Void

The night was ending, and with it, the drugs were wearing off. The euphoria faded into an all-too-familiar emptiness, like the tide receding to reveal nothing but sharp rocks. Apathy crept back in, dull and persistent.

To make matters worse, the ATM decided to swallow my last few bills, leaving me standing there in the sweltering morning heat with a headache pounding in my skull. I spent the better part of an hour bouncing between the bank and the customer service desk, filling out useless paperwork and trying not to snap at the overly cheerful teller who promised me the issue would be resolved "in a few business days."

The irony wasn't lost on me as I glanced at my journal while waiting. On the back of a page filled with yesterday's meticulously detailed chemical equations and ramblings about solvents was a hastily scrawled list of documents I needed to submit for a job application. And where was this job? At a pharmacy. It felt like a cruel joke, but I wasn't laughing.

The building I'd recently moved into was a character in its own right—a crumbling, half-forgotten relic of Soviet architecture. The elevator was its pièce de résistance, a temperamental contraption with a peculiar quirk: it stopped moving the moment you let go of the button. Riding it was less about transportation and more about negotiation, as if the lift demanded your full attention to operate.

Above the control panel, a single bright eye had been crudely painted on the elevator's cabin roof, its gaze eerie and unblinking in the dim light of the flickering bulb. One floor had an especially macabre detail: the thick, yellowed glass of the landing window was pockmarked with holes that looked disturbingly like bullet wounds. Someone had smeared streaks of red paint—or perhaps something worse—around the edges, creating the unsettling illusion of bloodied shrapnel.

Later that evening, Beard, Snide, and some guy with a "compatible blood type" (Havoc's prerequisite for friendship) stopped by. Beard and Snide always had solvent with them—a clear, ominously efficient liquid they claimed could dissolve just about anything, from physical objects to existential crises. "But don't get greedy," Beard liked to warn. "Too much of it, and you'll dissolve yourself."

I got a message from a friend in Russia, a diehard fan of Castaneda and all things mystical. She told me I'd appeared in her dream, explaining the finer points of selecting the perfect fly agaric mushroom. "Thanks to you, I picked the best one!" she wrote, her gratitude almost palpable through the screen.

Her gratitude didn't last long. Her next message was heavier: someone had torched her barn, reducing her carefully cultivated stash of premium weed to ash. The barn was her sanctuary, her livelihood, and her escape. I'd been planning to visit her that summer, but after the fire, I decided against it. Some things—like a burned-out life—are better avoided.

In the kitchen, the rhythmic drip of a psychedelic funnel filled the silence, each drop landing with a soft, deliberate plink. It was oddly comforting, like the ticking of an old clock. Havoc leaned against the counter, ranting about his latest frustrations.

"The yield is pathetic," he grumbled, pacing in that manic way of his. "If I have to deal with another batch this small, I'm throwing the whole setup out the window." Then, with a smug grin, he added, "But at least I live in Ukraine. There's no one here with a cough or a cold—those people don't exist anymore." His tone made it sound like a point of national pride.

A cat—round and gray, like a plush ottoman come to life—sauntered through the room with an air of authority. Its belly nearly grazed the floor, and its eyes darted to the dripping funnel as though it were calculating the next experiment.

Havoc noticed and smirked. "That fat bastard could use some solvent," he said, stroking his chin. "It breaks down fat, you know. Might do him some good."

Before anyone could protest, Havoc had donned a white lab coat and a surgical mask, his transformation into "mad scientist" complete. Beard held the squirming cat in place while Havoc, armed with a syringe of clear liquid, expertly delivered a dose to the foaming, wide-eyed feline.

The room tensed in silence, everyone watching to see what would happen. For a moment, the cat's frantic movements slowed, its breathing steadied, and then—miraculously—it purred. Not just purred, but rubbed its head against Beard's arm, exuding an almost eerie sense of calm.

"See?" Havoc said triumphantly, pulling off his mask. "A grateful patient."

This wasn't Havoc's first foray into "scientific research." He and Beard had experimented on everything from rats to family members. The rats never survived, succumbing to the chemical cocktails within minutes.

But Havoc's mother, plagued by insomnia and the trivial anxieties of suburban life, was a different story. When she couldn't sleep, Havoc offered her a syringe of some nameless elixir. "A miracle cure," he called it. To my amazement, she never questioned him. She took the dose, thanked him profusely, and slept soundly for the first time in weeks. After that, she never brought it up again, as though ignoring the details made the solution more palatable.