Chapter 6

Brenda slept later than usual, feeling drained. Probably more alcohol than she was used to. She used to be able to party hard in college, then still function the next day, but maybe that changed as you got older, or perhaps she was just out of practice.

She felt better after a shower and some coffee. In the back of her mind, there was something she knew she was supposed to do? Was it laundry? No, that wasn’t due yet. Grocery shopping? She’d stopped after work on Thursday and picked up the few things she was low on, so that wasn’t it.

It was nagging at her. It was something from yesterday. No, from last night. She found her purse and poked around inside it, finally noticing the card.

She looked at it. It was a business card, but not for “The Amazing Rebecca”, it was for “Rebecca Montclair, Ph.D., Clinical Psychologist.” She turned it over.

Brenda --

Please call me on my private line. Important! 555-8713

-- R

She tried to recall some of the events of the last evening. She remembered meeting her crew and some of the things they’d done before she was cajoled into going up on stage, but the events after it were hazy, incomplete. She also recalled a vague sense of unease, but she couldn’t localize it.

Why would Rebecca, the stage hypnotist, want to talk to her? Did she also send cards to the other volunteers? There was another volunteer, she remembered, from an adjoining table, and she didn’t remember the waiter bringing a card to that table afterwards.

She shrugged. I suppose the only way to find out is to call. Maybe she’d decided I’m crazy and need immediate therapy. I wouldn’t be surprised, given the weird way I’ve been feeling lately.

Brenda poured a second cup of coffee, pulled out her phone and dialed the number.

When a voice answered, she said, “Good morning, Rebecca, -- I guess I should say Dr. Montclair -- this is Brenda from the club last night. You sent me your card and asked me to call you. I hope this isn’t too early.”

“Rebecca is fine, and no, it’s not too early, Brenda. I’ve been up for hours. Thank you for calling. I was a little ... concerned at the reaction you had to hypnosis last night, and I wanted to follow up.”

“My reaction? What do you mean?”

“You became very stressed, upset, at certain of the suggestions I planted in you. It doesn’t normally cause that kind of a response. In fact, I’ve only ever seen it once before, and it has me a bit troubled.”

“I don’t understand. What kind of a response did you see? I don’t remember.”

“And that’s part of my concern. Look, Brenda, I’m not really comfortable discussing this at a distance, over the phone. Would you have a little time to come to my office, perhaps later today, to talk about it? No charge, of course. Maybe I can explain it better in person.”

“Now you have me a little worried, Doctor ... I mean, Rebecca.”

“That wasn’t my intent, Brenda. I just want to make sure I’m not overreacting to something I may have misinterpreted. It’s not something I wanted to get into on stage last night, better done just the two of us. If it’s nothing, then no harm done. It it turns out to be something, then we can figure out how to fix it.”

“I’m still confused, but I guess I could spend an hour. What time works for you?”

“Two o’clock, perhaps? And if you’re not comfortable coming alone, you’re welcome to bring a friend or relative along, too.”

“I’ll think about it. Two’s okay for me.”

“Excellent. My office address is on the card. Just ring the buzzer. Two o’clock, Brenda.”

Brenda ended the call, feeling no better than she had earlier. This sounded very mysterious. Oh, well, she’d find out later.

In the end, she decided that she wouldn’t bring along a friend. She thought about asking Martha or Randi to accompany her, but what if it turned out that Rebecca had determined she was nuts or something. Then the story would be all over O’Brien’s by Monday. She’d go alone and deal with it as best she could.

She ate lunch and decided that an Uber would be the best option, rather than having to struggle to find a place to park and perhaps wind up being late as a result.

So a little before two the car stopped in front of the building on Second Street. It looked to be filled with small business and professional offices. She found the correct buzzer and was admitted after saying “It’s Brenda” to the intercom.

The elevator took her to the third floor, and the office was directly across from the elevator. Before she could knock, the door opened and Rebecca stood there, her hand outstretched. She was dressed slightly less flamboyantly than at the club last night.

“I’m glad you could make it, Brenda, Please come in. Would you like some tea or coffee?”

Brenda declined, slightly nervous, but Rebecca was making an effort to put her at ease.

“C’mon in to my office. The seating’s more comfortable there.” Inside, Brenda found that it was a pleasant room, muted colors, not too busy, nothing to distract people from focusing on one another.

Rebecca got herself settled and spent a moment apparently trying to find the correct opening. Brenda wasn’t sure what to say, so she just waited.

Rebecca cleared her throat. “I think I mentioned at the show last night that I’ve been doing hypnosis for a long time. I taught myself before I ever had any professional training in hypnosis, so I’ve seen both sides, so to speak. Hypnosis, when it’s done professionally, is seldom harmful, and there are warning signs you can look for. So when I do these shows I’m always careful to check for responses which are ... out of the norm.

“Mostly they hardly ever occur. People just do silly things, then they wake up feeling refreshed and happy. Nobody gets hurt. But it’s possible for a hypnotist to cause people to do things that can cause trauma, discord in a subject. Sometimes it takes a while to make itself known. There are often signs that manifest themselves when that starts to happen. Sometimes a subject will start to feel uneasy or nervous, and they don’t know why. It may happen when they encounter a particular trigger event, maybe a situation or a phrase, a sound, a smell.

“When I put you under last night -- you may not remember this -- I suggested that you would forget my name while we were talking, and that you’d start tap dancing when I said a phrase, and stop dancing when I said another.

“And that’s just what happened. Except that as we got further into it, it obviously started to upset you. You started stuttering, couldn’t finish a sentence, and you started crying.”

Brenda looked shocked. “I did? I don’t remember at all.”

“I know. You were hypnotized, so you weren’t aware of it. But I saw it. It reminded me of something, and I knew I had to stop it right away. So I had you sit down, and I whispered a suggestion to you that you would become relaxed and peaceful, calm and happy. I went on to the next volunteer.”

Rebecca cleared her throat again. “It was a very specific reaction that you had. I mentioned that I’d only ever seen it once before, with a patient, and in that case, when we looked into it more deeply, we found that someone had planted some hypnotic suggestions in her, including that she would forget that it had happened.

“It was a person, someone she thought was a friend, who wanted this woman out of the way, because she thought she was a rival. It caused a significant amount of psychological damage, which we were finally able to fix, but it could have led to a psychotic break if it hadn’t been discovered.”

“Is that what you think happened to me?” asked Brenda.

“I’m not sure, Brenda. Your reaction was so similar to this other patient that it struck me hard, almost made me stop the show. But reactions can have a number of causes, some benign. Maybe you secretly hated tap dancing and your being made to do it on stage brought up some old wounds.” Rebecca smiled.

“That’s what I meant when I said that I might be misinterpreting it. I need to make sure it’s not something bad. Would you be willing to humor me and spend some time checking this out?”

“I suppose it’s better to know that kind of thing than not,” said Brenda.

“Great! Okay, let’s start with some simple questions. How’s your state of mind been lately? Do you feel worried about something, even if you can’t figure out what it is? Do you feel vaguely uneasy in your everyday life? Do you feel like you’ve forgotten things that you should remember? Those are kind of vague questions, but I’m leaving them open-ended. Think about it for a minute.”

Rebecca reached over and took a sip from a glass of water on a tray. She made a motion toward an empty glass, asking if Brenda would like one. Brenda nodded.

With the glass in her hand, Brenda stared at the wall for a long while.

“I’m not sure how accurate my memory is,” she said finally. “I sometimes feel like there are things I should be remembering, certain people, for example, and I just can’t get my hands around their face or their name. Y’know, that feeling you get when you see someone on the street and you’re pretty sure you know them, but you can’t recall from where, or their name, like that?

“And sometimes I feel like I’ve lost parts of my day, like I can’t remember what happened for the last twenty minutes or so. That seems to happen a lot recently, and it bothers me. ‘Cause most of the time I can remember everything. So, yeah, that’s been making me uneasy.”

“And you never come up with their name?” asked Rebecca.

“No, not really. It’s like it’s right on the tip of my tongue, but I just can’t grab it.”

“Tell me about your work, Brenda. What do you do?”

Brenda described O’Brien’s and her function there. She said she’d been surprised to find that she liked working there, that she was good at it, and that people seemed to respond to her, and she was able to make them happy by finding ways for them to build what they wanted within their budget. She hadn’t realized how fulfilling that would be.

“Is it mostly at work that you have these feelings of forgetting faces, losing track of time?”

Brenda nodded. “Yeah, almost always, I think.”

Rebecca stared out the curtained windows for some time. Finally she turned, facing Brenda. “It’s almost enough to convince me, but not quite.”

“To convince you of what?”

“That someone’s messing with you. I don’t have any of the details because you don’t have any of the details. That’s either because there aren’t any details to be had, because you’re having quite normal bouts of forgetfulness. We all get them.

“Or else it means that someone has embedded suggestions in your mind that you will forget certain people, names, events. That could be what’s causing you your uneasiness, because your mind knows that there are things you should be remembering.

“Look, would you be willing to allow me to hypnotize you again, this time in a clinical setting, which allows for a deeper trance -- lousy, misleading term, but it’s the one people recognize. If you were hyper-focused, we might be able to pull out some of the details your mind is blocking out. If it is.”

Brenda sat up and thought about it. She wasn’t sure how she felt about psychologists and psychiatrists. They made her a little nervous. On the other hand, she really hadn’t been feeling right the past few weeks and it was bothering her.

“All right. I’ll try. I don’t know what you expect to find, but go ahead.”

“Thanks, Brenda. Give me a moment.” She pulled the drapes closed, leaving the room very dim, full of shadows, with one light on in the corner.

She pulled her chair closer to Brenda’s. Brenda had expected Rebecca to pull out a pocket watch on a chain, or perhaps a necklace with a bauble, and swing them slowly in front of her, like in the movies.

Instead, she held up a simple No. 2 pencil with the eraser pointing up, and moved it slowly back and forth in an arc. “All right, Brenda. Empty your mind and try to focus on the eraser, watching it as it moves. Keep following it, and as you do you’ll feel all your concentration pointed at the eraser as it moves. All the other sounds in the room and outside will fade away, because all your focus is now on the eraser.”

She continued, in a slow, even cadence, and Brenda found it very soothing, comforting to listen to her voice. She wasn’t aware of when she finally fell asleep.

Nor was she aware of how long she had been out. The last thing she was aware of was Rebecca’s voice saying, “ ... and three, and now you’re awake. You are completely rested and calm, as if you had awakened from a nap. How do you feel, Brenda?”

“Me? Oh, I feel fine. How long was I out? I’m sorry I dropped off, I must have been tireder than I thought.”

Rebecca looked distracted, upset. Had Brenda said something that offended her? She couldn’t recall, and she started to worry about it.

“Brenda ... Brenda, this is very serious. I was able to dig in while you were under, and I pulled out some details that I found very disturbing. You would, too, if you knew what they were. There is someone in your life who has given you suggestions, which are kicked off by trigger phrases. And those triggers cause you to do certain things in the belief that you are performing a public service. Some part of your mind knows that this isn’t right, and I believe that’s what’s causing the unease you’ve been feeling. No, wait, I’m not going to tell you yet, because it would upset you and it would prevent us from finding a fix for this.”

Rebecca took a long drink of water, then looked at Brenda again. “Brenda, do you know anyone in your recent life, the past two or three years, perhaps, who said they were proficient with hypnosis?”