“To be sure, pain is not the same as torture,” Demarest went on. “As an academic, you’ll appreciate the importance of such distinctions. Torture requires an element of human intention. It has to be interwoven with meaning. Simply to be eaten by a shark, let us say, is not to experience torture—whereas if someone intentionally dangles you over a shark tank, that is torture. You might dismiss this as a nicety, but I’d beg to differ. The experience of torture, you see, requires not only the intention to inflict pain. It also requires that the subject of torture recognize that intention. You must recognize my intention to cause pain. More precisely, you must recognize that I intend you to recognize that I intend to cause pain. One has to satisfy that structure of regressive recognition. Would you say that you and I have done so?”

“Yes!” the old man screamed. “Yes! Yes! Yes!” His neck thrashed this way and that as a bolt of electricity blasted into him once more. He was being raped by pain, felt that the very fiber of his existence had been violated.

“Or would you offer another analysis?”

“No!” Fielding shrieked with pain once more. The agony was simply beyond imagining.

“You know what Emerson says of the great man: ‘When he is pushed, tormented, defeated, he has a chance to learn something; he has been put on his wits, on his manhood; he has gained facts; learns his ignorance; is cured of the insanity of conceit.’ Would you concur?”

“Yes!” the scholar shrieked. “Yes! No! Yes!” The muscular convulsions that rippled his spine only magnified the already unendurable pain.