A sort of humming vibration seared through my flesh, channeled via the well-kept nails sailing across my back on predetermined tracks, forcing involuntary shudders when she hit the right spots. Vocal control had surrendered to the usurpers of Pharmaceutica long ago, conquest aided by Nan straddled atop my back, pulling out guttural groans and moans from my insides on strings invisible. Her silhouette flickered across the walls, dancing with the candle lights like a serpent for its fiddler. The hairs on my back, butt and legs were all on edge despite the suffocating night-heat soaring in through a window wide open. Opiate chills coursing through veins, blood ebbing and flowing, guided by Nan's distant purring.

“I could live in this moment forever,” I slurred, sinking deeper into the pillow.

“It gets better.”

She ran her breasts across my back, erect nipples grazing like sandpaper. A beckoning, but I couldn’t. I was a thousand pounds light, tethered by phantasmal bonds, disconnected from nerves. As I slurped up drool from my cheek, she collapsed on top of me.

“I want to be inside you but I don’t know which side is up,” she murmured, giggling at the unwinnable conflict or something else entirely.

“Nan. My dear. My loovliest of lovvs. Lowies. Lovellas.”

“Are there others? Your body feels like a swamp. I’m stukk.”

"There could be none. Ooooh, this feels like it used to do, back in time. Naked days. Day-days. Bay-bays. So simple, so gutwrenchingly simple. A lifetime ago."

"I'm here," she whispered all godly. "I never left."

"I think we went overboard. My body won't obey. I wanna run my hands all over you but I've lost my arms."

She sighed the content sigh of an opiate dreamer, slipping deeper down the hole. This was okay. Everything felt more than okay. Breathing in tandem, we floated on the waves of an open ocean, no landmarks in sight, nothing to reel us in from the lost cause of making sense. There was nowhere in the world that would accept us in this state. No place where we belonged.

“It’s okay Max. Tell me something you’ve never told me before.”

“Like what? I’ve told you everything.”

“That’s the sweetest lie. You can say anything in the world. It doesn’t have to be true.”

“Well… I’m jealous of you, that you got sacked like you did. I feel like I’m trapped in that office and that they’re using me up like a pawn to fuel their greed, that they’re tapping into my life-force, siphoning out my will to… anything really. It’s like, you have all these people there and they think that this is it. Now we’re finally living a life free from adolescence, teetering with independence and growth and we’re gonna do things god damnit. We’re gonna be somebody. But that place sucks all joy out of you. And there I am, in the middle of it. Thinking that I’m doing all these grand things, racking up accomplishments that mean something when all I’ve done is stock the halls of someone else's bank account. It’s like…”

“Like what? I’m listening. Your voice is just…”

“I’ve always thought that I’d be someone other than this person sitting there making these calls, hello? Yes? Hello? Making an effort to impress people by my ability to push fucking cash. All day I’m surrounded by these drones right, these hypnotized fucking drones, and I’m starting to see it. I’m one of them. I’m not wonderboy. I sit in the same chair, rabbling the same nonsense, sucking the same cock as everyone else. Before, like when we were living in Pisstown, I can honestly say that life was good. But in comes this blue fucker, makes it my purpose to aspire for breadwinning. This ain’t the first time you know. When we met, and I was pushing dope? I’d just sit and count pennies, and inventory, pennies and inventory. Now I count lines on a whiteboard, count hours on a clock. I’ve been possessed by some nitwit who wants all the pennies, all the money. And he’s such a fucking drag.”

“Baby you should just quit.”

“Oh god have mercy, what the hell did I just say? I literally can’t remember.”

“It’s okay. Everything is okay.”

She pulled the cover over us, locked her arms around my shoulders and we drifted away on silent murmurs of breath, occasionally reminded by seagull horror of the city moving its bricks without us. Fade to black. Scene.

The familiar tingle of a brain passing through a mangle, accumulating strength to register the basics of where-what-when, jolted me awake. Dripping of sweat, I kicked off the covers, lifesigns spreading into Nan—first as a low rumbling, and then a hand fishing for quilts and protection. She slid across my body on our shared coating of sweat, shivered, and hurled into a ball, kneeing my thigh, coming to a halt in my armpit.

“Babe we dozed off again,” I said in an attempt for nothing, adjustning, enveloping myself in divine comfort.

“Mmh… I was… Dreaming. Fuck!” With beastly determination she came to life, jumping over me as if zhe Germans are coming, took a couple of wobbling steps towards the hallway, hands stretched out like feelers, before collapsing. “Fuck! Max, do something! No! This isn't happening!"

“What? Nothing has happened, you dreamt it. Come back to beeeed, it’s warm and fuzzy and I love you and I’m not prepped for spazzing right now,” I beckoned all foggy.

“No, we won't sort it out tomorrow. This isn’t a tomorrow problem,” she said. I turned over to look at her, face in palms, shaking her head. “Don’t you get it? I can’t be doing this no more. My head, it’s done. This was supposed to be the last night and then we were going straight.”

Silence fell upon us. The sort of silence that is a dark trench littered with corpses and mines, pitfalls and grime. Trying to find my existential bearings, I sat upright, leaned against the wall, watched Nan's lungs heave her puddled body up and down.

“So, like,” I ventured but it was too much to process, to many variables to account for. “Why haven’t you said something?”

“Cus’ you wouldn’t be onboard,” she said reluctantly. “You’d talk me out of it and convince me that it’s a bad idea. Like last time, you think the world loves us when were fucked up.”

“Ok, first of all I didn’t talk nobody out of nothing.”

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

“See, you’re getting defensive! This isn’t gonna work.”

“Geesh, I don’t know Nan. Feels weird that’s all, coming out of nowhere into this.”

I took a deep breath, sighed, shook my head, noticed I was shaking it, stopped and tried to focus on the topic.

“I mean,” I continued, treading carefully. “How straight are we talking here? Full mormon?”

“I don’t know,” she sobbed.

“White robes, yoga? Full hindu, capri sonne absolu-santem?” She laughed, and I couldn’t tell if it was a breakdown laugh or a good laugh, so I continued. “Well shit, I’m in. Sobriety is a high too I suppose, how else can all those straight edgers stand it? But we’re not gonna stop boozing right? And the weed? That’s hardly a drug if we’re being sensible here.”

"I don't know Max. I don't know what I'm doing. These mornings, the burnout… I can’t go through another one. I just can’t. But I thought, like if we do one last night. Then we’re clean. One night all in, that’ll feel so utterly horrible tomorrow that I’ll want to die, but perfect now. But you’ll have to be there for me when it dips.”

“Come here,” I said, pouted, extended my arms. “I wanna hold you. Why didn’t you say something earlier?”

“No, not yet. I’m afraid Max.”

"We can do it. I promise, I'm onboard. Okay? You want out, that's cool. Okay?"

"That’s not like, what I’m afraid of. I know that we can do it, there’s not an option for me. I'm afraid that we'll wake up and realize that we're different people than we thought we were. You only love me when I'm fucked up and you're fucked up and we do all this shit. But take that away, and then what?"

"That's insane."

I began sliding down from bed, one rubbery inch at a time, and when I hit the floor she jolted, twitched up, streaks of mascara down her cheeks, eyes one big black mess.

"I’m not insane. I don't wanna, you know, fuck this up or get lost. You and me. But this is the last time, okay? And if you want this. Like if you want all of us, I want you to treat it like we're going to die tomorrow."

I stopped, scoffed, rubbed my eyes. “What?”

"I'm fucking serious,” she growled. “You'll forget all about this conversation, about quitting tomorrow, and love me like this is the last time you’ll ever see me."

"Sure babe," I grinned. Her eyes were pure fire, face wild like some primordial edition. No quarter. No room for bargains. We were going raw. She wasn’t fucking around. Two years of madness, of unconditional loving and doping and capsulated living, behind the walls of a transparent cocoon for the world to see but not touch. This would rip it apart, no doubt, letting the air of reality muddle the purity of us. But I couldn’t tell her that, that she was probably right. It terrified me. Such a vast subject, to envision a world so far from the status quo that it might as well have been a different planet. “So what’s the plan?”

“You need to make a vow.”

“A what?”

“Kiss it.” She stood up, walked towards me all seductive, grabbed my hair and pulled it back. “Kiss your queen.”

Our eyes locked and the lips of her cunt parted as she slowly pushed her hips forward. This was it. A death sentence. The kiss of death, layers upon layers of nestled death. So I kissed it, let the hill of coins conquer me. She was pleased, melting, until some thought struck her face like a bolt of lightning and she pushed me to the floor.

“Don’t move!”

And with those words she left me alone in a film of dried sweat with nothing to do but contemplate the feels of a body numb and hypervigilant at the same time. The cold floor mended with my spine, disregarding the ambient music playing low-key somewhere on the aether, laughters of a gathering at the neighbors. When I closed my eyes I could see her rummaging around the kitchen, opening cabinets, closing others, unwrapping wrapped goods, re-wrapping them? I drifted on the remnants of the synthetic opiate waves to images of a toppled cocoon with a creature buried underneath the capsized ectoplasmic walls. As I walked closer it moved with a popping noise, frantic like a frightened animal caught in a bear trap. I couldn’t see who it was, which one of us got left behind. Footsteps approached from out of sight, out of mind. I could feel her presence, watching and scheming. Something cold pressed against my lips. I took a bite, mouth exploding with succulent acidity.

“Chocolate strawberry?”

“Open your eyes.”

She held two fizzing flute glasses filled to the brim with a pinkish liquid, handed one of them to me and crashed down cross-legged opposite without spilling a drop. With eyes and face smiling, she took out a piece of paper and began.

“Max. Before I met you I thought I knew everything about life and love. I thought that the universe rested in the palm of my hand, that I was in control.”

“Baby I…”

“Shush! And then you came, like a weird creature without the slightest warning, and no matter how hard I tried to stay away, to resist the force of bright darkness beckoning for me—I didn’t stand a chance. You’ve taken me to the depths of my soul, opened up vaults I didn’t knew existed. It was destined for us since birth, to see unity in its pure form. We’ve been one, shared our most intimate selves, and I want you to know this now more than ever.”

Her face vibrated from the opioid static reminding me that in the here and now, all was well. A face clad in an aura radiating from a cauldron of totality, brewing beneath the surface of our external being. This had always been us, since I rode up on my moped to bum a smoke off Teddy’s sister, some six or seven years ago, when Nan in her kiddie galore stood in the background, timid and shy. The thoughts of tomorrow, of next week, next month, a hundred years from now, pecked for attention. As I looked her in the eyes, I teared up, as she did.

“I’ll die before I lose you,” I said and leaned towards her.

“A toast!” she proclaimed, deflecting me. “Gulp it all down. We’re in for a ride, and wherever it takes us I need you to know this. You are my everything. My life. My love. I feel weak when I’m not around you. Burning when I am. Skål!”

Without a word, I clinked her glass, echoes of crystal ringing through the air, swept the sweet sweet bubbles, combating the want to surrender mid-way to the carbon tearing through my esophagus. We were lost. None of us knew it at the time, that we’d go spinning off the earth, that we’d fuck ourselves into vapors and communicate truths on a nether plane. The last drop of Asta Martini rolled solemnly to join it's brothers and sisters below, effectively sealing our imminent fate. It felt ominous, grand, when she leapt at my throat like a frothing beast, when we fucked ourselves past the acrid borderlands of waiting, waking up in dense jungles on an alien planet, where sight and touch couldn't be trusted, where we had nothing but our fundamental wits and each other to guide us forth.

She'd placed a custom order with the Chemist from Berlin; something called hovedbanger, a decoction nobody in the world had ever experienced before, and even he didn't know where it would take us. It had the clinical precision of an acid trip, boosted confidence of a coke high, crystal clarity of meth and devious intention of psilocybin. Anchored in the middle of the torrent, love in its purest form. An endorphin dispensary pumping out rivers of affection each heartbeat, running mad on a million watts with no controlling agent left alive to initiate the emergency stop protocol. All sense had perished to ash in the feverish torrent flushing out all that had been to make room for new beginnings. We were climbing on the walls, into each other, merging, dissolving and rearranging ourselves a thousand times over. The hallucinations were otherworldly. Nan towering over me as I hid under shrubbery, taking the shape of a farmhand confronted by the mistress of the mansion for mishandling the dairy cows, readying up for a well-deserved spanking. Every orifice filled by fingers and cocks and tongues and toes. At one point she had her entire hand in my anus and I felt like I would disappear forever. At another junction she took the form of a horned succubus, tits bobbing over the surface of the blood-filled tub, moaning as I pleased her with my feet, gnawing on her toe-nails. I was a baron, a carpenter, an orphan and a soldier, waiting to storm the line of zigzagging machine gun fire to take a bunker from an enemy I'd never heard off. This went on for a full 24 hours, and as we crashed I held her close, stroked her tangled hair. This was surely the last time.