Hypnotizing Maria

are standing on a stage in the Lafayette Hotel in Long Beach, California, and you are the only person in this hall who believes that you’ve been walled in.”
    The stone didn’t flicker. “Why are you doing this to me,” he asked. “Are you doing this for fun?”
    “Yes, Jamie,” said Blacksmyth gently. “We are doing this for fun. You volunteered for this and for so long as you live, you shall never forget what is happening today.”
    “Help me, please,” he said, not a trace of pride or anger.
    “I'll help you help yourself,” said Blacksmyth. “We need never be prisoner of our own beliefs. At the count of three, I shall walk through the stone at one side of the room. I shall take your hand in mine and we shall walk together through the wall on the other side. And you will be free.”
    What does one say to that? Jamie chose silence. “One,” came the hypnotist’s voice. “Two....” Long pause. “Three.”
    All at once, it was as Blacksmyth had said. For an instant, Jamie caught a blurry twisted place in the stone, as though it were dry water; the next instant Blacksmyth in his spotless tuxedo stepped through the wall into the prison, offering his hand.
    Flooded with relief, Jamie took the mans hand. “I didn’t think...”
    The hypnotist neither slowed nor replied, striding toward the stone on the opposite side of the room, pulling his subject with him.
    It must have sounded like a scream, though he didn’t mean it that way. From Jamie Forbes came a cry of fearsome baffled astonishment.
    Blacksmyth’s body disappeared into the stone. For an instant Jamie held tightly to a disembodied arm, whose wrist and hand moved forward, drawing him directly into the wall.
    Whatever next sound he gave might have been muffled by the wall, and in the following instant there was a click like the snap of fingers and he stood back on stage, holding Mr. Blacksmyth’s hand, blinking in the spotlight, enveloped in fascinated applause.
    The people he could see, in the first rows before the dark behind the spotlights, were rising to their feet, a standing ovation for the hypnotist, and in an odd way, for himself.
    The act was Blacksmyth’s finale. He left his subject soaked in applause, disappeared into the wings, returned twice to the stage before the sound of the crowd hushed to gentle patter and the murmur of many voices, folks gathering their programs, jackets and purses as the house lights came up.
    Jamie Forbes made his way unsteadily down the steps to the main floor, a few of the audience there to smile and thank him for his courage to volunteer: “Was it real, did it feel real to you, the stone and all?”
    “Of course it was real!”
    They laughed, then puzzled smiles, explaining. “You were on the stage, in the center. Empty stage! Blacksmyth on the left, talking to you. You made it seem so real! The leap at the end, and the kick, it was amazing! You really believed ... did you?”
    More than believed. He knew.
    Jamie Forbes lived the evening through, over and again, all the way back to his apartment.
    Stone solid as any boulder, hard as any steel that ever he had touched.Belief? He would have starved to death in that room, trapped there by ... by what? More than belief. By absolute, unquestioning conviction.
    From the barest of suggestions: “Let’s you and me take a little walk in our minds ...”
    What was I thinking, “I can't be hypnotized?” I fell for some smooth talk, I was convinced into prison. How can that happen?
    Years later, he learned he wouldn’t have died there, left alone. He would finally have slept, and waking, recovered from the prison-beliefs that seemed so real to him a few hours before.



CHAPTER FIVE
    T he sign in the lobby next evening was unchanged:

    This last night of the show, Jamie Forbes took a seat mid-audience, row S center, a hundred feet from the stage. No volunteering this time, he thought. Tonight we watch. What did this man do to me? How did he do it?
    Each act was fun, of course, but he shrugged the fun aside and watched what happened: a few quiet words and the first volunteer was lost in trance.
    One glance through a shuffled deck, she could recall the sequence of fifty-two playing cards, error-free, as they were drawn from the deck.
    “Your arm is as stiff and solid as an iron bar,” commanded the hypnotist to a relatively small volunteer, and no man from the audience was strong enough to bend it.
    “You can clearly see the spirit of Mrs. Dora