If you are reading this, you are already quite familiar with pain. You’ve been pricked and cut and dunked and twisted and pulled apart.
What you don’t know is, there is torture without pain.
So before we get started, I’d like to give you a little overview of what’s in store for you. A tour, if you will.


The beginning is long blurred hallways, strong hands gripping your shoulders, the buzz of fluorescent lights. You’re led downstairs, down, down, ‘til you lose track. Then you're pushed backwards, through a hole in the floor - gone. The opposite of being born.

The first thing you focus on is the pain. Your spine, your legs, your skull. The cold cement floor. You’re so focused on the tactile that you barely register the echo of the door on the ceiling slamming closed. At first you try to blink, to adjust to the dark, but there’s no light at all, not even around the door. You’ve been pitched into the black.

The natural response, the one you always have, is to explore your surroundings. You stand, reach upwards. Nothing. A few steps to the right or left you find a wall, run your hands along it. You find: four corners. Smooth plaster. That's it.

The room you're in, it gives you about enough space to lie down, that and a little more. So you do a systematic exploration of the floor, crawling with your palms flat in front of you, sweeping back and forth. Then the walls again, looking for a vent, a microphone, a chink or a loose bit of paint. Some people walk around several times, their hands at different heights. Some start pacing immediately. But you – you've read this already – let's assume that you give up more easily. You sit in the corner. And you think.

You think.

The thing about absolute, silent dark is, you have no temporal cues. You sit and you ponder what got you here – not that you feel remorse or regret, not yet. Maybe you're relieved even, for a couple of minutes, sitting there with nothing happening. But here's the thing about time: it's subjective. For you it will be slow, slow, like a body dragged along a gravel road, its skin catching on the little rocks. Slow like someone was going to light you on fire, and they just dripped the gasoline along your limbs, smiling, looking you in the eye. That moment before they struck the match.

Slow like eternity.

Let’s say you go through the memories of your life, chronologically, as far back as you can remember. Everything that you can bring to mind, just to pass time. You call up every detail, every view from a mountain in the summer, every conversation, every kiss. You'd be surprised how few memories you can recall on command. Once you’ve shuffled through all those people in your life, all the two-dimensional versions of them like a card deck made up only of jokers, you will still have eternity left.

I don't think I could ever impress upon you the nature of nothing, of invisible hours divided into minutes, seconds, infinitely small, infinitely huge fractions.

After a while, your mind starts to fill in the gaps. Your sympathetic nervous system kicks in: your pulse increases, your blood fills with adrenaline, your breath comes fast and sharp. You hear someone. A rasping breath, a scuffling in the dark. Someone’s in the room with you, a million horror movie stereotypes rolled into one. Someone with his face peeled off. Red eyes. Fingers like ice and nothing. You feel him at your back with a knife, at your throat with his winter hands.

He’s more real than anything you’ve felt in a long time.

So you say something stupid, something like, I know you’re there, or, you can’t hurt me. Trying to convince yourself. You press your back against the wall, the cool soft pimples of the plaster digging into your skin. You sweat. You count to a thousand, ten thousand, to distract yourself. Perhaps you say something valiant. You say, it doesn’t matter what you do to me, I’ll never tell.

But time, formerly liquid, flowing, is fast becoming a solid, condensing around you like amber. There are no shadows because there is no light.

After an hour or so, your words begin sound and taste metallic, clanging off the walls. They float. They grow wings. You babble on, tell your life story, cough up your memories, your goals and aspirations. Eventually you dream: tumbling, ragged dreams – a temporary freedom.

And when you wake up, everything’s the same. You can’t even begin to comprehend nothing. Fear, loneliness, those are such abstract terms. There’s no real power to them. No phantom breathing in the dark – you or him, you don’t even know anymore. No hatred for life, or whatever this is; no deep, animal desire to live.
  
So you bite your nails, pull at your hair. You strain your ears for any sound. Any sign of the outside world. That's how the physical injury starts, usually: you call out, slam your foot or your fist against the wall. That’s when you realize that blood takes time to clot. It couldn't be more than ten minutes, or less than one. So there you have it: a reliable measure of time.

Take a look at your future self, wretchedly noble, dragging the skin off your fingers one knuckle at a time.

So you jack off. You do sit ups, push-ups, crunches until you can barely breathe. Words scratch themselves out of your throat, wishes, promises. I love you. I miss you. I'm sorry. You slide in an out of sleep, unable to tell the difference anymore.

And every time you wake up, it starts all over again. Not that there's really a start or an end. Time just drags by, slow, slower than anything you can imagine. That’s your future.


Right now you're thinking, a person can die of hunger within a week. I’ll die of thirst within a few days, and they’ll never get anything out of me. Here’s an alternate option. You make it a few days, then fall asleep. We pump you full of vitamins, fat and salt and sugar. You wake up with no idea if we’ve been there, no idea how much time has passed. Oh, we’ve got it down to an art.

We can are going to be generous. You have a choice, a second chance. You just tell us what we need to know – a word, even, or a name – and we let you go. Blindfold you and lead you right on out of here. Back to your family, your wife or husband, maybe, and your kids. In a moment, one of us will come in, and we will give you this choice.

But you will say no.

You will say no, because you are a stupid, brave, stubborn human being. You have honor, principles.

In a way it’s arrogant of you, to think you’re better than all the rest. But that’s fine. That’s what they all think. So I’ll just take this opportunity to welcome you here, to your future, to the dark.

Welcome.