Max came close to the woman. He could smell her now: piss and shit, sweat and blood. He imagined brushing her skin with a warm wet sponge, of dabbing at her wounds to help them heal.

There was another smell entirely coming from the bucket, a sharp so that it almost stung the skin, irritated his eyes. It was a wonderfully clean smell.

"Please," the woman croaked.

The beauty of the contraption was that it could be filled with any liquid.

"You know what's in there?" Max said, "Acid. I won't let you die. But your face will be disfigured…"

She was still very beautiful in her own way. The filth and grime served as a contrast to how he remembered her from the times when he had spied on her. Her current state of broken corruption illuminated her former innocence and joy.

"You'll be a monstrosity," he said, "hardly recognised as human at all."

Yet he knew that this one's failing was not vanity but rather a fresh vitality, an inner kindness that had always been expressed in her open smile.

He lifted the glass helmet onto her head and tightened the straps around her neck. She struggled in the chair, grinding gashes in her flesh as it rubbed against the bindings at her wrists.

Then Max leant down to her ear.

"I love you," he said and he reached for the tap.

Inside the helmet her screams warped and died against the glass. They were almost comical.

"You know what you have to say, don't you?" he said.

This was the moment he enjoyed so much, the moment his unrequited love for the subject was finally returned, when they submitted and joined society once again.

His hand was poised on the tap ready to let the acid fill the helmet. He could see her eyes inside the glass bulging, imploring.

"Please," she screamed, "don't do it to me, do it to…."

She said the name of her most beloved.

He smiled at her as he took the helmet off and replaced it on the table.

He left through the reinforced door and walked past all the other similar doors. Each had the same number embossed on it, each the same room yet with its own particular hell. He could hear the satisfying screams and comforting whimpers of people being tortured. He was happy to be in the Ministry of Love. He knew his place in the monochrome tower blocks and roomscapes of Airstrip One where he was a high-ranking Inner Party official, a boot stamping on the least flicker of resistance.

His days were rich in variety: overseeing interrogations and tortures.

He grew old in power, watching on telescreens as the people became ever more docile and accepting. At times he tried to train his mind to truly accept the precepts of the ruling ideology. There might even have been moments when he believed it all.

Then in the sweated delirium of a particular dawn he dreamed of the bird-woman, of her soft flesh and the delicate beauty of her feathers. He woke with his blood boiling, aroused in a way he hadn't been for years. He was weeping.

That day he went into the bowels of the Ministry and through one of the Room 101s. He left through the door he had originally arrived by years before.

No longer an old man he was found himself back in the circular corridor. It was dimmer now; the chandeliers above were covered in dust that obscured their light. Some of them flickered as though about to short out. Down the corridor, at the place where it began to disappear behind its curve, the bird woman posed naked with her wings outstretched, their feathers silver in the light of a flickering chandelier.

"It's you I want," Max said.

Her words ripped the inside of his head. "No it isn't."

Then she ran again and he ran after her, passing doors with their nonsensical phrases.

He ran on and on.

How big was this corridor, this wheel?

Then up ahead he saw her disappear through one of the doors. When he got there the absurdity it pronounced wasn't what he expected. It said simply: Exit.

He came out into what looked like the foyer of a cheap hotel. The light from a bare bulb flickered showing a reception desk with a grey Bakelite telephone on it and pigeon holes on the wall behind. At the desk was a young woman, with her chin rested on one hand while she held a cigarette with another. She had a frizz of dyed orange hair.

"So you've finished." she said.

She looked at him as though he was something unpleasant on her dinner plate. On her bare shoulder, just beneath a faded purple bra strap she had a tattoo of a falcon.

"Where's the woman? Where's the bird woman?"

The receptionist blew out smoke.

"It's always the same with you," she said, "You keep coming back and every time you just don't get it."

"I want her."

"You don't want her."
"I want my money back."

"You've got plenty of money."

"I didn't even get to…"

"What?" said the receptionist, and ground out her cigarette in a tin ashtray that contained other lipstick stained butts. "You think you wanted to fuck her? God if that was it you might have been satisfied a long time ago. But you're the worst kind of pervert. A power pervert. The endless variation you want isn't sex, is it?"

She reached back into the pigeon holes and took something out. Then she threw it over to him. It was a clear plastic change-bag full of coins.

For a long moment Max held the bag in his fist. He felt himself flood back, knew who he was once more. Each coin had his face on it. He'd spend them as fast as he could before more arrived, more coins to keep him in this settlement.

He thought of the room and of the girl. The girl with the glass helmet on her head. He thought of other rooms he had been on other occasions.

The place where people were the slaves of apes and he was an ape.

The place where men made perfect women out of construction kits, gluing them together and painting them with soft, insidious, brushstrokes.

"I'm sorry," he said.

The receptionist glared at him for a moment and then she shrugged.

"It's all right," she said, "It's just a soft museum."

Before he left he looked at the door he had come out of, the door to the corridor and its rooms. It bore a single word: Max.

Out in the street it was nearly dawn. He headed for the arcade.