12. Your body is a smaller theater situated inside a bigger theater situated inside a bigger theater.
13. Theaters are places where outside time and space go away.
14. Cynthia likes theaters.
15. It is dark. Remain calm. This will all be over soon.
00:04:23:21
CHEST A BURNING bush, Vladislav Dovzhenko stares at the movie screen without understanding what he is hearing. This isn’t because he doesn’t know English. Even though raised in central Kazakhstan in an area Russian rocket scientists once used as their sandbox, Vladislav has lived in this country five years. No: he can’t concentrate because six days ago on a dirt road near the Salton Sea he made the biggest haul of his career. Back in his apartment half a mile away, sealed in a large Ziploc Sandwich Bag buried beneath a potted rhododendron, rest thirty-two Krugerrands. This is more wealth than Vladislav has possessed at any time during his nineteen years. What he likes most about the Russian mafia is it is the kind of organization that will shoot you just to see if the gun works. Vladislav doesn’t know that the Centurion safe he helped liberate from two terrified Mexicans in an Army-surplus Jeep seventeen miles northwest of Calipatria belonged in April 1986 to a man named Anatoly Dyatlov, chief engineer at Chernobyl the day its reactor expired in a plume of lethal steam. The Russian mafia hired six unsuspecting teens, Vladislav among them, to pull off the heist because the Krugerrands are shot through with radiation. On his drive to Minneapolis, where he plans to lay low, work out at Los Campeones Fitness Center, and pick up easy American chicks at local bars, he wore six Ziploc Sandwich Bags distended with his irradiated booty glued to the inside of his thighs beneath his shapeless pants just in case a cop pulled him over. At rest stops he walked like Boris Karloff in Frankenstein. Seven years, and he will be sterile. nine, and he will lose his eyesight. But now, one seat behind and to the right of Cynthia Morgenstern, Vladislav Dovzhenko gloats and gloats.
00:04:24:07
THE UNSHAVEN, trollish teen dressed in black jeans, black button-down shirt, and Bolle sunglasses two seats to Vladislav’s right is conducting an imaginary interview with himself. Yeah, urn, Brandon Bazin is saying to Barbara Walters behind his eyelids, so like the camera is supposively rolling and all? Okay. So. Zondi. …? Yeah. Just Zondi. Fuck the parental-naming thing, dog. That kinda shit is all about like social control and whatevuh. …? Yeah. Grand Rapids. …? No. The, urn, the other Grand Rapids. …? Kind of, but not really. I knew I had what it took since like forever, pretty much. …? The art establishment is all like: you don’t have any “talent.” I’m all like: wassup with that? …? Communications. …? What? …? Normandale Community College. …? Sucked. They’re all like: you flunk. I’m all like: whatevuh. Which is when I meet Mongo at the Fringe Festival. He introduces me to AIDS. …? Arts In Denial & Shit. Which it deals with like stuff that like denies it’s like art? Which gives me this idea for my own magum okus. …? What? …? Eighteen. …? So I’m all like: fuck the commodrification of images, know what I’m saying? I won’t like create a fucking thing for the rest of my life. That’s my like project. …? What? Three-point-two mil. …? Not doing something being the like something I’m doing, know what I’m saying? It’s a, urn, statement. …? I dunno. What do you think it means? …? Really? Huh… So I’m all like……? Three-point-two. Yeah. …? Listen to music, mostly. Surf the tube. …? Nickelodeon. Lotta fly shit in SpongeBob is like strictly for adults, know what I’m saying? …? Lately? Thinking about taking up teaching. …? Yeah. I’m all like: maybe it’s time to give something back.
00:04:51:23
ED BERGMAN IS fifty-eight years old but he doesn’t know how old he is. He is an auto mechanic with three grandchildren but he doesn’t know who he is. Ed just woke up a second ago in an uncomfortable chair, row four, seat six, behind a big-eared man in a black mackintosh and is awash with worry someone was supposed to pick him up here but hasn’t or maybe Ed should be somewhere else but isn’t. It occurs to him there is a good chance he is drifting through deep space inside a capsule with a television screen set into the wall where the porthole should be and mistaking what is on the screen for what is really happening to him. Next he cannot remember having just had that thought. Ed wishes every Malaysian Madness franchise would provide a selection of serotonin reuptake inhibitors on the menu but he would also settle for simple painkillers. Ed cannot fathom why certain people are bent on concealing the fact there are no animals in Barnum’s Animals Crackers nor goldfish in Pepperidge Farm Goldfish. Sometimes he can see his ideas. Sometimes they look like flaky little white wedges of angel-food cake crumbling in a large black mouth. Ed can feel someone grinding them up and swallowing them down. Sometimes if he listens very closely Ed Bergman can hear gastric fluids fizz, slosh, and gurgle around his thoughts exactly like a threat.
00:04:52:25
NIGHLS, LARA MCLUHAN takes classes at Norman-dale Community College. She graduated high school a year early and wants to earn an associate degree in business so she can run her own upscale shoe store. Her schedule allows her two free afternoons a week. Sundays she treats herself to a movie like this. Tuesdays she drives to a warehouse across town to star in bukkake videos. Seventy-five men cum on her face and in her hair during a shoot. Because she can pass for eighteen, no one at Face Value Productions asks Lara any questions. One of the other girls told her in ancient Japan women cheating on their husbands were tied up in the middle of town and humiliated like this. It doesn’t concern Lara one way or the other. Bukkake is good money. The hours are reasonable. Sometimes between shoots she catches up on her homework. But Lara doesn’t like the taste much. It reminds her of snotty Brie cheese mixed with Ajax. When she Googled it, she was relieved to discover it contains nothing more than ninety-five percent water with traces of sugar, vitamin C, and zinc mixed in. Plus there are only twenty-five calories per load. Passing time on her knees, occasionally in a girls-school uniform, occasionally in a pair of schoolmarm glasses, occasionally with her wrists chained in her lap, Lara likes to shut her eyes, listen to all the cute little slupslapping sounds going on around her, and imagine the cleancut Republican financial advisor ten years older than she whom Lara is determined to marry by the time she is twenty-three. His name will be something in the leafy suburban neighborhood of Christopher or Brian or David. Christopher or Brian or David will enjoy the missionary position with the lights off. Lara and he will produce three remarkably fair-haired children with high IQs and enormous self-esteems. After making love, side by side in bed, Lara will ask Christopher or Brian or David to tell her the same story he always tells her, the one she read someplace but forgot where, as if it really happened to him: the one about that azure autumn morning he was on the forty-second floor of the North Tower when he looked up from his desk and saw a Boeing 767 getting bigger and bigger through the window. Without thinking, Christopher or Brian or David began to run. Down on the street, he peered up the very instant Nick and Jim, two of his colleagues who had always hated each other, always done nothing but snipe and bicker, leaped from a gaping burning rectangle on the sixty-fifth floor. They were holding hands. This future memory always makes Lara feel simultaneously patriotic and romantic, causing a diminutive smile to form upon her perfect lips at just the right time.