This partial sensory deprivation is alarming because it’s quite nice. You’d think it would be frightening, and of course it is—that, I don’t mind so much—but it’s also soothing and that, I distrust intensely. I only have smell, touch and sound to work with, and as I lie here I get a sense of the ebb and flow of the room. I start to recognise the wash of air that accompanies a particular set of footsteps, the tinge of sweat and cologne that means the first technician or the second or someone new. The regularity, that intimacy, is settling some little evolutionary rodent circuit lodged somewhere in the engine room of my brain. I can’t help it: I’m relaxing into the situation. Under other circumstances I’d even be worried that I might say something inappropriate or self-incriminatory, but that’s not really an issue. In twenty minutes or so they’re going to read my entire mind to protect the security of the state. They will hollow me out like a pumpkin and leave me with a pumpkin smile: a wide, idiot, toothless grin. They’ll go home and tell their friends they did a good job. They’ll greet their partners, their spouses, their kids, and if they let on in the small hours of the dark that they’re not without qualms, they’ll say in the same breath that they know it’s necessary. Their partners and their spouses will tell them they are brave, because they accept the sleepless nights of troubled conscience so that everyone else can be safe. No doubt that’s how it always goes with torturers.