00:06:32:29
TIMES IN HIS LIFE Lewis Smoodin chose the fifth seat in the fifth row for his viewing pleasure: 1. Times he believed it must be a beautiful day outside, only not in the city where he currently resided: 895. Times he delighted that English, with its vocabulary of over 1,000,000 words (3x more than French), is the largest language in history: 21. Times he hoped the invention of the iPod would transform his life into a musicaclass="underline" 479. Times he was forced to stop eating the meal he was eating because one kind of food on his plate made contact with another kind: 1,833. Times in his life Lewis liked being touched by another human being: 7. Times in the last month he ate at the Mall of America food court: 37. Times he has been able to tell with certainty if someone were interested or bored by what he was saying: 3. Times someone said something to Lewis Smoodin for which he had no reply: 1,376. Times married: 1. Times he began a conversation in the Mall of America food court with an unfamiliar person by saying My age is forty-three and I am five-feet — six-inches tall when I don’t wear my shoes: 112. Times Lewis employed the term foveated vision in the public sphere to denote how the human eye can only focus on one very small area at any given moment: 1. Times divorced: 1. Times he forgot he had a brother fighting in Iraq: 1,082. Times in his life he employed the term saccadic movement in the public sphere to denote how the human eye, in order to compensate for the aforementioned foveated vision, reflexively moves every 1/20 of a second in an attempt to perceive the entirety of its surroundings: 5. Times his brother fighting in Iraq forgot to acknowledge Lewis’s birthday: 43. Times he has had a birthday to forget: 43. Times Lewis Smoodin wished time could run backward: 4,502.
00:06:33:12
FRED QUOCK’S wandering thoughts stray down a passageway from his childhood. The pinkie of a smile widens beneath his vestigial salt-and-pepper mustache. A lively blue autumn afternoon on the other side of his sister Leni’s bedroom window. Downstairs, his mother cooking supper. Onions. Meatloaf. Mushrooms. Fred is five, Leni eleven, and Leni has just decked him out in one of her favorite Easter dresses. He looks exactly like a princess on her way to a ball, Leni tells him, and Fred feels instantly pretty. Their father, Fred Quock, Sr., a cardiologist at Sacred Heart in Eugene, brings home 45’s from the office once a month as inexpensive presents for his kids. The 45’s are anthologies of irregular heart rhythms meant to teach doctors the sounds of disease. Leni and Fred listen to them on Leni’s black plastic rca stereo with the volume turned way up. Fred raises his little arms and makes little fists of his little hands and squats and swivels on his little hips to the organic beat. He would be happy if he could know this blue moment would dilate and dilate and go on dilating forever. Whenever Fred daydreams lately, this is the vivid room to which he returns. The comforting smell of his mother’s cooking. The lacy crinkle of his new dress in his fingers. The way his sister Leni never takes her chocolate eyes off him because he is not a chubby boy with a big nose and buckteeth that Randy Roberts from up the block wedgies. No. He is Fred Quack the princess and Fred Quack the princess is the stuffed animals huddling on his sister’s pillows, the gusty sunlight, the way this autumn afternoon brightly arranges itself. Fred Quack is the Frug. The Twist. He is the Funky Chicken.
00:06:35:18
KOSA PRCAC’S GHOST wavers like a strand of nearly invisible seaweed several millimeters to the right of her husband’s wheelchair. Each time she attempts touching him, her fingers pass through his face and the couple experiences another recollection from their years together. When she was young, Kosa always felt the need to apologize to anyone she met for anything she did. That changed the evening she met Zdravko at the opera. She was nineteen, he twenty-seven, and Zdravko was wearing his handsome military dress uniform. When he bowed to kiss her hand, Kosa knew she would marry him someday. Six weeks later, they took a drive in the countryside. Zdravko was behind the wheel, the convertible’s top down. Grassy hills rose and ducked around them in a silver haze of sunshine. They stopped by a wooden gate and carried their wicker picnic basket out to a big willow standing alone in a deserted pasture. After drinking too much wine, they began to kiss. Soon they were helping each other undress. Beneath Zdravko’s slacks, Kosa discovered a frilly pair of women’s undergarments. Beneath Kosa’s slip, Zdravko discovered an underdeveloped penis and half-formed female parts. They made delicious exploratory love for hours. Fingers passing through her husband’s face again, Kosa recalls the evening in Belgrade she turned sixty-four and treated herself by visiting a soothsayer. After studying Kosa’s palm for many minutes, the ancient woman told Kosa she had no future. Kosa looked up, startled. “I’m sorry, sweetheart,” the soothsayer said, “but you’ve already been dead three years.” Appalled at the woman’s insolence, Kosa rose and left without paying.
00:06:39:02
NADI SLONE, ONE seat in front of Claude Méliés and two behind Jeff Kotcheff, is recalling the pub drama she saw in London last month. Nadi was there for the opening of her first exhibition outside the U.S. Her work consists of traveling to famous museums and taking clandestine photographs of people passing by famous pieces of art without seeming to notice them — daydreaming, chatting, tending to their astronaut infants in baby carriages — without, however, ever documenting the famous piece of art itself. The evening before her flight back to America she had nothing to do, so Nadi picked up a Time Out, checked the fringe listings, and chose a performance of Peter Handke’s My Foot, My Tutor playing upstairs in a small pub not far from the Elephant & Castle tube stop. The performance space was no larger than a bedroom. Admission was six pounds fifty. There were two actors and three audience members, including Nadi. There were two rows of seats, each comprised of four folding chairs. If you stuck your legs out, you would trip the players. Yet they never broke stride, never dropped their personae, displayed nothing save intense industry and surprising talent. Afterward, they took their bows with professional deadpan faces. The three audience members, including Nadi, clapped fervently. One, a distinguished elderly gentleman who might have been a banker, judiciously rose to his feet to provide the actors with a standing ovation. That night, back at her B&B, Nadi dreamed everyone everywhere in London stopped where they were at the stroke of noon one Monday and began singing the same exquisite aria. Three minutes later, they ceased simultaneously and went on with their lives just like before. The Incident, at it came to be known, was never repeated.
00:06:42:16
THE ONE WITH THE cell phone: she’s the one who will date Max’s blind twin brother. Max wonders if Max will be able to tell she is colored. Maybe the smell. Max considered inviting home the disgusting pig who just tripped in the aisle instead, but feels Josie from Wisconsin would prefer someone closer to her own age. They will have more in common to be silent about. The inner ear, Max remembers, consists of a cochlea, semicircular canals, and auditory nerve. The cochlea and semicircular canals are filled with a water-like fluid. In part this is due to the fact that sometimes it is hard to chase down sleep. Max hasn’t had none in two days. “Are we having thoughts again?” his twin brother, sweating, asked him while staring sightlessly at the unplugged TV with the bashed-in screen last night in the trailer. “Put a sock in it, honeybun,” said Max, sitting beside him. Not long after that, Max rose without a word, tramped out to the Impala through the rising blizzard, and began the long drive south with the radio off. In his trunk, he carries a burlap sack. This is for the food from the dumpsters. In his coat pocket, he carries a vial of hush tonic, a handkerchief, and a small Phillips screwdriver. “The two of us makes three,” he will whisper into the colored girl’s ear as he helps her locate the peace within herself. Maybe this will take place in an unlit corner of a parking garage, maybe in an empty ladies room behind a gas station. “Am I alone yet, cupcake?” Max will whisper into her ear. “Am I alone?”