southern-twanged voice behind her ask in a loud, matter-of-fact voice, as if it were asking about the weather: “So you think them spacemen is gonna send us another sign soon, Johnny Ray, er whut?”