...of narcotics

Literature isn't innocent. I've known that since I was fifteen. And I remember thinking that then, but I can't remember whether I said it or not, and if I did, what the context was. And then the walk (but here I have to clarify that it wasn't five of us anymore but three, the Mexican, the Chilean, and me, the other two Mexicans having vanished at the gates of purgatory) turned into a kind of stroll on the fringes of hell.
The three of us were quiet, as if we'd been struck dumb, but our bodies moved to a beat, as if something were propelling us through that strange land and making us dance, a silent, syncopated kind of walking, if I can call it that, and then I had a vision, not the first that day, as it happened, or the last: the park we were walking through opened up into a kind of lake and the lake opened up into a kind of waterfall and the waterfall became a river that flowed through a kind of cemetery, and all of it, lake, waterfall, river, cemetery, was deep green and silent. And then I thought of two things: either I'm going crazy, which is unlikely since I've always had my head on straight, or these guys have doped me. And then I said stop, stop for a minute, I feel sick, I have to rest, and they said something but I couldn't hear them, I could only see them coming closer, and I realised, I became conscious, that I was looking all around trying to find someone, some witness, but there was no one, we were in the middle of a forest, and I remember I said what forest is this, and they said it's Chapultepec and they led me to a bench and we sat there for a while, and one of them asked me what hurt (the word hurt, so right, so fitting) and I should have told them that what hurt was my whole body, my whole being, but instead I told them that the problem was probably that I wasn't used to the altitude yet, that it was the altitude that was getting to me and making me see things.

[The Savage Detectives, Bolano, R.]