Chapter 33: Chapter 33
They just moved, one foot in front of the other, two hollow men carrying the incontestable proof that there was no bottom deep enough, no fire hot enough to burn away what they were slowly, painfully, going to have to face.
The apartment door clicked shut behind them, sealing them into the tomb of their own making. They didn’t make it to the couch or the rug. They slid down the inside of the door, legs splayed on the hardwood, and slept there in the foul, fully-clothed misery of their own undoing. Dawn came and went, a grey intruder through the window they’d never closed. Jake woke to the taste of alley bile and tequila still etched into the cracks of his tongue. Ethan was already awake, staring at the opposite wall, his eyes red-rimmed and empty.
“The quiet won,” Ethan said, his voice scraped raw from vomiting.
“It was always going to,” Jake replied.
A beat passed, thick and soupy. Then Ethan pushed himself up, his movements stiff with a new kind of determination. It wasn’t resolve. It was surrender to a deeper current. “One more time.”
Jake blinked. “What?”
“We go out. We drink until the quiet isn’t just gone, but until we are.” Ethan’s gaze pinned him, desperate and clear. “We drink until we forget what quiet even is. We drink until we fucking break. All the way.”
“That’s what we did last night.”
“No.” Ethan shook his head, a sharp, final motion. “We got drunk. I’m talking about annihilation. I want to taste my own brain shutting down. Come with me.”
There was no discussion. It was a pact, signed in the residue of dried sick on their shirts. They spent the day in a fugue state, sipping water, ignoring the hunger gnawing at their insides. The silence was a physical weight now, a third occupant they meticulously ignored. When night fell again, they dressed without a word. The walk to The Grotto was solemn, a pilgrimage to an altar of nothing.
They didn’t bother with shots.
Ethan went straight for the jugular, ordering two entire bottles of cheap, oily vodka and a plastic tub of warm, neon-pink mixer. They claimed a high-top table in the very center of the club, the lights throbbing directly onto their bowed heads. Ethan poured straight vodka into two pint glasses, splashed in a token gesture of pink syrup, and pushed one toward Jake.
“To forgetting how to remember,” Ethan said.
They drank. The vodka was a solvent, wiping the slate clean with brutal, efficient strokes.
Jake felt the disconnect happen faster this time. His vision didn’t blur—it simplified. People became shapes, light became streaks, sound became a uniform pressure in his ears. He lost the feeling in his lips first, then his hands. He watched his fingers around the glass as if they belonged to a stranger, pale and disconnected. He drank not to feel good, but to cease feeling the vessel that contained him.
Ethan was a statue pouring liquid into a void. His eyes were fixed on a point a million miles away, his drinking methodical, relentless. The first bottle was gone in an hour. The second appeared. Jake’s consciousness began to stutter. He’d be lifting the glass, then it would be empty, with no memory of the act in between. A jump-cut. A missing frame. Time became a series of still images: the sweat on Ethan’s temple, the slow spin of a disco ball, the endless purple void of the club’s ceiling.
“Can you hear my thoughts?” Ethan slurred, leaning so close his beard scratched Jake’s cheek. His breath smelled of pure alcohol, a sterile, medical smell.
“No,” Jake said. His own voice came from the bottom of a deep well.
“Good.” Ethan nodded, a ponderous, slow movement. “They’re fucking ugly.”
Jake laughed, or thought he did. He couldn’t tell if sound came out.
The floor started tilting in a slow, corkscrew motion. Standing was an abstract concept. Ethan tried, gripping the table. His knuckles were white. He swayed like a mast in a hurricane, his eyes rolling back for a second before he steadied himself. “Gotta piss,” he declared, and shuffled off into the kaleidoscope of bodies, immediately swallowed by the chaos.
Jake waited. Or didn’t wait. Time was meaningless. He studied the condensation ring his glass had left on the table, a perfect, smeary circle. It was the most important thing in the universe. When Ethan returned, or perhaps when a different version of Ethan arrived, his fly was still half-down. He didn’t sit. He grabbed the near-empty second bottle, took a long, gurgling pull from the neck, and slammed it down.
“We’re leaving.”
“Why?”
“Because I can’t see you anymore. You’re a smear.”
They teetered through the crowd, a four-legged creature with a shattered nervous system. The cold night air was a physical assault, a sandblasting of reality against their chemically-scoured skin. They made it two blocks before the rebellion began.
It started deep in Jake’s gut, a slow, tidal churn that rose with inexorable force. He stumbled to the curb, gripping a lamppost slick with grime. His mouth flooded with acrid saliva. He bent double, and a hot, violent surge of vodka and pink syrup erupted from him. It wasn’t a single heave, but a series of convulsive retches that emptied him in stages—first the sharp burn of alcohol, then the acidic bile, and finally a thin, clear string of nothing that tasted of pure stomach lining. It splashed over the pavement, the neon bar sign reflecting in the vile puddle. He gasped, shuddering, strings of spit and vomit connecting his lips to the ground.
A similar, wet roar sounded beside him. Ethan was on his knees, vomiting a dark, relentless torrent onto the sidewalk. It came with deep, grunting groans, his whole body seizing with each expulsion. He vomited until he was dry-heaving, his body convulsing around the emptiness. He spat, a thick, final sound, and slumped back against the brick wall of a closed bakery, his face waxy and pale under the streetlight.
“I think,” Ethan panted, wiping his mouth with a trembling hand, “I think my soul came up that time. I saw it. It was grey and small and shaped like a scared animal.”
Joke couldn’t answer. He was hollow, a vessel scraped clean. He slid down next to Ethan, their shoulders touching. The sour, stinging smell of their shared sickness was a new layer of the city’s perfume. They sat there for a long time, watching a stray dog trot by with disinterest.
“The quiet’s still there,” Jake finally whispered, the truth a cold stone in his emptied gut.
Ethan turned his head slowly. His eyes, glassy and red, held a shattered kind of recognition. “It’s in here,” he said, tapping his own chest with a limp finger. “We can’t outrun what’s inside the container.”
The walk home was a silent, shambling negotiation with gravity. They fell into the apartment, into the darkness. This time, they didn’t collapse separately. A magnetic pull, filthy and essential, drew them to the ruined rug. Their clothes, stained with sweat and the evidence of the curb, formed a trail to the center of the room.
Ethan’s hands were on him, not with last night’s punishing fury, but with a frantic, searching need. They kissed, and the taste was awful—vomit and vodka and despair. Jake didn’t care. He craved the awful truth of it. He yanked at Ethan’s belt, the leather sliding through his clumsy fingers. Ethan pushed Jake’s pants down to his thighs, his own following. Their cocks, hard amidst the ruin, pressed together, a shock of heat in the cool room.
“Need you in me,” Jake gasped, his voice shattered. “Now. Raw. I need to feel all of it.”
Ethan didn’t hesitate. He spat into his palm, a crude, wet sound, and slicked himself. He pushed Jake forward, not onto his back, but onto his hands and knees on the wool. The position was animal, vulnerable. Jake felt the broad, blunt head of Ethan’s cock press against him. There was no preparation, just the brutal, burning pressure of the push. He cried out, a raw sound torn from his throat, as Ethan forced his way inside in one relentless, unyielding thrust.
The stretch was agonizing, a white-hot tear of friction that stole his breath. It was too much, too dry, too fast. Perfect.
“Fuck, Jake,” Ethan groaned, sinking deeper, burying himself to the hilt. He held there, his body trembling. “You’re so fucking tight. It hurts.”
“Good,” Jake gritted out, pushing back against him. “Give me the hurt. Give me everything.”
Ethan began to move, a slow, deep, punishing rhythm. Each withdrawal was a ragged gasp, each thrust a punched-out groan. The pain began to mutate, melting into a searing, overwhelming fullness that blurred the lines between pleasure and agony. Jake pushed back onto him, meeting each drive, wanting the impact to shake the silence from his bones.
“Harder,” Jake demanded. “Don’t you fucking hold back.”
Ethan’s rhythm broke into something frantic, brutal. His hands gripped Jake’s hips, fingers digging into the soft flesh, surely leaving bruises. The slap of skin, the wet, filthy sounds of their joining, filled the apartment. It was ugly and honest and theirs.
“I’m gonna come,” Ethan warned, his voice a shattered thing.
“Do it,” Jake panted. “Mark it. Claim all this fucking ruin.”
Ethan slammed into him one final, devastating time, his body locking, a raw, broken shout ripped from his lungs as he pulsed deep inside. The feeling of that hot spill triggered Jake’s own climax, his cock jerking untouched, painting the rug beneath them with stripes of release.
They collapsed forward together, a heap of sweating, trembling limbs. Ethan slipped out, and Jake felt the wet, sore emptiness left behind. They didn’t move. The silence of the apartment poured back in, but it was different now. It wasn’t just the absence of noise. It was a presence they had filled, however messily, with a shared, brutal truth. They had found the bottom. They were lying on it. And for the first time, they were both looking at it, together.
They just moved, one foot in front of the other, two hollow men carrying the incontestable proof that there was no bottom deep enough, no fire hot enough to burn away what they were slowly, painfully, going to have to face.
The silence in the apartment the next day was a living thing. It pressed against Jake’s eardrums, a low hum underlined by the relentless, shameful throb in his skull. He sat at the kitchen table, rolling a cold can of soda over his forehead. Ethan stood at the counter, staring at the empty coffee bag as if sheer will could summon grounds. Every attempt at a sentence died in the air between them, withered by the memory of vomiting side-by-side in the alley. The pact to talk felt like a joke told in bad taste.
“We could go to a movie,” Jake said, the words too loud.
“Too much light. Too much sound.” Ethan didn’t turn around. “I can’t sit still. I feel like my skin’s on backwards.”
“So what then? We just sit here and listen to the clock tick?”
Ethan finally turned. His eyes were bloodshot, his face pale beneath the beard. The confident man from the clubs was entirely gone, leaving this raw, twitching nerve. “I don’t know. I just know I can’t be inside my own head right now. I need it to stop.”
The solution, when it came, wasn’t a decision. It was a gravitational pull. The silence became so immense, so filled with the echoing memories of their failures, that the only logical response was to meet it with an equal and opposite force of sheer, obliterating noise. They didn’t discuss it. They just caught each other’s gaze, a flicker of horrified recognition, and began to move. They dressed in the same clothes from the floor, the fabric stiff with yesterday’s sweat and alley grit.
The Grotto wasn’t a destination. It was a verdict.
They walked in, and Ethan went straight to the head bartender, a woman with knuckle tattoos. He placed a folded stack of cash on her mat. “Don’t stop bringing us shots. Don’t ask what kind. Just pick the strongest thing you have and keep them coming until this runs out.”
The bartender looked from the money to Ethan’s hollow eyes, then shrugged. The first two glasses of clear liquid appeared. They smelled like industrial cleaner.
“To what?” Jake whispered.
“To nothing,” Ethan said. “To the great, big, fucking nothing.”
They drank.
The descent was rapid and absolute. The first three shots built a familiar fire. The next two made the edges of the world bleed sound, the music becoming a physical pressure in Jake’s chest. By the fifth, time began to stutter and skip. He’d blink and find a fresh glass in his hand, no memory of the last one leaving it. Ethan’s face became a wavering moon, his features softening and melting. His laughter, when it came, was a sound disconnected from any humor, a sharp bark that made Jake jump.
“My fingers,” Ethan slurred, holding his hand up, splaying his digits. “They’re not my fingers. They’re sausages someone glued on.”
Jake tried to focus on his own hand. It was a foreign object, pale and puppet-like at the end of his wrist. He willed it to move, and after a significant delay, it twitched. A giggle bubbled up in his throat, thin and hysterical. This was different. This wasn’t drunk. This was a chemical dismantling of reality. The room lost its dimensions, the walls breathing in and out in a slow, nauseating rhythm. People were smears of color and light, devoid of form or intention.
The bartender placed two more shots, this one a deep, smoky brown. Ethan didn’t hesitate. He threw it back, slammed the glass down, and his eyes immediately glazed over, fixed on a point somewhere past Jake’s shoulder. A string of drooseep connected his lip to the bar for a second before he wiped it away with a clumsy, sweeping motion. “I think,” he announced with immense, careful precision, “that the floor is made of water. And we are on a very, very small boat.”
Standing was an act of profound audacity. The floor did not feel like water. It felt like a trampoline that actively disliked them. They weaved through the pulsing crowd, a four-legged creature of pure imbalance. The cold air outside was a solid wall they had to push through. They made it half a block before Jake’s digestive system staged a full-scale rebellion.
It began as a hot, metallic flood in the back of his throat. He stumbled to the curb, knees cracking against concrete, and his body folded in half. A violent, pressurized torrent of acrid, brown liquid erupted from his mouth and nose. It wasn’t just vomit; it was a punitive evacuation of everything he’d consumed for days. Chunky, sour, and endless, it splashed over the sidewalk, the smell of rancid whiskey and stomach acid so potent it made him gag again, producing only dry, painful heaves that racked his entire frame. Tears blurred his vision as he spat, strings of mucus and bile hanging from his lips.
A similar, wet cacophony sounded beside him. Ethan was on all fours, vomiting a shocking volume of clear liquid mixed with dark, gelatinous bits onto the asphalt. His body convulsed with each heave, a deep, grunting “uh-uh-uh” forcing the poison out. It pooled beneath him, shimmering under the streetlight. He collapsed onto his side, breathing in ragged, wet gasps. “I can feel my heart,” he moaned, his voice shredded. “In my teeth. I can feel my heartbeat in my fucking teeth.”
The walk home was a pilgrimage of the damned. They stopped twice more, each time to dry-heave over bushes, their bodies convulsing with nothing left to give. They didn’t speak. They just moved through the sleeping city, two ruins leaking sickness, the silence now inside them, too, carried in their hollowed-out cores. They reached the apartment door, and Ethan fumbled the key for a full minute before the lock gave.
Inside, the familiar smell of old books and their own lingering misery enveloped them. They stood in the dark hallway, swaying. The silence here was final. It had won. Ethan turned, his movements slow and oceanic. He looked at Jake, his face a mask of absolute defeat, and in his eyes was a desperate, aching plea for one last sensation to prove they were still alive.
He pushed Jake back against the wall, not with passion, but with a dire need. His mouth was on Jake’s, tasting of bile and salt. His hands pulled at Jake’s jeans, yanking them down, and Jake fumbled with Ethan’s belt. There was no tenderness, only a raw, mechanistic urgency. Ethan spat into his palm, slicked himself, and without ceremony, pushed inside.
The penetration was a brutal, dry burn that carved a strangled gasp from Jake’s throat. Ethan didn’t pause. He shoved deeper, his own grunt a hot puff against Jake’s neck. He was thick and unyielding, a solid, punishing presence that stretched Jake to a point of white-hot friction. “Fuck,” Ethan breathed, the word trembling. “Fuck, you’re tight. You feel that? You feel how deep I am?”
Jake could only nod, his forehead pressed to the cool plaster. Each thrust was a jarring impact that shook his glasses. Ethan set a relentless, punishing rhythm, his hips slamming forward, his balls slapping against Jake’s skin. The pain began to mutate, blurring into a sharp, overwhelming fullness that felt like the only real thing in the universe. Jake reached back, grabbing a handful of Ethan’s shirt, anchoring himself to the violent momentum.
“Harder,” Jake gritted out, the word a surprise to them both.
Ethan obeyed, his thrusts becoming ragged, losing rhythm. His hand snaked around Jake’s hip, finding his cock, jerking him in a rough, clumsy syncopation. “Gonna come inside you,” Ethan choked out, his voice breaking. “Gonna fill this fucking perfect ass. Mine.”
The crude, possessive words, paired with the brutal physical rhythm, detonated something in Jake. His orgasm ripped through him, a sharp, almost painful clenching that pulsed around Ethan’s cock. Ethan cried out, a raw, shattered sound, and drove in as deep as he could, pulsing hotly within him. They stayed locked together, shuddering, Ethan’s weight heavy and complete against him.
Slowly, Ethan pulled out. A warm trickle followed. They slid down the wall to the floor, a tangle of limbs and spent breath, their clothing around their ankles. The quiet returned, but it was different now. It held the echo of their grunts, the smell of sex overlying the scent of sick. Ethan’s head lolled onto Jake’s shoulder.
“We’re out of clean rug,” Jake murmured, his voice shot.
Ethan’s laugh was a weak huff of air. “We’re out of everything.” He found Jake’s hand in the dark, their fingers intertwining, sticky and sour. “Tomorrow,” he whispered, the word a vow or a threat, they couldn’t tell which.