He was getting more hopeful. The dogs continued. Idly, he began singeing the hairs on his wrist with the tip of his cigarillo.
Ione said, “I learned hypnosis from a fairly sinister woman — a religious charlatan, really. Classes in hypnotism were a sideline for her. Her main business was a little sect she ran in her garage, the Church of the Supreme Master.” She was moving her hands in a smoothing pattern above him as he lay in a lounge chair. He was supposed to relax, but her insistence on meeting in the motel was still bothering him. She was sitting to his right, leaning over him. She had made him take off his shoes. Was it a sign that he was going under that he saw her hands almost as detached things? He asked her.
She said, “You have to try and avoid critiquing each step of the way or you won’t go under. You have to let go more. Tell me anything that’s still bothering you. I think you understand about confidentiality and so forth. I want to help you. Your situation is pretty severe. Go long enough with low sleep and you can begin seeing things, seriously. So I want you to seal all that up in a mental envelope and lick the flap and visualize it going into a mailbox. Concentrate on your tongue, licking. Good. That’s better.” She resumed her breaststrokelike movements. “Remember, we have plenty of time and you’ll be back in your office by four, tops. I run a tight ship. You can trust me.” He concentrated.
She said, “We met in her garage, where she had, I’ll never forget it, a picture of Christ on the wall with the eyes coated with clear nail polish — to give you some kind of frisson, I guess. The other students were something. A woman who demonstrated stove polish in ten-cent stores for a living was one. And a man who at the time owned the largest sandblasting concern in New Jersey. He was losing contracts. And an unfortunate type who was in it for one thing only — the power to cloud women’s minds. You follow me. She was a wonderful teacher, though.”
Today Ione was normally dressed, except that her blouse had unusually deep armholes, if you were interested. She was wearing a tight white skirt and a white sleeveless blouse. She had started off by removing an ivory bracelet and her wedding ring, because they would distract him when he was concentrating on her hands.
She bent closer to him. “Think what I speak but don’t move your lips,” she said.
• • •
“This is sad,” Ione said. Carl had the impression she was repeating herself. He had been asleep. “This is too sad, as they say here. You’re too exhausted to be hypnotized.”
He said, “I thought you were going to try again.”
“I did,” she said. “You only remember the first two tries, when I woke you up. The third time I just felt like I was torturing you. So I let you sleep.”
It’s just as well, he thought. His mind felt unusually clear. He hated the motel room. A brown line led down the wall from the air-conditioner to a rank spot in the rug. He felt a little panic. He was in danger. It was nearly four.
Ione was smoking. “We learned something from this,” she said, soothingly, letting smoke out as she spoke. “We learned I have to catch you at the right moment — sometime when you’ve had a good night’s sleep. Wait, I totally comprehend that that’s exactly the problem, but wait for my plan. It isn’t difficult. You need to spend one night away from the dogs and just sleep yourself out before we try this the next time. You have to travel, in your job. You could tell your wife you had some field thing to do. Do you know the Mafenya Tlala Hotel, in Molepolole?” She said this quickly.
Lois was young. She would never understand this. Hypnosis had been a mistake. Ione was saying that she still maintained he was a good subject for it.
He interrupted. “This is it for hypnosis, I think. It’s not a good idea for me. I don’t like the feeling, to tell you the truth.”
She said, “But you haven’t really experienced it yet, because you kept falling asleep.”
He tied his shoes. He would leave first. She looked penetratingly at him, in a way that made him feel guilty and ungrateful. “I bow to what I hear in your voice,” she said.
He said, “I appreciate your efforts.”
A sliding door gave directly onto the parking area. The drapes were drawn. “You can almost go,” she said, looking out along the edge of a drape.
But he sat down. The idea of leaving was suddenly intolerable. It felt like a mistake. This was the only person who had tried to help him, except for Lo to the best of her ability.
He began apologizing. He said he’d felt from the beginning that hypnotism was going to be a no go for him. He apologized because he realized what he really wanted from her was probably a fantasy. His fantasy had come about because people said she knew all about the culture, and about witchcraft in particular. Probably witchcraft appealed to him because he was at the end of his rope. But wasn’t there something to it? He thought she had been implying that there was, whenever they talked. He had seen birds kept off millet fields through juju, in West Africa. He knew the Batswana used witchcraft on one another. There ought to be some way to use it on dogs. He wanted her to admit that she had implied there was a tool available in witchcraft, the first time they’d talked, unless he had imagined it, which he admitted was possible.
She seemed to be going through some inner conflict, trying to persuade herself to help him. He said that he understood her position. He reminded her that he was desperate.
Finally, he sensed a reluctant decision in his favor. “I understand you,” she said, seeming grave and hesitant. “But remember, I only know so much in this field. You could call me a novice. You want me to locate a sangoma for you — that’s what you’re asking.” She closed her eyes for a moment. “Carl, you understand we’d have to be even more careful about getting found out than you can imagine. You know what it would mean if it got around that we were involved with witchcraft. And you would have to follow instructions, and I mean to the letter.”
“Anything,” he said.
• • •
Ione called him at work every couple of days to keep him current on her search for a sangoma. He found himself looking forward to her calls, which usually somehow evolved beyond the matter at hand to range over a lot of unlikely issues on which she had opinions he found interesting. His sleepless nights provided him with endless topics for discussion. Also, he liked her voice.
Again she was reporting no luck in finding a sangoma.
He said, “Stop looking if you want to. What really started me on this tack was when you said that some university had sent a team out to see if there was anything to the claim that sangomas could direct lightning strikes against certain people or places. I don’t know. It gave me hope. When in Rome. But what a long shot! Maybe it’s not a good idea. I get a lot of good ideas quote unquote at night while I’m memorizing the ceiling.”
She said he was sounding defeatist. She went on for a while, trying to buck him up.
He said, “Here’s another good idea that came to me, that I actually put some time into. It occurred to me that it would be funny to get up a fake memo saying AID should hereafter stop talking about the poor and instead refer to them as the ‘pre-rich.’ It was just for the bulletin board. This has to do with some incredible new reporting and nomenclature guidelines we recently got from Washington. I actually started typing this thing up the next day, before I realized what I was doing and tore it up. Close call.”