00:08:27:26
PATTING THE POCKET of his Army-surplus jacket, Max Watt gets up and begins ambulating sideways toward the aisle, a human crab, while Anderson Bates questions why more people aren’t bothered by the idea that in excess of ninety percent of all household dust is comprised of sloughed-off skin cells: we are all, he frets, literally busy raining ourselves away.
00:08:34:09
LILY GRODAL FLOATS in a hot fragrant bubble bath, submerged up to her chin. She feels sleepy and tingly. Her children do not exist. She has never met her husband Charlie. Lily doesn’t know what she is looking for in her life, but it wasn’t any of that. She wants to be somebody else, but this evening Lily will settle for being herself. A single red rose leans in a green glass vase at the far end of the tub. She reaches down for the washcloth between her legs with the fuzzy notion of unfolding it across her face, and her elbow by chance knocks into the hairdryer on the stool beside her. Before Lily can respond, the hairdryer splashes into the sudsy water in a silverwhite flash of sparks and smoke and…and, hey, someone has fallen down over there. Someone has fallen down in the aisle. Lily turns to see what has happened. It is that creepy guy who hissed at her. He isn’t getting up. Everyone is staring in his direction. Serves him right, she thinks, an arc of guilty alarm for entertaining such an ugly thought bounding through her.
00:08:34:12
TRUDI CHAN PUSHES through the door at the back of the theater and breaches into light so smartingly concentrated it makes her immediately squinch shut her eyes. She swerves and stops and steadies herself, then presses on for the exit.
00:08:35:06
A HEAVY THUMP. Zdravko Prcac recoils from his half-sleep. In front of him is a young woman in a drab steelblue apron and headscarf, twenty or twenty-one, mopping the floor of a yellow-tiled interrogation cell at the Omarska camp, the linoleum floor tiles spattered with teeth and chunks of bloody hair. She is living inside her own rhythms, unaffected by her profession.
00:08:35:06
KOSA PRCAC’S GHOST darts left, into and out of her husband’s mind, the passing impression being one of flying extremely fast through a silver haze of sunshine.
00:08:35:06
ANGELICA ENCINAS’S hand leaps out in search of Miguel Gonzalez’s.
00:08:35:06
MIGUEL GONZALEZ’S hand pushes Angelica Encinas’s away.
00:08:35:06
RIBCAGE THROBBING, the stray cat dashes back into the insanity of legs.
00:08:36:14
MAX WATT DOESN’T know he is taking a tumble until the left side of his face hammers the carpet. Then Max and Max are walking with their father through spindly woods behind their beat-up trailer in northern California. Max is eight and Max is eight. It is raining lightly. Max hopes the opal droplets will help explain the world to him. Their father, a bison in overalls, is carrying his whipping belt in one hand and holding the brothers’ wrists in the other. He is going to make them do a couple of things. After awhile, they pause by a dead gray tree. His father tells Max and Max to drop their drawers. “We ain’t nobody’s children,” he announces, lifting his belt over his head. Max and Max barter looks. “I don’t want to, daddy,” Max says. “It don’t matter none, boys,” his father says, lifting, “it’s just the way things is. First you get born. Then you get whomped. Then you get whomped some more.” Next Max is up on his knees in the theater again, everybody using their eyes against him, and then he is scramble-limping up the aisle, through the door into the lobby, and she is nowhere, nowhere at all, and Max Watt is everywhere but here.
00:08:45:21
BETSI BLISS RECITES a little prayer to herself for that poor man who tripped and hopes he didn’t hurt himself too bad. That kind of thing happens to everybody. Nothing to be ashamed of. It’s just the Lord’s reminder to us all that we’re not quite as special as we sometimes think we are. Then Betsi Bliss’s back begins itching. Everything around her distends weakly, a few millimeters, and contracts again.
00:08:49:11
SOMETIMES THEY feel rubbery when they bump into your cheek, Lara McLuhan thinks, just like wet handballs.
00:08:53:16
VLADISLAV DOVZHENKO lunges and twists against the Shock Troops console in back of the arcade on the fourth floor. Lights strobe. Subwoofer explosions rumble. Each time he gets a kill, Vladislav can feel the electronics vibrating beneath his groin. Now he’s got an erection. He is already on level seven, deep into the enemy stronghold, some sort of dark, shadow-hectic, film-noir factory complex, bolts the size of bodies, gears the size of cars, metal catwalks crisscrossed over vats of black tinfoil fluid, and he can sense those baby mamas by the skeet-shooting game admiring his moves, and now he’s got an erection. They are American girls with long blond hair like California and David Lee Roth and they are wearing tight torn jeans and black leather jackets and they think Vladislav is a total stud. When he rolls a million, he makes up his mind, he will stroll over and introduce himself, chat them up a little, suggest they head down to the food court for a burger and fries together. They can’t be more than fifteen. How hot is that? But Vladislav has to concentrate. This is no time to let his attention drift. This is no time to mess up a good thing.
00:08:57:09
ARTIFICIAL WHITES and blues sputter over Byron Metnick’s face as on the screen automatic assault weapons clatter, tanks burst over barricades, and buildings implode in columns of dust and raining debris. From what Byron can tell, he is not just watching trailers for a war movie, but trailers for the sequel or prequel to a war movie, though he can’t figure out what war it is supposed to be, doesn’t think he saw the original version, and doesn’t in any case much care. He is still occupied with being impressed by how utterly that guy wiped out in the opposite aisle. Byron contemplates following him from the theater just to make sure he’s okay, but something on the screen tugs back his attention. The soldier’s face there in the background. Six GI’s are huddled in a bomb crater surrounded by ragged structures that might once have been an apartment block, bullets searing overhead, mortars slamming down around them. The faces of the five in the foreground are sweaty, warped with forebodings of doom. But the sixth one, the one belonging to the guy in the background, appears almost relaxed. Although he exists faintly out of focus, Byron determines he is not so much huddling as reclining on the sandy embankment, and he’s got something in his hands. Cards. He’s shuffling a deck of cards, playing what seems to be a game of solitaire with himself. And his face is familiar. Very familiar. It hits Byron precipitately he is looking at himself up there. “Hey,” he says to nobody, scanning the theater for corroboration and support, heart punching around blindly inside his chest. “Hey…um…hey…”