[music] He was lying on something that felt like a campbed, except that it was higher off the ground and that he was fixed down in some way so that he could not move. Like that seemed stronger than usual was falling on his face. O'Brien was standing at his side, looking down at him intently. At the other side of him stood a man in a white coat, holding a hypodermic stretch. Even under his eyes were open, he took in his surroundings only gradually. He had the impression of swimming up into this room from some quite different world, a sort of underwater world far beneath it. How long he had been down there he did not know. Since the moment when they arrested him he had not seen darkness or daylight. Besides, his memories were not continuous. There had been times when consciousness, even the sort of consciousness that one has in sleep, had stopped dead and started again after a blank interval. But whether the intervals were of days or weeks or only seconds, there was no way of knowing. With that first blow on the elbow, the nightmare had started. Later he was to realize that all that then happened was merely a preliminary, a routine interrogation to which nearly all prisoners were subjected. There was a long range of crimes, espionage, sabotage and the like, to which everyone had to confess as a matter of course. The confession was a formality, though the torture was real. How many times he had been beaten, how long the beatings had continued, he could not remember. Always there were five or six men in black uniforms that him simultaneously. Sometimes it was fists, sometimes it was truncheons, sometimes it was steel rots, sometimes it was boots. There were times when he rolled about the floor, as shameless as an animal, writhing his body this way and that in an endless, hopeless effort to dodge the kicks. And simply in fighting more and yet more kicks in his ribs, in his belly, on his elbows, on his shins, in his groin, in his testicles, on the bone at the base of his spine. There were times when it went on and on until the cruel, wicked, unforgivable thing seemed to him not that the guards continued to beat him, but that he could not force himself into losing consciousness. There were times when his nerve so forsook him that he began shouting for mercy even before the beating began, when the mere sight of the fist drawn back for a blow was enough to make him pull forth a confession of real and imaginary crimes. There were other times when he started out with the resolve of confessing nothing, when every word had to be forced out of him between gasp of pain, and there were times when he feebly tried to compromise, when he said to himself, "I will confess, but not yet, I must hold out till the pain becomes unbearable." Three more kicks, two more kicks, and then I will tell them what they want. Sometimes he was beaten till he could hardly stand, then flung like a sack of potatoes on the stone floor of a cell, left to recuperate for a few hours, and then taken out and beaten again. They were also longer periods of recovery. He remembered them thinly, because they were spent chiefly in sleep or stupid. He remembered a cell with a plank bed, a sort of shell sticking out from the wall, and a tin wash basin, and meals of hot soup and bread, and sometimes coffee. He remembered a surely barber writhing to scrape his chin and crop his hair and business-like, unsympathetic men in white coats feeling his pulse, tapping his reflexes, turning up his eyelids, running harsh fingers over him in search for broken bones, and shooting needles into his arm to make him sleep. The beatings grew less frequent and became mainly a threat, a horror to which he could be sent back at any moment when his answers were unsatisfactory. His questioners now were not ruffians in black uniforms, but party intellectuals. Little rotund men with quick movements and flashing spectacles, who worked on him in relays over periods which lasted, he thought he could not be sure, 10 or 12 hours at a stretch. His other questioners saw to it that he was in constant slight pain, but it was not chiefly pain that they relied on. They slapped his face, wrung his ears, pulled his hand, made him stand on one hand, refused him leave to unite, shown glaring light in his face until his eyes ran with water. The aim of this was simply to humiliate and destroy his power of arguing and reasoning. The real weapon was the merciless questioning that went on and on. After hour, tripping him up, laying traps for him, twisting everything that he said, convicting him at every step of life and self-contradiction until he began weeping as much from shame as from nervous fatigue. Sometimes he would weep out a dozen times in a single session. Most of the time they screamed abuse at him and threatened at every hesitation to deliver him over to the guards again, but sometimes they would suddenly change the tune, call him comrade, appeal to him in the name of Inksok and Big Brother, and ask him sorrowfully whether even now he had not enough loyalty to the party left to make him wish to undo the evil he had done. When his nerves were in rags, after hours of questioning, even this appeal could reduce him to sniffling tears. In the end, the nagging voices broke him down more completely than the boots and fists of the guards. He became simply a mouth that uttered, a hand that signed, whatever was demanded of him. His sole concern was to find out what they wanted him to confess and then confess it quickly before the bullying started anew. He confessed to the assassination of eminent party members, the distribution of seditious pamphlets, embezzlement of public funds, sale of military secrets, sabotage of every kind. He confessed that he had been a spy in the pay of the East Asian government as far back as 1968. He confessed that he was a religious believer and admirer of capitalism and a sexual permit. He confessed that he had murdered his wife, although he knew, and his questioners must have known that his wife was still alive. He confessed that for years he had been in person of touch with ghosting and had been a member of an underground organization which had included almost every human being he had ever known. It was easier to confess everything and implicate everybody. Besides, in a sense it was all true. It was true that he had been the enemy of the party and in the eyes of the party there was no distinction between the thought and the deed. There were also memories of another type. They stood out in his mind disconnectedly like pictures with blackness all round them. He was in a cell which might have been either dark or light because he could see nothing except a pair of eyes. Near hand some kind of instrument was ticked in slowly and regularly. The eyes grew larger and more luminous. Suddenly he floated out of his seat, dived into the eyes and was swallowed up. He was strapped into a chair surrounded by dials under dazzling lights. A man in the white coats was reading the dials. There was a tramp of heavy boots outside. The door clanged open. The waxed-faced officer marched in followed by two guards. Room 101 set the officer. The man in the white coat did not turn round. He did not look at Winston either. He was looking only at the dials. He was rolling down a mighty corridor. A kilometer wide full of glorious golden light roaring with laughter and shouting out confessions at the top of his voice. He was confessing everything. Even the things he had succeeded in holding back under the torture. He was relating the entire history of his life to an audience who knew it already. With him were the guards. The other question is the man in white coats. O'Brien, Julian, Mr. Charrington all rolling down the corridor together and shouting with laughter. Some dreadful thing which had length embedded in the future had somehow been skipped over and had not happened. Everything was alright. There was no more pain. The last detail of his life was laid bare. Understood, forgiven. He was starting up from the plant bed in the half certainty that he had heard O'Brien's voice. All through his interrogation, although he had never seen him, he had had the feeling that O'Brien was at his elbow, just out of sight. It was O'Brien who was directing everything. It was he who set the guards on to Winston and who prevented them from killing them. It was he who decided when Winston should scream with pain, when he should have a respite, when he should be fed, when he should sleep, when the drop should be pumped into his arm. He was he who asked the questions and suggested the answers. He was the tormentor. He was the protector. He was the inquisitor. He was the friend. And once Winston could not remember whether it was in drug sleep or in normal sleep or even in a moment of wakefulness. A voice murmured in his ear. "Don't worry, Winston. You are in my keeping. For seven years I have watched over you. Now the turning point has come. I shall save you. I shall make you perfect." He was not sure whether it was O'Brien's voice, but it was the same voice that had said to him. We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness. In that other dream, seven years ago, he did not remember any ending to his interrogation. There was a period of blackness and then the cell or room in which he now was had gradually materialized around him. He was almost flat on his back and unable to move. His body was held down in every essential point. Even the back of his head was gripped in some manner. O'Brien was looking down at him gravely and rather sappy. His face, seen from below, looked coarse and warm. With pouches under the eyes and tied lines from nose to chin, he was older than Winston had thought him. He was perhaps 48 or 50. Under his hand, there was a dial with a lever on top and figures running round the face. "I told you," said O'Brien, "that if we met again, it would be here." "Yes," said Winston. Without any warning except a slight movement of O'Brien's hand, a wave of pain flooded his body. It was a frightening pain because he could not see what was happening and he had the feeling that some mortal injury was being done to him. He did not know whether the thing was really happening or whether the effect was electrically produced, but his body was being wrenched out of shape. The joints were being slowly torn apart. Although the pain had brought the sweat out on his forehead, the worst of all was to fear that his backbone was about to snap. He set his teeth and breathed hard through his nose, trying to keep siding as long as possible. "You are afraid," said O'Brien, watching his face, "that in another moment something is going to break. Your special fear is that it will be your backbone. You have a vivid and mental picture of the vertebrae snapping apart and the spina fluid dripping out of them. That is what you are thinking. Is it not?" Winston did not answer. O'Brien drew back the lever on the dial. The wave of pain receded almost as quickly as it had come. "That was 40," said O'Brien. "You can see that the numbers on this dial run up to 100. Will you please remember throughout our conversation that I have it in my power to inflict pain on you at any moment and to whatever degree I choose? If you tell me any lies or attempt to pre-varicate in any way or even fall below your usual level of intelligence, you will cry out with pain instantly. Do you understand that?" "Yes," said Winston. O'Brien's manner became less severe. He resettled his spectacles thoughtfully and took a pace or two up and down. When he spoke his voice was gentle and patient. He had the air of a doctor, a teacher, even a priest anxious to explain and persuade rather than to punish. "I'm taking trouble with you," Winston said. "Because you are worth trouble. You know perfectly well what is the matter of you. You have known it for years, though you have fought against the knowledge. You are mentally deranged. You suffer from a defective memory. You are unable to remember real events and you persuade yourself that you remember other events which never happened. Fortunately, it is curable. You have never cured yourself of it because you did not choose to. There was a small effort of the will that you were not ready to make. Even now, on weather wear, you are clinging to your disease under the impression that it is a virtue. Now, we will take an example. At this moment, which power is Oceania at war with? When I was arrested, Oceania was at war with East Asia. With East Asia, good. And Oceania has always been at war with East Asia. Has it not? Winston drew in his breath. He opened his mouth to speak and then did not speak. He could not take his eyes away from the time. The truth, please, Winston. Your truth. Tell me what you think you remember. I remember that until only a week before I was arrested, we were not at war with East Asia at all. We were in a lion's room. The war was against Eurasia. That had lasted for four years. Before that, O'Brien stopped him with the movement of the hand. Another example, he said, "Some years ago, you had a very serious delusion indeed. You believed that three men, three one-time party members named Jones, Aronson and Rutherford, men who were executed for treachery and sabotage after making the fullest possible confession, were not guilty of the crimes they were charged with. You believed that you had seen unmistakable documentary evidence proving that their confessions were false. There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph, something like this. An oblong slip of newspaper had appeared between O'Brien's fingers. For perhaps five seconds, it was within the angle of Winston's vision. It was a photograph, and there was no question of his identity. It was the photograph. It was another copy of the photograph of Jones, Aronson and Rutherford at the party function in New York, which he had churned upon 11 years ago and promptly destroyed. For only an instant it was before his eyes. Then it was out of sight again. But he had seen it. Unquestionably, he had seen it. He made desperate, agonizing effort to wrench the talk half of his body free. It was impossible to move so much as a centimeter in any direction. For the moment he had even forgotten the dial. All he wanted was to hold the photograph in his fingers again, or at least to see it. "It exists," he cried. "No," said O'Brien. He stepped across the room. There was a memory hole in the opposite wall. O'Brien lifted the grating. Unseen, the frame slip of paper was swirling away on the current of the warm air. It was vanishing in the flesh of flame. O'Brien turned away from the wall. "Acious," he said. "Not even identifiable ashes, dust. It does not exist. It never existed." "But it did exist. It does exist. It exists in memory. I remember it. You remember it." "I don't remember it," said O'Brien. Winston's heart sank. That was double-think. He had a feeling of deadly helplessness. If he could have been certain that O'Brien was lying, it would not have seemed to matter. But it was perfectly possible that O'Brien had really forgotten the photograph. And if so, then already he would have forgotten his denial of remembering it and forgotten the act of forgetting. How could one be sure that it was simple trickery? Perhaps that lunatic dislocation in the mind would really happen. That was the thought that defeated him. O'Brien was looking down at him speculately. More than ever, he had the air of a teacher taking pains with a wayward but promising child. "There is a party slogan dealing with the control of the past," he said, "repeated, if you please. Who controls the past controls the future? Who controls the present controls the past?" repeated Winston obediently. "Who controls the present controls the past?" said O'Brien, nodding his head with slow approval. "Is it your opinion, Winston, that the past has real existence? Again, the feeling of helplessness descended upon Winston. His eyes flitted towards the dying. He not only did not know whether yes or no was the answer that would save him from pain, he did not even know which answer he believed to be the true one." O'Brien smiled faintly. "You are no metaphysician," Winston, he said. "Until this moment you had never considered what is meant by existence, I will put it more precisely. Does the past exist concretely in space? Is there somewhere or other a place? A world of solid objects where the past is still happening?" No. Then where does the past exist if at all? In records, it is written down. In records and in the mind, in human memories. In memory. Very well then, we, the party, control all records and we control all memories. Then we control the past. Do we not? But how can you stop people remembering things? Cried Winston again momentarily for getting the dial. It is involuntary. It is outside oneself. How can you control memory? You have not controlled mine. O'Brien's manner grew stern again. He laid his hand on the dial. "On the contrary," he said, "you have not controlled it. That is what has brought you here. You are here because you have failed in humility in self-discipline. You would not make the act of submission, which is the price of sanity. You prefer to be a lunatic, a minority of all. Only the discipline mine can see reality, Winston. You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right. You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident. When you delude yourself with thinking that you see something, you assume that everyone else sees the same thing as you. But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind and nowhere else, not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes. And in any case, suit perishes, only in the mind of the party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the party holds to be the truth is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the party. That is the fact that you have got to relearn, Winston. It needs an act of self-destruction, an effort of the will. You must humble yourself before you can become sane." He posed for a few moments, as though to allow what he had been saying to St. King. Do you remember, he went on, writing in your diary, "Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four." Yes, said Winston. O'Brien held up his left hand. It's back towards Winston, with a thumb hidden and the four fingers extended. How many fingers am I holding up, Winston? Four. And if the party says that it is not four but five, then how many? Four. The work ended in a gas of pain. The needle of the dial had shot up to fifty-five. The sweat had sprung out all over Winston's body. The air tore into his lungs and issued again in deep groans, which even by clenching his teeth he could not stop. O'Brien washed him. The four fingers still extended. He drew back the lever. This time the pain was only slightly eased. How many fingers, Winston? Four. The needle went up to sixty. How many fingers, Winston? Four. Four. What else can I say? Four. The needle must have risen again, but he did not look at it. The heavy stern face and the four fingers failed his vision. The fingers stood up before his eyes like pillars. Enormous, blurry, and seeming to vibrate. But unmisticably, four. How many fingers, Winston? Four. Stop it. Stop it. How can you go on? Four. Four. How many fingers, Winston? Five. Five. Five. No, Winston. There is no use. You are lying. You still think there are four. How many fingers, please? Four. Five. Four. Anything you like. Only stop it. Stop the pain. Abruptly, he was sitting up with O'Brien's arm around his shoulders. He had perhaps lost consciousness for a few seconds. The bonds that had held his body down were loosened. He felt very cold. He was shaking uncontrollably. His teeth were chattering. The tears were rolling down his cheeks. For a moment, he clung to O'Brien like a baby, curiously comforted by the heavy arm around his shoulders. He had the feeling that O'Brien was his protector. That the pain was something that came from outside, from some other source, and that it was O'Brien who would save him from it. "You are a slow learner," Winston said Ryan gently. "How can I help it?" He blubbered. "How can I help seeing what is in front of my eyes?" Two and two are four. Sometimes, Winston, sometimes they are five, sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane. He laid Winston down on the bed. The grip of his limbs tightened again, but the pain had stepped away and the trembling had stopped, leaving him merely weakened cold. O'Brien motioned with his head to the man in the white coat who had stood a mobile throughout the proceedings. The man in the white coat bent down and looked closely into Winston's eyes, felt his pulse, laid an ear against his chest, tapped here and there, then he nodded to O'Brien. "Again," said O'Brien. The pain flowed into Winston's body. The needle must be at 70, 75. He had shut his eyes this time. He knew that the fingers were still there and still fall. All that mattered was somehow to stay alive until the spasm was over. He had ceased to notice whether he was crying out or not. The pain lessened again. He opened his eyes. O'Brien had drawn back to leather. How many fingers, Winston? Four. As opposed there are four. I would see five if I could. I'm trying to see five. "Which do you wish to persuade me that you see five or really to see them? Really to see them?" "Again," said O'Brien. Perhaps the needle was 80, 90. Winston could not intermittently remember why the pain was happening. Behind his screwed up eyelids, a forest of fingers seemed to be moving in a sort of dance, weaving in and out, disappearing behind one another and reappearing again. He was trying to count them. He could not remember why. He knew only that it was impossible to count them and that this was somehow due to the mysterious identity between five and four. The pain died down again. When he opened his eyes, it was to find that he was still seeing the same thing. Enumerable fingers, like moving trees, were still streaming past in either direction, crossing and re-crossing. He shut his eyes again. "How many fingers am I holding up?" Winston. "I don't know. I don't know. You will kill me if you do that again. Four, five, six, in all honesty. I don't know." "Better," said O'Brien. A needle slid into Winston's arm. Almost in the same instant, a blissful, healing warmth spread all through his body. The pain was already half forgotten. He opened his eyes and looked up gratefully at O'Brien, a sight of the heavy, lying face, so ugly and so intelligent. His hearts seemed to turn over. If he could have moved, he would have stretched out the hand or laid it on O'Brien's arm. He had never loved him so deeply as at his moment and not merely because he had stopped the pain. He hoped feeling that at bottom it did not matter whether O'Brien was a friend or an enemy or a combatant. O'Brien was a person who could be talked to. Perhaps, one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood. O'Brien had tortured him to the edge of the dynasty, and in a little while, he was certain he was sent him to his death. It made no difference. In some sense that when deeper than friendship, they were intimate. Somewhere or other, although the actual words might never be spoken, there was a place where they could meet and talk. O'Brien was looked down at him with an expression which suggested that the same thought might be in his own mind. When he spoke it was in an easy, conversational tone. Do you know where you are next to him? I don't know. I can guess. In the Ministry of Love, do you know how long you have been here? I don't know. Days, weeks, months, I think it is months. And why do you imagine that we bring people to this place? To make them confess. No, that is not the reason, try again. To punish them. No, exclaim O'Brien. His voice had changed extra ordinarily, and his face had suddenly become both stern and animated. No, not merely to extract your confession, not to punish you. Shall I tell you why we have brought you here? To cure you, to make you sane. Will you understand, Winston, that no one whom we bring to this place ever leaves our hands uncured? We are not interested in those stupid crimes that you have committed. The party is not interested in the overt act. The thought is all we care about. We do not merely destroy our enemies. We change them. Do you understand what I mean by that? He was spinning over Winston. His face looked enormous because of its nearness, and hideously ugly because it was seen from below. Moreover, it was filled with a sort of exaltation, a lunatic intensity. Again, Winston's heart shrank. If it had been possible, he would have cowered deeper into the bed. He felt certain that O'Brien was about to twist the dial out of sheer wantonness. At this moment, however, O'Brien turned away. He took a pace or two up and down, then he continued less vehemently. The first thing for you to understand is that in this place, there are two martyrdoms. You have read of the religious persecutions of the past. In the Middle Ages, there was the Inquisition. It was a failure. It set out to eradicate heresy and ended by perpetuating it. For every heretic it burned at the stake, thousands of others rose up. Why was that? Because the Inquisition killed his enemies in the open and killed them while they were still unrepentant. In fact, it killed them because they were unrepentant. Men were dying because they would not abandon their true beliefs. Naturally, all the glory belonged to the victim and all the shame to the Inquisitor who burned him. Later, in the 20th century, there were the totalitarianists. As they were called, there were the German Nazis and the Russian Communists. The Russians persecuted heresy more cruelly than the Inquisition had done, and they imagined that they had learned from the mistakes of the past. They knew at any rate that one must not make matters. Before they exposed their victims to public trial, they deliberately set themselves to destroy their dignity. They wore them down by torture and solitude until they were despicable, cringing wretches, confessing whatever was put into their mouths, covering themselves with abuse, accusing and sheltering behind one another, whimpering for mercy. And yet, after only a few years, the same thing had happened over again. The dead men had become martyrs and their degradation was forgotten. Once again, why was it? In the first place, because the confessions that they had made were obviously extorted and untrue, we do not make mistakes of that kind. All the confessions that are uttered here are true. We make them true. And above all, we do not allow the dead to rise up against us. You must stop imagining that posterity will vindicate you. Winston, posterity will never hear of you. You will be lifted clean up from the stream of history. We shall turn you into gas and pour you into the stratosphere. Nothing will remain of you, not a name in the register, not a memory in the living brain. You will be annihilated in the past as well as in the future. You will never have existed. Then why bother to torture me, thought Winston, with a momentary bitterness. O'Brien checked his step as though Winston had uttered the thought loud. His large ugly face came near with the eyes little narrowed. "You are thinking," he said, "that since we intend to destroy you utterly, so that nothing that you say or do can make the smallest difference, in that case, why do we go to the trouble of interrogating you first? That is what you were thinking, was it not?" "Yes," said Winston. O'Brien smiled slightly. "You are a flaw in the pattern, Winston. You are a stain that must be wiped out. Did I not tell you just now that we are different from the persecutors of the past? We are not content with negative obedience, nor even with the most abject submission. When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will. We do not destroy the heretic because he resists us. So long as he resists us, we never destroy them. We confer him. We capture his inner mind, we reshape him. We burn all evil and all illusion out of him. We bring him over to our side, not in appearance, but genuinely, hard and so. We make him one of ourselves before we kill him. It is intolerable to us that an erroneous thought should exist anywhere in the world, however secret and powerless it may be. Even in the instant of death, we cannot permit any deviation. In the old days, the heretic walked to the stake, still inherited, proclaiming his heresy, exulting it. Even the victim of the Russian purges could carry rebellion locked up in his skull as he walked down the passage waiting for the boot, but we make the brain perfect before we blow it out. The command of the old despotism was thou shalt rot. The command of the totalitarian was thou shalt. Our command is thou art. No one whom we bring to this place ever stands out against us. Everyone is washed clean. Even those three miserable traitors in whose innocence you once believed, Jones, Aronson, and Rutherford, in the end we broke them down. I took part in the interrogation myself. I saw them gradually worn down, whimpering, groveling, weeping, and in the end it was not with pain or fear, only with penitence. By the time we had finished with them, they were only the shells of men. There was nothing left in them except sorrow for what they had done and love of big brother. It was touching to see how they loved him. They begged to be shot quickly so that they could die while their minds were still clean. His voice had grown almost dreamy. The exultation, the lunatic enthusiasm, was still in his face. He is not pretending, thought Winston. He is not the hypocrite. He believes every word he says. What most oppressed him was the consciousness of his own intellectual inferiority. He watched a heavy yet graceful form strolling to and fro in and out of the range of his vision. O'Brien was a being in all ways larger than himself. There was no idea that he had ever had or could have that O'Brien had not long ago known, examined and rejected. His mind contained Winston's mind. But in that case, how could it be true that O'Brien was mad? It must be he, Winston, who was mad. O'Brien halted and looked down at him. His voice had grown stern again. Do not imagine that you will save yourself, Winston. However, completely you surrender to us. No one who has once gone astray is ever spared. And even if we chose to let you live out the natural term of your life, still you would never escape from us. What happens to you here is forever. Understand that in advance. We shall crush you down to the point from which there is no coming back. Things will happen to you from which you could not recover if you lived a thousand years. Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love or friendship or joy of living or laughter or curiosity or courage or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squish you empty and then we shall fill you with ourselves. He paused and signed to the man in the white coat. Winston was aware of some heavy piece of apparatus being pushed into place behind his head. O'Brien had sat down beside the bed so that his face was almost on level with Winston's. 3,000, he said. Speaking over Winston's head to the man in the white coat, two soft pads, which felt slightly moist, clamped themselves against Winston's temples, he quailed. There was pain coming, a new kind of pain. O'Brien laid a hand reassuringly, almost kindly on his. This time it will not hurt, he said. Keep your eyes fixed on mine. At this moment there was a devastating explosion or what seemed like an explosion, though it was not certain whether there was any noise. There was undoubtedly a blinding flash of light. Winston was not hurt, only prostrated. Although he had already been lying on his back when the thing happened. He had a curious feeling that he had been knocked into that position. A terrific painless blow had flattened him out. Also something had happened inside his head. As his eyes regained their focus, he remembered who he was and where he was and recognized a face that was gazing into his own. But somewhere or other there was a large patch of emptiness as though a piece had been taken out of his brain. It will not last, said O'Brien. Look me in the eyes, what country is Oceana at war with? Winston thought he knew what was meant by Oceana and that he himself was a citizen of Oceana. He also remembered Eurasia and East Asia. But who was at war with whom he did not know? In fact he had not been aware that there was any war. I don't remember. Oceana is at war with East Asia. Do you remember that now? Yes. Oceana has always been at war with East Asia since the beginning of your life, since the beginning of the party, since the beginning of history, the war has continued without a break, always the same war. Do you remember that? Yes. Eleven years ago you created a legend about three men who had been condemned to death for treachery. You pretended that you had seen a piece of paper which proved them innocent. No such piece of paper ever existed. You invented it and later you grew to believe in it. You remember now the very moment at which you first invented it. Do you remember that? Yes. Just now I held up the fingers of my hand to you, you saw five fingers. Do you remember that? Yes. Well Brian held up the fingers of his left hand with the thumb concealed. There are five fingers there. Do you see five fingers? Yes. And he did see them for a fleeting instant before the scenery of his mind changed. He saw five fingers and there was no deformity. Then everything was normal again. And the old fear, the hatred and the bewilder came crowding back again. But there had been a moment. He did not know how long, 30 seconds perhaps, a luminous certainty when each new suggestion of what Brian's had filled up the patch of emptiness and become absolute truth. And when two and two could have been three as easily as five, if that were what was needed, it had faded but before Brian had dropped his hand. But though he could not capture it, he could remember it. As one remembers a favorite experience at some period of one's life when one was in effect a different person. "You see now," said O'Brien, "that it is at any rate possible." "Yes," said Winston. O'Brien stood up with a satisfied air. Over to his left, Winston saw the man in the white coat break an ampoule and draw back the plunger of a syringe. O'Brien turned to Winston with a smile. In almost the old manner, he resettled his spectacles on his nose. "Do you remember writing your diary?" he said. "That it did not matter whether I was a friend or an enemy, since I was at least a person who understood you and could be talked to. You were right. I enjoy talking to you. Your mind appeals to me. It resembles my own mind except that you happen to be insane. Before we bring this session to an end, you can ask me a few questions if you choose. Any question I like? Anything." He saw that Winston's eyes were upon the dial. "It is switched off. What is your first question?" "What have you done with Julia?" said Winston. O'Brien smiled again. "She betrayed you, Winston. Immediately. Unreservedly. I have seldom seen anyone come over to us so promptly. You would hardly recognize her if you saw her. All her rebelliousness, her deceit, her folly, her dirty mindedness. Everything has been burned out of her. It was a perfect conversion, a textbook case. You tortured her. O'Brien left this unanswered." "Next question," he said. "Does Big Brother exist?" "Of course he exists. The party exists. Big Brother is the embodiment of the party. Does he exist in the same way as I exist? You do not exist," said O'Brien. Once again, the sense of helplessness has sailed him. He knew, or he could imagine, the arguments which proved his own non-existence, but they were nonsense, and they were only a play on words. Did not the statement. You do not exist, contain a logical absurdity, but what use was it to say so? His mind shriveled as he thought of the unanswerable. Mad arguments with which O'Brien would demolish him. "I think I exist," he said weirdly. "I'm conscious of my own identity. I was born and I shall die. I have arms and legs. I occupy a particular point in space. Now, other solid objects can occupy the same point simultaneously. In that sense, does Big Brother exist?" "It is of no importance. He exists. Will Big Brother ever die? Of course not. How could he die?" "Next question. Does the brotherhood exist?" "That," Winston, "you will never know. If we choose to set you free when we have finished with you, and if you lived to be 90 years old, still you will never learn whether the answer to that question is yes or no. As long as you live it will be an unsolved riddle in your mind." Winston lay silent. His press rose and fell a little faster. He still had not asked a question that had come into his mind the first. He had got to ask it, and yet it was as though his tongue would not utter it. There was a trace of amusement in O'Brien's face. Even his spectacles seemed to wear an ironical gleam. He knows, thought Winston sadly. He knows what I'm going to ask. At the thought, the words burst out of him. "What is in room 101?" The expression on O'Brien's face did not change. He answered drawing. You know what is in room 101, Winston. Everyone knows what is in room 101. He raised a finger to the man in a white foot. Evidently the session was at the net. A little jet into Winston's arms. He sank almost instantly into deep sleep. Prevaricate. Prevaricate. Verk. Speak or act in an invasive way. Despotism. Despotism. Now, the exercise of absolute power, especially in a cruel and oppressive way. Empo. Empo. Now, a small sealed glass capsule containing a liquid, especially a measured quantity ready for injecting.
