Methane

(First published in the Fish Anthology 2021 also available to read on Substack)

A desperation came onto London when the nights got this warm. Unable to sleep, people would lie awake or take ill-advised walks. Some would give in totally, and sit outside on baked curbs, talking across the road. Now and then, an argument flared up, and what in colder years could have been a fistfight turned into a quick, lazy stabbing. From up above in the flats none of this sounded like much, but it was enough to keep the residents awake.

#

In the morning, Tom watched out of his window as men squinted at tablets and sprayed the asphalt with green, orange, blue and white scribblings. Tiny arrows and numbers marked power lines, old copper phone lines, fibre optic lines, and every form of plumbing since record keeping began. They would hide in their air-conditioned cabins, and then scurry out with spray cans and their archaic plans, repeating until the road seemed littered with confetti.

With the markings all in place, they examined their work, hands on hips, and sighed. A day later, the hydraulic jaws of the machine ripped straight down the middle of the road. This was, after all, the path of progress. Some new data line was to be laid down, and if they tore out anything still useful, so be it. The aggrieved party would complain, they would pay the fine, and new lines would be run. If no one complained, good riddance.

He was sitting at his desk staring at his monitor when it went dark. He noticed himself in the reflection, shirtless. With the fan, the computer and the fridge turned off, his apartment felt supernaturally quiet. He could hear his neighbours groan in annoyance and outside, the machines working and the men shouting. He stood by the window and watched as a meek, lukewarm rain started falling on the hardhats and the steel.

He leaned out of the window to look around. On both sides the neighbouring buildings seemed to still have power, he could see TVs and fans. He took the bags of food from his freezer, emptied them into the biggest pot he owned and put it on the stove, before realising his stove wouldn’t work either.

With that sorted, he grabbed his phone and set to cancelling his rent payment. Even if the power came back in a few days, he wouldn’t be able to afford it. The key in these situations was to stop paying as soon as possible; evictions had been frozen for a few years now, so any cash you could keep was more useful than fulfilling any lingering sense of obligation to a landlord. The landlord, in turn, would stop paying the mortgage, but repossessions were frozen too, and so every little tragedy triggered gridlock that cascaded upwards until someone said it was fine. Nothing you could have done.

The next day there was no trace of the rain, and he felt like if he did eat something it would just fall straight through. He wet a towel in the bathtub and put it around his shoulders before leaving the apartment.

# 

The air by the fountain was thick with chlorine and the synthetic peach smell of sunblock. People waded through the water, cupped it in their hands, and threw it on their shoulders.

He stood in line for the phone chargers with some 20 people. On the side where the buildings cast a shade, people sat on towels and meditated. Among them, a man walked and instructed. He asked them to let thoughts come into their minds, but to watch out for where the thoughts came from. He waited a long time before speaking again. A meditating woman struggled to stifle a cough and eventually opened her eyes and puckered her lips to the side. She sat in a loose white t-shirt and leaned back on her hands, looking over the square.

Three police officers scanned the crowd like bored lifeguards. They seemed fine with the people in the fountain. These days cops seemed to be fine with almost anything, as long as no large, rowdy groups formed. Move along, move along; the city tolerated anything but clotting.

The line inched forward and the instructor asked the meditators whether the appearance of the thoughts was any different from they when they became aware of a sound. “For the final 15 minutes,” he said, “consider the sensations of your skin, and whether it bounds your perception. What is actually the size of you?”

Tom closed his eyes standing in line. He felt the towel, still cold on his shoulders, but he imagined that the interface between his back and the towel was not the end of him. He imagined himself a ten-foot ball of hot gas, with a cool towel and a head in it, but that was as large as he could fathom. Someone tapped on his shoulder and he moved up the line.

By the time his phone was in the charging locker, the shade slanted halfway across the square, not quite far enough to reach him. He moved into the shade and towards the meditators, who were slowly getting up. He asked the woman with the cough what this was all about. Her hair was buzzed short and she seemed used to the questions. “It’s a meditation group. He runs it,” she motioned towards the young man who led the proceedings.

“Why does he run it?”

 “Not sure. He’s good at it. He’s enlightened.” He wore round glasses and smiled sincerely at the students as he walked past. He was a few years younger than Tom and wet his towel in the fountain before draping it on his narrow shoulders.

“What is it like? Being that way.”

“Supposedly, it’s all now. No voice in his head, no intrusions. It’s hard to tell from the outside.”

Tom watched him for any tell-tale signs of spiritual superiority as he walked towards them and introduced himself.

“I’m Samuel. We’re headed to a,” he paused, as if translating in his head, “Sikh temple for food. We’re not,” he paused again, “associated but the food’s free if you want to join us.”

Tom agreed. Food would do him good.

 #

The group walked far enough apart to not be a group, simply people walking from the same place to some other place. Some talked amongst themselves, and no one seemed to mind that a newcomer had joined them. The young woman spoke to two older women, who wore exercise gear and waist bags. Periodically, she would walk off to the side and cough into her elbow, and then walk back closer to the group.

They discussed how unseasonably warm it was, which was true. It had been hot for years though, and it seemed wasteful to be surprised by each wave of a rising tide. Surely, that’s as high as it’ll go.

The temple was a blocky building with gold lettering on the street-facing wall. The first room was a simple reception with an unmanned counter, and a table with bandanas of various colours. Through a wide door was a shallow rectangular pool, bright blue, with a row of taps on the opposite side. They all covered their hair with the coloured cloths, as if sorted into random teams, and then stepped off their flip-flops and sandals and walked solemnly through the pool. Some joined their hands by their chest as they waded through, but they seemed to have made that bit up.

The shallow foot washing tank reminded him of going to public pools with his father when he was younger, and the memory made his nose fill up and his eyes sting. At 15 he had gotten an ear infection from the public pool, and his fever got so high convulsions shook his body like a wet rag. Even at its worst, he remembered the experience with an odd clarity. He didn’t go swimming much after that. They washed their hands at the faucets and walked through a curtained opening.

The main hall was large and airy, the false ceiling domed and painted in a two-tone geometric pattern. There was a folding table on one side of the room, looking insubstantial in context, with three stainless steel food warmers on it. Four long parallel mats extended across the room, and two people sat on them already eating, wearing their assigned colour headscarves. The place seemed emptier than it expected to be; it was well into the afternoon, an odd time to be eating.

They lined up at the folding table and each grabbed a compartmented stamped aluminium tray. A turbaned middle-aged man wearing an apron over a t-shirt that read Welcome to Las Vegas served them lentils, potatoes and flatbread out of the food warmers. They thanked him as they went by. Filled with the rich smells of the food, the room made sense.

They sat on the mats facing outwards. He sat at the far end of their group with only an old man to his left. His face was bursting with blood vessels and his nose seemed swollen. He didn’t touch his food, halfway through some conversation with himself.

“It’s awful isn’t it?” The old man said.

Tom had no idea which bad thing he was referring to, but nodded gravely.

The old man continued, “It’s awful, all the people on the streets.”

Tom still wasn’t sure exactly what he meant, but he acquiesced between bites. He was starving now that he’d started eating.

“People need something to do, they can’t just go around waiting for something to happen,” the old man continued.

“Oh.” The unemployed masses. “Yes, it is terrible.”

“It’s a shame, it’s a real shame, people need a goal, especially young people.”

Tom confirmed again through a mouth full of food.

Having settled that debate, the old man moved on to how warm it was, it hadn’t been like that the past few years, and so on. “It’s the methane I guess,” said the old sage, still barely having touched his meal.

“Yeah.” Tom wasn’t sure where to take it, this was where conversations ended. “Have you been doing the meditation thing for long?”

“Yes. It helps.”

“Helps with what?”

“Helps me,” the old man looked up towards the small window high up on the wall, “remember which things I can change and which things I can’t.”

“What can you change?” Tom pressed for more information.

“I can change how I react.”

“Yeah.” That was, of course, the issue. It was the methane, they said, pouring out of the permafrost, choking, congesting, only it wasn’t the methane, it was people that took it as it came, and sat on the stairs with the sun in their faces and thought isn’t it nice.

The old man sought to fill the silence: “Do you work?”

“Yeah. Content moderation.” This didn’t please the old man, who now seemed to be grasping for a way to change the subject. Tom beat him to it. “Not at the moment, I lost power.”

“Oh, that’s terrible,” the old man said, and then he remembered, “depending on how you react!”

Tom agreed and smiled. He stood up and walked to get more of the food. He was the only one to have done so, but the man serving the food made no mention of it and looked back down at his phone.

Samuel joined him and they spoke again. He told Tom he was welcome to come more often. He added him to a group chat and they went back to their seats. By this point, most people had left. Tom scrolled up through the messages, it was mostly dates and times and ”sorry I couldn’t make it”.

#

When he got back home, it was almost dark. He flicked the light switch on and off a few times and nothing changed.

#

The next day they met at someone’s apartment. It was out east and he took a crowded bus there. Greying semi-detached houses surrounded groups of stout apartment buildings with all their front doors facing outwards towards a shared balcony. He found the one he was looking for after analysing a large faded outdoor map. On the group chat they had called the place Lana’s, but he didn’t know who Lana was, and whether she was the one who answered the door when he got up to the first floor and rang the buzzer. There were four locks on the door and all the windows were open. It didn’t look like she had power, but he could hear the neighbours’ television. Most people sat in the living room chatting in hushed tones.

The lady with the cough sat in the hallway with her eyes closed. She seemed untroubled by it today, and he allowed himself to look at her as he walked down the short corridor, before edging past her to get to the living room. Samuel went around greeting people with a kind, subdued smile. The old man from yesterday wasn’t there.

Tom sat at the back of the living room and leaned on the wall. That day they thought about the “emotions that tinted their perception” and Tom struggled to identify how he felt. It was hard to find any trace of the anger he remembered feeling. It was hard to stay angry in this goddamn heat. He focused on his breath like he was supposed to. The lady in the hallway sneezed and threw her hands up.

He didn’t know how long this was supposed to go on for, but after a long period of silence Samuel thanked them and some people stood up to leave. He sat for a while and eventually left, thanking the small, happy woman who was probably Lana. Outside, Samuel stood facing the street. The sun hung low enough that they were shaded by one of the identical buildings on the far side of a small green. Samuel thanked him for coming.

“You think you’ll be coming back?”

“I’m not sure, this has never been my thing.” Not wanting to offend, he added. “But this is great.”

Out on the street a dog walked by. Its back lumpy with tumours, they watched it march steadily past.

“Someone told me yesterday you’re enlightened.” Tom probed.

Samuel confirmed.

“So why do all of this? Do you know what I mean?”

“It’s what I was doing before.”

Again, they stood silently, and no one walked down the street.

“How did it happen?”

It was hard to read anything on the young man’s face.

“It’s a bit of a long story”, Samuel said, knowing they both had as much time as they were willing to put into this. “I was living in Croydon, doing this sort of stuff, and I wake up one night and I’m not in my room.” A few people left the flat and walked past them, and Samuel smiled at them.

“I’m not in my room, I’m in some sort of facility, and I can’t move.” Tom refused to react. “I’m looking out onto a smooth metal room, and I can’t move at all, I can’t even feel my body. All I can do is see, and blink. And then, after a while, I can hear, but I’m not hearing from the same place I’m seeing from. The place I’m hearing from is somewhere on the other side, and this place is so quiet I can hear myself blink from across the room.” It didn’t seem rehearsed, but it didn’t seem like he was making it up on the spot either. “And I get it then, I’m nowhere. I’m not on this side of the room or that side of the room, and I was never anywhere to begin with. It’s like they’re showing me, mocking me.“

Tom steeled his face, as if any reaction would be conceding defeat.

“All of a sudden I can feel my hand, but my hand is somewhere else entirely, like two miles to the left”

The last few people walked out of the flat, including the young lady with the buzzed hair. Samuel spoke calmly, like he was telling an amusing anecdote.

“There was a knob under my left hand, somewhere off in the distance, and I turned it. Like a knob that was set to max and I turned it all the way off. As it turned, my thoughts, my sense of self, all dimmed. Even the bit of me that felt like the whole thing was weird quieted down until it was all the way off. After a while I fell back asleep and I woke up in my room, and none of it has come back since.”

“So, this was a dream?”

“I don’t think it was a dream, it’s what I remember happening. Does it matter?”

“It matters. Of course it matters. Fuck.”

#

When he got home, he didn’t try the light switch. He sat in the in the dimming light of the window as the asphalting truck bubbled down the street and rounded the corner. Outside, a fresh, dark streak ran down the middle of the road, splitting the newly decorated blacktop.