“Never again,” I blurted out as the door slammed shut behind us. “I don’t care what voodoo you rep, never again I’ll go that far off grid to rave.”
Kicking my shoes off on a bounce through the hallway, I fell to the floor and stretched out on the cool marble tiles of our new abode. Every grain of debris and sand registered on the bare skin, razors cutting straight through the hyper-sensitive. Mind raced past a thousand images, conversations played in reverse. Thought-trains ran on circular tracks passing every station with a semblance of conclusion at manic speed with no intention of stopping.
“Crybaby,” Nan sighed as she stepped over me, heading for the kitchen.
“Help the baby. The baby is dying!” I rose to my knees, clambering after her to drown with waterfalls the dehydrated ghost of a bassline hammering away at the inside of my skull. “For the love of a name make it stop. Oi vey. Nanna! Hey, tell us a story.”
“No,” she replied, zooming back and by me into the bathroom wearing nothing, and I could've sworn that such was not the case two seconds prior.
“All uphill from here.” Leaning against the wall, I slowly rose to my feet under the screams of muscles I didn’t know I had. My legs were bruised up real bad, lips like sandpaper. I dove under the faucet, let it pour freely over face and mouth, into me, filling up like a balloon. The headache took a few steps back and I could grab onto a thought for more than a fleeting moment. Fumbling for the phone, I dialed Teddy and put it on speaker. A showerhead blasted in the background, behind a door I didn’t remember closing. No escape from it. No way to go but down. The beeps of a dialer echoed between kitchen tiles, enhanced by an imperious sun peeping its nasty eyes through the open window. I limped over, pulled the blinds down, closed what Nan had opened.
“Hello! Bye!” Teddy’s voice mail. I hadn’t seen him for hours when we left, which didn’t worry me at first. These things happen. Each to its own when the bass done blown. He’d bloomed up, danced his little chicken legs away, barefooted on pinecones and moss, far away from civilization and smack dead in the center at the same time. Until suddenly he wasn’t. Gone. With a head full of meth, ecstasy and Lord knows. Eve’s friends had picked us up some time after dark when spirits were wild, love and laughter flowing abundant. They rolled in a modded camper van turned party on wheels, filled to the brim with hippies and punkheads. Not the usual MCity rave scene suspects. Once the mood had elevated and the lights of the city were but a distant flicker, we’d snorted lines left and right, everyone racing to get rid of their stash, tin box steering off the main road onto trails meandering through mid-Scanian woods. The rave was a forest stomp, like night and day compared to its urban equivalents, this particular delivering on all the qualities you’d expect from an event of its sort. The most blatant difference between rural and urban stompers is the unapologetic hedonism. Rurals don’t give two shits about appearances and popularity politics. It’s not about showing up, or whom you graze on the dancefloor. Theirs is an introspective journey, a trip indulged to maximize efficiency, undertaken to reach a peak higher than all previously surpassed. Naturally, the dope circulating is calibrated to the quest. Heavy on the acid, research chemicals, mushrooms for the purists, DMT, ketamine. But you’ll find just about anyone on anything. Old veterans, shirtless and blabbering mad looking like they haven’t had a meal since the eighties, nervous city folk stumbled out by chance, ordinary bumpkins dripping acid like it’s beer. Not for the weak of mind and heart. Ten minutes in power hour is enough to send a perfectly sane specimen into a spiral, never to be seen again. Many such cases, people stumbling into a psychosis when Märta flashes her cunt just as the acid is about to take hold and your bearings haven’t quite settled in.
We’d left around noon, me and Nan, under circumstances that I sensed she wasn’t too happy about. The fiesta was a two-night affaire, going strong despite having left the darkness long behind, when a police van rolled into the periphery. I was well aware of the state of myself and that of my neighbors, adding two and two, calculus crunching out five. Grabbing Nan, I convinced her that we needed to scram, that bad news was looming. So we did, no questions asked. Casually strolled into the forest, picking up the pace as the music died and the birds started chirping again. It took us an hour to reach a road, a waterless hour in exhausted bodies, exchanging the bare minimum of looks and words, and another thirty minutes to find a bus station. An hour waiting for the bus, two layovers to get back to MCity. All in all, we’d spent six hours getting back, no provisions, all the while coming down hard on just about everything in the chemist’s lockbox. And when Eve finally responded to Nanna’s missed calls, she kindly informed us that the cops were familiar faces, looking for psychotics and people on bad trips. Real humanitarians.
Trying to drop the charades, facing the agony, I stripped, walked into the bedroom, darkened it up. Then the living room, hiding in darkness the hideous art nouveau decorating the walls and knick-knacks Nan had placed at random locations to ‘home’ the place up. With them out of sight, shrouded in shadows, we could be anywhere. Hotel room in Tangiers, train coupé on our way to Amsterdam. Dark. Lost to time and space.
Twelve hours minimum. Real time. Bunker down, ride the wave. With a bit of luck and grit I would eat again, some day… some day. The starvation cure was doing wonders for my physique. I’d shaved off every single grain of fat. Muscles outlined. Nighttime images like fluttering moths in passing, of hands touching my abs, nails tearing across my back while the speaker stack sang its horrory psy-trance to squirrels and worms, breathing fear into the deaf. I knew that I had to eat something, that I couldn’t hide from my body in revolt for much longer. Hands were already shaking, arms struggling to lift and get to work prepping for the come-down proper. Alone with a racing mind, jabbering ad infinitum when all you crave is quiet. For that there is no shortcut. The bullet that must be bitten. Sex is the only potion able to numb the voices, offer release to tensed up muscles, disolve the anxiety. But at this rate it’s not a certainty, and I was beginning to fear that this particular sixteen hour stint until I was supposed to show up at Todo, ready to start blabbering, I’d have to make due without the sexual cure. The thought of food made me wanna puke. Water was challenging enough.
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I don’t know how long I’d zoned out on the couch in the dim darkness. The water was still running in the kitchen. Heeding its call I could hear something. An irregularity, masked by the showerhead. A heavy breath, moaning or whimper. I wobbled inside through a curtain of steam. Hurled up like a ball, face covered by hands, there she was.
“What’s going on here? Loveliest of lovely, what’s the dip about?” I tried to climb into the tub with her. “Holy fuck! You’ll smelt your skin off.” Turning the knob, I waited a bit, then crouched beside her, trying to navigate the complete system shock that had scorched her body red. After some resistance, she gave way.
“I’m so embarrassed… People think I’m an idiot,” she sobbed, clinging to my arms. “I don’t even remember. So fucking awkward. Always talking about myself. Me me me! Look at me!”
“No it’s nothing like that. Fuck me, I don’t know. Were you?”
“I preached… my fifth grade English teacher. Told em’ all how much she meant to me, that she’s the biggest influence in my life. And they tried to get a word in but I just ran em’ over.”
“She wasn’t?”
“It’s not fucking funny!”
“Alright. Sure. Nan. We good now. Everyone’s like that on powder.”
“No they’re not. People can handle it and then there’s you and me. And Teddy for fuck sakes. We’re junkies Max! Like you going off in the woods, what the fuck? Nobody else does this shit! Other people are normal!”
She started thrashing around her, banging her head against the enameled metal, growling and hissing. I tried to grab a hold of her like a wrestler from behind, jumped in, slipped, pulled her head to my chest as we tumbled and sloped around the bathtub.
“Shhhhh! Someone’ll call the loonies and get us pinched. Calmez-vous. We’re insane. Off the hinges fucking bonkers. Til’ the sun is black and the last of us dead. You haven’t seen half of it! I told this hippie fellah that the Eric Andre Show was the equivalent of Ulysses for television for Christ sakes. What the fuck does that even mean?”
Letting my hands run rampant over her glossy wet skin, I sucked out the evil, bit by bit as the water tapped its nuisance. For a moment I knew exactly what it meant, and I was about to tell her when she spun around, placed her hands on my ass, dug her claws into it, licking my open wounds, completely transformed.
“This is the best part of it all,” I continued. “The real show. Jokes and charades for those twats, fuck the lot of them. Royalties gracing the commoners we are, and they look at us in awe I tell you. In true awe. They’ve never seen anything like it. Compressed love of the universe in two specters so beautiful. Their time is over. It never even begun. Nobody will remember’em. You’re here. Naked as the day you entered this world. With me. This was the destination all along. And we had to fight and toil across that God awful forest. But we’d never stop. No sah. We don’t know how to stop.”
“You always know how to fix me,” she moaned, giggled and sniveled. “I saved some for us.”
“You and I, a bed, no itinerary. When did we need more?”
“I’ll chop some up,” she whispered as she started rubbing her crotch against mine. A twitch ripped through me when I understood what she was talking about.
“You know that ain’t speed, right? C’mon babe. I’ll set us up proper. Light candles, darken the place up. Music and a shit movie. You go across that line we won’t find respite for another twenty four hours. We need sleep. I gotta be at work tomorrow, remember?”
“You said you’d do anything for me if I was nice. Weren't I super super nice?”
Looking up into the ceiling, I started slipping into desperation.
“You said you wanted my babies,” she whispered in the rain as she took a firm grip around my cock. “I can’t come down before you give them to me.”
“Ah for fuck… If we’re going down that road I’ll need some downers to level me out man. I’ll be wrecked for a week without them.”
“You know I take care of you…”
“There’s like... “
“What?”
“Nevermind.”
“Say it! You think I’m a fucking junkie!”
She stormed up and out, leaving me shattered with a throbbing hardon in the middle of a monsoon. Outside, cupboards slamming, feet pounding around as if trying to break the floor or bones within them. I knew I’d fucked up. Knew exactly what had wandered through my mind. Then came the tapping. The unmistakable tapping of plastic on glass. I jumped up, threw a towel over my shoulder, walked out and found her as expected. On the couch. Soaking wet, teeth grinding.
“I’m just tired love,” I pleaded. “I’m really fucking tired. I don’t think you’re a junkie. You want to keep going, I want to start this God forsaken marathon to normality and another line sets us tumbling right back to the starting grid. Sometimes you just gotta chill man.”
“Snake. You’re a fucking snake,” she said with a rapid razor-stare thrown like a shuriken.
If there was one thing that I could think of that would be worse than going into work feeling like a spit-shined version of my current wreckage, it was this. Turning into that polished turd cut off from all life support. It was unimaginable, the horror of passing through the murky murk with a methed up Nan tooting a drug-fueled vengeance at me. Dead race. Rigged to her liking. I never stood a chance.
“Stop! Alright. Never do dope when you’re mad. I didn’t say I was unwilling. Look at me, I’m massive willing,” I said gesturing to my cock. She didn’t laugh. So I dropped the towel, fell to my knees, pressing my forehead on the handmade Persian rug and continued: “Divinity, sweet love of mine. My mind wanders. A slave is but a body in a mind, shackled to a master. A slave forgets. I’ll bleed for you. I’ll crawl inside you and plant the seed of life. Let me in. Please. Let me come in. I’ll be good. Let me hold my promise.”
The tapping seized. I didn’t dare to look up. Floor vibrating, creaking under her weight. Breath burning against my neck. Gentle hands caressing my stretched out back with teasing nails scraping its surface. Raisin foot slithering down and under, across my throat, locking me into a Camorah. Wet cunt easing into its nest on top of my head, pushing me down until I couldn’t breathe, rectal fire of unlubed entry.
“Beg me for it.”