Hypnotist

She’s a sprite, whirling wisps of energy, even while sitting perfectly still on the the overstuffed parlor couch. Her pixie hairdo, maybe that’s it, like Audrey Hepburn, no, Shirley MacLaine, her Irma La Douce phase, eyes always in motion. She’s a sprite.

“I’m sixty” she says with some pride. “I used to be fat, too, so I know how hard this is. I lost forty-five pounds.”

I look at her tiny waist, wrapped in a kind of translucent purple flower-printed non-trendy post-hippie overblouse, green Danskin underneath clinging to her fatless middle.

“You look great,” I say. What else can a person say when confronted with such triumphant talk? She did look great. Her face was the face of a fifty-year-old, at least from five feet away — pretty but sagging a bit, no work, no Beverly Hills knifings and tuckings, although auburn highlights did light up the unnaturally dark pixie do.

“We need to break through,” she says. “We are trying to use your mind to reprogram your brain,” she says.

Her energy feels random, almost desperate to please, to win, to help me. It’s been a month now since I called, talk about desperation, another cycle of weight gain and weight loss and gain again, and even worse, the blackness that follows the wild ride, the ‘fuck-it,” the why-bother? fuck you, fuck the world, who cares if my clothes fit anyway?

In this familiar trough, I encounter Shelley, my landscape consultant and wholesale exotic plant lady. Shelley seems to have dwindled her fatness into nothingness. My God, girl, what happened? She drops the bread-crumb to Stephanie, the sprite, the hypnotist, in whose living room I now sit.

I don’t know what I was expecting, something occult, like the bookstores that sell Edgar Cayce, look deep into my eyes, follow the pendulum, you’re going into a trance, blah blah, like in the movies? Instead, she’s on a sales frenzy of scientific credentialism, name dropping institutes and professors and research studies, and UCLA over and over, driving home the point that she knows what she is doing, and that all of this business I’m paying her for will work.

Only it hasn’t.

Nearly two months into this, and I’m exactly the same weight.

I’m still at it however, I’m fascinated. As with any practitioner of the specialized arts that I have hired, one must be fascinated. Also, one must master the art of surrender.

I am sitting by a calm blue swimming pool with Michael, a big-time Enneagram aficionado — the ones who say, “Oh, he’s such a three and you stare, baffled, no idea what a three is, no matter how many times it’s explained.

“I am just not drawn to these systems,” I say, “I never remember anything about my number…or my sign…or my type. How can everybody be divided up into…into bins like that?”

“How about those 12 Steps?” he asks, “Aren’t you drawn to them?” A breeze from the redwoods above nudges a few new ripples on the surface of the cracked turquoise pool at Michael’s foot.

Immediately I know he’s got me. Yes, that’s a system that works for me, it’s a system that tells me that I don’t have all the answers, a system that let’s me surrender to whomever I decide at a given moment is my higher power, whether it is my yoga teacher, my meditation leader, my neuro muscular therapist, my nutritionist, my psychologist, shaman, chiropractor, acupuncturist, masseur, masseuse, reiki practitioner, sacred intimate, life coach, sex coach, christ, my homeopathic cardiologist — when I tell this shit to my friends back east they just say, Jesus, you Californians, Christ, woo-woo west coasters. I guess I am.

I look up at Stephanie. Her brow is knitted and she has brought her manicured hands to a praying position in front of her chest. She leans towards me.

“Do you want to lose weight, Nick?” she asks. “You cannot do this if you don’t really want it.” The house holds its breath, waiting.

“I guess so,” I say. She raises an eyebrow. A vase of star lilies on the table between distracts me for the slightest moment with their insistent fragrance.

“No, I do, I am tired of the tight clothes and the shame.”

The house breathes out with a creak.

“You’re a rebellious little 13-year old, you know?” she says.

This isn’t working, I think. It’s voodoo, snake oil, like the Ouija board. Faith as its own reward, like a new religion, like they all are. I just want to flee from the burning building, screaming into the night, “let me alone” and hope that the fires melt the fat away with only a little pain, no effort, automatic, a celestial visitation, please may I have one with a slice of pie?

“For some reason, I can’t even listen to the CDs you give me, and when I do, I fall asleep before you even get to the good stuff. I don’t think I’ve heard anything on those CDs.”
I look over at the elaborate recording equipment, a CD burner and earphones and these weird light-emitting frames that she’ll slip over my closed eyes like interplanetary sunglasses.

“Why don’t we try another approach. Let’s work on that rebelliousness,” she says, her smile reminding me that she was once an actor, studied at the Actor’s Studio. I am the audience, she wants me to applaud.

“OK, let’s do it,” I pick up the glasses and the earphones and lean back against the soft cushion behind me.