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