The Stolen Child(50)

"Good. When I touch your eyes, you'll open them, and for the next few minutes you'll 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 Arm-strong's famous wide smile, which he wiped from time

to time with an imag-inary 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 "I'll Be Glad When

You're Dead, You Rascal You," and then, using his thumb as a mouthpiece and 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 entertaining the room still, had he not slipped on a slick of beer and fallen to the floor.

McInnes raced to him. "When I count to three and snap my fingers," he said to the slouching body,

"you'll wake up, feeling refreshed as if you have slept soundly each night this week. I want you to

remember, Jimmy, that when you hear someone say Satchmo, you'll have the uncontrollable urge to sing

out a few bars as Louis Armstrong. Can you remember that?"

"Uh-huh," Cummings said from his trance.

"Good, but you won't remember anything else except this dream. Now, I'm going to snap my

fingers, and you'll wake up, happy and refreshed."

A goofy grin smeared on his face, he woke and blinked at each one of us, as if he could not

imagine why we were all staring at him. Upon serial questioning, he recalled nothing about the past

half-hour.

"And you don't remember," Oscar asked, "Satchmo?"

Cummings began singing "Hello, Dolly!" and suddenly stopped him-self.

"Mr. Jimmy Cummings, the hippest man alive," George laughed.

We all gassed Cummings over the next few days, working 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 McInnes for more information on how hypnosis worked, but all he could say was that "the

subconscious rises to the surface and allows repressed inclinations and memo-ries 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 ancient Egypt through Mesmer and on to Freud, hypnosis has been around in

one form or another for millennia, with philosophers and scientists arguing over its validity. A piece from

The International Journal of Clinical and Experi-mental Hypnosis settled the debate for me: "It is

the patient, not the therapist, who is in control of the depth to which the imagination reaches the

subcon-scious." I tore the quote from the page and tucked it into my wallet, reading the words now and

again as if repeating a mantra.

Convinced that I could manage my own imagination and subconscious, I finally asked McInnes to

hypnotize me. As if he knew the way back to a for-gotten land, McInnes 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 delu-sion. 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 hobgob-lin in the forest—especially

that awful August night when I became a change-ling and stole the boy away. Ever since my time with

the Days, I had been carefully erasing every vestige of the changeling life. It could be dangerous if, under

hypnosis, I would not be able to recall anything about Henry Day's childhood prior to age seven. My

mothers tales of Henry's childhood had been so often repeated that I not only believed she was talking

about me, but at times thought I remembered that life. Such created memories are made of glass.

McInnes 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 confessed 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 accidentally divulged would have to be ra-tionalized away. My desire for the truth

about the German boy trumped my fear of being unmasked as a changeling.

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 McInnes turned off all the lights

except for a lamp at the end of the bar. The boys said their good-byes, and McInnes and I were alone in

the room. Panic and apprehension clawed at me. Suppose I said something about the real Henry Day