CHAPTER 15
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Moving bae from college brought a kind of stupor to my daily life, and my nights became a waking dread. If I wasnt pounding out yet another imitation on the piano, I was behind the bar, tending to the usual crowd with demons of their own. I had fallen into a routi Oscars whera of them all arrived and ordered a shot of whiskey. He slid the glass against the rail and stared at it. I went on to the er, poured a beer, sliced a lemon, and came back to the guy, and the drink was sitting undisturbed. He ixy fellow, , sober, in a cheap suit and tie, and as far as I could tell, he hadnt lifted his hands from his lap."Whats the matter, mister? You havent touched your drink."
"Would you give it to me on the house if I make that glass move without toug it?"
"What do you mean, move? How far?"
"How far would it have to move for you to believe?"
"Not far." I was hooked. "Move it at all, and you have a deal."
He reached out his right hand to shake on it, ah him, the glass started sliding slowly down the bar until it came to a halt about five io his left. "A magi never reveals the secret to the trick. Tom Mes."
"Henry Day," I said. "A lot of guys e in here with all sorts of tricks but thats the best I ever saw."
"Ill pay for this," Mes said, putting a dollar on the bar. "But you owe me another. In a fresh glass, if you please, Mr. Day."
He gulped the sed shot and pulled the inal glass ba front of him. Over the several hours, he suckered four people with that same trick. Yet he ouched the first glass of whiskey. He drank for free all night. Around eleven, Mes stood up to go home, leaving the shot on the bar.
"Hey, Mac, your drink," I called after him.
"ouch the stuff," he said, slipping into a raincoat. "And I highly advise you not to drink it, either."
I lifted the glass to my nose for a smell.
"Leaded." He held up a small mag he had cealed in his left hand. "But you khat, right?"
Swirling the glass in my hand, I could now see the iron filings at the bottom.
"Part of my study of mankind," he said, "and our willio believe in what ot be seen."
Mes became a regular at Oscars, ing in four or five times a week over the few years, curiously i on fooling the patrons with ricks or puzzles. Sometimes a riddle or plicated math game involving pig a number, doubling it, adding seven, subtrag ones age and so forth, until the victim was right back where hed started. ame involving matches, a deck of cards, a sleight of hand. The drinks he won were of small sequence, for his pleasure resulted from the gullibility of his neighbors. And he was mysterious in other ways. On those nights The Coverboys performed, Mes sat close to the door. Sometimes betwees hed e up to chat with the boys, a it off with Jimmy Cummings, of all people, a fine example of the artless thinker. But if we played the wrong song, Mes could be guarao vanish. Whearted c The Beatles in 63 or 64, he would walk out each time at the opening bars of "Do You Want to Know a Secret?" Like a lot of drunks, Mes became more himself after hed had a few. He never acted soused. Not more loquacious or morose, merely more relaxed in his skin, and sharper around the edges. And he could e mass quantities of alcohol at a sitting, more than anyone I have ever known. Oscar asked him one night about his strange capacity for drink.
"Its a matter of mind over matter. A cheap trick hinged upon a small secret."
"And what might that be?"
"I dont holy know. Its a gift, really, and at the same time a curse. But Ill tell you, in order to drink so much, there has to be something behind the thirst."
"So what makes you thirsty, you old camel?" Cummings laughed.
"The insufferable impudence of todays youth. I would have tenure now were it not for callow freshmen and the slippery matter of publication."
"You were a professor?" I asked.
"Anthropology. My specialization was the use of mythology and theology as cultural rituals."
Cummings interrupted: "Slow down, Mac. I never went to college."
"How people use myth and superstition to explain the human dition. I articularly ied in the pre-psychology of parenting and oarted a book about rural practices in the British Isles, Sdinavia, and Ger-many."
"So you drink because of some old flame, then?" Oscar asked, turning the versation back to its ins.
"I wish to God it was a woman." He spied the one or two females in the bar and lowered his voice. "No, women have been very good to me. Its the mind, boys. The relehinking mae. The incessant demands of tomorrow and the yesterdays piled up like a heap of corpses. Its this life and all those before it."
Oscar chewed on a reed. "Life before life?"
"Like reination?" Cummings asked.
"I dont know about that, but I do know that a few special people re-member events from the past, events from too long ago. Put them under a spell, and youd be amazed at the stories that e out from deep within. What happened a tury ago, they talk about as if it were just yesterday. Or today."
"Under a spell?" I asked.
"Hypnosis, the curse of Mesmer, the waking sleep. The transdent trance."
Oscar looked suspicious. "Hypnosis. Another one of your party tricks."
"Ive been known to put a few people under," said Mes. "Theyve told tales from their own dreaming minds too incredible to believe, but with such feeling and authority that one is vihat they were telling the truth. People do arahings when theyre under."
Cummings jumped in. "Id like to be hypnotized."
"Stay behind after the bar is closed, and Ill do it."
At two in the m after the crowd left, Mes ordered Oscar to dim the lights and asked Gee ao stay absolutely quiet. He sat o Jimmy and told him to close his eyes; then Mes started speaking to him in a low, modulated voice, describiful places and peaceful circumstances in such vivid detail that Im surprised we all didnt fall asleep. Mes ran a few tests, cheg oher Jimmy was under.
"Raise yht arm straight out in front of you. Its made of the worlds stro steel, and no matter how hard you try, you ot bend it."
Cummings stuck out his right arm and could not flex it; nor, for that matter, could Oscar ee or I wheried, for it felt like a real iron bar. Mes ran through a few more tests, thearted asking questions to which Cummings replied in a dead monotone. "Whos your favorite musi, Jimmy?"
"Louis Armstrong."
We laughed at the secret admission. In his waking life, he would have claimed some rock drummer like Charlie Watts of the Stones, but never Satchmo.
"Good. When I touch your eyes, youll open them, and for the few minutes youll be Louis Armstrong."
Jimmy was a skinny white boy, but when he popped open those baby blues, the transformation came instantaneously. His mouth twisted into Armstrongs famous wide smile, which he wiped from time to time with an imaginary handkerchief, and he spoke in a gravelly skat voice. Even though Jimmy never sang on any of our numbers, he did a passing fair rendition of some old thing called "Ill Be Glad When Youre Dead, You Rascal You," and then, using his thumb as a mouthpied his fingers as the horn, blatted out a jazz bridge. Normally Cummings hid behind his drums, but he jumped up on a table and would be eaining the room still, had he not slipped on a slick of beer and fallen to the floor.
Mes raced to him. "When I t to three and snap my fingers," he said to the sloug body, "youll wake up, feeling refreshed as if you have slept soundly eaight this week. I want you to remember, Jimmy, that when you hear someone say Satchmo, youll have the untrollable urge to sing out a few bars as Louis Armstrong. you remember that?"
"Uh-huh," Cummings said from his trance.
"Good, but you wont remember anything else except t<big>?９９ｌib.</big>his dream. Now, Im going to snap my fingers, and youll wake up, happy and refreshed."
A goofy grin smeared on his face, he woke and bli eae of us, as if he could not imagine ere all staring at him. Upon serial questioning, he recalled nothing about the past half-hour.
"And you dont remember," Oscar asked, "Satchmo?"
Cummings began singing "Hello, Dolly!" and suddenly stopped himself.
"Mr. Jimmy Cummings, the hippest man alive," Gee laughed.
We all gassed Cummings over the few days, w in "Satchmo" now and again until the magic words wore off. But the events of that night played over in my imagination. For weeks afterward, I pestered Mes for more information on how hypnosis worked, but all he could say was that "the subscious rises to the surfad allows repressed inations and memories free play." Dissatisfied with his answers, I drove over to the library in town on my days off and submerged myself in research. From the sleep temples of a Egypt through Mesmer and on to Freud, hypnosis has been around in one form or another for millennia, with philosophers and stists arguing over its validity. A piece from The Iional Journal of ical and Experimental Hypnosis settled the debate for me: "It is the patient, not the therapist, who is in trol of the depth to which the imagination reaches the subscious." I tore the quote from the page and tucked it into my wallet, reading the words now and again as if repeating a mantra.
vihat I could manage my own imagination and subscious, I finally asked Mes to hypnotize me. As if he khe way back to a fotten land, Mes could tap into my repressed life and tell me who I was, where I came from. And if it was merely truthful and revealed my German roots, the story would be derided by anyone who heard it as a fantastical delusion. We had all heard it before: In a former life, I was Cleopatra, Shakespeare, the Genghis Khan.
What would be harder to laugh off or explain was my life as a hobgoblin in the forest—especially that awful August night when I became a geling and stole the boy away. Ever since my time with the Days, I had been carefully erasing every vestige of the geling life. It could be dangerous if, under hypnosis, I would not be able to recall anything about Henry Days childhood prior to age seven. My mothers tales of Henrys childhood had been so ofteed that I not only believed she wbbr></abbr>as talking about me, but at times thought I remembered that life. Such created memories are made of glass.
Mes knew my halt-story, what he had gathered from hanging around the bar. He had heard me talk about my mother and sisters, my aborted college career. I even fessed to him my crush on Tess Wodehouse one night when she came round with her boyfriend. But he had no clue about the other side of my tale. Anything I actally divulged would have to be rationalized away. My desire for the truth about the German boy trumped my fear of being unmasked as a geling.
The last drunk staggered away for the night, and Oscar closed the cash register and hung up his apron. On his way out, he threw me the keys to lock the doors while Mes turned off all the lights except for a lamp at the end of the bar. The boys said their good-byes, and Mes and I were alone in the room. Panid apprehension clawed at me. Suppose I said something about the real Henry Day and gave myself away? What if he tried to blackmail me or threateo expose me to the authorities? The thought crossed my mind: I could kill him, and nobody would even know he was gone. For the first time in years, I felt myself reverting to something wild, an animal, all instinct. But the moment he began, panic subsided.
In the dark ay bar, we sat across from each other at a small table and listening as Mes droned on, I felt made of stone. His voice came from a distance above and beyond me, and he trolled my as and feelings with his words, which shaped my very existence. Giving in to the voice was a bit like falling in love. Submit, let go. My limbs were pulled by tremendous gravity, as if being sucked out of spad time. Light disappeared, re-placed by the sudden snap of a projected beam. A movie had begun on the white wall of my mind. The film itself, however, lacked both a narrative and any distinct visual style that would allow oo draw clusions or make inferences. No story, no plot, just character aion. A face appears, speaks, and I am scared. A cold hand s around my ankle. A shout is followed by discordant notes from the piano. My cheek pressed against a chest, a hand hugging my head close to the breast. At some scious level, I glimpsed a boy, who quickly turned his face from me. Whatever happened resulted from the clash of iia and chaos. The major chords were altogether ignored.
The first thing I did when Mes snapped me out of the trance was to look at the clock—four in the m. As Cummings had described the sensation, I, too, felt curiously refreshed, as if I had slept fht hours, yet my sticky shirt and the matted hair at my temples belied that possibility. Mes seemed totally worn and wrung-out. He pulled himself a draft and drank it down like a man home from the desert. In the dim light of the empty bar, he eyed me with incredulity and fasation. I offered him a Camel, a smoking in the dead of m.
"Did I say anything revealing?" I asked at last.
"Do you know any German?"
"A smattering," I replied. "Two years in high school."
"You were speaking German like the Brrimm."
"What did I say? What did you make of it?"
"Im not sure. Whats a Wechselbalg?"
"I never heard of the word."
"You cried out as if something terrible was happening to you. Something about der Teufel. The devil, right?"
"I never met the man."
"And the Feen. Is that a fiend?"
"Maybe."
"Der Kobolden? You shrieked when you saw them, whatever they are. Any ideas?"
"None."
"Entführend?"
"Sorry."
"I could not tell what you were trying to say. It was a mash of languages. You were with your parents, I think, or calling out for your parents, and it was all in German, something about mit, mit—thats with, right? You wao go with them?"
"But my parents arent German."
"The ones you were remembering are. Someone came along, the fiends or the devils or der Kobolden, and they wao take you away."
I swallowed. The se was ing bae.
"Whoever or whatever it was grabbed you, and you were g out for Mama and Papa and das Klavier."
"The piano."
"I never heard anything like it, and you said you were stolen away. And I asked, When? and you said something in German I could not uand, so I asked you again, and you said, Fifty-nine, and I said, That t be. Thats only six years ago. And you said, clear as a bell, No ... 1859. "
Mes blinked his eyes and looked closely at me. I was shaking, so I lit anarette. We stared at the smoke, not saying a word. He finished first and></a> ground out the butt so hard that he nearly broke the ashtray.
"I dont know what to say."
"Know what I think?" Mes asked. "I think you were remembering a past life. I think you may have once upon a time been a German boy."
"I find that hard to believe."
"Have you ever heard of the geling myth?"
"I dont believe in fairy tales."
"Well ... when I asked you about your father, all you said was, He knows." Mes yawned. M was quite nearly upon us. "What do you think he knew, Henry? Do you think he knew about the past?"
I knew, but I did not say. There was coffee at the bar and eggs in a miniature refrigerator. Using the hot plate in the back, I made us breakfast, settling my wayward thoughts by trating on simple tasks. A kind of hazy, dirty light seeped in through the windows at dawn. I stood behind the ter; he sat in front on his usual stool, ae our scrambled eggs and drank our coffee black. At that hour the room looked worn and pitiful, and Mess eyes tired and vat, the way my father had appeared the last time we met.
He put on his hat and shrugged into his coat. An aause between us let me know that he would not be ing back. The night had been too raw and strange for the old professor. "Good-bye, and good luck."
As his hand turhe knob, I called out for him to wait. "What was my name," I asked, "in this so-called former life of mine?"
He did not bother to turn around. "You know, I hought to ask."
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