TW // Strong language
“Will you just try it?” Mary stamped her feet in frustration, facing her boyfriend with clenched fists and gritted teeth.
“No.” Greg half chewed the syllable and let it roll out of his mouth.
“Why not?”
“I just don’t see the value in it. It’s not exercise is it? It’s just sitting down.”
“That’s the point! It’s embracing your thought and switching off to what is going on around you.” Mary felt her temper rising. It was only Greg that could make her so irate. He knew it too. The small smirk told her so, it was his not-so-secret weapon. He could jab and jab - waves of micro-aggressions - before she snapped and was in the wrong for “lashing out” or “overreacting”. Now he just stood there, wearing her over-sized Coldplay T-shirt (which was a little too small on him) and thriving in his antagonism.
“My thoughts are great.” He chewed his lip to stop from laughing at his success in irritating her, “why would I choose to deny them the space they deserve?”
“Your thoughts are crap: football, take-aways, Call of Duty, vape flavours…” She counted them off on her fingers, which had begun to tremble with The Rage.
“How dare you.” He gasped, faux-wounded, clutching his chest with one hand and sucking on the vape in his other. “They are superb thoughts. “And “women.” You missed “women”.” His grin was a casus belli.
“You sit down right now.” Her voice was thin and raged through the narrowed gaps in her recently straightened teeth. The smile fell from his face, as though punched away by the weight of meaning in her words. “You will meditate with me now or I will leave this house and you will never see me again.”
“That’s a bit-”
“Sit!” The joviality in the room warbled with the command and the man did as he was told. Mary took a deep breath - now more than ever, she needed to meditate - and gave him a thin smile laced with unuttered caveats. “Now. We will breathe in through our mouth, filling our chests, hold for four, and then breathe out all the way for four. Repeating the process indefinitely.”
“Indefinitely?” He balked.
She ignored him and continued as she sat down on the mat opposite: “in for four, out for four. Concentrate on your breath, and if your thoughts trail off to other things, bring them back to your breath. Okay?” She eyed him and his eyes flickered, searching for a joke, a sarcastic comment, before settling on the calm of obeying.
“Okay.”
“Greg?” Mary shook his shoulders but there was no response. His face was soft and calm with a slight smile. His chest rose and fell with each measured and expected breath. But there was no response. She gently shook him, then slightly more with more urgency, more force, and then she thumped his arm. Nothing. “Greg!” She yelled a centimetre from his docile and content face.
“He’s not dead.” Mary’s mother said, taking her hand away after having checked Greg’s pulse.
“Yet.” Her father chimed in, frowning. “Why did you make him do it?”
“Do what?” Mary asked, bewildered and angry.
“That meditation crap.” He stumbled through the word with disdain, doubling the number of syllables. “Woke nonsense.”
“It’s been around for thousands of years!” Mary was incredulous.
“And look what good it’s done us.” Her father spat back before leaving to answer the kettle’s silence.
“He’s definitely not dead.” The paramedic removed their hand from his neck and shrugged, slightly put out by the fact that had been called to see a man tremendously deep in a meditative state, but otherwise perfectly healthy.
“What do we do?”
“Wait, I guess.” Another medicinal shrug.
“For what?”
“He’ll wake up. It’s a deep sleep, essentially.” The paramedic was packing away their measuring instruments and seismological knick-knacks, their partner was biting a nail absent-mindedly.
“Can’t you take him somewhere for scans?” Mary was breathless with confusion and anger.
“What scans?”
“Brain scans? Could be be brain dead?”
“Judging by the t-shirt he already was.” The paramedic laughed and checked themselves before frowning at Mary’s whitening face, “all vitals are fine, there is zero sign of decreased brain function. This man is asleep.”
“Asleep?”
“Asleep.”
“Thank you so much, doctor.” Mary’s mother chimed in, taking his hand with an odd flexion of affection, doubtlessly instigated by an early sherry.
“Not a doctor. Not a problem.”
“I’m leaving, Greg.” Mary was less emotional than she had expected she would be. The truth of it was that she had never really loved the man; it was a relationship of convenience for them both and his three and a half years of reluctant meditation had only reinforced that fact. She had gone about her life as normal, occasionally checking his pulse or if his pupils had dilated (the “danger signs”) but broadly just continued to live her life around her statuesque ex-boyfriend.
There were times it was tricky: like the ill-conceived Halloween party where somebody covered him in fake blood and wedged Dracula teeth into his mouth; or the time she had consumed too much alcohol and allowed a drunken tirade to end with her punching him square in the face and then sobbing into his lightly heaving chest; or the time her auntie Pam’s dog relieved itself against him like an aged tree. But otherwise, her existence took place around him. After the first few months she didn’t even expect him to wake. He was just there, like an old fridge that came with the house: incidental.
“The landlord will let you stay until the lease is up in August, then…” She shook her head and stifled a laugh at the absurdity of the situation, “well, I guess I don’t know what then.” She kissed the top of his head - anything else seemed inappropriate - and left him in the room alone, hesitating before deciding to leave the light on.
“Oh my.” Esmerelda walked in a circle around Greg, surveying him from every possible angle. The snow outside blending with the softened Christmas lights from neighbours’ houses gave the room a haunting glow; like a strip club in Blade Runner, or a petrol garage on the M6.
“Yeah.” Michael, the landlord narrowed his eyes and leant against the wall in an attempt to appear aloof and indifferent to what was happening. “Remarkable.”
“Remarkable?” Esmerelda snapped with an aghast look of wonder on her face. “It’s astonishing! It’s biblical. Mythical. And nobody knows?”
“There are rumours.” Michael said, knowing that to be true because it was him that had started them: “Has anybody heard about the man that’s been in some meditative coma for four years in an East London flat?” one of the Tweets on one his burner accounts had read. It didn’t get the response he had desired: just one nutjob claiming it was because of the chip in the Covid jab, and thirteen Russian bots advertising porn.
“Sensational.” She bit her lip and did another lap of the meditating man, her long red coat redressing the scene as a ritual, a sacrificial ceremony.
“Sure.” Michael used all his strength to keep from rolling his eyes. “Johnny mentioned you might be interested?” His voice rose to a tone he didn’t know it had as it attempted to remain distant and ambivalent. Johnny had sold her the art studio on Connaught Road and given her a call on a whim. She was now Michael’s last hope of selling the place, given it was unrentable with a dozing man as its central feature. The last hope before a misplaced cigarette and hail mary insurance claim. He gulped.
“Interested?” She stopped and stared at him, eyes wet with emotion, a passion he would never know. “I will pay you whatever you want. In fact, I will purchase the entire block of flats. This is the most incredible thing I have ever witnessed and I need to preserve it, contain it, shield it from whatever dreadful future you might discard it to.” The last words became a growl under raging eyes.
“Sold.” He managed one word in a thin whimper, though he wasn’t sure she heard it over the driven thumping of his heart.
“Esme, this is spectacular.” Members of the art gallery swooned and gaped and walked in a tight circle - a death-spiralling ant colony - around Greg with his closed eyes, ageless complexion and out of time posture.
“How did you find him?”
“Remarkable.”
“Outrageous.”
“Is it safe?”
“Can I touch him?”
“No, you may not touch him.” Esme voice was a purr of vodka fumes that interrupted her silence; she was happy leaning away against the wall and watching the dumbfounded crowd filter in, do a lap or two, and then filter out to the staging area for nibbles (which had once been a second bedroom for Greg’s drunken friends or Mary’s divorcing and bereft aunt. It now housed an L-shaped trestle table for vol-au-vents and warming champagne, and a spiral staircase that led into the labyrinthine remainder of the gallery).
Dust fell from the ceiling in thin clouds that found Greg’s hair and lips and shoulders. The bombs were far away, then closer, and the brickwork groaned in unison with their distant two-step. With there being no power, the darkness became a normality, only to be absconded on a brief occasion where fire was close enough to illuminate every inch of the flat-come-abandoned art gallery.
Vines creep up the body of Greg, clutching his skin, using the ballast of his - oddly intact - frame to pull themselves from the ground and wrap, claw and climb. Around waist, up chest; under armpit; over shoulder; around neck; across brow; over ear-lobe and then out reaching for more of the same and finding only light metallic breeze and crisp sunlight. The seasons end the life of one adventuring green tendrils only for it to decay to a skeletal scaffold for the next, and the next and the next. Over and over until the wrapping became an armour of woven, deceased organism, beneath which the now laden breath of Greg, the man who meditated for a millennia, continues to rise and fall, rise and fall.
“It is real.” Cthum was breathless, from the walk, from the tight, barely-breathable air. He hadn’t believed young Yipt when they had said what they’d found. It was an impossibility. A living, breathing statue. A gift from the Gods. It was enough blasphemy to guarantee young Yipt’s own death at the hands of Great Blade, or The Baltic Priest. But there was a curious pulsing in their eyes, a contracting, wobbling discomfort that aligned to something new and strange, something impossible. And now here it was.
“It has a beating heart.” Yipt placed a hand on the chest of the figure and Cthum inhaled with the shock of their calm. But it was Yipt who had found it, who had cut away the centuries of vines to reveal the wonder beneath. Cthum felt a wave of jealousy as he watched his friend possessing the statue. Why is it them that will take the glory? How can they lay claim on a message from beyond?
“It is a gift, from the gods.” Yipt was weeping and Cthum felt inclined to do the same.
“A sign we win the war.”
“You believe this?” Yipt spun with wide, wet eyes.
“It must be.” Chtum had hot tears running down his cheeks as he nodded to his childhood friend. “Lead the way, young Yipt. We must tell the others of the fortune we have found. You have found.”
Yipt smiled and cried and dropped their hand. “You are a good friend.” They began the long walk down the rough hillside.
“For the good of all.” Chtum said in a thin whisper that was caught in the sulphuric breeze and gone a heartbeat before he unsheathed his dagger.
“This is the being that divided them all.” The words were a series of pops, clicks and whistles that were chewed up and then relayed with a percussive acknowledgement between the semi-circle of creatures that had Greg surrounded.
“Do we know why?” A vibrato, like a full-throated bird-call, danced across the dusty ground.
“It is the last alive. It must be a deity. It is the source of their destroyers’ lives.”
“Then kill it.” One smaller creature with a hunched back and wheezing lungs offered. A quiet fell.
“We take it to The Mother.” The leader, stood beside Greg and dressed in a silvery robe, affirmed to one frown and several nods.
“She will be grateful.”
“She will.” Clicked a unified response.
She has to be, or she will destroy us all.
The stars blinked at Greg and his eyes stayed closed as the ground beneath him detached and - with it - he lifted away. The world was left behind with the gravity that rocked and swayed and then puckered out like a light. It all defragmented around him; crumbling, breaking down to an infinite collection of segments that would wind their lonely way into space. The last human life went with them. The infinite meditator; the artwork; the God; the deception; the symbol of an entire, extinct race; Greg. Like a frozen mammoth, out of time and untethered. He was tethered by invisible lines that dragged him up and away into the rough dark of space, while the world tumbled away into a fragmented nothing behind him. Crossed legs, folded arms, straight back, and strands of long-dead vine trailing behind him. A million pairs of eyes watched him ascend, a figurative breath held, an existence on the precipice. The Mother gathered him in her tendrils. Her vastness dwarfed that of the world that Greg had left, her unblinking eye consumed him; weighed him. All was still for a time unrecordable. They all drifted in the chain of moments that stretched out every-which-way. There was a tension of energy that emitted a deep, bright light as The Mother closed her eye for the first time. A sigh, a begrudging acceptance, a fizz, a pop, a relaxation. Greg opened his own eyes and gasped once into the blackness, and then it was done.