(interactive mystery event / swimmer travel / shower rescue)
I put on an event at what looks like a converted house or old barn. Inside, it feels like a colonial-era space with rustic wood and varied furniture. It’s set up for people to have drinks and watch a show.
The hostess, a shorter woman with a cropped blue pixie cut, has seats reserved for her family and friends. They aren’t seated near each other—her family in one area, her friends in another—and she sits with a table of guests. Everyone is chattering excitedly. The show is highly recommended, but we ask participants not to talk about the content with anyone who hasn’t attended, to keep the mystery. They only know that it’s interactive. The lights dim and the show starts with a projection.
The video shows a colonial town. A witch lives in a cottage outside of town and is being pestered by townspeople for being a witch. They point to parts of her attire as clearly witchy. She refutes them and they eventually leave, but as they go she remarks on how they knew about all that, since she is actually a witch and those are things witches use.
The first audience segment is introduced. An audience member walks around the tables while a recorded dialogue explains her character, an old woman from town, and her perspective. The show is a mystery adventure where all participants are characters who use clues and their positions in the story to reach a conclusion.
There is a knocked-over tunnel near the witch’s house, like a TARDIS. A middle-aged man in a brown suit wanders too close and gets sucked into another time. When the others find him, they look through the tunnel and see him walking on a beach. Someone asks if time moves differently on each side, since it really is him, and even though he’s been missing for days, it hasn’t been long for him.
HS Classmate C is at the event and brags about a Halloween comedy show she put on as a child, saying it was like this one. She did two shows a day for four days leading up to Halloween and charged three dollars per person. She considers it a proud success, even though her parents had to advertise to fill the room. I think to myself that it’s not comparable to this proper, adult, paid event that is sold out in advance.
Olympic swimmer Mirco Rembrant, or something like that, swims at the same place Friend A and I do. We’re coming back from a meet and end up on the same flight as him. He’s alone in first class and we’re in the back. It takes him an hour to get from his last Instagram location to our pool for his publicized practice. He gets picked up in a racecar from the airport while Friend A and I walk.
As we walk, we complain about how stuck up he is and how the public doesn’t even know. The team sends a car so he doesn’t waste time. On a map, it looks like we traveled from somewhere in Southeast Asia to the Middle East near India on a thirty-minute flight. He only adds another thirty minutes for local transport, while we wait much longer because of commercial flying rules.
We pass the main pool, where spectators are crowded around and he’s showboating again. At the member entrance, we’re blocked. They try to stop us, but we push through since we’re part of the team. They say they’re blocking his fans and that it will be harder to stop them if they see other women entering. It doesn’t make sense to us.
Friend A wants to shower. At first I plan to wait, but the locker room gets crowded and people are searching for his locker room. I don’t want to be left alone, so I go in with her. The girls’ showers are separate but still part of the same larger room the boys use.
Friend A takes the end shower near the doors on the second row in. I take the one next to her. I still have shorts and a white T-shirt on when I turn on the shower and wash. Friend A offers to tell me stories about what she’s been doing in the past months we haven’t seen each other, so I sit on the floor and listen.
I notice the curtain next to me is lifted slightly. At first I worry about peeking, but then I realize the man there is a swim member and he looks unconscious. I crawl over and check his wrist through the opening. Just then, the stall is opened by fans chasing Mirco. They accuse me of being lewd, even though the man is unconscious. I try to explain, but they don’t listen.
The others look at me in disgust. I refuse to let him drown because no one else seems to recognize how serious it is. I keep holding him up and checking his vitals. Eventually Friend A comes to disperse the situation and help me.