By Calley Nelson
With twenty other strangers in folding chairs, I saw a hypnotist at the state fair. He was a balding man with a paunch and a too-long red tie. Hands in his pockets he stood in front of the crowd, a black-and-white spiraled wheel next to him. With a roll of his sleeves and a good shove, he turned the wheel and the black and white spirals pulsed and shifted in and out, making me feel slightly sick to my stomach.
I looked down at my hiking boots through the brim of a grey baseball cap, my thighs stuck together with powdered sugar and sweat. Being 16 years old and small meant there were always men watching you, and, you knew (that they knew) that they could snap you clean as a wishbone.
Last summer, a teenager was abducted at the fair. I wondered if she was solicited by some older guy on the internet, if she had wandered off and into his arms, or if she had been snatched away on the spot. Pictures of the girl were plastered around the tents, saying she was MISSING and LAST SEEN HERE. In the picture, she had light brown skin, curly brown hair, thick eyeliner, and was seated at a restaurant booth. I didn’t think I could distinguish her in a crowd.
Gazing into the wheel, the hypnotist beckoned our eyes closed, and I watched the spirals unfold in streaks of white behind my eyelids. Outside the tent, people screamed on the tilt-a-whirl, a woman ate peanuts, a man fanned himself with a brochure, the prize cows mooed, and the butter sculpture started to melt. Then the hypnotist tapped me on the shoulder, ushering me off the stage and behind the funnel cake truck. A cold shock ran through me, and I told myself that if I escaped this I would be more careful with my daydreams, how my thoughts must have influenced all of this. The hypnotist towered over me, reeking of fried dough and gasoline. Though he was unattractive, I was determined to surrender to my fate in the sex trafficking ring that was surely waiting for me.
“I can’t hypnotize you,” he mumbled, rubbing a slash of mustard out of his beard with a thick hand. “This happens sometimes… it’s a lot to explain and they’re waiting back there. Don’t worry about it,” he said assuringly, “I can’t be hypnotized either.”
Back with my friends, I watched with envy from a picnic bench as he snapped his fingers and the hypnotized shook their sleep from their faces. “What was it about me that refused to be hypnotized?” I pondered. I wanted to be controlled, told what to do, act out of control, pause all decisions about what to do or not to do with my body, to not feel responsible to anyone or anything, just for a few minutes. The people swayed their hips andgot on their hands and knees, panting like animals at the square silver buckles of the hypnotist’s shoes. Were they really hypnotized in a way that I couldn’t be?
“You are trapped in a box,” he told a college kid, singling him out. “You can’t leave unless you lay an egg.”
The guy tried, squatting and straining to push one out, his face as red as the hypnotist’s tie. He started moaning with effort until he farted and looked faint.
“Stop,” the hypnotist said calmly as if he’d seen this a million times at a million different fairs, and the guybroke out of his squat, shaking his head as if trying to remember a dream.
For the rest of the summer, I stayed up worrying about being hypnotized and having no idea. Was that why I couldn’t be hypnotized—because I was too hypnotized already? Were people, including me, that easily manipulated? And if they were, could I manipulate them?
I was suddenly consumed with a lustful quest to get my power back, to take control of cat callers and call them back, seduce the teacher who gave me detention for my shorts not being as long as she wanted them to be, punch the family friend who always “accidentally” touched my boob at the end of the night. I wanted to take a pink eraser to all the contexts where I felt ashamed about my body and myself. So I would slip away and touch myself furiously, fantasizing about being a hypnotist. In this role, I would have full sexual power and say, where people would willingly submit and enjoy it in a way that I didn’t seem able to. I’d make my voice a throaty velvet and punctuate all my sentences with a carefree chesty laugh that I didn’t have yet. I’d fantasize about having many clients, going to bars and drinking together, an activity I didn’t do. I would get drunk but I’d never lose control, a feeling I had never felt.
Across the eyes of my customers, I’d swing a pendulum, massage my nails into their scalp, humming them into a trance at the back of the bar. I would feel the fibers in their neck and throat muscles tense up and then relax under my hands. I would crack their neck and they would relax. Sweat would drip like a lit candle from their hairline, my fingers coated in the film. I would hold an imaginary cookie in my pocket, I would tell them if they ate it, it would be a sign that I would have their consent to continue. The hardest customer would spit it out after one imaginary bite, saying they always hated raisins, or that it was too hot in the bar to eat.
I’d make my tongue velvet and say “You’re feeling claustrophobic, let’s go for a walk.”
Outside we would go and I would hold the door. I would take my belt off and tie it around their neck.
“You are a cat on a leash,” I would say. “People will stare at you because you are my beautiful kitty.”
My customer would nod, lick their paw, chase the flies in the park until they grew tired, and collapse in the grass next to me as a happy customer.
“You are a good kitty,” I would say, pressing my fingers around their face, relaxing any effort left to concentrate.
“Listen kitty. You will never smoke a cig again, you little beast. That’s why you came to see me, right? If you want a litter later in life…”
The difficult customers will claim to be spayed, uninterested in a litter.
I wouldn’t reply, but I’d keep a firm grasp on the belt until their throat grew tight, until they thought they might sneeze, then laugh, then choke, then die. I would pull the belt until fear happened. I would tell them “You are my kitten and I am smothering you in a cardboard box, but on the off chance you escape, you must NEVER smoke again. You wouldn’t wish to die suddenly like this, would you?”
I’d let go of the leash and snap my fingers, give my client time to wander in the park and process their experience under my thumb, journal even. To know that you could surrender, that someone could hurt you badly but wouldn’t — what greater thing could you give a person approximate to love?