Extract:
“The thing is,” he said, and it was the voice of a man whose soul had died but whose body was condemned to go on, “I miss it.”
I looked at him, too horrified to speak.
“I need them,” he said, and he raised his face to me, a face with empty eyes from which all hope had fled. “Now that I’m out, I don’t know what to do without them. I dream of them. I walk around and see bullets and sub-bullets, headlines and graphical elements, bubble charts and area graphs. And then I wake up, and realize that none of that is available to me now that I’m out. I’m lost. I don’t know what to do.”
I let him go then, and went my way as well. But that face has stayed with me, become, in a way, a burden to me.
God damn the people who do this. And God damn
(source)