00:09:37:02
TRAPPED BENEATH the wreckage, Garrett Keeter thinks it is cigarette smoke he smells. The tang quickly thickens and turns acidic. When the first burn hisses into his thighskin, he understands with a jolt the theater is on fire. He has traveled all these miles, covered all this geographical and psychic distance, and here he is, caught in a real-life disaster film. Close by, Jaci makes stunned whimpering sounds. Garrett tries to reach out to comfort her, only something is pinning down his arm. He tries to speak, only his jaw won’t move. Flames lick his legs. Garrett Keeter cries out as he feels himself slipping beneath burning waves.
00:09:42:22
SOMEWHERE BELOW the soul of Remedios the Beauty, a secondary explosion, then silverwhite light flocking toward her through the ventilation system. In the instant before it arrives with a fiery kiss, she remembers the day her great-grandfather, Jose Arcadio Segundo, having vanished for years into the jungle in search of a waterway connecting Macondo to the sea, unexpectedly floated into view on the river in a rickety steamboat filled with prostitutes. Since he did not succeed in finding the course he had been questing for, he decided to celebrate his failure instead. That evening he threw a Festival of Disappointment on the Street of Turks. Remedios the Beauty was crowned queen, not because of her looks (she had shaved her head with a dull razor that morning), but because of her wondrous cinnamon-and-orange scent. As the master of ceremonies lowered the rusty clothes hanger standing in for a coronet onto her head, a rival queen in a magnificent white lace dress and abundant veil came into sight at the far end of the block. An enormous entourage of nuns flooded around her. A wary hush swelled through the revelers. Even the prostitutes ceased laughing. One of the nuns shed her habit. In her place stood a soldier with a rifle. He raised the weapon above his head, shouted something Remedios the Beauty could not comprehend, and the holy entourage turned quickly into an unholy platoon. With that, the Banana Company Massacre commenced. When a bullet took off José Arcadio Segundo’s kneecap twenty-two inches to Remedios the Beauty’s left, and her great-grandfather crumpled into a pile of useless old clothes beside her, Remedios the Beauty felt something tingle in the bottoms of her bare feet for the first time in her life, and realized her future would be nothing if not curious.
00:09:46:12
“HANG IN THERE, people!” Josh Hartnett shouts, scrabbling over chunks of fallen concrete, rebar, upturned seats. “I’m Josh Hartnett, the actor! Help’s on the way!” His eyes sear. He has a hard time catching his breath. But he scrabbles forward searching for survivors. In his mind’s eye, he is Staff Sergeant Matt Eversmann in Black Hawk Down and his mission is to boost his men’s morale no matter what. They are pinned down in the streets of Mogadishu. They are taking heavy fire. It’s up to him to get them through alive. He closes his eyes, knowing he has to concentrate. This is no time to let his attention drift. This is no time to mess up a good thing. Only he can’t figure out why no one has showed up to lend a hand yet. The exit doors remain shut, the lobby silent. Where is everybody? Emergency personnel should be thronging this place by now. Josh can’t figure it. Then he notices he is holding something in his right hand. Knotty, bristly, wet. He glances down. Through the dust and smoke, he sees his soggy Irish tweed walking hat and fake goatee. Something in him liquefies. Shit, man. Shit. This isn’t a stupid movie. He’s no Army Ranger. This is the real deal, and he’s just Josh Hartnett, the schmuck with really nice eyes. He drops his hat and goatee. “Help us!” he screams. “Oh, god, help us! Help us! We’re all gonna die! Stand by to crash! Help! Help us! HELP!”
00:09:49:08
FIRE CRACKLES. The alarm cycles. Susie Carbonara sobs quietly to herself beneath debris, waiting to die. She is thinking about how she lived a super life with Ronny and Tyler and Taylor, how she always tried as hard as she could to be a good Christian. She made mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes…even if she can’t quite call up any particulars at the moment. Isn’t that funny? Nor can she fathom this is where it will end. After all the work she did for the homeless, all the daily greeting cards she posted to Our Maker. Hope, Susie decides, sobbing, is a joke. Everyone is trapped here. Everyone is doomed. This evening Sophia Choi on CNN will refer to what happened as a terrible tragedy. Susie finds it harder and harder to catch her breath. Her sole wish is that time will speed up now like in one of those movies, her world quickly become a what’s that word jump-cut to the final credits. Close by, Juanita makes whimpering noises. Susie attempts reaching out her hand to comfort her, but touches something knotty, bristly, and round instead. She retracts to find a shrunken head gawking back at her from her open palm. Susie Carbonara shrieks in terror.
00:09:54:27
THE EXIT DOORS smash open. They don’t. Firemen flood in. Ropes spaghetti down the edges of the cavernous hole in the ceiling. S.W.A.T. teams rappel, semi-automatic Heckler and Koch MP5’s blazing. The smoke. The dust. Or it is something else. They do or they don’t. One or the. Because in the gray absence above, a copter leaps into view, snow swirling in its downdraft. No, wait. That’s not right. The copter doesn’t leap into view. Everything is as it was. Everything is. What? A Sunday afternoon at the movies. Then the fat man slowly stands and slowly turns. He remains seated. The audience watches. The exit doors. The firemen. Is this another commercial? Anything’s possible. The S.W.A.T. teams rappel. But next. After that. Subsequently. It’s hard to say what. The second bomb, the one under that man’s mackintosh. A firestorm whooshes out from him. Maybe. Maybe not. Another section of roof. The Mall of America is under attack. Yes, that’s it. Other suicide bombers, other floors. You can hear them. You can hear the screams. The dynamics of metaphor. Chaos in the atrium. And then: a ruptured waterpipe. Sections of floor gape open. People, seats, chunks of concrete disappear. A magic act. Use your. No. Imagination. Wait. That’s not right. How can you imagine such things? But afterwards, it’s something else. It’s one thing and then it’s another. In the course of time. If you don’t use it, somebody else will. And so. Next. Later on. As things worked out. It’s the. What? Listen. Machinegun chatter. The rush of flames. The panicked shouts. The harsh cold wind blowing. Only that. None of it. All. Next the. And after that? What happens after that? And then what? What then?
00:09:58:15
MILO MAGNANI, one of the assistant managers of the Mall of America, loves watching trailers for disaster movies. But he loves watching his clients watch trailers for disaster movies even more. This is why two minutes ago he slipped unnoticed behind Byron Metnick during his, Milo’s, afternoon walkabout and took the first seat in the very last row. From here, Milo can enjoy the view, not of the screen, but of the crowd sprinkled before him enjoying the view. Milo turns fifty-seven today. These next few minutes are a small birthday present to himself. Arms crossed above his generous belly, American-flag bowtie knotted beneath his chalky shaven wattle, Milo loosens his hold on his thoughts and finds himself back in Edina, Minnesota, site of Southdale, the first enclosed, multi-level mall in the United States. Milo’s mother took him there for his eighth birthday in 1956, two months after its grand opening. Milo understood what he wanted to be when he grew up the second he walked through the entrance and saw the awesome sight of seventy-two stores stretching out ahead of him. It felt like a series of signposts to the future. Southdale was the creation of a man named Victor Gruen, an Austrian-born architect who, fleeing the Nazis, arrived in this country with eight bucks in his pocket and the belief that for communities to work well they needed to provide spaces for people to exist together. The advent of the automobile and suburbs had effectively blocked that possibility, so he invented a new kind of zone for human activity. People wouldn’t only want to enter it to shop. They would want to enter it to