The Game

feelings with his face.
    She thought about it for a moment. “Well, I guess I get a funny feeling in my stomach, like butterflies.”
    Ross put his hand, palm up, in front of his stomach. “Yes, and I bet that the more attracted you become, the more those butterflies rise up from your stomach”—he began slowly raising his hand to the level of his heart—“until your face begins to flush…like it is right now.”
    Twotimer leaned over and whispered: “That’s anchoring. It’s when you associate a feeling—like attraction—with a touch or a gesture. Now, every time Ross raises his hand like that, she gets attracted to him.”
    After a few more minutes of Ross’s flirtatious hypnospeak, the waitress’s eyes began to glaze over. Ross seized the opportunity to toy with her mercilessly. He raised his hands like an elevator from his stomach to his face every few seconds, smiling as it made her blush every time. The dishes she was carrying were forgotten, balancing precariously on her weakening arm.
    “With your boyfriend,” Ross continued, “were you attracted right away?” He snapped, freeing her from her trance. “Or did it take time?”
    “Well, we broke up,” she said. “But it took a while. We were friends first.”
    “Isn’t it so much better, though, when you just feel that sense of attraction”—he moved his hand up like an elevator and her eyes began to glaze again—“right away for someone.” He pointed to himself, which I assumed was another NLP trick to make her think he was that someone. “It’s incredible, isn’t it?”
    “Yes,” she agreed, completely oblivious to her other tables.
    “What was wrong with your boyfriend?”
    “He was too immature.”
    Ross seized the opportunity. “Well, you should date more mature men.”
    “I was just thinking that, about you, as we were talking.” She giggled.
    “I bet that when you first came to the table, I was the last person you thought you’d be attracted to.”
    “It’s strange,” she said, “because you’re not my usual type.”
    Ross suggested they get together for coffee when she wasn’t working, and she jumped at the opportunity to give him her phone number. His technique was so different than Mystery’s, but he seemed to be the real deal too.
    Ross let out a loud, victorious laugh. “Well, your other customers are probably getting angry. But before you go, I’ll tell you what. Why don’t we take all those good feelings you’re having right now”—raising his hands again—“and put them into this pack of sugar”—he picked up a sugar pack and rubbed his raised hand on it—“so that you can carry them around with you all day.”
    He handed her the sugar pack. She put it in her apron and walked away, still beet red.
    “That,” Twotimer hissed, “is condiment anchoring. After he’s gone, the sugar pack will remind her of the positive emotions she felt with him.”
    As we left the restaurant, Ross ran the exact same routine on the hostess and collected her number. Both women were in their twenties; Ross was in his forties. I was floored.
    We pressed into Ross’s Saab and headed to the Getty. “Anything you want from a woman—attraction, lust, fascination—is just an internal process that she runs through her body and her brain,” he explained as he drove. “And all you need to evoke that process are questions that make her go into her body and brain and actually experience it in order to answer you. Then she will link those feelings of attraction to you.”
    Sitting in the back seat with me, Twotimer scanned my face for a reaction. “What do you think?” he asked.
    “Amazing,” I said.
    “Evil,” he corrected, letting a thin smile creep over his lips.
    When we arrived at the Getty, Twotimer turned his attention to Ross. “I wanted to ask you about the October Man sequence,” he prodded. “I’ve been switching around a few of the steps.”
    Ross turned to him. “You understand that these things are very bad?” As he spoke, Ross wagged a finger at Twotimer’s chest, over his heart. He was anchoring again, trying to associate the notion of badness with the forbidden pattern. “There’s a reason I don’t teach them at my seminars.”
    “Why is that?” Twotimer asked.
    “Because,” Ross answered, “it’s like giving dynamite to children.”
    Twotimer smiled again. I could tell exactly what he was thinking—because, in my mind, the word evil was anchored to that smile.
    “Darwin