Diary of a Drug Fiend

254 The Diary of a Drug Fiend Lou answered mechanically, as if he had pressed a button :— “ Death is not a way out of it!” “Thank you,” he said. “It’s a great help to me that you should have been able to remember.” Something in his tone caught my imagination vividly. His eyes burnt through me. I began to wonder whether there were any truth in what was said about the diabolical powers of the man. Could he have divined the reason for our coming to the café? I had the absolute certainty that he knew all about it, though it was humanly impossible that he should. “A very strange theory, that about death,” he said. “I wonder if there’s anything in it. It would really be too easy if we could get out of our troubles in so simple a fashion. It has always seemed to me that nothing can ever be destroyed. The problems of life are really put together ingeniously in order to baffle one, like a chess problem. We can’t untie a real knot in a closed piece of string without the aid of the fourth dimension; but we can disentangle the complexities caused by dipping the string in water—and such things,”’ he added, with an almost malicious gravity in his tone. I knew what he meant. “It might very well be,” he continued, ‘ that when we fail to solve the puzzles of life, they remain with us. We have to do them sooner or later ; and it seems reason- able to suppose that the problems of life ought to be solved during life, while we have to our hands the apparatus in which they arose. We might find that after death the problems were unaltered, but that we were impotent to deal with them. Did you ever meet any one that had been indiscreet about taking drugs? Presumably not. Well, take my word for it, those people get into a state which is in many ways very like death. And the tragic thing about the situation is