Chris Vaughan

Isa said all Underground stops have spiritual twins on the U-Bahn and Metro and Subways, like Hammersmith is her Berlin’s Hauptbahnhof–Hönow and Paddington Paris’s Saint-Lazare and Madrid’s Príncipe Pío, routes with their own secret curvatures and sororities, speaking to each other in an ancient language, and I believed everything Isa said.

I got so used to travelling that line, I imagined the tunnels as cracks formed by stress lines of overpopulation above, the Tube a natural history of tourists, commuters and the protestors me and Isa were supposed to be. But we didn’t feel guilty because those hours hurtling 20 miles per hour away from Occupy windchill revitalised our strength.

Getting on at Cannon Street our ride always began with an imperative vow of silence.

It was too cold above and the songs didn’t move us.

Isa called our retreats Subway Satori. Satori Isa said is a divine emptiness, how you feel when you’re happiest without a thought in your head.

Daily commuters worldwide are devout agents of this Zen practice, all of them masters of an art about which they’re oblivious, divinely oblivious.

Our private silences on these outings might make it into her book on silence. She’d been recording her silence findings for seven years, she said on one of our afternoon orbits, writing about the smallest degrees separating silence like that on a Circle Line platform after rush hour and the silent subspecies of waking alone in a strange motel in Odessa, Texas. Worst of all are the silent milliseconds following a car crash before someone screams. Her dreamiest silence, sustained at depth for an hour or more, Isa experienced taking the crossing over the Pyrenees in Walter Benjamin’s footsteps, similar taste to the silence she recorded in Viznar looking for Lorca’s ghost, at the time when she thought her book was about something else.

In December we practised morning Subway Satori.

Getting on at Cannon Street before lunch we told the few people we spoke to regularly, our fixed tent neighbours, that we were going foraging for supplies.

I talked about the conversation I’d heard, a group discussing reverting to the Mayan calendar to reset the financial year and glitch the system, more than once they used this phrase without flinching, glitch the system they said, believing there is any correspondence between their waffling and the FTSE 100. Glitch the system, they might as well talk about bloodletting when the moon wanes.

That morning we’d watched the camp kitchen flip and fly across the square and Isa said before they glitch any systems and crash markets, they’d better work out how best to secure tents to the ground. Isa used breezeblocks. Introducing herself in October, she brought me a present of breezeblocks and rope and asked if I needed help painting my signs.

We mulled whether to take a second orbit, which had become a habit. Morning orbits floating into afternoons.

Isa said her favourite cliché was social fabric.

I said I’ve a phobia of indexes like you see on trader’s screens on TV when there’s a crisis and they show an office, where nobody appears on edge, not like before when they’d show you trading floors and people gnashing, turning blue and shouting. This phobia isn’t a fun one with a name.

Isa was quiet, whiffs of an electric violin floated through the open doors and Cannon Street station passed.

Would Occupy survive the winter? If it survives until next January, survives through the years, in what form does it survive?

Isa said she’d noticed tents abandoned on the edges of the perimeter we made it a point of walking at night, after Subway Satori, atoning for our long and longer absences underground. Seeing those abandoned tents, she remembered fringe towns she’d visited for her book. Some English towns after midnight sing a silence she found spookier than deserts. They might not spell the end, Isa said, but those unoccupied tents signalled a change of texture.

I said perhaps they’re abandoned because of the wolf fringe tents were talking about, a sabotaging wolf that came at night eating food, ripping tents, pinching weed.

Disgruntled occupiers above were demanding more than signs crayoned a rich range of colours, angry and absorbed in minor crisis, like how do we keep our tents from floating away, boil a kettle, not get eaten by the wolf?

A group in a camping tent far southeast said the werewolf tore open their tent at night while they slept. Isa said she wanted to see the tent. Four twentysomethings greeted us with banana bread. Since the incident they’d decided not to sleep in the dark. Showing us four slits down the back of their tent, one said he’d heard the wolf and another agreed, she did an imitation growl and the third said she’d seen the werewolf herself. Some ventured there in awe and others in fright, to agree on preventative measures and hear corroborating stories about newer attacks.

Isa asked them, do you think this beast crawled out of its medieval swamp because it got strong whiffs of good and evil?

Don’t they know they'll die? Isa asked on our third orbit, late into the afternoon. Their real concern is the enormity of extinction, but they don’t have the stomach, Isa said. Her hands were stained blue and pink from our nightlong sign-painting session.

Ignorant and plain blind to our faith in rotten conditions, police were waiting for the weather to turn.

Isa told me about trudging through South American jungles in rainstorms, just so one of their party could shit in the palm fields of a bio-fuel giant, to take a photo of him shitting, and it was worth trudging, she said. Trudging among activists is dying out.

I told Isa I’d dreamed of a tent tsunami, an onroll of hemp and Hydratex eating London whole, heterotopias would form within a city unravelling, an ever-expanding frontier of insatiable polycotton tents, vanishing points of tarpaulin, nylon, cotton and there’s us, I said, me and you nested in its heart, reaching through tunnels and mazes of colour.

Vampires exist but werewolves don’t, Isa said.

As a girl in Düsseldorf her brother Hans told her vampires had their headquarters in Drakeplatz and thousands crawled night-wide from basements and bunkers across the city to the Altstadt, where they hung out in crypts under the Art Academy beer cellar until dusk and buried children in the Lohhausen vegetable lot, then one day walking home from her piano lesson with Mr Kren, Isa saw Joseph Beuys performing his famous How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare piece through the Galerie Schmela window. Beuys with his face painted gold and head smeared with honey carried a dead hare around a gallery, whispering into the dead hare’s ear and that’s when she knew Hans was right about vampires.

Talk of the wolf died down, more than that died down and Isa untied our breezeblocks when policemen and dogs told the city to forget, forced the concrete to unravel us, and we slipped away in search of her final chapter on silence on the Tube.