The Sauna

It is a Sunday evening and I am cold and wet. There is ice in the canal. The ducks walk around topside, confused. It is dark and my phone has died. I am listening to traffic sounds. My nose is drippy, I sniff. I have come through the park so there is mud on my socks somehow. But I am trudging along the pavement with a towel in my bag and a swimming cozzy under my jeans. I am trudging towards Hackney Wick’s Bath House.

Inside, past the cafe and chess boards. Past the sofas where people are lounging like cats. Down the corridor, past a screenprinting studio and a hairdressers. Out back to the old car park where there is a kiosk and a man standing behind the bench with a clipboard. I sign a waiver without reading it, I only see the phrase extreme temperatures. I put my bag and my clothes and my dead phone in a wire locker with no lock. The only light is coming from those garden lights that turn on when someone walks past. I can see people moving around under those white beams, steam rising off their shoulders. My breath clouds in front of me. There are 5 sheds in the car park. They are in a semicircle around a big metal vat and a lump of astroturf. As I walk to the shed nearest me, I put my bare foot in a cold muddy puddle. My toes feel invisible. The shed has a porch and I can see three figures coming out of the internal door. The glass is fogged. I wait for them to exit. I don’t open the internal door until I have closed the external door. We must trap the heat. Then I am in the sauna with my muddy foot and my cold nose and I am climbing to the top bench, sitting cross legged and yogic so my bun scrapes the wood of the ceiling.

There are many other people in the sauna around me. They are chatting and I am eavesdropping. I am thinking about how I am in the sauna. The air is warm on my face. It feels like I am sitting in the sun. A friend told me that she goes to the sauna to feel alive because she doesn’t do drugs any more. The sauna is better than the club, she said. It’s like a high, you feel powerfully viscerally energetically spiritually alive. In Sweden they come out of the sauna and roll around in the snow. Your body is used to the grey area, it’s about swinging back and forth between extremities. In extremity, hot is HOT and cold is COLD. It cleans the skin, the body and the mind. It does something good for lymph nodes too, but I don’t know what they are or where they might be in my body. In Russia they whack you with birch leaves. You drink berry tea and have a full dinner afterwards, still naked I think. In Finland they wear felt hats, for some reason or the other. Go to the sauna in Berlin, she said. They wave towels and do strange chanting, it’s like being at the football but everyone’s naked and hot. It is all about dry-heat. Without humidity, you can endure higher temperatures without scalding to death. I think to myself that, if given a choice, I prefer steam-heat. I like the feeling of breathing in wet air. I like the way the wet air moistens my eyes. I like the swimming feeling of all movement in the steam room or the hammam. I like the way sound bends and echoes. In Morocco, in the hamams you lie on a marble slab while someone pours endless buckets of water on you. There’s some kind of soap sud situation that scrubs off all your dead skin. You leave so smooth you’re practically squeaking. You feel clean in every crevice. That must be how cars feel when someone comes at them with a chamois cloth. That must be what washing machines feel like after Calgon. I am listening to a girl talk about going to the studio and working out her frustrations. I assume that she is an artist experiencing practice-based catharsis, but it becomes clear that she is actually talking about a Pilates studio where she is involved in some sort of content-creation. Behind the stove there is a large window. I gaze out and see women in bikinis under the garden lights. They are drinking tea from camping mugs. One of them is tugging on a vape. Someone next to me says ‘The First Sauna Is Always The Hottest!!!’ and I notice that my necklace is so hot, it is leaving red welts on my chest. The pilates content creator is talking about a situation with a new romance that makes her feel like she is flying. My arms are shimmering in dew. My body is slippy with whatever is left over from the cocoa butter I rubbed in this morning. I feel like I have been personally lubed up. Another girl across from me is wearing a headband with a cartoon frog face. The frog is holding back her baby hairs. The frog is three dimensional. The frog turns to me and winks.

I slip down the wooden levels, out the door and it is raining cold plops on my sizzling hot skin. I look at my arm and it is steaming. Like, the way a dumpling would steam in a basket, like I am Dim Sum. It is very mid-winter. I stand in the puddle again. My toes feel like they have been underlined. I smell like hot tarmac and sweat and biscuits (because of the re-moistened cocoa butter). I wipe the butter-dew layer off with my towel and go over to the showers. I don’t stand to the side and wait to test the water. I just press the button and wait for a surprise. I yelp like a kicked dog. A middle aged woman in a wrap around swimming costume giggles and then nods at me knowingly. I cannot escape the cold shower because the powerful jet is pinning me still and I am probably in a mild state of shock. I look up at the sky and I can see stars. I am thinking about how I am under a piss stream of probably tepid (but relative to my steaming skin, cold) water in the middle of a soaking wet car park in Hackney Wick. My hairs are plastered to my face and the water is in my mouth. I think this might be a kind of abjection, but not the critically interesting kind of abjection that people make art about. This is the abjection of worms and wet socks, the feeling of being out of breath and sweaty in room full of people who don’t experience flyaway hairs.

Still wet, I go into a different sauna shed. This one says SHHHHHHHH… on the frosted glass door because it is completely silent inside. People are sat facing each other, close enough to kiss. There is one free space at the end. The air is so hot it’s solid. It physically covers me. I am wet and heavy. I practice staying very still. My legs crossed, feet pointed, hands on knees, back straight, eyes closed, deep breath. I feel a bead of sweat roll its way down from my collarbone to my bellybutton. For some mysterious reason, my sweat has a different viscosity and is immediately distinguishable from the tepid shower water. I can hear the sweat dripping off the man opposite me. He has enormous muscles and he is baby pink from the neck down. There is an egg timer in the corner, by the door. I am immediately bored and I want to scream. The pipes clunk as someone outside the shed loads something into the stove. I can smell heat, it is thick. If the person next to me touches me, even by accident, I might scream. I imagine screaming into the thick hot silence of the packed out silent sauna. All the meaty bodies crammed side by side, slick with sweat and clenching in surprise. My friend told me that she meditates in the sauna. She counts down from 10 and enters a blissful state where thoughts drift through her mind like passing clouds. She waves them goodbye on their way out of her head. I think I should scream. If anything, I should scream to communicate that my nose ring is very very hot and I can feel the heat of it on the delicate interior skin of my left nostril. People will want to know. I once read in a book or spoke to someone who had read in a book — it doesn’t matter — apparently, in complete sensory deprivation, after literally 30 minutes your brain starts to eat itself. You don’t just lose it in a cartoon loony tunes way, your brain literally starts to dissolve. It occurs to me that my brain might be dissolving in the sauna, because it has surely been at least 30 minutes — I look at the egg timer on the wall and the sand that has collected at the bottom is not even a finger high. Maybe I will scream and make the muscle daddy opposite jump high into the air, pink and livid. The sweat is collecting in my bellybutton. The girl next to me is chewing her necklace. Her knees are red. I get the appeal of small hot rooms, and I get the appeal of the dry smell of hot wood. I do not get the appeal of marinating in the vaporised air of other people’s sweat. The man opposite me is now magenta or fuschia — he could be either, I can’t tell because there are no lights in this tiny sauna. Everything I see is by the grace of the garden lights in the car park outside. I am experiencing a molten existence. Time is relative and muscle daddy is my egg-timer. I bounce off everyone’s knees on my way out.

People are crowded on the astroturf, waiting to go into the big metal vats. I join them. I don’t really know what I am waiting for. When it is nearly my turn, I look up and see someone clamber up to the top of the vat, then get in. Or dip in. Because they are only in there for a few seconds. They are breathing loudly. They are fully clenched. They move very fast up the ladder to get out. There are plastic dinosaur toys on the rim of the vat. I am walking up and standing at the edge of the water. I feel fear. The fear is underlined and in bold, maybe also caps. FEAR. I have not experienced fear this pure and explicit and unavoidable and obvious in a very very long time. I realise that I am more used to feeling fear on a chronic dread-like scale. Low level. White noise fear. I have learned to drown out fear, push past it so I can get on with things. Now my fear feels solid. Because I have literally just now in this moment realised that the vat is full of ice cold water and I am like the ducks freaking out canal-topside, but in this specific situation I’ve got to go under. I obviously do not want to go under because out of all the bodily sensations I am familiar with, I find coldness the most unpleasant. I would rather have toothache. I would rather stub my toe. I would rather accidentally bite my own tongue. I would actually rather not, but it’s my turn so I have to move fast because otherwise my brain will catch up and realise what my body is about to do. My brain will stop me, which will be very embarassing, because I do not think of myself as a wimp. So I move fast without thinking and I climb down the ladder into ice cold water. And I scream.

I cannot feel any part of my body beneath the water. So shoulders down I might be invisible. I can feel the blood moving around my body, but not my body itself. It is like a gesture or an outline, a hint at where my body might be. When I put a snus in my upper gumline (between gum and lip), it sends a minty fresh shiny tingle all around the top of my mouth. I get woozy, like I have done the smallest tiniest crumb of a bump and my heart is beating in my face but only from afar. That feeling is taking place at the same intensity all across my potentially invisible body right now. Everywhere that is submerged in the vat of ice cold water, so everywhere from the shoulders down. Shiny and tingly and silvery, minty-fresh. I think that maybe I am experiencing the powerful visceral spritual energetic aliveness my friend told me about. I feel like I am being downloaded into another space that I cannot yet be conscious of because the download bar is only at like 75%. I think that I wish there were German men waving towels and chanting at me right now, because the fear is making my heartbeat manifest in my eyeballs and hooligan-style encouragement would motivate me to leap out of the vat and back up the ladder. I should get out. My hands are shaking. I cannot feel the bottom. Where are the chanting Germans. Where are the Russians waving birch leaves. I want someone to whack me back into the grey area. Hoist me out into the car park air with their towel. I think I like this feeling, this being alive but with exclamation marks and jazz hands. I think my entire body is in itallics and capitalised. I think I am definitely screaming.