Hypnotizing Maria

The prison needed my personal consent to exist, this room is built from the consent of every person in spacetime: Walls hold things in.
    Eyes closed against the dark. There is no world out there, it is every bit of it in here, he thought, suggestions become beliefs become perceptions become every so-called solid thing in our playground.
    Jamie Forbes went to sleep with that.
    Woke five minutes later, an attack of reason. Are you crazy, man? Thinking this stuff, the world’s not really here, there’s nothing out there but your imagination? Are you so susceptible to suggestion that the minute some lady comes along and says nothing’s real you swallow it all one gulp?
    Went back to sleep, glad that he kept his sanity.
    Woke ten seconds later, what about relativity, quantum mechanics, string theory? If you think Suggestions crazy, what about Science?
    There's not just four dimensions here in spacetime, folks, because you see there's really eleven dimensions, but of course seven of them are wrapped up in little tiny balls so we don't see those. But honest , they're there!
    There's holes in empty space where the gravity s so strong not even light gets out.
    There's an indefinite number of alternate universes existing side by side , don't you know, a universe with every possible outcome of every possible difference that anybody could ever make in this one . . . universes with no Second
    World War ; universes with a Third World War that we don't know, and a Fourth and a Fifth, universes with people exactly like we are, except in about a billion of them you're called Mark instead of Jamie and you have brown eyes instead of blue.
    Back to sleep again. How does it work?
    Five minutes later, annoyed at himself. This is not differential calculus and me some mathophobe, he thought; this is drop-dead simple. How do we see what we see? How does a painter see the picture he paints? Here’s how:
    Painter look at canvas.
    Dip brush into paint.
    Drag wet brush on canvas.
    Painter look at canvas.
    Dip brush into paint.
    Drag wet brush on canvas.
    Painter look at canvas.
    One stroke at time.Every day of our lives.
    That’s how it works.
    Here’s your paint bucket Jamie, swirling with suggestions. Here’s your brush, dip from the bucket what you’ll accept for true. Here’s your canvas: we call it a lifetime.
    Now you try painting a picture, OK?
    You need explanations how that works, he thought, you’ve got to go back long before school.
    I’m hypnotized, he thought. I know how that feels, myself, personal experience, nobody has to explain. Accept suggestions and they’re real, every stroke. Thirty years ago, and still I remember. There was no way I could have pounded through Blacksmyth’s wall, on stage, and the wall didn’t exist. I only thought it did.
    Some Christian zealots on holy days, he knew, there’s blood on their palms from miracle nail-wounds like Jesus’ imagined in old paintings. Next Zealots Convention are you going to tell them that’s not blood that’s belief? Give your presentation: we’ve just discovered that when folks got nailed to crosses in those happy olden days they weren’t nailed through the palms but through the wrists so why are you bleeding from your palms?
    Answer? “Because we thought it was palms.”
    Are you going to tell somebody’s got some illness she’s dying from, tell her that’s no illness that’s your belief?
    The thoughtful victim will say yes it’s my belief and it’s my belief for my own I think are pretty good reasons thank you and I intend to die from my belief, do you mind, or do you insist that I die from some different belief that you’d prefer, or at some other time that fits your schedule instead of mine?
    Books with photographs for evidence—subjects hypnotized, convinced their legs are tightly bound with ropes. Minute later, day later, there’s the imprint of ropes on their skin. Touched with an ice cube and told it’s a hot iron, there’s the blister raised at the spot. Not ropes, not irons ... amazing powers of mind.
    Not miracles, he thought, hypnosis. And not even hypnosis, that Greek mystification, but plain everyday have-a-donut?-yes-or-no suggestion, several hundred thousands of billions of times over and most answers yes. It’d be astonishing if we didn't see what we’ve been told is so!
    Isn’t it possible, he wondered, that this whole quantum-electric universe they say’s made of tiny little strings, those strings might be created by