3. If Cary Grant ran a hand through his beautiful hair, she is convinced, beautiful dreams would pour out.
4. When the theater within the theater is gone, you get to return home. Sometimes this takes a minute. Sometimes this takes a lifetime.
5. Fade in.
6. Fadeout.
00:07:27:22
JUST HERSELF ON your fingertip, just like that, just the way it slid in, the astonishing slick heat of inside her, just these things, just her tiny palm around you, the way it felt a little like pain too, just you breathing, just the seriousness of it, just the way your fingertip slid into her and then everything splintered, just the way she suddenly shoved you back down inside your pants, just like some stupid rolled-up sock she found in a drawer, just the way she turned away from you, just you sitting there asking with your eyes what the hell she did that for, just her wanting to see what it felt like to tease you, just so she could tell all her friends about it tomorrow, just so they could all laugh at you behind your back, just her thinking she could do it one minute and not the next like it was some kind of joke, just being mean just to see if she could, just her letting it happen but then letting it not happen, just the leaky sting of it like you have to pee real bad but can’t, just you sitting here feeling so dumb, just her sitting beside you being so like whatever, just you breathing, just her being that harsh, just like you are nothing, just like that.
00:07:34:03
LISTENING TO THE teenage couple going at it behind her changes Trudi Chan’s mind. She finds herself restless and doesn’t feel like seeing a movie anymore. Gathering her coat, she rises to leave. Her analysis of malls has revealed a subculture almost no one knows about: a singles scene with its own meeting places, secret handshakes, and coded phrases. Trudi hasn’t had sex since Carlos left. This afternoon will be different, fresh, open to chance. She will order a pink drink at Gators and wipe the hard drive called Trudi Chan. For the next two hours her name will be Mary Sapphire. As Mary steps past Vito Paluso into the aisle, the fetus suspended in her uterus experiences an intense sensation of the color red.
00:07:53:01
SOMETIMES EXPLORING, fingering small tubes of alphahydroxy cream or a floss dispenser on a bathroom shelf, Anderson feels compelled to evacuate his bowels. The muscular excitement augments inside him, distant at first, then nearer, a part of him, and then he has to go. He unbuckles his belt, unzips his fly, lowers his beige LL Beans down around his ankles, and lowers himself onto his neighbor’s toilet. If there is a magazine rack nearby, he enjoys thumbing through articles in People and Newsweek. Every so often, though, sitting there, a picture comes to him of himself sitting there, minding his own business, when, a genetic unfortunate, one of his carotids blows at the liberating rush. Then the family whose house he is investigating returns home from their daughter’s piano lesson or trip to the supermarket to find their neighbor lying on their bathroom floor in a pool of his own shit and blood. Like the fallen King. Like Elvis himself, with those pills and fried-peanut-butter- and-banana sandwiches strewn around him. Anderson cannot conceive of a sight more completely hideous. Wiping, he shakes clear his head. Standing, he hoists his pants, zips his fly, buckles his belt. He washes his hands at the sink shaped like a caricature of a shell. He uses the lilac-scented soap shaped like the caricature of a flower, twice, then strolls down the hallway, through the kitchen, and out the back door, leaving the toilet unflushed, a commanding trace of himself in his wake.
00:07:55:11
NO, MAX WATT tells himself as that chink girl gets to her feet right in front of him, her world of commotion blocking his view: No, her.
00:08:01:08
NADI SLONE FEELS something brush against her calves and believes it might be death itself. She shivers involuntarily. Then the sensation has vanished and Nadi forgotten it. While the stray cat passes beneath her seat, two strangers in top hats and frock coats escort Kate Frazey to a quarry on a stark, full-moon night lit by a German Expressionist filmmaker. Tomorrow is Kate’s thirty-first birthday. Reaching an unexceptional spot along the packed-dirt road, the strangers stop and ask her to kneel. Kate does. One reaches out and holds her throat. The other produces a knife and stabs her in the heart deferrentially. He rotates the blade twice, clearing his windpipe with small, uneasy coughs as he works.
00:08:11:21
ATHENA FULAY, THE thin old woman swaddled in a whirlwind of black shawls, diamond brooches, and whitepink pearl necklaces two seats to the left of Ed Bergman in row four, has been alive since 1731. Athena once accompanied Blake’s patron, Thomas Butts, to the poet’s summerhouse in south London for lunch and discovered William and Catherine reading Paradise Lost aloud to each other in the garden, naked. “Come in!” Blake cried. “It’s only Adam and Eve, you know!” They did. When she left, Athena was more or less immortal. She met Peter Quinn, Bloomington’s first white settler, shortly after he arrived in America in 1843, formed part of the first audience watching those eight brief moviettes in the basement of the Grand Café in Paris on December 28, 1895, and shared tea with an elderly Julia Ward Howe in her Boston home one afternoon at the turn of the century. Athena found Howe insufferable. God this, God that, loving, loving, loving. Many of the living dead find immortality as sad and tedious as Athena found Howe, but Athena is not among them. For her, as for Blake and Catherine, change turns trees into fountains of light, people’s faces into incandescent masks. Everything in her world is beewing buzz. Existence for Athena is like a good novel by Mr. Charles Dickens: she has to keep reading, keep turning the pages, although she knows the ending will always somehow disappoint, that after the last period on the last sentence on the last page there will always be nothing but book cover, and then nothing but nothing. Athena’s ambition is to invite as many people as possible along with her into her almost-forever party while she can. She leans forward and parts her lips to invite another.
00:08:16:01
LARA MCLUHAN closes her eyes and is sitting on a bench at Nine West, tugging on that adorable pair of mod boots with the white stripes made of plastic at the top she noticed yesterday, surrounded by naked old men with droopy buttocks and hairy backs beating off, while, four rows behind and three to her left, Celan Solen tries to figure out why reality feels so inadequate simply because you can’t look at it through a frame like you can a movie.
00:08:18:08
SHORTLY AFTER his return from Vietnam in 1969, a buddy of his turned Rex Wigglie onto the perfect scam. Rex hired himself out as a professional vampire hunter. He would arrive on the scene late at night, produce a crucifix and ash-wood stake, and tell his clients to vacate the premises. Then he would unroll his sleeping bag, get a good night’s sleep, and in the morning pronounce the surroundings safe. Now Rex feels two quick pricks on the back of his neck, reaches up to brush them away, and locates nothing but air. In two weeks, his eyes filling with blood instead of tears after stubbing his toe on a doorjamb, Rex will fetch up, shocked, unable to absorb the coarse revelation about his new state of being. The last time Rex had sex was on April 30, 1975, the day Saigon fell. He doesn’t really remember it, except that the girl was a holy roller from Lockjaw, Idaho, who obtained most of her notions about truth from country-western ballads, to which she introduced Rex. That’s when he learned there are more interesting things than having sex. Since then, he has composed 4,312 lyrics, all concerning animals, mostly falcons and fish, although frogs have also put in sporadic appearances, and how nature is not nice, except sometimes, when it is. Try as he might, Rex can’t think of anything else to write about, even though he lives in a split level in the suburbs and secretly feels he has seen enough nature out his kitchen window to last him centuries. Absentmindedly rubbing the back of his neck, he experiences an apparition: the Mall of America swarmed with thousands of Rex Wigglies, puffy eyed, pale faced, jelly bellied, arms reaching before them robotic ally as they shuffle-stumble forward on a zombie shopping spree. Rex Wigglie blinks to make the vision go away, and it does, but only for a second.