For me, dear reader, that place was purgatory incarnate; neither good nor bad, but a gateway to great rewards or even greater punishments.

Alfred is taken past this broom, and enters this room; which can only be described as 'piecemeal'. It is full of pieces of fish-market paraphernalia, pieces of military-regalia; and pieces of rusted-steel.
It is full of these spiky-hooks, fishmongery-books; and saline-scalers. These bayonet-blades, grenades; and dusty loud-halers.

Those drugs were either going to bring me nirvana or they were going to kill me. I was sure of it. And I was comfortable with it.

Albert Einstein once said that ‘insanity’ was ‘Doing the same thing over and over again, expecting to achieve different results’. He was a clever chap, that Einstein fella. And, according to him, I must have been insane. Because I kept on working hard, and I kept on expecting to be rewarded, even though my hard work had never been rewarded before. I didn’t have any evidence to suggest that I’d be rewarded. It wasn’t a rational belief. It all came down to optimism. Blind, debilitating optimism.

The creature who lives inside my brain suggested I do it,” I offered tentatively. “It was very convincing.

I became a new person; sucked into the neutrality of the abyss, comforted by social norms, and set free from the burden of individuality.