Human Sister

the large blade dives into your thigh.”
    I felt my eyes widen as the story came to life in my mind.
    “What will you do then?” he asked.
    I thought for a moment. “Nothing. The knife won’t be real. I’ll know it’s just an illusion. I’ll only feel sensations, harmless sensations merely imitating sensations of hardness, sharpness, and cold. I’ll see the grape leaf floating in the sky and call it to me, counting five, four, three, two, one, and I’ll fly away from the painful sensations on the wings of the leaf.”
    “Amazing!” Grandpa exclaimed. “An eleven-year-old girl foils the great algetor! What a shame I won’t be able to show this to certain people at the CIA.”

    Before Grandpa attached me for the first time to the algetor, he told Michael to go to his room and close the door. Grandpa said he didn’t want Michael to become frightened by seeing or hearing me in pain, illusory or not. After Michael left, Grandpa pulled a small knife out of the pocket of his kimono, unfolded the blade from its handle, and said, “I thought we would start with a little knife blade and work our way up, if that is all right with you.”
    “You’re not going to stick me with any knife, so you can make it as big as you want.”
    “Do not be so sure what I’ll do when you’re all bound up in electrodes and you can’t see through the helmet covering your eyes,” he said, pretending to be menacing.
    “You can’t fool me!”
    On went the helmet, and on went sticky strips along the back of my neck, down my spine, and around my right thigh.
    He told me not to hypnotize myself for this first session.
    “Do you feel the cold blade flat against your thigh?” he asked.
    “No.”
    “What do you feel?”
    “Just a cold, metallic sensation.”
    “Do you feel the sharp point of the knife digging into but not yet breaking your skin?”
    “No.”
    “What do you feel?”
    I hesitated, trying to resist his suggestion. “Sensations of pressure and sharpness.”
    “Do you feel the sharp edge of the blade about to cut through your skin?”
    “No.”
    “What do you feel?”
    I hesitated again. “A sensation, as if a sharp edge were pressing against my leg.”
    There was a short silence.
    “Ow! Grandpa, be careful! You cut me!”
    No sooner had I finished exclaiming those words than I became aware of an internal struggle. Part of me was still recoiling in absolute certainty that I had just been cut by the knife, while another part of me began lecturing on the high probability that I’d been fooled.
    “Oh, sorry,” I heard Grandpa say. “Let’s take a look at that cut.”
    He took off the helmet. I saw a black band covering the area of my perceived cut. He unfastened the band, exposing what appeared to be my uncut thigh.
    Then my fingers reported agreement with my eyes.
    “Let’s do it again,” I said, perplexed and unhappy with my first reaction.
    We did it again. And again. And again. But I couldn’t stop feeling the knife slicing into my skin. I knew there was no knife, yet I felt a sharp, cold edge press down and then begin to slide along my thigh. I felt the skin yield and the piercing pain, and at the same time something beyond reason in my mind became convinced—terrified—that I had just been cut by a knife. Finally, yielding not to pain but to frustration, I began to cry. Grandpa took the helmet off my head, and as I looked up at him I saw sadness and ambivalence in his eyes. But then I remembered Michael and the threats against him, and even as I cried, I redoubled my resolve not to disappoint Grandpa or endanger Michael.
    Thus began years of twenty-minute training sessions with the algetor three times each week, sometimes using hypnosis, other times not. During the sessions in which I used hypnosis, the pain seemed somewhere else, and those sessions were easily endured. Without hypnosis, however, all of the illusory painful sensations remained—the perceived knife cuts, the breaking of bones, the flames scorching my skin, the ice picks piercing my eyes—and the initial motor responses of recoiling from those illusions also remained. But over time I learned to tame the fears and anxieties associated with the illusions, and I learned to befriend, and so endure, even the fiercest sensations of pain.
    Or at least I thought then that these were the fiercest sensations of pain.

    Grandpa never allowed Michael to witness any of my algetor training sessions. He didn’t want Michael to become