The Hypnotists

  He hung his head, which was why he never saw it: Rodney Steadman, MVP, served up an air ball so far from the basket that it was barely in the arena. Final score: 67−66, in favor of the Westside Automotive Chargers, the new Gotham League champions.

  Parents and friends rushed the court. The bleachers emptied. Gatorade sprayed in all directions as the victors dumped out their bottles over one another’s heads. The celebration was insanity — a howling blizzard of backslaps and high fives.

  Jax experienced it from two different perspectives. In one, he was right in the middle of everything at the Chargers’ bench, leaping and screaming with his teammates and coaches. And then, in a flash, he saw himself at the center of the pandemonium — as if he wasn’t part of it all, but was watching from half-court.

  It wasn’t just the vision that shocked him, but the hint of emotion that went along with it. Inside the bedlam, he was bubbling over with the pure joy of the greatest, most unlikely David-versus-Goliath victory in Gotham League history.

  So how come, in his hallucination from a short distance away, he couldn’t help feeling just a little bit bummed about it?

  The Bentley was a sleek, fast, high-performance machine, but in Manhattan afternoon traffic it didn’t make much difference. It was a few days after the Gotham League championship, and Ashton Opus was gridlocked at Twenty-Eighth Street. He leaned on the horn, more as a release of tension than anything else. The driver in front of him couldn’t move; neither could the driver in front of her; and so on and so on through the gridlock. Didn’t anybody understand that he had to get to his son?

  Many frustrating blocks later, he pulled up in front of the medical building just as his wife, Monica, came hurrying out of the subway station.

  “Have you heard anything more?” she panted, breathless from running.

  “I just got here myself.” Leaving the Bentley parked illegally, Jax’s parents rushed into the complex. Mr. Opus wasn’t concerned that the car would be ticketed or towed. A three-hundred-thousand-dollar vehicle commanded a lot of respect. It probably belonged to someone with clout in this town, and people with clout didn’t pay tickets. As it happened, Jax’s father had very little clout. He just happened to be the sales manager of a Bentley dealership.

  “I can’t believe it!” his wife whispered as they rode the elevator to the fourteenth floor. “Why would Jax misbehave at a doctor’s appointment? I don’t even understand what he’s supposed to have done!”

  When they reached the ophthalmologist’s office, they found the waiting room empty except for their son, who was in the company of a building-security agent. The practice was closed until further notice, and Dr. Palma had been escorted home.

  “It wasn’t my fault, Mom,” Jax defended himself. “It was the doctor. He went ape on me! I didn’t do anything! Honest!”

  The Opuses looked to the security guard, who shrugged. “Don’t ask me. By the time I got up here, everybody was running around the waiting room, the patients were bailing out, and the receptionists were sitting on the doctor.”

  “Is Jax in trouble?” Mrs. Opus asked anxiously.

  “Nobody’s pressing charges,” the man replied. “But if I were you, I’d start shopping around for a new eye doctor. They just told me to wait with the kid till the parents showed up. That’s you, right?”

  The Opuses made short work of hustling their son out of the building and into a nearby coffee shop. Over a steaming hot chocolate, Jax tried to explain the events of the afternoon. “He was looking into my eyes with that blue light, and suddenly he just froze. I mean, for a long time. So I said I had homework, would he mind hurrying it up? I wasn’t being rude — I even said please. But he went nuts, running around the room like a crazy man, knocking things over. When he came at me with these eye drops, I got scared and yelled, ‘Leave me alone!’ Well, that’s when he totally lost it. He wouldn’t let anybody near me. Every time one of his nurses came into the exam room, he tackled her. That’s when they called security.” He glanced up at his parents, his eyes beginning to fade from purple to royal blue. “I guess he just snapped.”

  Mr. Opus scratched his head. “I suppose no one could hold you responsible for someone else’s nervous breakdown.”

  Mrs. Opus put a hand on her son’s shoulder. “Honey, I’m so sorry you had to go through that.”

  “Why did I have to go to an eye doctor, anyway?” Jax complained. “I see just fine.”

  She looked embarrassed. “You know how your eyes change color. I wanted to make sure it wasn’t anything that could affect your vision.”

  Jax looked angry. “Yeah, wait till you hear what he said about that. He said, ‘It’s not possible.’ If you were going to send me to an eye doctor, you should have picked one who knows what he’s talking about.”

  “Of course it’s possible!” his mother exclaimed. “It runs in your father’s family. Right, Ashton?”

  Mr. Opus looked away. “Well, it doesn’t exactly run in the family, but there are a few stories. My grandfather’s cousin — he had it, I’ve been told.”

  “And his eyesight was perfectly normal, I’m sure,” his wife added triumphantly.

  “Oh, sure.” Her husband was evasive. “His eyesight. Twenty-twenty.”

  “But?” Jax prompted, sensing there was something more.

  “Well, what do I know?” Mr. Opus told him. “I never even met the guy. He died when I was a baby. It’s just stupid family gossip, so the old ladies had something to whisper about. Now let’s go home.”

  “Not until you tell me this so-called gossip,” Jax insisted.

  “It’s nothing. They said he was crazy.”

  Jax turned pale. “Because of his eyes?”

  “Of course not!” his mother exclaimed. “We’re sorry we brought any of this up. Why would you think such a thing?”

  “Well,” Jax admitted, “I’ve been having some … problems lately. I’ve been … seeing things.”

  His father was alarmed. “What things?”

  “Myself, mostly,” Jax tried to explain. “Like I’m somebody else watching me. It only lasts for a second or two, but it’s starting to freak me out a little.”

  His parents exchanged a worried look.

  “I suppose,” Mr. Opus mused at last, “at one time or another, we all kind of picture ourselves. It’s not real vision, but we trick ourselves into believing it is.”

  Jax shook his head. “I don’t think so, Dad. I was hoping it would stop, but it keeps coming back. It happened today in the doctor’s office — right before Palma lost it.”

  “Don’t worry,” Mrs. Opus said. She was a chiropractor and believed there was a medical professional somewhere who could cure anything. “We’ll get to the bottom of this.”

  There were framed diplomas from Harvard, Oxford, and the University of Vienna next to a signed black-and-white photograph of Sigmund Freud himself, the father of modern psychoanalysis. Dr. Gundenberg was the top child psychiatrist in New York, and the most expensive. No one batted an eye when one of his patients arrived in a Bentley. Mom might have told Jax not to worry, but the fact that the family was willing to blow this much money on a shrink for their son showed Jax that plenty of worrying was going on somewhere.

  However much Dr. Gundenberg charged, Jax was sure it was a rip-off. He tried repeatedly to explain about his visions. Yet all the psychiatrist wanted to talk about were his dreams.

  “But, Dr. Gundenberg,” he protested, “there’s no problem with my dreams. I dream great. It’s when I’m awake that the trouble starts.”

  “Your dreams hold the key to your subconscious mind, young Jackson.” Dr. Gundenberg didn’t seem to be foreign, but he spoke with a phony accent. It was almost as if he thought he was a better psychiatrist if he sounded like Freud in addition to being the guy’s number-one fan.

  “Yeah, but can your subconscious mind make you see yourself from thirty feet away?” Jax persisted.

  Dr. Gundenberg leaned into Jax’s face, the light shining
off his forehead, which extended all the way back over his bald crown down to his starched collar. “Clearly, it is physically impossible to be in a position to observe oneself from a distance.”

  Jax bristled. “Are you saying I’m lying?”

  “There is no lying in this office. Even when you speak an untruth, deeper truths are revealed to me.”

  “Like what?”

  The doctor rubbed his endless forehead. “If you choose to see yourself from the perspective of another, this may indicate that you are unsure of who you are.” He leaned in farther. “Don’t answer. Your conscious mind is not capable of observing the big picture. Now listen….”

  So Jax listened — and kept on listening, but Dr. Gundenberg wasn’t saying anything. The psychiatrist had lapsed into silence, his huge bald head barely eight inches away, blotting out the diplomas and most of the rest of the room.

  Right there in the office, where he’d gone to make his visions stop, he had another one. This was a close-up, vivid enough for him to make out his eyes — wide with outrage, and the color of amethyst crystal. It was the last straw. Four hundred bucks an hour to get hit with the problem in the middle of what was supposed to be the cure! And what did this guy have to offer? Dead air.

  “It’s happening!” Jax breathed. “Right now! Honest!” The doctor made no reply, not a sound, barely a twitch. Was he even listening? Exasperated, Jax made a play for the man’s attention. “I’m jumping out the window now, Doc.” Still nothing. “Better still, you jump out the window.”

  Without a word, Dr. Gundenberg left his chair and began to walk away.

  Jax saw red. “Hey, remember me? I’m the paying customer. I’m still here, you know….”

  He watched openmouthed as the psychiatrist rolled up the blinds, opened the window, and threw a leg over the sill.

  The cry that burst from Jax was barely human. “What are you doing?” He sprang over, grasped the man’s arm, and held on with a grip like a steel vise. In the blink of an eye, this appointment had changed from a boring and overpriced hour to nothing less than a tug-of-war with death. And death was winning!

  The doctor resisted, straining ever closer to the tipping point.

  “We’re on the thirty-fifth floor!”

  But that didn’t seem to register with Dr. Gundenberg. He was determined to take a flying leap.

  Jax dug his sneakers into the carpet and began to haul the psychiatrist back from the brink, pulling with all his strength at the man’s shoulder, his sleeve, his cuff — anything that might keep him inside the office. In answer, Dr. Gundenberg shrugged out of his blazer, freeing himself from his patient’s grasp, and began to roll his body over the sill.

  It was too late. In seconds he’d be falling. Jax squeezed his eyes shut in an attempt to banish thoughts of the hurtling descent, the upward rush of the pavement below….

  “No!” he howled. “Stop!”

  With that, Dr. Gundenberg stepped back into the office, brushing off his immaculate white shirt. He accepted his blazer from his trembling patient and sat back down in his chair as if nothing had happened.

  “Are you all right?” Jax barely whispered.

  “Certainly,” the doctor replied. “But I see that our time is up. We’ll continue this next week.”

  “If you haven’t killed yourself by then.”

  The psychiatrist looked shocked. “Young Jackson, why would you even suggest a thing like that?”

  Jax just stared. Could it possibly be true that the man honestly didn’t remember the horrible thing he’d just tried to do? Could an event like that just slip a guy’s mind?

  First Dr. Palma and now this. There was only one conclusion Jax could draw. He’d always assumed that his hallucinations were his problem alone. But now people around him were doing crazy things. There had to be a connection.

  Was there something about his strange visions that was making others act in a way that was even stranger?

  “You’re so clueless, Opus,” Tommy told him at school the next day. “Everybody’s a little weird around you. It’s been happening since kindergarten.”

  The two seventh graders were navigating the halls of I.S. 222 en route to the cafeteria.

  “Nobody’s ever climbed out a thirty-fifth-floor window,” Jax insisted. “My parents said he was using some kind of shock therapy, but I think he was serious. If I hadn’t grabbed his arm, he’d be a grease spot on Park Avenue.”

  “Yeah, that’s pretty bugging,” Tommy admitted. “But people are different with you. It’s like there are two sets of rules in the world — one for you and one for the rest of us.”

  “Name one time that’s ever happened,” Jax demanded.

  “How about Steadman? The kid’s an animal, averaging forty points a game all season. But when he comes up against you, he can’t hit the broad side of a barn.”

  “Maybe I played him tough,” Jax suggested. “Maybe he had an off game. Anything’s possible.”

  “I guess.” Tommy looked skeptical. “But don’t you think it’s strange that you’re on student council?”

  “Lots of people are on student council!”

  “Yeah, because they ran for office! You never did, but enough kids wrote in your name that you got elected.”

  “They thought I could do a good job,” Jax offered lamely.

  “Right. Just like the debate team — which you never tried out for either. You stink at debating, man! How about the one where you said we all should be vegetarians? And if people lose their jobs in the meat industry —”

  “Okay, so that wasn’t my finest hour,” Jax conceded.

  “Remember what you said?” Tommy crowed. “Your amazing argument that crushed the other side with its sheer brilliance and logic? You said if people get laid off at the slaughterhouse, it’s no biggie, because all they have to do is —”

  “— buy a pack of seeds and start farming,” Jax finished, along with his friend. “It was the only thing I could think of. Besides, we won the debate.”

  “That’s my whole point!” Tommy exclaimed. “Everybody in that room was staring at you like you’d just solved all the world’s problems. They always do!”

  “People don’t stare at me —”

  “Hi, Jax.”

  Brown-haired, petite Jessica Crews walked up to them. While she stood equally distant from both of them, it was obvious that all her attention was focused on Jax. Tommy mouthed the word Staring.

  Jax lowered his eyes from her gaze. “Hi, Jess. How’s it going?”

  “Do you want to be my bus partner on the field trip tomorrow?” she asked. As part of a unit on the Roaring Twenties, the seventh-grade social studies class was scheduled to attend a reenactment of a genuine vaudeville show.

  “He’s already got a bus partner,” Tommy put in.

  For the first time, Jessica seemed to notice him. “Oh, hey, Tommy.” Back to Jax. “Well, if he gets sick or something, come and find me.” She disappeared into the cafeteria.

  “You see?” Tommy was triumphant. “I might as well have been a cockroach on a locker.”

  Jax took a deep breath. “Okay, so it happens sometimes. The question is: Why?”

  “That’s an easy one,” Tommy said confidently. “It’s because you were born with a giant horseshoe up your diaper. You’re lucky, man.”

  “Yeah, right. That’s why I ended up with a psychiatrist who’s nuttier than I am.”

  “Seriously, everything goes your way. If you weren’t my best friend, I’d hate your guts. Why look for reasons? Just sit back and enjoy it.”

  “Except that I’m seeing things, and the people around me are freaking out.”

  “I’m not freaking out, and I’m around you twenty-four-seven. I guess I’m just more stable than everybody else.”

  They entered the cafeteria and headed for the lunch line. At least a dozen people waved and called, “Hi, Jax.” There wasn’t a single “Hi, Tommy.”

  Tommy took a mock bow. “I’m here, too.” To Ja
x, he said, “Maybe they’re just checking you out to see what color your eyes are today. But it doesn’t work on me because it’s all gray.”

  Jax helped himself to some mashed potatoes. “And that’s why you’re the only one who understands why you can’t start farming in a tenth-floor apartment? Because you’re color-blind?”

  Tommy deposited a dollop of potatoes on his tray and licked the scoop before returning it. “Nope, because I’m gifted. Pass the pepper.”

  Roaring: New York Vaudeville in the Twenties was being held in a refurbished theater on the Upper West Side. It was part variety show and part museum exhibit. Every effort was made to re-create the New York City of the 1920s, from the vintage Stutz Bearcat parked by the entrance to the bouncing ragtime piano and the five-cent ice-cream cones sold at the concession stand. The ushers, dressed in ornate uniforms, expressed bewilderment over smartphones, iPods, and even plastic bottles of water. A few devices had to be confiscated as the seventh graders vied to show the staff the most mind-blowing and/or offensive app. They seemed to forget that the employees weren’t from the past any more than the students themselves were, and probably had cell phones of their own under the gold braiding and shiny epaulets of their costumes.

  Eventually, everyone settled down and the show could begin. There were singers, tap dancers, and jugglers. The comedian was completely unfunny, but that might have been on purpose, to show what humor was like in the twenties. The boos and catcalls got so loud that the teachers were circulating up and down the aisles, dispensing whispered warnings. But then the hapless performer was pulled off the stage by a hooked cane, and it became clear that it was all part of the vaudeville experience.

  After a short silent newsreel about the election of Calvin Coolidge, the appointment of J. Edgar Hoover as head of the FBI, and the first Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, the master of ceremonies introduced the Amazing Ramolo, who was “going to dazzle you with his astounding powers of the mind.”

  Ramolo turned out to be a hypnotist with a swinging gold pocket watch that gleamed in the footlights. When he asked for volunteers from the audience, the raucous seventh graders became very quiet. No one believed Ramolo had any special powers. But just in case, it was better to let somebody else’s mind be tampered with first.