The Land of Faerie
Chapter One—Asleep in the Audience
by Argos
Do you believe in magic? Real magic, I mean, not the tinsel and stardust and fanfare this town provides. I don’t mind that kind of Vegas “magic”; I do live here after all, and I see how the fake magic excites people who arrive here tired and dispirited, and if they don’t lose too much money, leave feeling more adventurous and free. But I am an educated person, and so are most of them, and if you asked us if we believed in real magic—the kind of magic possessed by the Faeries or piskies or sprites or sylphs, Hob Gadling or Strega Nonna or whatever name you heard in the stories you grew up with—we’d feel duty bound to say no. We live in a world of laws, physics and chemistry and mathematics and probability, one cause following another like the hours in a cuckoo clock, each effect in turn becoming a cause, in an intricate lockstep stretching back to the big bang and forward to the heat-death of the universe. No magic there in any of it.
I say “we” but the truth is I’m off that deterministic train. I do believe in magic. I’ve seen it. I’ve felt it. At the beginning it changes causes and effects into dogs and cats that chase themselves back, forward, and crossways in time, and then, if you are lucky or unlucky, it reaches out and changes you and from that there is no going back.
I don’t even know where “back” would be anyway. Magic is transformation. Frog into prince; naughty boy into donkey; coach into pumpkin.
Me into whoever I am now, after . . . her.
So, to my story. I don’t know why it took me so long to move away from that rust belt city to a place with a reasonable climate. Las Vegas, I mean. Yes it gets hot but number of snow days? Almost none. And I’d spent my life amid snow and road salt and sweaty parkas and mittens for God’s sake. I’d reached my mid-30s and there was nothing holding me there. (A voice in my head says that’s not true; I dimly recall a “life” there. I had friends, some of whom are still my friends, and there was that nice woman—what was her name? She was very nice and I am afraid I broke her heart but I don’t remember much; my memories are partial, like watercolor paintings left in the rain, and I don’t spend much time trying to decipher what remains.)
I was—I am—a tech consultant. I travel around and help with custom implementation of software, project management, system design. Pays well, and I can live where I want, even though for some reason it never occurred to me to move until . . . .
Well, I had a day to kill in Las Vegas. A presentation at a trade show on a Wednesday, a three-day meeting in San Francisco starting Friday evening. Not worth flying back to snow and road salt, and so I stayed in Las Vegas and walked out in the early evening to see the crowds.
I had no idea where I was going. But that doesn’t mean I wasn’t going somewhere. See what I mean about cause and effect? What happened to me later wasn’t the effect of my choice to walk out without a destination in mind. The walk was the effect. The cause came later. That’s how magic begins.
Then transformation, but I said that already.
Anyway, my hotel was mid-strip; an expense account place, but not one of these $70 hamburger palaces they’re building these days. I walked north, for some reason—had some idea of walking to Fremont Street, though I didn’t know the distances involved—and I set my course by the Stratosphere Tower.
I walked by a few of the old-style casino hotels. Not Flamingo old style or even Stardust but from the 1970s, smallish joints that no one on an expense account would consider. Their clientele were frat boys from SoCal or Grandma and Grandpa on their annual visit to see someone impersonate Neil Diamond and enjoy the all-you-can-eat buffet at Caesars. Long, darkish casino space with a low ceiling. Plink-plink-plink of the slots, 70s rock in the background, a food court with chain burgers, a Panda express, and soft-serve ice cream. A place I would run away from but as I passed I saw a poster and it stopped me cold.
KATE THE GREAT, it said, over a picture of a woman with eyes as bright as glacier ices. Eyes that reached out and grabbed hold of you and made you not just pause but stop and not just stop but turn. Black hair, low-cut dress and . . . well . . . I spent a lot of my teenage years dreaming of breasts like those. Oh, hell, to be honest, I spent a lot of time even then, in my thirties, thinking of breasts like those. Those and the eyes. They stopped me, as I said.
Under her picture the poster said only OBEY. NIGHTLY 8 PM.
I looked at my watch. It was 7:49.
What did I have to lose? I went through the loud casino floor to the box office and bought a ticket to the show in Oberon’s Theatre. I actually still didn’t know what it was. I just knew I wanted to see the eyes again.
The eyes and—well, you get it.
The lights were going down by the time I took my seat. The theater wasn’t full. I found a small table on the side but not far from the front. I looked around. When they called it a “theater” they were stretching the term a little bit. It was actually just a curtained off area in one corner of the casino. You could hear all the sounds of gambling, drinking, and giggling that any casino generates, and some of the glare from the gaming area crept under the curtains even when the theater lights dimmed. All in all not very private. But a waitress came up and told me drinks were only $4, so I calmed down with a margarita in my hand and waited to see what would happen next.
Spacy electronic music, like the opening of a “Twilight Zone” episode. Then a recorded voice that said, “Ladies and gentlemen, please give it up for Kate, the Queen of Hypnosis!”
OK, this was getting cheesy. Honestly, I am not sure what I expected. Maybe I thought she’d sing. Or juggle. Or take her clothes off. But I hadn’t expected an old-school hypnosis show, and I wouldn’t have bought a ticket if I had, breasts or no breasts. I’d been to a hypnotist once before, at the state fair back home in the Midwest. It was a bust—a strange, pale little guy with a mullet and a lisp, who managed to convince three men on stage that they had lost their penises and one woman in the audience that she had found them and was holding them for ransom. There was also a blow-up doll, as I recall, but I was headed out the door by that point.
But she came out, and she was not a disappointment. Her eyes were not a disappointment. And (I know you’re wondering) they were not a disappointment either. She wore a red dress, belted to show off how small her waist was and how her hips flared out below and her breasts billowed above. Her hair was jet black, her lipstick was bright red, and carefully drawn eyeliner directed a viewer’s attention to those ice-blue eyes, and once your gaze reached there it was hard to go anywhere else. Her voice was low, and though she spoke clearly, though everybody heard her clearly, still their was a kind of low thrum that suggested that she was speaking—whispering—directly and only to me.
I sat up in my chair. But she wasn’t looking at me.
“Hello, everybody!” she said. “Are you ready to have a good time and learn about the magic of your own mind?”
There was a smattering of applause. This audience was sitting behind curtains in a low-rent casino listening to the slots go ding-ding-ding and they weren’t hostile, just cold. She was going to have a hard time with this group.
From the show I’d seen before, I knew the drill. Now she’d give a little pep-talk that was an introduction to hypnosis. She’d ask the audience if they’d ever driven for an hour and not remembered doing it; she’d talk to them about being absorbed in books or TV shows; she’d assure them that hypnosis was something perfectly natural and that she could never make them do anything they didn’t want to.
Only she didn’t—not exactly, I mean. She congratulated us on our interest in hypnosis and then she told us a story. The story of her life, actually. She sat on a chair and talked about a young girl who’d dropped out of school and pursued the good-time life, and who ended up a few years later broke, drinking too much, hanging around with a guy who didn’t treat her well, without skills, and—this was hard to believe—not in good shape. Dumpy, in fact, she said; or shlumpy. Or both.
She’d needed a job, and she’d answered an ad for a magician’s assistant. She wasn’t in Vegas, but somewhere in California—somewhere not very glamorous named Modesto or Yuba City, and the magician’s original assistant had walked out while they were on the road, leaving him in the lurch. He was desperate for an assistant and she was desperate for a job. Getting on the road seemed like a good way to ditch a loser boyfriend. And magic seemed luck fun.
Only turned out it wasn’t magic. He was a “mentalist”—a guy who did fake tricks that seem like mind-reading—and a stage hypnotist. And the latter part wasn’t fake. She found out, she told us, that hypnosis was real. Found out not just by watching either. The first time he did his routine on stage, she said, she went down like the dirigible Hindenberg, in a deep trance on stage. Fortunately the hypnotist reminded her each time she was supposed to do something, and she did it. She said she saw a video later and didn’t recognize the smiling zombie who was parading around the stage with perfect poise. Inside herself she had found a woman who wanted to spotlight and knew what to do with it.
And so it went for a year or so. Each night she’d don the sequins, smile, and point to the chairs, keep volunteers from falling out of their seats, stand behind them and whisper to them to relax, hand the hypnotist the little dummy for “the doll bit,” whatever that was—and each night she’d do all this in a trance, with the rest of the world falling away, no distractions, not the sounds of traffic or the drafts in the crummy little halls where they were booked, not the loud drunk customers who tried to pinch her butt, just smiling and thinking—if, she said, you could call it thinking—“I am a hypnotist’s assistant” until the show was over and the lights came up. Then, still in a different world, she’d pack everything up and go back to the motel.
But a funny thing happened. Without meaning to; without trying to; without even knowing it was happening, she changed her life. Her outlook changed. She stopped smoking; she stopped getting drunk; she stopped sleeping late. Every morning she was up in whatever god-awful exercise room the motel had, or in the pool, or if there was nothing else walking up and down the highway. She began to do yoga, tai ch’i. Her eating changed. She lost weight and gained muscle and people began to do double takes when they walked by. She’d always been pretty, she said, but now men would stop and come back just to make sure they hadn’t imagined her.
The hypnotist, by the way, was a perfect gentleman throughout the process. He was an older guy; he wore a toupee and looked kind of like Woody Allen in that JADE SCORPION movie—old and used up. But he enjoyed his life, he liked being on the road, and he was a good hypnotist and a good mentor. And one night he announced that she would be the hypnotist and he would assist her the next night—one show only of KATE THE GREAT! He put up pictures of her, low-cut dress, leaning forward, you get the idea, and the turnout was terrific. Then for a while they billed themselves as a duo.
Then he retired, and she was on the road alone. It was lonely, but she loved the work, and after a few years the road carried her here. Performing nightly at the French Quarter Casino.
When she was done, the theater was silent. We heard the beeping and buzzing, but nobody inside was whispering or laughing. We were just like kids who’d heard a fun story. “Did you enjoy the story?” she asked.
There was applause.
“Want to know what happens next? Would you like to know who becomes MY assistant!”
Whistles and shouts of ‘Yeah baby!”
“Well, then, let’s find out! Tonight is next! Maybe one of you can be my assistant tonight. If you want to experience the power that changed my life, then COME ON UP!”
There were a dozen chairs on stage; they filled up before I could even think about volunteering. I wouldn’t have even if I’d had time, though; not my thing, going into a trance in front of strangers, I thought. She turned to the volunteers and welcomed them. It was a little sad when she turned her back on us in the audience; I’d been looking at her as she told us about her life and she was—well—easy to look at and, as I noted before, hard to look away from. Suddenly I felt a pang of envy of the volunteers.
She spoke to them and to us. “Now, ladies and gentlemen, for the next 5 to 10 minutes, I must ask you to keep as quiet as you can. No shouting, no flash photos, no cellphones. Just let these volunteers have the peace and space they need to relax, and I promise you that after 10 minutes you can make all the noise you want. They will hear you, but they just won’t care.”
A couple of the volunteers looked skeptical at that, but she briskly told them to sit up in their chairs, feet flat on the floor, legs uncrossed. “In a minute I will have you look at me, look at my eyes, but let me finish telling the audience what to expect,” she said. “Now, folks, you’ve decided to enjoy the show from your seats. That makes sense! If everybody volunteered I’d have no audience. So just relax in your chairs. You don’t have to do a thing! You can just let go and be entertained. Hypnosis is a fascinating phenomenon, and if you’ve never seen it before you’re going to be amazed at the ability of the human mind to relax, to let go of stress and worry, and to travel to distant lands, to that magic land we all dream of, east of the sun and west of the moon, where magic is real and your dreams are all true. So pay careful attention to what you see here and listen to what I tell these volunteers. That way you’ll understand how it is that here in this casino on a Wednesday night, they can relax more deeply than they have in months, they can feel peace and quiet that comes from inside, they can hear and follow suggestions that will make them feel good tonight and give them the tools to make powerful change in the weeks and months ahead. And if you want you can imagine it’s me instead of you listening, it’s me going into trance and beginning this terrific adventure that you’re now in the middle of, so just sit back and enjoy the ride.”
Then she turned again to the volunteers, and the electronic music began again, slower and softer than before the show, very relaxing, sort of like a lullaby from outer space, and she told the volunteers to look at her, to look at her eyes and just focus gently on them, let their attention come back to her eyes and it was all right if it wandered but it would always come back, “just as you listen to my voice and if your attention drifts it drifts right back to my voice and if you hear what I say you hear it but if you don’t hear it your unconscious mind does hear it and if you don’t hear it it’s because it’s something you don’t need to hear because either way you relax and keep your eyes open now as your breathing becomes calm and regular, look at me again let your eyes come back to mine.”
She had her back to us, but a big TV monitor above her head showed us the image of her face as she looked at the volunteers and told them to take a deep breath, then breathe out, then do it again and breathe out again and “then 1-2-3 deepest breath yet! Hold for a count of three now blow it out in a big rush that lets go of all your worries and tensions,” she said.
Did I mention that, if you closed your eyes and ignored your surroundings, you’d have thought that voice was whispering only to you? I could see some of the volunteers nodding, their eyes heavy, looking sleepy. And that whisper said, “Now let go of all your worries, give it up. Today is already gone. Tomorrow is a thousand light years away. All you have and all you need is this time, this place, this moment of quiet and peace.”
It was amazing how quiet the theater had gotten. Except it hadn’t. Right outside the curtain the same stupid buzzes and beeps and giggles and guffaws were still going on. I knew that. I could hear them. Sort of. She was describing night falling at the beach. Have you ever seen that, night coming on from the Pacific as the shadows stretch lazily east and a sea breeze ruffles the palms and the falling sun paints a gentle orange ribbon of road between you and the heaven that must be waiting in the west, as if you could walk across it? And then how the light fades like a kiss goodnight and a promise to be back tomorrow, and suddenly there’s the dome of the sky, the broad welkin they called it in the old stories and one by one the jewel points of the stars come out and then they are all there, precise and faithful in their places wheeling above until it seems that you could just float off the ground and join them? And then how when you do rise higher and higher and lighter and lighter into the welcoming dark, the warm embrace of the night, you see first the horizon and then the curve of the earth and then the planet itself, our frail green mother, and through the sky above her are the trails of airplanes going here and there, each trail drawing a great circle, dozens of them across the night sky until looking down you could believe that they were strands of silk and that the earth was spinning itself a puffy white cocoon, out of which would come something wonderful and new, something you could not wait to see at the end of the night and the dark and the sleep. Sleep. Sleep.
“Open your eyes,” she whispered.
She was talking to me. I hadn’t know that I’d closed them.
“Look at me. Don’t look away.”
She was standing above me, looking at me with those glacier blue eyes. I wasn’t sure what had happened—not sure where I was exactly, but the voice had told me not to look away from the eyes and so I didn’t as she said, “When I snap my fingers, you will get up, go on stage, and sit in an empty chair.”
Then she snapped.
It’s hard to describe what that walk felt like, exactly. I’ve never dived in one of those deep-sea pressure suits, but I imagine that it’s very slow, and that noise from outside reaches the ear softly, if at all, so that most of what you hear is your own breath, in and out. It was a bit like that. What was going on around me was sort of mysterious and vaguely interesting, but most of my concentration was involved in going where I knew I had to go.
Kate meanwhile was addressing the audience. “What a handsome man!” she said. “I have a feeling I’m not letting him see daylight for quite a while.” I heard them laughing. I didn’t connect the words with me, and I wasn’t curious what she meant. I had walking to do. The chair came closer and closer and closer and then after a long time I sat down in it. I didn’t know what to do next, so I just sat there. I’ve seen the video; the look on my face is sort of like the look of one of those zombies on the TV shows. Just blank, focused on a point very far away and probably not visible to the naked eye. I heard giggling and I think some people were pointing at me. I noticed out of the corner of my eye that the other volunteers were sitting and staring much the same way. It seemed like a fine way to spend the time. If there was time. I didn’t think there wasn’t time because that would be a thought of a kind I didn’t think at the time. Wasn’t thinking at the time. I was thinking, just not thoughts like that. I was thinking that I needed to do whatever she told me so I was waiting to hear what that was. And it didn’t matter how long I had to wait, because I wasn’t thinking about time. So I was thinking a lot of things but somehow they didn’t seem like thoughts or me thinking them.
After a few minutes, she turned back to us. One thing you need to realize is how aware I felt of her. She basically filled up my vision and my mind. Hypnotized people seem out of it but I wasn’t, exactly. I was really really focused. I’ve learned to focus like that—almost like that—on work projects and it has made a huge difference. But at the time it was new to me. Pure. I wasn’t focused because I needed to focus. I was just focused. On her.
She came closer and closer. I just watched.
“Hi!” she said. “I’m glad you could join us! What’s your name?”
“Dane,” I told her. (My first name is Dane, okay? Got a problem with it?)
“That’s great, Dane!” she said. The audience laughed. “Do you ever forget your name, Dane?”
“No.”
“Well, this will be a new experience for you, then? Look at me, Dane. Look at my eyes. Don’t look away, Dane.”
The eyes got bigger. They swam down through the air and ate me up. I couldn’t have looked away if an H-bomb went off.
“Good boy,” she said. “When I count three, you’re going to forget your name, it will go right out of your head, and no matter how hard you try you won’t be able to remember it until I snap my fingers and say ‘Remember,’ do you understand?”
I nodded blankly.
“Good boy! Now—1-2-THREE! Forget now, it’s gone! So, what’s your name?”
I thought for a moment. “I don’t know.”
“I just mean your name, that’s all. You don’t know it?”
“No.”
“Is it Dane?”
“I don’t know.”
“Come on, Dane, think of your name.”
“I don’t know it.”
I don’t know whether this dialogue was interesting to the audience. It sounds really boring but it had quite an effect on me. Each time she asked me a question I focused a little more intensely on her. Each time I realized she’d made me forget my name I went a bit—I guess they call it “deeper,” though I’d say more like “clearer.” I wasn’t sleepy at all at that moment, just focused on her. What she said was what I needed to know. What she wanted was what I needed to do.
“Well,” she said, “I think if you don’t know your own name, maybe you really don’t know how to talk. You don’t know how to talk, do you? Say something, Dane!”
I opened my mouth. Not a sound came out.
“You can’t talk, can you?”
“ .”
“Yes, I like you like that,” she said. “Until I tell you you can talk again, you can’t say a word. Nod your head.”
I nodded.
“Good boy,” she said, and patted me on the head.
I liked that. It felt appropriate.
“You just sit there and relax,” she said. She passed on to the next guy. She told him she had some magic glasses that would let him see through her clothes. They looked like the clown glasses that you buy at the circus but they were clearly magic. The guy liked them a lot and he looked her up and down. She moved down the line doing stunts with each volunteer.
I wanted those glasses. I wanted to see through her clothes. I tapped the guy on the shoulder to ask for them, but when he looked at me I couldn’t say a word. I’d forgotten I couldn’t talk.
Pretty soon she’d done tricks with each of the volunteers. One was shooting imaginary baskets. Another had turned her chair around and was riding a horse at a gallop. The one at the end was now the “laugh police.” Every time someone in the audience laughed, she yelled at them, “quiet in the theater.” That didn’t seem to help the noise problem. They laughed more. I realized I could hear the laughter but it really did seem to be coming in from a long way off, like a signal on a short-wave radio that is faint and more or less out of phase, coming and going at odd moments. Anyway, it wasn’t important.
Anyway, she stood in front of us and said, “OK everybody, eyes on me! Eyes on me! Watch my hand and . . . .sleep.”
Again the velvet black of space, the delicate traceries soaring from the surface and back to earth again, the deep sense of cosmic peace and unimaginable time with all things moving as they should, the music of the spheres that sounded oddly like a casino but like the most peaceful and perfect casino in the world.
“Open your eyes remaining deeply hypnotized,” she said, and I did.
She was standing in front of us. Her eyes were about the size of Greenland. I was focused on them the way an iron filing is focused on a magnet, the way a moon in space is focused on a planet, the way an electron focuses on the nucleus. Without her, there was no me.
“Now, wasn’t that fun?” she said, with a smile. “Ladies and gentlemen, how about a big hand for your stars of the evening?”
I think there was applause. It didn’t matter any more than the laughter had.
“All right,” she said. “We’re going to have a fun show tonight but before we can begin, I need one thing. I need a lovely assistant, I need a beautiful shapely woman in a sequined leotard to help me hypnotize. Who wants to volunteer?”
There were three women on stage, I think. Out of the corner of my eye I saw three hands go up. But she walked back and forth as if thinking hard and then looked at me.
Right at me. The eyes sent a charge through me. I sat up straighter. “Yes, I think I know. Dane? Look at me, Dane. Look deep into my eyes. You can’t look away, just float into my eyes.”
The eyes were the size of Greenland. I was lost in them. “Now, Dane, when I snap my fingers you’re going to be my beautiful assistant. You are a beautiful young girl with long filly legs and small rosebud breasts, and you are eager to obey because you know everyone in the audience will be watching you and seeing how beautiful and sexy you, understand? Nod your head, Dane. Good boy. But there’s some things you need to do first. You need to do them and you want to do them, understand? Nod. Good boy.
“You’re my beautiful assistant, now, and you’re not Dane the boy you’re Dane the sexy girl, understand? You need to make yourself all pretty like me, with lipstick and eye shadow and mascara. You need to be pretty enough to be my assistant, so here’s your makeup kit, take it and put on your makeup, nothing is more important, pay no attention to anything else you see and hear until I say your name again, just concentrate on making yourself sexy and pretty NOW!”
Putting on makeup is a lot of work. I hadn’t known. I took great care to draw the lipstick perfectly. I blotted my lips and brushed the edges. I used eyebrow pencil and eyeliner and eye shadow and rouge, I thought my girlish cheeks looked pretty good.
There was laughter. I didn’t notice. I had to be careful.
“Look at me, Dane,” she said. “I floated toward Greenland again. You look so pretty, Dane, doesn’t she, audience?” Distant applause. “Yes, you do, good girl! Now stand up, you need to adjust your beautiful sexy costume, stand up, smooth it over your breasts, that’s a good girl, yes, smooth, and then around your shoulders, tug the sequins down around your hips, good girl. Oh, look, Dane, honey, the seams on your fishnet stockings are crooked, you need to smooth them, turn around, that’s good.” I turned my back to the audience. “Good, now bend forward.” I heard some whistling but had no idea what it was about. “Now straighten the seams, that’s right. Oh, it’s so hard, I’d better help you.” She ran her hands down the back of my legs. I almost passed out. “That’s better! Now stand up! At attention, Dane! For the rest of the show you’re my assistant, you will do everything I tell you, you will do it perfectly and skillfully and beautifully because my assistant is what you’ve always wanted to be, so stand up! Stand up now! You will follow only the suggestions I give you that begin with your name, otherwise you will simply wait for me to tell you what to do, understand? Nod! Good girl!”
She turned away. “Now, the rest of my lovely volunteers—SLEEP!”
The rest of the evening centered on them. They were hot, and nearly took their clothes off. They were cold, and huddled together. They gave birth to baby dolls, they thought they were strippers and almost took their clothes off, they turned into a chorus line, they rooted for their favorite football teams in stands are yelled at each other, they did the YMCA song all together. At the end, the women were lounging on an imaginary street corner and the men walked by swinging their hips while the women shouted compliments, whistles and catcalls. I didn’t pay much attention to the stunts because I had my own duties to concentrate on—making sure no one fell out of a chair or tripped over another one sleeping on the floor, moving chairs in and out, whispering to each one to relax and go deeper. Annoyingly enough, my stockings kept getting out of alignment and we had to stop while I tried to straighten them and she helped me. I felt embarrassed that my costume was causing her so much trouble but she said it was okay.
At the end, she gave each of them a thundering orgasm when she shook their hands. I think that must have been quite dramatic, but it didn’t make much impression on me—I was stuck striking a pose, smiling, and pointing at them like a model at a carshow.
Then she put them all to sleep and turned to me. “Look at me, Dane,” she said. “Look right at me! Now, wasn’t that a funny show?”
I nodded.
“Isn’t it silly how they do anything I tell them to? Isn’t it ridiculous that I can make them believe anything I say?”
I nodded.
“It’s funny, isn’t it? Yes, Dane, it’s so funny, it’s okay, Dane, there’s just you and me here, go ahead, it’s funny! LAUGH, Dane!”
A giggle became a chuckle and then a guffaw. I threw back my head and held my hips and laugh—
“FREEZE, Dane! Freeze, right there!”
I was a statue with my head thrown back. “Listen carefully, Dane, there’s something you forgot. Something you know you have to do. It would be terrible if you forgot. You see, Dane, the President of the United States is in the audience tonight. You admire the President so much, he’s such a wonderful man, and not only that, it’s his BIRTHDAY today, Dane, and you have a song you want to sing to him, you want to show him just how much you wish him a happy birthday and how wonderful you think he is, so . .. SING!”
I felt as if a spotlight had swung toward me. I stepped forward and crooned, “Happy birthday to you! Happy birthday to you!” Slowly, sinuously, I ran my hands up my hips, my waist, until they were just brushing my rosebud breasts, and sang, “Happy birthday, Mr. President! Happy birthday to you!”
I did hear that applause. I must have done well.
“Good boy, Dane! Now . . . SLEEP!”
Velvet.
“Open your eyes! Wide awake feeling wonderful!”
I was sitting on a wire chair in a corner of a low-rent casino hearing the slot machines go plink-plink-plink. It didn’t matter, though. I wasn’t sure what had just happened, but I felt great.
I heard her voice. It was like a small jolt of electricity. “Here you go, sugar,” she said. “Take a look.”
She held out a hand mirror. I looked in it and my jaw dropped. Looking back at me was a face covered in seemingly random dabs of color, big red lips like a clown’s, with two raccoon’s eyes staring back from inside deep smeared black wells.
I heard a roar of laughter, and started to feel embarrassed. But then I heard a voice in my head saying, “they are just jealous of you, Dane. You won’t feel embarrassed at all,” and it was so.
She gave me a towel and some cold cream. “Here you go,” she said, and turned away. By the time I had finished removing it, she had said goodbye to the volunteers and the audience was gone. The little “theater” was emptying out. A few audience members were lined up buying DVDs of the show from a waitress. As I began to slip out, she flagged me down. “Dane, wait! Kate asked me to give you some things!” She handed me a DVD, with an autograph reading TO DANE, THE SEXIEST ASSISTANT I EVER HAD, KATE, and a Gift Certificate for one cocktail in the casino bar. Thanks for starring in my show, Dane, she had written at the bottom. I promise you WILL enjoy a drink here afterwards. And tip your server.
Absently I handed the waitress a $100 bill as I put the gift certificate in my pocket. I hadn’t decided whether to have a drink or not; I felt like going back to my hotel and thinking about what had happened. Or at least trying to remember what had happened. My head was jumbled. I felt good, not bad. Wide awake, not tired (though I heard a voice in my head saying, “You’ll fall asleep easily tonight and wake rested tomorrow”). I headed for the door to the strip.
Now this was curious, because I knew where the outside door was; I had come in that way, and anyway it was in sight. But every time I walked toward it, I somehow lost my way and ended up walking back into the casino. I don’t know how it happened; it was like one of those magic stairways in the game of CLUE that take you from the Conservatory to the Lounge without passing through the rest of the board. My feet kept taking me back to the casino bar, and the gift certificate seemed to sort of flutter in my pocket, and I heard a voice in my head saying, “you WILL enjoy a drink here,” and finally it just was too hard to fight and I went to the bar and ordered another margarita.
The barman widened his eyes a bit at my gift certificate, then looked over my shoulder and nodded. I was taking a sip when I felt a hand on my shoulder, and that familiar almost-whisper said my name. “Dane, isn’t that your name?”
I turned and was hit by the ice-blue eyes. “Yes,” I said.
“You’re sure now?” she said. “If I told you to forget it, what would your name be?”
I stared into her eyes and said, “I don’t know.”
“No, you don’t, do you, Dane?” she said, and smiled. “Now the real show can begin.”