a moment when he thought he had me. After a while Elsie got bored and went in the kitchen to get food ready. Frank began to talk softly with Anne and direct an occasional, acidulous comment our way. A good hour must have passed and we were still nowhere. I don't know why Phil kept on. He must have felt I was a challenge. At any rate, he wouldn't give up. He kept on with that theatre bit and, after a while, Frank stopped talking and watched and, except for a slight clinking of dishes in the kitchen, there was only the monotonous sound of Phil's voice, talking at me.
"The walls are dark velvet, the floors are covered with dark velvet rugs. It's black inside, absolutely black. Except for one thing. In the whole pitch-black theatre there's only one thing you can see. The letters up on the screen. Tall, thin, white letters on the black, black screen. They spell sleep. Sleep. You're very comfortable, very comfortable. You're just sitting there and looking at the screen, looking, looking at that single word up there. Sleep. Sleep. Sleep."
I'll never know what made it begin to work on me unless it was sheer repetition. I suspect my assurance that I couldn't be hypnotized helped too; an assurance of such illogical magnitude that I took it for granted. I didn't even try to get hypnotized. To quote Elsie-I just played along with the gag.
"You're relaxing," Phil said. "Your feet and ankles are relaxed. Your legs are relaxed, so relaxed. Your hands are limp and heavy. Your arms are relaxed, so relaxed. You're beginning to relax all over. Relax. Relax. You're going to sleep. To sleep. You're going to sleep."
And I was. I started slipping away. By the time I felt the slightest trickle of awareness as to what was happening to me, it was too late. It was as if my mind-or, rather, my volition-were a moth being set into congealing wax. There was a faint fluttering as I tried to escape; but all in vain. I began to feel as I had once when I had an impacted wisdom tooth taken out. The oral surgeon had jabbed a needle into the exposed vein on my left arm. I'd asked him what it was for and he'd said it was to stop excess salivation. I guess that's what they always say so the patient won't be afraid. Because it wasn't for that, it was a fast-acting general anesthetic. The room started weaving around me, everything got watery in front of me, the nurses leaning over me wavered as if I were looking at them through lenses of jelly. And then I woke up; it was that fast. I didn't even realize when I'd lost consciousness. It seemed as if I'd closed my eyes only a second or two. I'd been out cold for forty-five minutes.
It was just like that again. I opened my eyes and saw Phil sitting there grinning at me. I blinked at him.
"What'd I do, doze off?" I asked.
Phil chuckled. I looked around. They were all looking at me in different ways; Frank, curious; Ron, baffled; Elizabeth blank; Elsie half afraid. Anne looked concerned.
"Are you all right, honey?" she asked me.
"Sure. Why?" I looked at her a moment. Then I sat up. "You don't mean to tell me it took?" I said, incredulously.
"Did it ever," she said, her smile only half amused.
"I was hypnotized?"
That seemed to break the tension. Everybody seemed to talk at once.
"I'll be damned," said Frank.
"My goodness," said Elizabeth. Ron shook his head wonderingly.
"Were you really hypnotized?" Elsie asked. There was very little distrust left in her voice.
"I... guess I was," I said.
"You know it," Phil said, unable to stop grinning.
I looked at Anne again. "I really was?" I asked.
"If you weren't, you're the best little actor I ever saw," she said.
"I never saw anything like it," Ron said quietly.
"How do you feel?" Phil asked me and I knew, from the way he said it, it was a loaded question.
"How should I feel?" I asked, suspiciously.
Phil forced down his grin. "A little... hot?" he asked.
Suddenly, I realized that I was hot. I ran my hand over my forehead and rubbed away sweat. I felt as if I'd been sitting in the sun too long.
"What did you do-set fire to me?" I asked.
Phil laughed out loud. "We tried," he said, "but you wouldn't catch." Then he calmly told me that, while I was stretched out like a board