Lars Kepler - The Hypnotist

“All right,” he said.

I put him down and saw Simone’s pensive expression.

Benjamin tugged at my trouser leg. “So what was it, Daddy?”

I didn’t understand.

“Why were you so happy, Daddy?”

“It was just money,” I replied, subdued. “I’ve got some money for my research.”

“David says you do magic.”

“I don’t do magic. I try to help people who are frightened and un happy.”

Simone let Benjamin run his fingers through the marjoram leaves and inhale their scent. “Tomorrow I sign the lease for the space on Ar senalsgatan.”

“But why didn’t you say anything? Congratulations, Sixan!”

She laughed. “I know exactly what my opening exhibition is going to be,” she said. “There’s a girl who’s just finished at the art college in Bergen. She’s absolutely fantastic; she does these huge- ”

Simone broke off as the doorbell rang. She tried to see who it was through the kitchen window, before she went and opened the front door. I followed her and saw her walk through the dark hall and toward the doorway, which was filled with light. When I got there, she was standing looking out.

“Who was it?” I asked. “Nobody. There was nobody here.”

I looked out over the shrubbery toward the street. “What’s that?” she asked suddenly.

On the step in front of the door lay a rod with a handle at one end and a small round plate of wood at the other.

“Strange,” I said, picking up the old tool and turning it over in my hands.

“What is it?”

“A ferrule, I think. It was used to punish children in the old days.”

It was time for a session with the hypnosis group. They would be here in ten minutes. The usual six plus the new woman, Eva Blau.

I picked up my pad and read through my notes from the session a week earlier, when Marek Semiovic had talked about the big wooden house in the country in the region of Zenica-Doboj.

It was Charlotte’s turn to begin this time, and I thought I might then make a first attempt with Eva Blau.

I arranged the chairs in a semicircle and set up the video camera tripod as far away as possible.

I was eager that day. The stress of worrying about funding had been relieved, and I was curious as to what would emerge during the session. I was becoming increasingly convinced that this new form of therapy was better than anything I had practised in the past- that the importance of the collective was immense in the treatment of trauma. I was excited by the way the lonely isolation of individual pain could be transformed into a shared and empathetic healing process.

I inserted a new tape in the video camera, zoomed in on the back of a chair, adjusted the focus, and zoomed out again.

Charlotte Ceder entered. She was wearing a dark blue trench coat with a wide belt tightly cinched around her slender waist. As she pulled off her hat, her thick, chestnut-brown hair tumbled around her face. As always, she was beautifully, and terribly, sad.

I went over to the window, opened it, and felt the soft spring breeze blowing over my face. When I turned around, Jussi Persson had arrived.

“Doctor,” he said in his calm Norrland accent.

We shook hands and he went over to say hello to Sibel, who had just come in. He patted his beer belly and said something that made her giggle and blush. They chatted quietly as the rest of the group arrived: Lydia, Pierre, and finally Marek, slightly late as usual.

I stood motionless, waiting until they felt ready. As individuals, they had one thing in common: they had each suffered traumatizing abuse of one kind or another, abuse that had created such devastation within their psyches that they had concealed what had happened from themselves in order to survive. In some cases, I had a greater command of the facts of their lives than they did. They were each, however, acutely aware that their lives had been decimated by terrible events in the past.

“ The past isn’t dead, it isn’t even past .” I would often quote William Faulkner. I meant that every little thing that happens to people remains with them throughout their lives. Every experience influences every choice. In the case of traumatic experiences, the past occupies almost all the space available in the present.

Everyone was waiting for me to start, but Eva Blau had not yet arrived. I glanced at the clock and decided to begin without her.

Charlotte always sat farthest away. She had taken off her coat and was as usual dressed elegantly. When our eyes met, she smiled tentatively at me. Charlotte had tried to take her own life fifteen times before I accepted her into the group. The last time she had shot herself in the head with her husband’s elk rifle, right in the drawing room of their villa. The gun had slipped, and she had lost one ear and a small part of her cheek. There was no trace of it now; she had undergone expensive plastic surgery and changed her hairstyle into a smooth, thick bob that concealed her prosthetic ear and hearing aid. Yet despite the fact that she was beautiful and impeccably groomed, I sensed an abyss within her, on whose edge she was constantly teetering. Whenever I saw her tilt her head to one side, favouring her good ear as she politely and respectfully listened to the others, I always went cold with anxiety.

“Are you comfortable, Charlotte?” I asked.

She nodded and replied, in her gentle, beautifully articulated voice, “I’m fine, thank you.”

“Today we’re going to investigate Charlotte’s inner rooms,” I explained.

“My own haunted house.” She smiled.

“Exactly.” I was always pleased and a little amazed at the way that certain meaningful phrases and expressions were commonly adopted as part of the private idiom in use within the group.

Marek grinned joylessly and impatiently at me as our eyes met. He had been training at the gym all morning, and his muscles were suffused with blood.

“Are we all ready to begin?” I asked.

Sibel spat her chewing gum into a tissue and got up quickly to throw it away. She glanced at me shyly and said, “I’m ready, doctor.”

Slowly I led them into a trance, evoking the image of a wet wooden staircase down which I was leading them. A familiar special energy began to flow among us, a unique warmth we all shared. My own voice, clear and articulated at first, began to register as a series of mesmerizing, calming sounds that guided the patients. I seemed to be watching through someone else’s eyes as their bodies settled more heavily into their chairs and their features flattened and relaxed, assuming the coarse, open expression shared by those under hypnosis.

I moved behind them, gently touching their shoulders, guiding them individually all the time, counting backward, step by step.

“Continue down the staircase,” I said quietly.

I hadn’t told the board that the hypnotist also becomes immersed in a kind of parallel trance as he puts his patients under. In my opinion this was both unavoidable and a good thing. My own trance always took place underwater. I didn’t understand why, but I liked the image of water; it was clear and pleasant, and I had developed a way of using it as a visual and tactile metaphor to help me understand and interpret the course of events during sessions.

My patients were each seeing something completely different, of course; all drifting down into memories, into the past, ending up in the rooms of their childhood, the places where they had spent their youth; returning to their parents’ summer cottages, or the garage of the little girl who lived next door. They didn’t know that for me they were deep underwater at the same time, slowly floating down past an enormous coral formation, a deep-sea plinth, the rough wall of a continental rift, all of us sinking together through gently bubbling water.