Chapter 7

At home again, after having been dropped off by the Uber, Brenda felt somehow lighter. As she thought about it, she decided that Rebecca had been unnecessarily mysterious, keeping some of the details of their session to herself.

And how weird was it that she’d completely forgotten about going out with Wade last year! They’d spent so much time together. She didn’t know much about psychiatry or psychology, but wasn’t that an indication that you were suppressing a memory because it bothered you? She’d have to ask Rebecca, who’d said she might call again.

She shrugged and decided not to worry about it now, because she was feeling good. Since Marie was on her mind, she sat down and wrote her a long letter, bringing her up to date on what had been happening in her life. She’d mail it Monday, because she needed to buy the correct stamps at the post office.

Come Monday morning, she was at work bright and early, so she could get organized. She thought perhaps she ought to prepare a list of suggested orders based on her log. She smiled as she mentally crossed off the ‘brown barnwood’ and ‘forest glade’ items from the list. Rebecca had told her those were from people playing a joke on her. She wondered if other new hires had had similar jokes played on them as a kind of hazing ritual. Maybe she’d ask during lunch break.

She had one man come up to her counter during the early afternoon and ask to see back-splash tiles in the pattern ‘brown barnwood’. Brenda looked puzzled, and told him that it was no longer produced. He looked like he’d been slapped, and asked if she was sure. She told him yes, she was positive. He walked away looking like he didn’t know what to do next. A similar thing happened the next day, but the customer was looking for vinyl tile flooring in the pattern ‘forest glade’. She was surprised at how disappointed he looked.

Wednesday afternoon, Brenda found a voicemail on her phone from Rebecca, asking if she was able to come in for a short while after work. Brenda had nothing planned, so she left a message saying she could probably be there by six-thirty.

She had her own car, of course, because she’d driven it to work, but it was the end of the day and parking spaces were more easily found. She came upon one a block away and was at the office just before she’d said she’d be there.

“Oh, wonderful, Brenda, you’re here. I’m glad you were able to make it. Please come in.” They again entered the room they’d used last time. It felt familiar now.

Once they were seated, Rebecca took a few moments to gather herself, then spoke. “Brenda, I’m not going to hypnotize you unless you want me to. You can decide later, just stop me and ask me to put you under. But for now I think it’s important that you hear and understand what has happened to you. I’m pretty sure it will upset you. And you may not agree with the way I decided to handle it, but we can talk about it.

“Brenda, you just didn’t decide to erase Wade Jefferson from your life that last time you saw him. He hypnotized you and planted suggestions that you would forget all about him, that you wouldn’t remember having gone out with him or even having met him. You’d discard all his letters and photos, everything that connected him to you. That’s why you couldn’t recall him at all.

“Because it was part of a larger depraved plan that he built for vengeance against you. He planted a trigger in your mind, that purple field mice thing, and whenever you heard it, you’d have to do what he asked. He was clever, he only asked you to do things you were already comfortable doing, and he tied it to your desire to make people happy -- we might want to talk about that need at a later time.

“So those other two patterns you could never find? Those were specific triggers that would encourage you to make the asker happy by performing specific sexual acts for each pattern.”

Brenda had pushed herself back into her chair, as if trying to distance herself from what she was hearing. Her unconscious knew what she was required to do, but her conscious mind had been unaware.

“What do you mean? What sexual acts? What happened?”

“If I understand this fully, a request for ‘brown barnwood’ would have you bring the customer to one of the sample kitchens or bathrooms and perform oral sex on them. And a request for ‘forest glade’ would induce you to have intercourse with them. Apparently Wade passed your work location, your name and the trigger phrases on to random people he’d meet.”

“No!” Brenda cried. “I’d never do that, I’m no slut.”

“No, you’re not, Brenda, and of course you’d never do that on your own. What was clever about Wade’s sick plan was that he knew that. So he tied it to one of your needs, one that he’d recognized -- the need to make people happy, to not disappoint them. So by convincing you that this would make these particular people happy, you accepted it, reluctantly.

“I think that’s why you were so ill at ease, so bothered by something you couldn’t put your finger on. You knew it was wrong and you shouldn’t be doing it, but he overrode your hesitation, saying it would make people happy and that you would feel that as soon as you’d finished. And he made you forget it right after it happened, so you wouldn’t worry about it too much. It was only because you wrote the patterns down that it stuck in your memory.”

“This is awful, disgusting,” cried Brenda. “How could I have done that? How could he have made me? I thought hypnosis didn’t allow you to do things that were against your moral code!”

“It doesn’t, as a rule. If somehow you are persuaded to do something because someone glibly convinces you it’s not really unethical or immoral, your mind still knows something’s off and it leaves those traces we talked about, and sometimes those can lead to a psychotic break. That might have happened in your case, but we found it in time.

“He was clever about it and tied those specific actions to your need to make people happy because it makes you feel fulfilled. That was enough to overcome your natural hesitation to do those things.

“I don’t know you that well, but I’d be willing to guess that sex feels natural to you, that you don’t have any particular shame or religious hangups about sex. If you had, it would have been much harder, maybe impossible for him to compel you to do that.”

“I’m so angry right now,” wailed Brenda. “How could he? What right did he have to do that? I want to have him arrested, send him to jail for a really long time, so he can’t ever do that to any other woman!”

“Yeah, I feel that, too. But it leads to the second half of this uncomfortable conversation. As a clinical psychologist I’ve had occasion to testify for or against people. Not my own patients, of course, but as an expert who examines clinical records of a person accused, or of a victim. So I’ve seen the judicial process from the inside, and what happens when lawyers are trying to protect their clients. It’s not pretty, and it doesn’t have much to do with justice.

“The hard thing here would be convincing a jury that he hypnotized you into doing these things. There is no physical evidence, none at all. And short of finding a tape recording of him actually performing the hypnosis on you, it’s your word against his. I don’t think there is any recording. So what it will come down to is his lawyers convincing the jury that you’re just a cheap tramp who gets her kicks from having sex with random people at work.

“I can see you getting worked up, Brenda. You’re not that. We know what he did to you. We just can’t prove it in court. You’ll have to trust me on this, I’ve seen it happen and I’ve seen what it does to the innocent who are painted to appear guilty.

“Filing an official complaint against him won’t work, and you’ll suffer the consequences. In a twisted way it would allow him to win, because he’d wind up vindicated in the eyes of the public and you’d be painted as a spiteful ex-girlfriend.”

Brenda was squirming in her chair, feeling angry and impotent. Rebecca repositioned herself so she was on the front of her seat, leaning forward towards Brenda.

“Just because I said an official complaint would be futile, it doesn’t mean that there’s nothing that can be done. I understand how furious you are now and how helpless you feel. I might be able to help you come to terms with that, if you’ll let me. But a little later.

“I told you I’d seen similar things before, and the justice system was unable to help. All clinical professionals run across it frequently. Most of the time there’s little we can do, mostly because we have ethical constraints, commitments that we make to patients. So we can’t intervene. As much as I’d like to sometimes, I can’t put out a hit on someone who’s a truly evil person. And I can’t send a couple of guys named Big Vinny and Jersey Fats to work him over and put him in the hospital as a subtle message. I can dream about it, but that’s as far as it goes.

“But sometimes I am willing to stretch my ethics for the greater public good. Like I did with Wade.”

Brenda raised her eyes.

“We meet people in this business -- and that includes the stage hypnosis stuff, too -- with a variety of professions and interests. Sometimes they owe me a favor, or they want me to owe them a favor. So it wasn’t very hard to have someone locate your Wade Jefferson. Did you know he lived here in town? And it wasn’t hard to find out where he likes to spend his time, what he likes to do.

“So it was perhaps not quite an accident that I happened to be having a drink in his favorite bar when he dropped in after work last night. And perhaps I was a bit flirty, maybe thinking about having a little mid-week fling, and was open when he offered to buy me a drink and started talking about himself.