Next thing he knew, he was on the grass. Next to him lied the parachute. Apparently, the parachute opened by itself, or something. Karza wasn’t sure. Perhaps he’d blacked out.
Karza moisturized his eyeballs with a few blinks and examined the surroundings. He was indeed in a vineyard, which was indeed green, perhaps even a tint greener now that he was looking at it from leveled sight. Man and his “girlfriend”, fortunately, landed safely not so far away. The three looked at each other, and then at the surroundings again. Puzzled, but relieved.
The three traversed a little on a grassy path, which slowly transformed into a gravel path, and then a cement road that eventually led them to an African township. It might be an over-extrapolation to say it was Africa, but the pedestrians were all, well, black. The settlements on both sides of the road were very white and very square, resembling closely to Khayelitsha per se. The only difference was that everything was so spotless, with not a single piece of trash in sight.
The three came across a single-story mall, or, actually more like a semi-indoor arcade, that was also very spotlessly white. There was a moderate amount of shoppers inside the mall, and an even more moderate amount of small green potted shrubs.
Once they neared the mall, the “girlfriend” was running left and right in search for food. Karza realized that he still hadn’t acquired her name, and by now he was afraid that it might’ve been too late to ask. Karza and Man paced steadily down the main corridor. When Karza saw a bathroom sign, he suddenly realized his urge to pee.
Karza briefly signaled Man and proceeded into the toilet. It wasn’t a men’s toilet, but instead the special handicapped one with only one flush toilet, one sink and one mirror. He slid the door shut and locked it—or at least he thought he did. While he was relieving himself, a man barged very aggressively into the bathroom. It was, surprisingly, a white man. A white man with short blond hair.
The man re-closed the bathroom door behind him. Without the slightest hesitation he signaled Karza to grab the plunger and plunge the toilet bowl a few times, then rotate the rod of the toilet paper holder forward half a circle and push it against the wall at the same time. Karza did what the man had signaled, and surprisingly the toilet started flushing by itself.
While the toilet was making that typical flushing noise, the white man looked him very seriously in the eye and opened his mouth.
“Listen here very carefully, and keep flushing the toilet if you need to talk more.”
This sentence was beyond all of Karza’s possible imaginations. Not a lot of people possess the ability to vocalize in Karza’s dreams, not even Karza himself most of the time. But this man just enunciated those words very clearly to him. It was, by far, a much more shocking moment than all those times when Karza nearly died in his dreams.
By the time Karza had come back to his senses, the flushing sound had stopped and the man was staring at his own face through the bathroom mirror, as if nothing ever happened.
More puzzled than ever, Karza plunged the flush toilet a few times again, then rotated the rod and pressed it against the wall.
Once the flushing sound ensured, the man turned to Karza and started speaking again.
“You need to grab your friends and leave this place immediately!”
The flushing sound stopped once more, and the man just casually turned his face back to the mirror, resuming that typical bathroom face check.
Karza plunged the flush toilet a few times, then for the third time rotated the rod and pressed it against the wall.
This time, to Karza’s greater surprise, he was the one speaking.
“What are we running from?”
“The defense mechanism!” the man nearly shouted.
At this exact moment, the bathroom door barged open again, except this time it was a very small child with fairly east-Asian – perhaps Japanese – facial features.
The child’s face was as pale as those in the morgue. When “he” opened “his” “mouth“, the insides were pitch black, and a painfully sharp scream gushed out from it.
Shocked and horrified, Karza tried to slide the bathroom door shut and plunge the toilet simultaneously, but it wasn’t doable for someone with only two hands—not even in a dream.
Half-assing both tasks to no avail, instead Karza ran out of the handicapped bathroom. Even though Man didn’t have a clue about the entire turn of events, he took no pause and started running behind Karza as well.
Karza sprinted at full speed towards the mall entrance. Although all the shoppers seemed completely ignorant of the pair, somehow Karza just knew that he couldn’t slow down or stop running for even a split second.
But Man’s girlfriend is still somewhere in the mall.
They ran past an actual game arcade while Karza was still trying to contemplate what to do with Man’s girlfriend. The only person who took notice of them was a black man who was testing his mics at the karaoke machine in the arcade. The man shouted with a Xhosa accent, “take this mic!”
With a sudden surge of trust in a complete stranger, just like what Karza always did in real life, he took a sharp right angle and headed towards the karaoke-r whom then threw the mic at him. Once he caught the flying mic in mid-air, he clenched it in his left hand and dashed off with Man again.
The black man didn’t run with them. He calmly swiped through the song list on the karaoke machine, and started playing Halo by Beyoncé.
Karza was familiar with the tune, so once the verse arrived after the intro, he started singing with his panting voice.
“Remember those walls I built—”
Karza and Man were already outside of the mall at this point, but they could still hear his off-key singing echoing throughout the entire mall. While the two ran up the now carless road that sloped up at nearly 30-degrees, Man took one last glance at the mall’s entrance. There were dozens, if not hundreds, of mall-goers hop-running after them as if they’d met Beyoncé herself. Despite the big crowd, Man couldn’t find his girlfriend.
Karza wasn’t entirely sure of the nature of the crowd. Was he supposed to get them out of the mall too? Or were they enemies? All Karza was certain at this point was that he had to keep singing so that Man’s girlfriend could – hopefully – find them by his shaky voice, or at least by the sheer size of the moving crowd.
But things never go as planned, especially in a seemingly senseless dream like this. Karza stopped hearing his own puff-gasp-singing voice that ought to have seeped out from the mall. He looked at the mic and of course – the battery died.
Karza took out the dead batteries, but where could he possibly find replacement batteries in the middle of this goddamningly steep road?
Karza glanced at the running crowd that was slowly catching up. Very illogically, a tiny boy – who was nonetheless running as fast as a longer-legged man – raised his right hand. In his hand there was a pair of batteries.
Should I keep running or take those batteries?
Though Karza didn’t even know the name of the “girlfriend“, he had to seriously ponder a risky bet that he couldn’t foresee any positive outcome.
Just as he grew more conflicted, his legs grew mushier as well. Now his legs felt less like flesh and bones and more like melting chocolate under the red hot sun. While the outcomes of the bet hadn’t changed, his legs had already made the final decision for him.
Karza slowed down his pace for the boy that didn’t show any sign of fatigue. The boy’s smile grew wider, sweeter, but at the same time, more disturbing as he got closer. Karza immediately knew it’d been a terrible idea to take the batteries.
He started running—or he hoped he could. His legs had completely given up already.
The boy shoved the batteries into Karza’s hands. Karza tried to fit those batteries where they belonged. But just like in reality, the more rushed a person tries to fit something into a slot, the slower it actually gets.
By the time Karza had successfully put the batteries in place, the crowd had caught up. A bunch of kids were encircling at the half-kneeling half-collapsing Karza, and the grown-ups were more towards the edge of the circle. They were all radiating a satisfied yet creepy smile at Karza.
Karza’s lungs and legs were sorer than ever. He tried to open his mouth, but the vocal cords no longer made a sound; he tried to move his legs, but he also couldn’t feel them anymore. What had replaced his tiredness was the feeling of drowning. Again. It wasn’t simply the fear of suffocation. It wasn’t the tingling sensation when one runs out of air. It was actual drowning. It was water unwelcomely invading and overwhelming every single air sac in a person’s lungs. Karza’s vision became blurrier. He couldn’t even see, feel or hear much anymore. The last things he might’ve seen were Man still managing to run at full speed with terror written all over his face, and all the remaining blue pixels – presumably of the sky – gradually changed to the same brown hue as the crowd’s skin color, before eventually fading into lightlessness.