A Stir of Echoes

Chapter Two

FIRST OF ALL, PHIL ASKED THAT ALL THE lights be put out except for one dim wall lamp over the fireplace. Then he had me stretch out on the sofa while Ron went into the kitchen to get extra chairs. Gradually, everyone settled down. When the rustlings, comments and coughs had finally ceased, Phil spoke.
"Now I can't promise anything," he said.
"You mean we're going through all this for nothing?" Elsie asked.
"Some people are harder to hypnotize than others, that's all," Phil said. "I don't know about Tom. But you, for instance, Elsie, would be a good subject, I'm sure."
"Flattery will get you nowhere," Elsie said. "You just hypnotize your brother-in-law." Phil turned back to me.
"All right, brother man, you ready?" he asked.
"Yes, sir, Mr. Cagliostro."
Phil pointed at me. "You just watch out," he said, "I have a feeling you're going to be a good subject."
"That's me," I said.
"Okay." Phil shifted in his chair. "Now everybody get quiet, please. Any distraction will break it up until the actual hypnosis takes place." He leaned forward and held out his forefinger again.
"Look at it," he said to me.
"Fine looking finger," I said. Frank snickered.
"Quiet, please," Phil said. He held the finger about six inches from my eyes. "Look at it," he said.
"Keep looking at it. Don't look at anything else, just my finger."
"Why, what's it gonna do?" I asked.
"Poke you right in the eye if you don't fermez your big fat bouche." Phil jabbed the finger at me and I shut my eyes instinctively.
"All right," Phil said, "open 'em up. Let's try again."
"Yes, sir," I said.
"Now look at the finger. Just the finger. Don't look at anything else. Keep looking at the finger, the finger. I don't want you to look at anything but the finger."
"Your nail is dirty," I said.
Everybody laughed. Phil sank back in his chair with a grimace and pressed his thumb and forefinger to his eyes.
"Like I said," he said, "a lousy subject."
He looked over at Elsie.
"How about it?" he said. "I'm sure I could hypnotize you."
"Uh-uh." Elsie shook her close-cropped head vigorously.
"Let him try, Elsie," Ron said.
"No-o." Elsie glared at him as if he'd suggested something vile.
"Come on, champ," I said to Phil, "let's put me under now."
"You gonna play it straight," he asked, "or you gonna play it for the gallery?"
"I'll be good, sir, Mr. Mesmer, sir."
"You will like..." Phil leaned forward again, then settled back. "Well, let's forget the finger," he said.
"Close your eyes."
"Close my eyes," I said. I did.
"Dark, isn't it?" said Frank.
I opened my eyes. "Not now," I said.
"Will you close your eyes, you clunk," Phil said. I did. I took a deep breath and settled back on the pillow. I could hear the slight breathings and chair-creaking's of the others.
"All right," said Phil, "I want you to listen to me now." I pretended to snore. I heard Elsie's explosive giggle; then I opened my eyes and looked at Phil's disgusted face.
"All right, all right," I promised, "I'll be good." I closed my eyes. "Go ahead," I said, "I'll be good."
"Honest Indian?" Phil enunciated.
"That's pretty strong language to use in the company of these fine women," I said. "However, honest, as you say, Indian."
"All right. Shut your eyes then, you bum."
"Now that's a poor way to win my confidence," I said. "How am I supposed to venerate you when you talk to me like that? Alan Porter doesn't-"
"Will you shut your fat eyes?" Phil interrupted.
"Shut. Shut," I said. "You may fire when griddy, Redley." Phil took a deep and weary breath. "Oh, well," he said. Then he started talking again.
"I want you to pretend you're in a theatre," he said. "An enormous theatre. You're sitting near the front. It's completely black inside."
Across the room I heard Elizabeth's slight, apologetic throat-clearing.
"There's no light in the theatre," Phil went on. "It's completely dark-like black velvet. The walls are covered with black velvet. The seats are all made of black velvet."
"Expensive," I said.
They all laughed. "Oh... shoot," Phil said. I opened my eyes and grinned at him.
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry," I said.
"Oh... the heck you are."
"Yes, I am. I am." I closed my eyes tight. "See? See? I'm back in the theatre again. I'm in the loges. What's playing?"
"You are a son of a b," said Phil.
"Sir," I said, "control. Go ahead. If I don't stay quiet, I give you permission to hit me on the head."
"Don't think I won't," Phil said. "Someone hand me that lamp." He was quiet a moment. Then he said,
"You really want to go on with it?"
"Brother man," I said.
"You..." Phil cleared his throat. "All right," he said, patiently. I won't go into the complete progression; it took too long. It's hard to get serious when you're in a group like that. Especially when Phil and I were so used to heckling each other. I'm afraid I broke up many a moment when he thought he had me. After a while Elsie got bored and went in the kitchen to get food ready. Frank began to talk softly with Anne and direct an occasional, acidulous comment our way. A good hour must have passed and we were still nowhere. I don't know why Phil kept on. He must have felt I was a challenge. At any rate, he wouldn't give up. He kept on with that theatre bit and, after a while, Frank stopped talking and watched and, except for a slight clinking of dishes in the kitchen, there was only the monotonous sound of Phil's voice, talking at me.
"The walls are dark velvet, the floors are covered with dark velvet rugs. It's black inside, absolutely black. Except for one thing. In the whole pitch-black theatre there's only one thing you can see. The letters up on the screen. Tall, thin, white letters on the black, black screen. They spell sleep. Sleep. You're very comfortable, very comfortable. You're just sitting there and looking at the screen, looking, looking at that single word up there. Sleep. Sleep. Sleep."
I'll never know what made it begin to work on me unless it was sheer repetition. I suspect my assurance that I couldn't be hypnotized helped too; an assurance of such illogical magnitude that I took it for granted. I didn't even try to get hypnotized. To quote Elsie-I just played along with the gag.
"You're relaxing," Phil said. "Your feet and ankles are relaxed. Your legs are relaxed, so relaxed. Your hands are limp and heavy. Your arms are relaxed, so relaxed. You're beginning to relax all over. Relax. Relax. You're going to sleep. To sleep. You're going to sleep."
And I was. I started slipping away. By the time I felt the slightest trickle of awareness as to what was happening to me, it was too late. It was as if my mind-or, rather, my volition-were a moth being set into congealing wax. There was a faint fluttering as I tried to escape; but all in vain. I began to feel as I had once when I had an impacted wisdom tooth taken out. The oral surgeon had jabbed a needle into the exposed vein on my left arm. I'd asked him what it was for and he'd said it was to stop excess salivation. I guess that's what they always say so the patient won't be afraid. Because it wasn't for that, it was a fast-acting general anesthetic. The room started weaving around me, everything got watery in front of me, the nurses leaning over me wavered as if I were looking at them through lenses of jelly. And then I woke up; it was that fast. I didn't even realize when I'd lost consciousness. It seemed as if I'd closed my eyes only a second or two. I'd been out cold for forty-five minutes.
It was just like that again. I opened my eyes and saw Phil sitting there grinning at me. I blinked at him.
"What'd I do, doze off?" I asked.
Phil chuckled. I looked around. They were all looking at me in different ways; Frank, curious; Ron, baffled; Elizabeth blank; Elsie half afraid. Anne looked concerned.
"Are you all right, honey?" she asked me.
"Sure. Why?" I looked at her a moment. Then I sat up. "You don't mean to tell me it took?" I said, incredulously.
"Did it ever," she said, her smile only half amused.
"I was hypnotized?"
That seemed to break the tension. Everybody seemed to talk at once.
"I'll be damned," said Frank.
"My goodness," said Elizabeth. Ron shook his head wonderingly.
"Were you really hypnotized?" Elsie asked. There was very little distrust left in her voice.
"I... guess I was," I said.
"You know it," Phil said, unable to stop grinning.
I looked at Anne again. "I really was?" I asked.
"If you weren't, you're the best little actor I ever saw," she said.
"I never saw anything like it," Ron said quietly.
"How do you feel?" Phil asked me and I knew, from the way he said it, it was a loaded question.
"How should I feel?" I asked, suspiciously.
Phil forced down his grin. "A little... hot?" he asked.
Suddenly, I realized that I was hot. I ran my hand over my forehead and rubbed away sweat. I felt as if I'd been sitting in the sun too long.
"What did you do-set fire to me?" I asked.
Phil laughed out loud. "We tried," he said, "but you wouldn't catch." Then he calmly told me that, while I was stretched out like a board between two kitchen chairs, he'd sat on my stomach and run a cigarette lighter flame back and forth along my exposed legs. I just sat there gaping at him.
"Let's have that again," I said.
"That's right," he said, laughing, delighted at his success. I looked over at Anne again.
"This happened?" I asked, weakly. She got up, smiling, and came over to me. Sitting down she put her arm around me.
"You sure are a dandy subject, love," she said. Her voice shook a little when she said it. Ten minutes later we were all sitting around the kitchen table, discussing my hypnotism. I must say it was the first time I'd ever heard an animated discussion in Elsie's house.
"I didn't," I said, laughing.
"You sure did." Anne made an amused sound. "There you were, twelve years old again, telling us about somebody named Joey Ariola who must have been a beast from the way you talked about him."
"Ariola." I shook my head wonderingly. "I'll be damned. I'd forgotten all about him."
"You just thought you'd forgotten," Phil said.
"Oh... I don't believe anybody can remember that far back," Elsie said. "He was just making it up or something."
"He could go back a lot farther than that," Phil told her. "There are authenticated cases where subjects go back to prenatal days."
"To what?"
"To before they were born."
"Oh..." Elsie turned her head halfway to the side again. Now that the vision of me stretched calcified between two of her kitchen chairs was beginning to fade, she was regaining dissent.
"That's right," Phil said. "And there's Bridey Murphy."
"Who?" asked Elsie.
"A woman who, under hypnosis, claims she was an Irish girl in her previous life."
"Oh... that's silly," Elsie said. Everybody was quiet for a moment and Elsie looked up at the clock. She shrugged at Phil.
"It's not time yet," Phil said.
"Time for what?" I asked.
"You'll see," Phil told me.
Elsie got up and went over to the stove. "Who wants more coffee?" she asked. I looked at Phil a moment longer, then let it go.
"What else did I say when I was-I mean when I thought I was twelve again?" I asked Anne. She smiled and shook her head. "Oh... all sorts of things," she said. "About your father and-your mother. About a bike you wanted that had a foxtail on the handlebars."
"Oh, my God, yes," I said, delighted at the sudden recollection. "I remember that. Lord, how I wanted that bike."
"I wanted something else when I was twelve," said Frank.
I noticed how Elizabeth looked down at her coffee, her pale red lips pressed together. Everything about Elizabeth was pale; the shade of her lipstick, the blond of her hair, the colour of her skin. She seemed, in a way, to be partially vanished.
"I wasn't after any bike at twelve," Frank said.
"Man, we know what you were after," I said, trying to make it sound like the joke that Frank had not intended it to be. "What else did I talk about?" I asked Anne before Frank could say any more. I noticed Ron looking up at the clock now, then glancing over at Phil. Phil pressed down a grin-as did Frank. Elsie came back to the table and put down another plate of little glazed cakes.
"Well, I don't think it's going to happen," she said. "It's already eleven."
"What's that?" I asked.
"Let's see," Anne said as if I hadn't spoken, "you talked about your sister and-about your room. About your dog."
For a second I remembered Corky and the way he had of putting his old shaggy head on my knees and staring at me.
"What's the joke?" I asked, because there was one obviously. "Why are you all looking like cats who swallowed the mice?"
At which point I took off my left shoe and put it into the refrigerator. I turned to face their explosion of laughter. For a moment I actually didn't know what they were laughing about. Then, suddenly, I realized what I'd just done. I opened the refrigerator and peered in at my dark shoe placed neatly beside a covered bowl of peas.
"What'd you do that for?" Phil asked, innocently.
"I don't know," I said. "I-just wanted to, I guess. Why shouldn't-?" I stopped abruptly and looked at Phil accusingly. "You crumb, you," I said, "you gave me a post-hypnotic command." Phil grinned, returned to glory again.
"He told you," Elsie declared. "You knew just what you were doing."
"No, I didn't," I said.
"You did so," said Elsie, pettishly.
"Say," said Frank, "what if Tom was a girl and you gave her the post-hypnotic command to-oh, well, never mind, my wife doesn't like that kind of talk. Do you, Lizzie old girl?"
"He's always making fun of me," she answered with attempted lightness. Her smile was pale too.
"I hope you didn't give me any other post-hypnotic suggestions, you idiot," I said. Phil shook his head with a smile.
"Nope," he said, "that's all, brother man. It's over." Famous last words.