I am sat on machine-cut wood, strung together by steel in the shape of a seat. Before me, two friends, one hot, one cold. One destined to live no longer than four minutes, the other certain to endure the collapse of the universe. I reach out and seize my warmer companion, lift them towards my mouth. I want to sip my friend. Someone who I cannot see involuntarily releases a loud noise from their face. It sounds like a yap. I prefer tea thrown on my tongue, if it were thrown anywhere, but I was no longer in the pilot seat. Evolution did not design us to hold small, steaming hot liquids, it designed us to leap. Leap at danger.

I leapt at danger.

I would not leap at danger a second time. My neurons had become yapless, they were bored of yaps, having so recently encountered one. If you want me to leap, you have to surprise my neurons. A string of yaps would follow and I sat there stiff as a cork in a bottle.

There’s a producer in this cafe, you might be interested to know. His face is entirely made up of two eyebrows, nothing else. His resource of production? Vibrating strips of air called yaps. This producer is in serious trouble, because whenever they return their eyes to the book in their hands, they scream like a banshee. God save them! Since when did we consider such manic behaviour sane? This is a man in dire straits. This is what is making him in dire straights: words in a book that someone put in a funny order.

We are a state cleaved in two, in this cafe. There are producers and consumers in our little state. The consumers feed and leave it at that. The producers emit liquid from machines, yaps, moisture from their breath, and leave it at that. Harmony among the two tribes is kept by a recipe that involves one part consumer and one part producer, otherwise the air gets too moist or the cups dry. There is one thing that no one is producing or consuming though, and that is words. All about me in this cafe, people are employed by a lonely business. So congested, yet the contents of our minds is a trade secret and we won’t squeak even for gold.

Here is a phenomenon that occurs in bipartite cafes such as ours: a person sat next to another turns, and says something like, “The password?”

The password to life? The eternal contentment code?

They remove their earbuds, and twist slowly to this interloper, “What.”

“Is there a wifi password?”

The password is shared. All is well?

But they do not stop when they should. “What do you think about this cafe?”

“It’s nice.”

“It’s nice. Isn’t it?”

“Isn’t it.”

“Right?”

In walks actor number three. It is my second friend silence. Silence does not walk, but struts. Silence does not belong to the producers or the consumers. Silence has a hat on. Silence would be grinning like a peach if silence had a mouth. Silence will endure the collapse of the universe. Silence squeezes onto a stool right between the two for a while, cools both drinks a little. It fits on a stool, yet fills a space the size of the room. And then silence checks their watch, stands up, takes a bow, and struts out the door.

What are some receptacle designs you have considered for tea? I imagine something that conforms better to our mouth padding. It’s like a caulk seal, those upper and lower pink sponges. Wrap tight around the rim and then suck, would be in the instruction manual for how to sip, I imagine. We create these momentary rivulets of tea over and over. To a mouth bacteria we are God, having summoned a river in an instant.

And then its gone quick, right down into the dark.

I was wrong. This cafe is not a state – here I have found myself inside a BYOTB tanning salon. To be called such a place, you need at least five people baking their faces with laptop screens, I have decided. And the business is self-operating. Yet it is far more intimate than the usual salon, I might add. The fog on the windows has only passed through everyone’s lungs twelve times.

Bring Your Own Tanning Bed. How indigestibly intimate.

I create a vacuum in my chest and suck in half a litre of molecules that are too small for my eyes to see, but have rubbed up and down the mucus of someone else’s insides a lot. There’s other stuff in my lungs too, brushed off of people’s clothes, blown in from the door. Combusted petrol, ash, flakes of grey goop from the roads and people’s shoes. I breath out. I have become a fleeting fan, my target: the face of the person across from me, which I blow the steam trails of my tea into, as well as ash and grey goop. They think the wisp is a remnant of my friend silence, they swat it away and continue tanning.

There is a person with pink hair who is clearly an expert in real estate. They have a property investment is a green armchair by corner window, which they moved into seven hours ago. They have a couple piercings too. And they have upset a thousand mathematicians by shaving one side of their head. A direct statement against symmetry.

I think how far we have come. Look at them. They are the first off many, I imagine, who will poke and recolour and cut their cells in interesting patterns that pleases them. They are editing their biology. The rest of us? We just settle on whatever growths we were born with, whichever way our locks fall. Each morning I wake up, run my hand under the tap, and rub it on my scalp until stuff stops sticking up.

Let’s count the time keeping pieces around us. The wall has two: one that if it stopped, I swear, we would all freeze forever. The other is a tin can fraud. I have an electric Casio on my wrist. My neighbour is a Rolex, and I bow, because I feel I have to respond that way? The pink-haired person in the chair has on a t-shirt so I can see on their wrists: a device so girthy it contains nuclear launch codes.

I look back again at the all-eyebrow producer with the book. He’s off to the left of me, near the counter, on a stool. Never read on a stool. The discomfort breaks the emersion. The man in trouble is about to turn the page. I yap.

This has the effect I desire, which is to make him leap at danger. He looks around but has no eyes, only eyebrows, and returns to his book. The Rolex watch next to me leaps at danger. Pink hair leaps at danger. The door leaps at danger and opens. Silence struts back in.

Now it is clear to me that most of the ones around me are defective. My finger rests on the temple of the person next to me and I push. They roll off the seat like a sack of potatoes. I stand up and point at silence.

“I have some questions,” I say.

Silence nods. They collect the fallen and rest them on the side of the wall.

“First, why?” I say.

Silence moves another defective from the seat across from me. She has ash-blonde hair to her shoulders and bright pink glasses that could slice bread with their ends. Her eyes are frozen. Her bread-slicing glasses tumble off her face as she is dragged away from her laptop, her coffee, and put against the wall. Silence takes the seat, intertwines its fingers like a whicker basket, and stares at me. What I am looking at is hard to describe. I can see right through silence, to a painting on the wall. It is a painting of a man in a wet street, stood in a puddle in the centre of a crowd. The crowd is busy with everything but him, they have so many places to be, it seems. The man has no shoes on. I return my focus to silence, who is like a cream shadow. Silence has two hollows that my mind tells me might be eyes. I look at those.

“You humans, you are reaching your peak potential. Though very few seem to be aware of this. Actually, only three of you are aware.”

“Who?” I ask

“The Dali Lama, he is aware. But he does not care. The other two, I have not met them yet. As for everyone else, it would certainly frighten them if they found out about this.”

“Ah,” I say, “About not being one of the three?” My tea is cold as ice cream now, but it is contained in a negative mug which is still warm. I hold the warm negative mug against my cheek.

“No, about Peak Potential,” says silence.

“Peak potential,” I repeat. “Peak potential?” I ask.

“Peak Potential.” says silence. I sat with silence.

Silence continues: “Peak Potential: it is the end, the inevitable end, really. Maybe it is baked in your human bones, this agnostic view on ceilings. I’ve met so many ceilings in my life, and, believe me, there are many.”

“Hmm,” I say. I move my negative mug to the other side of my face. “But we make such nice tea?”

“That is true, yes. But your tea will always eventually go cold. The perfect receptacle will not be invented.”

I am disappointed to hear this news. “All we seem to be able to produce is negative mugs,” I say.

“Yes, you’ll never have a mug that gets cold and keeps the tea hot. All mugs are negative mugs. But! Why let that upset you? What more do you need than a half-hour tea? Your dissatisfaction is not because the indefinite hot tea is impossible, it is because you demand hot tea everywhere. You go hiking, you drive, you fly to space, always at the end, a hot cuppa, please. My, oh my.”

“My, oh my,” I repeat. Silence picks up the coffee before it and sips. It dribbles right through them and onto the floor.

“There will be no hot tea on the moon,” says silence, and adds some more coffee to the floor.

“Would you like me to introduce you to two ceilings?” asks silence.

I think for a little bit about this request. I am hungry and outside a darkness is growing.

I say, “Okay.”

“I have already told you the first – it is the Hot Tea Limit. About half the stretch of Europe in a car, that’s the furthest you’ll be able to take your hot tea.” Silence’s two hollows drift to the window, I follow them. I have nothing to say about the Hot Tea Limit.

“And the second ceiling, out there, all that.” All that, I assume, was the sky, the moon, the trees. It was slap, slap as the cars ate the road. It was ten-thousand buildings, small and large, in a ten-mile radius around me. There were lights too, in all that, which turned on at night and off by day. Birds that carried ash and grey goop until their colours were forgotten. It was silence and I, and the four walls of this BYOTB tanning salon that turned against the hard rain, kept it from diluting my tea in its negative mug. I saw it now as one giant crystal in a salt bath – the all that, that was out there. Fighting for its life, against entropy itself.

Silence looks at me again. “Fighting For Your Life Against Entropy Itself?” asks silence.

I nod.

“I guess I don’t need to introduce you two,” says silence. “You’ve already met.”