“I gave you the recorder. You’ve got everything you need.”
“Not enough to prove that Ridley’s confession was anything close to legitimate.”
“I thought that was irrelevant to you. That you — to be absolutely clear — didn’t care.”
Mark said, “I can’t get at the truth of Ridley in an hour. I should be able to with you.”
It could have been a confusing statement, but she followed. “You want to be hypnotized?”
Mark nodded.
“This will tell you, what, whether I’m a fraud?”
“Whether I should believe that video confession of Ridley’s was anything close to legitimate.”
“It won’t tell you that,” she said. “You’ll learn about yourself, not about me. But I get your point nonetheless.”
“You’re from here,” Mark said. “Not Garrison, but close by. How did you come to do what you do? It’s a strange profession for an honest person to pursue.”
“You’re very wrong about that. There are many honest hypnotists. Some frauds, sure. But I suspect there are fewer frauds in hypnosis than there are in banking or real estate. And I’m quite confident there are more in politics.”
“How did you come to do what you do?” he repeated.
“My older sister struggled with alcoholism. Badly. She turned to a hypnotist, and everyone else thought she had lost her mind and was throwing away money. It worked. I was fascinated by that. I’d seen the wreckage of her life, and the idea that this thing had worked, and so effectively... it fascinated me. I read; I studied. I took classes.” She paused, and her eyes drifted, which was unusual for her. “There was another reason too.”
“What was that?”
She refocused on him. “There are always skeptics. Every day, I meet someone who doesn’t believe in me. In what I do. People like you. The personal challenge of that, the emotional challenge? I’ve learned to embrace it. Now, I could provide references, you could interview people about me to your heart’s content, you could go out and do your fact-checking work, but that’s not going to mean anything to you, is it? You need to feel things to believe in them. Every skeptic must. You put faith only in your own judgments, your own experiences.”
He thought of his mother with the dyed braids and brown contacts and self-tanning lotion, dream catchers scattered about.
“Yes, I put more stock in my judgment than in anyone else’s.”
She nodded. “That’s an issue you’re going to need to work on for the long haul, isn’t it? But no matter. We can conduct trance. I think if we—”
“We’ll conduct it just like Ridley’s confession.” Mark held out his phone. “We’re going to record it with this, not your equipment. And we’re going after memories, just like you did with him.”
“What memories, Mark?”
“How I got in that cave.”
She gave another of those measured, steady nods, but he could see intrigue in her eyes. “All right. We can do that. Come on in.”
He stepped over the threshold.
“Take the couch, please,” she said, and then she pulled a straight-backed chair close to him. He sat on the couch and tried to look relaxed, indifferent, crossing one leg over the other and folding his arms over his chest. She reached out and tapped his ankle.
“Let’s try a different posture. Something not so defensive. You’re guarding yourself.”
He put both feet flat on the floor and moved his hands to his sides and was amazed at how instantly vulnerable he felt.
“You’re going to have to be receptive,” she said. “Your pursuit right now seems to be due to sheer skepticism. You want me to prove that I can hypnotize you. I’d encourage you to think deeper. A stage hypnotist could hypnotize you, but it wouldn’t mean that person would be able to ascertain anything of value in working with Ridley Barnes. You want to get at your memories of that day, correct? The day you were hurt.”
“The day I was attacked.”
“And did that not hurt you?”
Mark wet his lips and gave a grudging nod.
“Can we vocalize that, please?”
“Yes, it hurt me,” he said, and the admission was entirely unpleasant. Try, he told himself, you’ve got to try. Think about Lauren, damn it. What she said you couldn’t do. Do not show this woman scorn or contempt, and do not rule out the chance of something legitimate here.
He was in his most receptive mood when Julianne said, “Can you give those emotions a shape?”
“Excuse me?”
“Tell me what shape they have. Those feelings, those hurts. What shape?”
He knew then that it wouldn’t work. Not on him. “I do not have a shape for my emotions,” he said.
“Then we’ll start with a box,” she answered, unfazed. “I think that’s a fine shape for your emotions, Mark. I want you to imagine a box in the center of the room.”
Lauren, baby, I’m trying, I really am, but this...
“Right there where the light goes through the shadow, do you see that?” Julianne said.
“Yes.”
“Good. Imagine the box. When you’re ready, I want you to describe it for me.”
He stared at the place where the light met the shadow, and he tried like hell to imagine a box, to imagine there was anything there but weathered floorboards. He couldn’t, but he didn’t want to admit that, so he said, “It’s wooden,” simply because the floorboards were wood and that was the easiest visual to conjure up.
“What kind of wood?”
“Older,” he said. He still wasn’t visualizing anything. He just wanted to have an answer.
“A large box? Like a chest?”
“No.” He wasn’t sure why he sounded so damn confident about that, considering he was making it all up on the fly.
“So what size is it?”
“Um... maybe about a cigar-box size,” he said, and there was a flicker of an image then, neither real nor imagined, just some spark in the synapses that gave him a vague sense of the thing that he was attempting to describe to appease her. He understood what a cigar box was, of course, he could picture that, and so the image flickered through and was gone and the empty floor remained.
“Keep looking at it,” Julianne said. Her voice had gone lower and softer and he squinted at the floor intently and then thought of how he must look and felt torn between a desire to call the whole thing off and a desire to laugh wildly. Julianne’s voice came again, though, saying, “The box needs to hold all of your focus. Really try. I know it’s not easy, but I can see how hard you are trying. That is very good. That is excellent. Your focus is impressive. Keep your attention out there in the room. There’s a box on the floor, and it is old, and it is made of wood, and it is a cigar box, maybe, or at least it is of that size. Focus on it. Focus.”
Mark stared at the patch of light on the floor trying to imagine a cigar box and thought, This is going to take a while.
It did. There were times when he felt vaguely detached and removed, times when answering questions about an imaginary box seemed important, but then self-awareness would return and jar him, or his mind would simply wander, and thoughts of Florida and Jeff London would intrude, or images of Ridley Barnes on the video, speaking of the dark man. He’d say this for Julianne Grossman — she was patient. She was incredibly patient. Over and over she asked meaningless, silly questions and listened to his meaningless, silly answers, and not once did her energy diminish. She managed to sound fascinated by his descriptions of the stupid damn box, and her voice came on and on in waves that rose and fell and broke over him and then washed back across him, and he was impressed by both her steadiness and her bearing, because it couldn’t be easy. He knew that it was not easy. He’d conducted a lot of interviews. Controlling your focus and emotions was hard enough, but to keep that cadence, that rise and fall, rise and fall, the vocal equivalent of rocking a child, was impressive. He was curious how she did it and how much practice it took and wondered if she was aware of her breathing or if that became natural. She never took a breath at the wrong time, and he thought that was probably critical. Any disruption would break the spell. Although of course there was no spell, no trance. No hypnosis. He’d always been skeptical that it would work on him. He believed that it worked in some situations, the science and evidence seemed undeniable, but it wasn’t for him.