Everything was a mess. It was a total fucking mess! I wearily opened my left eye and even more warily closed it. Then I tried to do the same with the right one but couldn’t, so I had to make my piece with the left again. My kitchen looked like a battlefield.

I heard a strange noise not far from me and made an enormous effort to focus my attention on the place where I thought it was coming from. It took me a while to find out. It turned out to be the sink tap, and the water was wildly gushing out of there, raising a frantic cloud of water drops everywhere—like a damn waterfall. I assumed it was the hot water because of the steam, but the weirdest thing was the color of the splashes. They seemed rusty, and I had no idea why.

Eventually, I managed to open my right eye, which was probably bruised because it hurt terribly, and then I tried to get up. Some obscure suspicion buried deeply in my dizzy brain suggested I would fail to do so, and I did. It was only natural, given the circumstances: my right hand was raised above my shoulder, hanging on to something that restricted my movements. I slowly turned my head to look up, but the headache I felt hit me so hard that I had to give up immediately. Instead, I tried to feel the thing with my fingers. It was a pair of handcuffs, obviously. One of the rings was clicked around my wrist, and the other was around the radiator pipe. From there, hot water trickled down my forearm and dripped on my neck, moving further down my back.

I tried to think about the situation, and not surprisingly, I failed again. I was totally unable to remember anything about the events that had led me to all this. In fact, I had no recollection of the past two days at all, and my brain felt dead and sleazy, like a three-day-old mushroom left to rot in the woods. Every attempt to make it work ended in the awful swamp of persistent amnesia, and my efforts just stopped there.

Right then, the telephone rang loudly across the hallway and startled me. Since I didn’t expect that, I jumped up, forgetting I was cuffed. The only result of my action was that I lost my balance, fell backward, and struck my head very hard into one of the radiator ribs. My brain exploded with pain, which made me curse as I sat on my butt again.

The phone kept ringing persistently. When, after a few minutes, my throbbing pain calmed down a bit, I made another attempt to look around and figure out what was going on. It was a tricky thing to do with no memories in my head. The new bits of information I managed to add to the picture were: an empty pack of ground coffee on the kitchen counter; the fact that the sink was obviously clogged with dishes and the brown water was now overflowing it, trickling down toward the kitchen tiles; and the presence of a blue plastic bucket, which seemed full of empty whiskey bottles. I fixed my eyes on the latter, puzzled, because I didn’t remember owning such a thing. Since I couldn’t rely on my brain to help me understand anything, I hoped the bucket itself would explain why it was here, but unfortunately, it wasn’t interested in doing so. In the meantime, the water from the sink finally reached the floor.

Confused, I struggled and stretched my left arm to turn off the tap. However, the sink was already full of whatever was in there and kept flooding my apartment. Soon, the liquid formed a big puddle on the tiles in front of the base cabinet, and two different arms crept toward the kitchen doorway. There, they overran the vague resistance of a dirty mop and attacked the pile of old, erotic magazines, which I had left behind the door for no good reason.

At this moment, someone banged on my apartment door and rang the doorbell simultaneously. Since I was already a bag of nerves and because my telephone was still ringing like crazy, this addition to the already nerve-wracking situation proved to be too much for me. As a result, I panicked, jumped up again, and again hacked the back of my head into the radiator ribs—now almost knocking myself out.

In the following few minutes, things didn’t settle down a bit. The stranger kept punching the door violently, the telephone was ringing urgently in the living room, and the slime on the floor was ravaging my magazines, brutally raping Jenna Jameson’s butt on the cover of one of the Penthouses. Soon, her poor ass turned brown in a place where it really shouldn’t be like that—not while on display in a popular magazine, at least. Just by looking at it, I felt sick, and everything suddenly swam before my eyes.

The guy outside my apartment didn’t let me faint, though. He decided it was time to take the next step and kicked the door, cursing. The racket escalated further and quickly led to my next fit of panic. The punching, the swearing, the doorbell, the telephone, my hurting head—they all fueled my agony and intensified my stress to the point of exploding. And after a minute, it finally happened—I felt I was losing it. I sensed my consciousness quickly slipping away, the kitchen blurring before my eyes, a dull rhythmic sound drumming into my ear canals, my body getting lighter, my eyelids growing heavier, the world twirling around me, and at the end, I felt I was sinking into a blessed and soothing oblivion, with all my problems backing out into the darkness that surrounded me. It was the last thing I actually remembered.

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