Hypnotizable

Looking for Answers

The next morning, I decided there was nothing better than returning to the scene of the crime. Dr. Lawson answered my email right away, and he had an opening. I went to see him that afternoon.

Olivia had sent me an email too. She said she'd been trying to call me and wanted to meet up. Explaining things would be too hard, so I put off answering.

When I showed up at Dr. Lawson's office, everything was ready. I'd taken the SIM card out of my phone and left it behind, then put in a new battery. The phone was carefully hidden in my bag. It wasn't going to take any calls, but it was already recording everything.

When he came to take me in, I avoided meeting his eyes for a moment, afraid he might be able to tell something was up. I had to will myself to act naturally.

"I must have liked it so much I wanted to come back." I tried to keep the words light, like they were well under half-serious. He gave me a look like he already suspected there was something else.

"Well," he said, "some more work with your phobia certainly wouldn't hurt."

I nodded. By now, I knew the drill. I put my bag on the floor and leaned back in the chair, staring at that weird mask on the wall. It seemed to have a different expression than before, like it was preoccupied with something no one else could know.

The plan was to fight off getting hypnotized, though at this point I wasn't especially hopeful about that. His voice droned on the same as before. "Relax....Be calm....Just feel your breathing...."

To distract myself, I kept clenching and unclenching the muscles in my legs. Instead of listening to his voice, I tried to concentrate on the traffic noise outside the window. Engines and occasional sirens weren't exactly a relaxing sound.

For a while, it seemed to work. I closed my eyes, wondering if he could tell I wasn't really hypnotized, and waited for what would happen next. But then his voice got harder to ignore, and the traffic noise started to sound like it was coming from farther and farther in the distance. My awareness was starting to slip away.

I tried to fight it, but not all that hard. Maybe I was afraid even my most desperate efforts wouldn't be enough. Slowly, then quickly, I gave way and sank into a deep trance.

Time went by, a fair bit of time. Finally I opened my eyes and sat there blinking, breathing slowly at first and then harder. There was nothing I could remember, nothing at all.

"So," he said. "It looks like there are some more issues we'd better deal with."

I didn't meet his eyes.

"Do you remember what just happened?" he said.

I stared at the wall, wondering whether to grab my bag and run out. Then I could check the recording afterwards.

"Please tell me," he said. "Do you remember?"

Barely enough for him to see, I shook my head.

"People who are extremely hypnotizable sometimes have this sort of amnesia," he said. "Even when it hasn't been specifically suggested. Well, you told me some strange things have been happening to you lately. You've been having some disturbing experiences. Including some gaps in your memory."

Gap after gap, like the one that had just happened right here. The burning question was whether I'd told him I was recording the session. He didn't mention it.

"There's plenty of time," he said. "We can try hypnotizing you again, and concentrate on helping you uncover some memories. They're recent enough they're almost certainly still there."

He sounded sincere. He really sounded like he wanted to help. But I still didn't trust him. If he was behind everything, the last thing I wanted was to keep getting hypnotized by him.