The Mime

Deciding a mime is better company than re-animated corpses, you run after him, down a flight of stairs, through the wings and on-stage. The mime darts to center-stage and collapses dramatically, in the middle of an array of alumni wearing full-body suits that leave their faces featureless.

Offstage, you recognize two old college friends whom you’ve fallen out of touch with since graduation, Ajax and Achitophel. Ajax sports a wild mane of red hair and looks like he just left a Korn concert (your older cousin listened to them, not you, you assure yourself – your inner monologue making that reference doesn’t make you old. Though they did appear in that one South Park episode). Achitophel, on the other hand, is wearing the same clothes you saw her in last – seemingly the entire Vineyard Vines Summer 2014 catalog – though she’s also holding a massive two-handed Infinity Bludgeon. It is an elegant weapon, from a more civilized age: the adamantium handle is sixteen hands long, and laced with a criss-crossing inlay of silver which blossoms out like a mandala over the bludgeon itself, a heavy boulder famously dug up by the school’s founder, Erich von Straussheim, in The Year of Our Lord 1744.

Before you can say anything, the mime is gesturing frantically to Achitophel, communicating something. Eventually, she nods her head and says, ‘I see.’

‘Achitophel! Long time no see,’ you say, cautiously, ‘this looks like a fun… theatre performance, just like old times.’

‘Berna’vida-mal, entath!’ she cries with a flourish, and all the sudden the faceless alumni are grabbing you and dragging you to center-stage.

‘No! Wait! Don’t!’ you cry helplessly, but it’s too late: you’re being torn limb from limb, who the hell can guess why, you’ll never know, cause…

Give it another go?
Credits

The Jock

You can’t quite figure out what the hell is going on, but this jock seems to be a maniacal lunatic, whereas the mime – so far as you can tell – is in some sort of trance that the jock put him in. Well, one way to find out. Whipping the ninja star out of your pocket, you flick it through the air and into the jock’s eye. The jock falls forward out of the mime’s hands and hits the floor hard, dead on impact. The mime stands still, stunned, looking at you wide-eyed.

You stare back. ‘Hey. Can you talk?’

The mime shakes their head back and forth in a long, steady motion, then – with both hands – points to the huddled forms on the floor around you.

You look. The bound and gagged alumni are no longer struggling in their ropes. Going over to one – a middle-aged man – you tear the bandage off his mouth and check for a pulse.

‘He’s dead,’ you say, looking over at the mime.

The mime pretends to cry and pull out their hair, and you are stunned by his callousness.

‘Hey, this isn’t an act,’ you say, looking at the other two bodies, ‘these people are dead. How…’

Your mind races through the possibilities: perhaps the jock had built up a neural bond with the people he’d brainwashed, and by killing the jock and severing that bond, you’d killed them? It didn’t make sense.

Just in case, you shake the body of the dead man. Yep, he’s dead.

‘What the fuck,’ you protest, exasperated. ‘Did I do this?’

The mime points to you, drags a finger along his throat, then starts to silently guffaw, throwing his whole body into it. Disgusted, you grab him and shake him, too.

‘Are you dead, as well?’ you demand hysterically, ‘what the hell is wrong with you?’

The mime makes a fist with their left hand, places it against their skull, and then with their other hand pretends to crank their fist as if it is some sort of engine. As they do so, you hear rustling, and look back: the seemingly dead bodies are rousing themselves again. Letting go of the mime, who darts out of the room, you watch as the struggling bodies free themselves from their bindings. What do you do – follow the mime, or stick around with the seemingly-once-dead-people?

A) Follow the mime.

B ) Stay with the re-animated bodies.

Climb up through the window

Feeling quite cavalier, you scramble up the side of the building and into the open window. Inside, you discover three alumni bound in ropes with scotch tape over their mouths. Yet there is a third alumnus, a guy you recognize from some intro class whom you believe was in a frat, but now is in a choke hold, compliments of a man dressed as a mime: he’s got the white face paint, Parisian attire, and Cirque du Soleil build, yet somehow is about to strangle this ex-linebacker with ease.

Seeing you, the mime lets up his grip, just enough for the captive jock to smile and say, ‘Aha! You’ve arrived just in time for the coup de grace – could be fantastic, no?’

Hold on, isn’t he the captive in need of saving? Why is he seemingly taking delight in his imminent death? No time to think about it – he’s gonna die soon, regardless. Maybe he’s somehow brainwashed the mime into becoming a weapon for his own self-destruction?

You reach into your pocket and feel your ninja star, kept for just this sort of occasion. You’re an excellent shot, everyone knows that. So the question is, whom do you take down: the jock, or the mime?

A) The jock.

B) The mime.

RUN!

Upon hearing the scream, you turn tail and run. Yep. You thought you’d conquered your fear of hearing people scream, but you haven’t.

As you run back up the hill, you pummel yourself with the same old critiques: I’m a coward! Did I learn nothing from middle school? Am I still in middle school? I might as well be!

You have a lot to learn, evidently, but thankfully you won’t have to worry about studying for those life lessons, let alone putting them in action: as you sprint up the open hill, you’re struck by lightning.

What? A storm was scheduled to hit tonight, yes, but that wasn’t supposed to be for a while – and the sky seemed pretty clear on the way down. Ah, but then you remember another middle school lesson which you never picked up: lightning can strike even when the skies are clear.

Yet you are not killed instantaneously. The electricity passes straight through you, opening up a Nile River – or Grand Canyon, you can Choose Your Own Analogy – along your spine, and you collapse in the dry grass like a sizzled steak that smells thoroughly unappetizing. You will be dead in a few minutes, it’s true, and your brain is already far worse off than it was in middle school (or even your classmate ‘ole Jimmy Fiddlepiss’ brain, for that matter, and now he’s a Congressman), but at least you can take these last few moments to reflect on your failures.

Yes, you should have either walked straight into those double-doors like Aragorn, or climbed up the bougainvillea like Romeo. Whether or not an Arwen or Juliet in distress awaited inside (or Frodo, to your Samwise), however, you will never know, because…

Try again?

Credits

Erich von Straussheim’s Thespian Hour

Under the masked student’s list of Reunion Activities, one catches your eye: Erich von Straussheim’s Thespian Hour.

‘I was a thespian, once,’ you say, surprising yourself with the use of the word ‘thespian’, which you had never employed in the past. The undergrad is equally alarmed by your word choice, yet you allow yourself to continue, wistfully: ‘I once played Banquo in Macbeth, back in the day… In fact, I wonder if any of my old cast mates will be there…’

You trail off, overwhelmed by a Proustian flood of memories – the anxious pre-performance warmups, the painful faux-beards that refused to peel off after a week of performing, and the disembodied ecstasy attained in fleeting mid-performance moments – and smile nostalgically. Yikes, you’re old.

The student looks on, unimpressed. ‘Beats me, thespian,’ she observes, then adds before she leaves, ‘One way to find out – go check out the theatre.’

You are left alone again on the windswept quad, which – aided by a well-timed murder of crows exploding from above some skeletal trees – attains a startlingly menacing quality. Afraid, but trying not to think about it, you begin a determined stride down the college’s beer can-littered hill and towards the old theatre building. Along the way, you pass a man whom you mistake for your old sociology professor, Dr. Felix Neanderfellow, but it’s just an ancient alum, who scowls as you walk by.

And so it is with a lurking sense of dread that you finally turn around the corner of a lamentable 1960’s-era academic office building to regard your old haunt, the George Gordon O’Hoohalan ’59 Memorial Theatre. It is an old, venerable building, with a long, sloping Parisian roof and an imposing pair of impossibly high wooden doors at the front, one of which is parted open just barely, allowing a red light to spill out into the crisp evening air. Strangely, no noise comes from inside – until just before you enter, when you hear a scream come from a 2nd-story window.

You pause. You could turn to run, continue through the front door, or climb a vine of bougainvillea up to the window, to investigate the source of the scream. Which will it be?

A) Run.

B) Climb up to the window.

C) Continue through the front door.