7
There I was, walking through the night, but even with my lighter load, the feeling of lightness had slipped away. Carrying only my small backpack, containing everything that was mine, I walked through the night, walking south, down the nearest road, not because I wanted to go in that direction, but because that was the road I was already on. I felt I couldn’t stop moving, that I had to keep moving. I felt that if I didn’t keep moving I’d fall, like a child on a bicycle.
I was walking past gas stations and fast-food outlets, walking and turning and putting out my thumb, when a car passed. And the cars did pass, and they didn’t stop, and after a while I found myself walking through a temporary city, a temporary-looking city, built with trailers and aluminum siding, and the parking lots weren’t paved. There were bars and stores and trucks parked at these establishments but no sense of solidity. I walked into a go-go nightclub to see if I could find someone going my way and maybe get a drink of water. I wanted to save my money and since just to sit in a chair cost money I walked back out into the night and the temporary town gave way to cleared land, newly plowed and leveled earth, drained of color and ready for development, ready for money to be made. I walked past irrigation ditches and rows of trees and then, like a nomad coming to a palm oasis, I came to an area of palm trees. Palm trees and green grass. Even in the night I could see it was green. The houses weren’t houses exactly, but they were meant to be lived in. They were all model homes, extremely suburban model townhomes, made to look like chalets, and the streets were winding, not because they had to be, but because it was someone’s vision. This was a manufactured town. A faux town. It was also deserted, which was good for me because now I could sleep. I found an area of sand, a children’s play area near some green grass, and because I wanted to stay dry, I lay in the sand, away from the sprinklers that seemed to go on at irregular intervals. I lay in the sand waiting to fall into a deep deep sleep because soon it would be morning.
And then it was morning.
I left the children’s playground before the security guards would make their rounds, and continued walking. I was headed in a definite direction. I needed a direction and I had it. And this feeling of direction I had was confirmed, I thought, when I walked to the highway and the first vehicle driving along the road, or almost the first vehicle, a truck with a Mexican driver, gave me a ride to Phoenix, Arizona.
Phoenix was named after a place named after a bird that rises from the ashes, and I found a quiet corner at a Winchell’s coffee shop, where I sat over coffee near a group of old men, the old men of Phoenix, who were talking about dead friends and dying friends, and I sat there, blending in with the bright unobtrusive surroundings.
It seemed strange to me that whenever I thought of Anne I automatically felt despair. And the strange thing was, I felt the most despair when I thought of our happiest moments. You’d think that the happy moments would have engendered pleasant feelings, but instead I felt almost dead.
When I say “almost dead” I mean that, although I’d rid myself of some possessions, I needed to get rid of more, needed to rid myself of the habit of being what I was. Since I knew about a hypnotist who lived in Phoenix, Arizona, and since I was now in Phoenix, Arizona, I went to see this hypnotist. I didn’t have an appointment, I just went to the man’s house. I found the address in the telephone book and walked past the cacti in his front yard and stood at his screen door, listening. I could hear a television show going on inside. It was Bewitched, a show in which Darrin, the husband, wants Samantha, the witch, his wife, to renounce her magical abilities. She doesn’t totally understand why he would want her to keep these powers, which are completely natural to her, in check. But she was willing to try, willing to accommodate him, and she was trying. Then a commercial came on and I was thinking I should knock on the door because the man would know, by the sounds of the birds, or the absence of the sounds of the birds, or some sense perception I wasn’t privy to, that I was standing on the other side of the screen.
So I knocked, and the man called out for me to come in. He was sitting in a wheelchair and I squatted beside him and we started talking. He was what I would have called a kindly old man, and he asked me what I wanted. I didn’t tell him about Anne, but I told him I wanted some direction. “There are a lot of directions,” he said. “But if you’re standing on the North Pole there’s only one.” He showed me his collection of carved animals and said that I wasn’t an Indian. “But,” he said, “if you want to be hypnotized, come back in an hour.”
So I went back in an hour, not to his house, but next door, to his small office. He greeted me and indicated that I should sit in a comfortable chair facing the window. He wheeled his wheelchair opposite me so that as I looked out, the window framed his head, and while he was talking he was asking me what I wanted him to talk about. I was going to tell him that I wanted him to talk about the unconscious part of my mind. I was going to tell him that I thought my unconscious mind might have something to tell me. I was going to tell him that I was afraid of the unconscious mind, afraid of the loss of consciousness, but he kept talking.
He was talking about something, very slowly, saying things that I was listening to, and hearing, and watching. The man’s head was shifting positions in front of the window and I began feeling my own head, not shifting, but wondering, was I moving my head becauses the man was, or was the man moving because I was. The window also seemed to be moving, or vibrating, and I was thinking about the silhouette of the man’s head touching the edges of the window, and also about the time, years ago, at a place called The Chuck Wagon.
I’d been with Anne, on a vacation. We’d gone to a theater or club above a restaurant called The Chuck Wagon, where a hypnotist named Dr. Dean put on a kind of show, an exhibition of hypnotic phenomena. Because I wanted to experience hypnosis, when Dr. Dean asked for volunteers, I went up on the stage with all the other people, sat in a chair in a row and I tried to see Anne in the audience, but it was dark and the lights were shining in my eyes. Dr. Dean began talking, not to the volunteers, but to the audience. He was facing the volunteers, moving his arms up and down, in his black suit, moving his arms and telling the audience what the people on stage were supposed to do, which was to breathe, which they all did. The people on stage began dropping off. He was telling them to go to sleep. And people were doing it. But I wasn’t doing it. I wanted to. Some part of me wanted to drop right off with the rest of them, to believe that I could, but it wasn’t happening. But I wanted it to happen. So what I did was fake it. I was good at pretending and so I pretended it happened. I relaxed my head like the man in front of me and let it fall to my chest. But because I wasn’t really sleeping I had to keep watching the man in front of me to see if I was doing whatever it was they were all doing, to see if I was doing it right. It was like looking in a mirror. I could see myself only when I was looking at myself. The minute I turned away …
Dr. Dean is saying, “Go down, down, all the way down.” And that’s what I am trying to do. I’m trying to do that but there’s a gulf between wanting and doing, and on one side are the cliffs of wanting and on the other side are the cliffs of doing, and I’m in the middle, I’m the river, except I’m not flowing, I’m just sitting there. I’m not bridging that gulf. And Dr. Dean knows that. He begins pointing to some of the volunteers, telling them to go back to their seats. “You and you and you.” And then he points to me. He pauses. “You almost made it.”