The marquee said Cameron Red's Hypnotic Show and he thought: Well, I don't believe hypnotism is the answer, but who knows? Maybe it'll make all my problems go away.
In the poster, the hypnotist smiled innocuously in black and white like someone on an old record album. But his white fingers reached and clutched; there was a terrifyingly hysterical and concentrated brilliancy in his irises.
The hypnotist was smoking a cigarette under a water-stained ceiling in a room wallpapered with a pattern of scarlet orchids shaped like praying mantises. It was evidently his dressing room, since the far door opened directly onto the wings of a stage where chorus girls were rehearsing, stretching their legs upward like soaring tree-ferns even though nobody watched or cared. There was a welding kit under the hypnotist's bed, then the hall to the bathroom door which was stuffed with paper where somebody had kicked or smashed a hole in it (the shower pull was broken off and you had to flush the toilet three times and even then it might not work). The husband said to himself: How do I know that about the toilet? How do I know there's a welding kit under the bed? Why does this place seem so familiar? — and then the hypnotist's eyes bulged out toward him a little more and he got dizzy, the tides of fever carrying him nowhere, only working him back and forth; but for a moment, only for a moment, he was able to remember that this room and hallway and bathroom had existed in the Arctic, which meant that it couldn't exist here, which meant… — but now the hypnotist's eyeballs clanged over his own. Just as a sleeping pill's effects begin within the quarter-hour, with numbness behind the eyes, followed by a heaviness in the fingers, these zones of deadness expanding rapidly, so now the hypnotist's thrusts of light oozed down his sore throat until he couldn't feel it anymore; then light curved around and round inside his skull like a turd too big for the toilet bowl, pressing down on his brain, blinking out blood vessels like city lights at curfew, and he forgot everything.
To remember her you MUST forget, said the hypnotist.
He said: I'm searching for something, and I still don't know what it is.
You must FORGET, said the hypnotist.
He said: I married someone, and I don't know who she is.
You must FORGET, said the hypnotist.
He said: I betrayed someone, and I don't know where I am.
The hypnotist said: What about the how and why? You forgot those. Those are the five questions that a good journalist is supposed to ask. Who, what, where, how and why.
You told me to forget.
That's no excuse. What's her name?
Vanna.
What's her name?
Vanna.
What's her name?
I–I forget -
You must FORGET, said the hypnotist. What's her name?
Who? What's my name? I don't remember my name.
You must FORGET, FORGET, FORGET, FORGET. .
He said: I feel that my breast is a closed iron door that I'm standing breast to breast with, and I have to smash it open with my breast or with my head because my heart or my love's heart lies inside.
Something touched him. He didn't know what it was. It was fishy and silverwhite and crewcut-soft like sealskin kamiks.
The hypnotist had brought him out of himself, as when a brook carves rock between scaly trees, slipping ever deeper into its own crack until it can rill out into desire, which is sun and space, white light, then GONE into the bowl of green trees below, sided by rock wall looming and leaning and bending, articulated at its reddish lizard-ledges, cradling that suicidal miracle of a desert waterfall; and it seemed he was going down wide white stairs that led into a lake; and now the lukewarm waters were lapping at his ankles; now they were at his knees and he felt slimy weeds rub against him coolly; now he'd gone waist-deep and his testicles contracted with the cold; the water was getting colder and darker by the time his chest went under and the stairs weren't white anymore; they were black; the hypnotist's pale hand took his and pulled him down three more steps so that the water was at his throat and there was an animal smell; the wife he'd divorced was drowned and rotting there; the hypnotist dragged him down deeper and his face went in, only his hair still floating in that bygone world of breath; he would have floated helplessly but for the iron-dark stairs that clung like leeches to the soles of his feet and sucked the buoyancy out of him as the hypnotist pulled him down; it was all very murky and ripply and bubbly but something was going round him now in nasty circles like a chained mongoose at a snake charmer's and the hypnotist's erection was in his mouth; it was a pink mesa over which hung blue-bellied storm clouds with flickering narrow strings of lightning, and from the hot plateau far away he could see other clouds with stems of rain connecting them to the ground. Then he was speeding through the warm drafty bathroom-tiled vaults of the Tube, seeing lots of slender black-leotarded legs, and the hypnotist was whispering in his ear: When you awake you'll forget all this. You'll FORGET. - He was choking and the hypnotist was suffocating him and chuckling and saying: That's right; now drink your milk. .
Once he'd paid the price, once he'd done what Vanna was paid to do, then he crossed over and saw her better and more completely than ever before: Vanna not quite smiling in a spangle of darkness, Vanna with her lip-red fingernail glossy against her apple-red lip, looking at him big-eyed with her pupils perfect circles of pure light in her black eyes; yes, she was smiling at him, a slow sad cautious smile out of darkness; there was a glitter of moisture at the corner of her mouth just beyond her finger; he wanted to lick it and get AIDS; Vanna with her shimmering skin gazed smiling gently, accepting him no matter what he did; her chin almost rested on her knuckle but there was darkness in between, the darkness of sunray eyelashes from his strange doomed new wife whom he'd married once and would probably never see again — his wife, his wife, his wife! — he knew now that no answering letter from her would ever come, but if he went back to Cambodia and found her in the disco or in some anonymous rice field whose corpse-mud and bone fragments oozed between her toes, then she'd smile at him in just the same way, so gently and lovingly and trustingly and sadly; and if he went away or didn't come in the first place she'd never think about him again. He saw Vanna striding away with ultraviolet footfalls outside a hotel room. .
Everything jolly now? said the hypnotist, sitting calm, skinny and brown-skinned beneath the blue dentist's sign with the giant glistening stylized three-pronged tooth, beside which a set of pink-lidded jaws smiled in a light blue circle; quite a sign, really. - Yes, thank you, the husband said. He went out past all the faces smiling politely, smooth, brown-skinned. A green army truck hooted down the street. A lady sat spoonfeeding custard to her little boy and girl. Two cyclists towed a trailer filled with dark green packages. Another cyclist had dozens of live chickens bundled under him. On the sidewalk in front of her kids a lady was splitting firewood with a cleaver. She had a Chinese-porcelain face. Past her stretched an ocher tunnel of bamboo stalks leaning into one another over a brown creek, and at the far end of its darkness was the place where Vanna was waiting for him after she'd left the hotel room.