Gordon (the adman) to Julian:‘But the past catches up with you,’ he thought and grinned sickly, ‘…one way or another.’
Julian to Gordon:‘Freedom has been lost to all-pervasive bureaucracy. Silent enslavement.’
(Ewart – Gordon's boss):‘If – when I get round to telling you what I want – it sounds onerous to you, then the pact would be broken, wouldn’t it.’
Gordon to Helen (Gordon's girlfriend):No adman at Brock, Hardy & Hammel was a mere copywriter – he had never liked the term; it sounded like a person who was always looking over someone’s shoulder for inspiration.
(Edmund – a patient of Julian's):‘Blooming – bloody expensive – Bloomers. Ring any bells?’
Julian:She laughed. Oh, that laugh. It tugged at something in him. It was both delicious and unbearable.
Julian to Gordon:Who said instinctive reactions had to be rational?
(Julian):‘You’ll be surprised at the power of hypnosis.’
Julian:He imagined he had pulled a lever and could hear Gordon’s mind whirring like the fruited reels of a slot-machine, one that only ever paid out.
Julian:‘I’m not playing games here! Why do today what you can put off till tomorrow – is that it, Gordon?’
Gordon and Julian:‘What do you think hypnotism is, Gordon?’
Julian:‘You think it will still work after everything you’ve told me?’
Auger gave him a pitying look. ‘Knowing the illusion doesn’t necessarily break the illusion. In fact, some illusions are inescapable.’
Julian to Gordon:Creation is an act of faith.
(Julian):‘Rationally you know the odds are utterly against you?’
‘Yes.’
‘But you have faith.’
‘Yes.’
‘Even though you realize it’s undeserved.’
Gordon to Julian:The reality was envy from all sides for a prize only the winner discovered didn’t live up to the dream, yet that remained paradoxically difficult to give up.
(Julian):‘Maximilian Forslagg,’ Gordon read aloud from the cover. ‘The Mesmerization of the Human Mind.’ Gordon looked at the rather uninspiring cover, which bore just the title and its author. ‘It sounds thrilling.’
Gordon and Julian:People’s problems always seemed special to themselves just because the problems were their own – that was natural. He sympathized with this. Experience had taught him, however, that in most problems one was rarely alone – he thought then of his own problem – but there were exceptions.
Gordon and Julian:‘It sounds like the Bible. Everybody says they’ve read parts of it.’
Julian snapped impatiently, ‘Religion is for the unevolved.’
Forslagg:‘It’s really the same thing either way, isn’t it, Julian? We will doubt facts before we doubt the assumptions we share.’
Julian grinned mischievously. ‘I’d have a hard time hypnotizing anybody if it were otherwise.’
Ewart:‘Dispassionate rigour was my antithesis. I worked for goose bumps not glory.’
(Gordon):‘One thing you shouldn’t forget about advertising, Gordon – it doesn’t have to make sense.’
Gordon and Julian:The answer would not help him wriggle out of this, but he wasn’t a cheat. And it was stupid, he knew, but he sort of worried that if he played down the truth now, he would jinx himself. Everything could vanish as though it had been just a mirage from the start, and it would be exactly what he deserved.
Helen and Gordon:‘That’s like… like… around here, that’s like being given three gold stars. And it all happened because you hypnotized me.’
‘I’m glad you think so.’
‘How did you do it?’
‘The best art hides the artifice.’
‘Your experimental techniques?’
‘What?’
‘You wanted to try out some new ideas.’
‘Oh yes, I did say that, didn’t I.’
Helen:‘Gordon, doesn’t any of this strike you as a little odd?’
‘You don’t know Julian.’
(Forslagg):‘Oh yeah, big difference. So he was straight and gay – that’s still gay.’
Gordon to Nerine:Not only was one’s mind in doubt, but the experience of one’s reality seemed pliable too. The objective world appeared little more than background scenery and stage props. The play was just invention – and not necessarily one of your own.
Gordon to Edmund:‘My mother told me that I was a late birth,’ he quipped. ‘I suppose it’s a case of start as you mean to go on. I can’t remember the last time I was early for anything.’
Man in café:‘Say, “Yes, Master,”’ said Gordon irritably. All pretence at therapy was quickly vanishing.
Nerine (Julian's receptionist) and Gordon:‘I think I’ll stick to my position – acting rationally is overvalued. Yeh, I think I’m onto something here. It’s a lot easier to formulate an unsound argument than it is to spot the flaw in it. By specious reasoning, you can arrive at any conclusion you want. In fact it would be irrational to put too much faith in anything you arrived at by reason… especially verbal reasoning – it’s a minefield.’
Gordon and Nerine:He nearly called out her name in some desperate and imploring manner, but luckily she spoke first. ‘Let me just lock the door,’ she said without turning around. ‘Hypnotists’ surgeries attract some right nutters.’
Relieved, Gordon replied, ‘Two good examples right here.’
(Forslagg):‘What happened?’ he asked feeling dislocated.
‘I hypnotized you.’
‘You really hypnotized me?’
‘I really hypnotized you.’
‘I didn’t know you knew how.’
‘So you wouldn’t have agreed if you thought I could really do it?’
‘Hmmm…yes…no…I don’t know. What did you do to me?’
Nerine laughed, but it was a kind laugh.
Sarah and Jennifer (girls on holiday) with Helen:Perhaps the memories of our lives had been thought an inviolable and cherished part of what identified us, but what of bad memories – couldn’t bad memories become our imprisoners? By twisting memories one might be freed of the tyranny of one’s own past. The rose-coloured spectacles could be made a lot rosier.
Edmund and Mary (Edmund's wife):‘Remember the Hotel de la Pedorrera last year, Jen?’
‘Oh yeh, I hope the place we’re going to is better than that place was. I suppose you looked that up in the dictionary too.’
‘Yep… string of farts.’
‘It doesn’t bloody mean that,’ Jen said in a torrent of laughter.
‘On my life, Jen, I swear.’
(Helen):‘We’re very busy at the moment,’ he was saying. ‘We’ve got an audit by the compliance department. Lots of documents to shred, files to lose, you know how it is.’
Mary flicked a pea at him off her plate. When was the last time he had tried to make a joke? ‘I thought you had an audit a couple of months ago.’
He was stumped for a moment. ‘Er…oh yes, of course. That was an accounting audit. That time I just had to cover my tracks to hide the embezzling I’ve been doing for our retirement to France.’
(Nerine):On the beachfront strip, mayhem ruled. Bass-heavy music wailed out of the bars, and competing rhythms interfered with one another in hectic syncopation. Laughs and shrieks carried on the general hubbub from three sides of commotion. There was a smell of sea air and fast food which mixed with the cologne and alcoholic breath of the melee. This daylight confusion of the senses created an exhilarating augury of the night soon to fall. There was a crowdwide expectancy and a thrill for what revelry might lie ahead.
(Ewart):Every time, an almost irrepressible urgency would overtake her and absorb her single-mindedly in the pursuit of that incorrigible pleasure, and afterwards she could reflect how important it had seemed at the time and, in contrast, how absurd any pretension of significance seemed afterwards. How could anyone think reverently about an act that left you naked and sticky.
Mr Chagawochi (a client of Ewart's):No. That was wimpy thinking, he told himself. Half the battle was just to be convincing. Gordon’s ideas would provide adequate bullshit for them to buy into. Gordon just had to do his job and sell it to them.
Helen to Jennifer and Sarah:‘A car for those who kick hard, and drive harder!’
(Forslagg):‘That’s my story anyway, and I’m sticking to it. I can’t believe what a slapper I’ve been.’
(Gordon):Were his memories of real events, or were they unrecognizably corrupted by the passage of time? Memories of memories filled with invented detail, gradually deteriorating like Chinese whispers.
(Julian):He had let himself be hypnotized by Julian… hadn’t he? So there was nothing for Julian to gain by having forced him. But what if he only believed himself to have been willing? But then if he believed he was willing, wasn’t that the same thing as being willing. What if it only felt that way because he was unwitting of the craft by which he had been manipulated? Maybe he wouldn’t have wanted what he had wanted if he had known the real reason why he had wanted it.
Helen and Gordon:Haughton should have forbidden anyone even to think about it. It did remain unspoken, but… it was on their minds; it was in their eyes; and every time he saw it there was like an assault.
Helen to Gordon:‘Do you think it worked then?’
‘What?’
She pushed herself away from him and gave a little twirl and a smile.
‘I should say so,’ he said but then put a finger to his lips and added jokingly, ‘But, just to be sure, I think I’d better give you a close, naked examination.’
Gordon to Helen:‘What do they say? Men lose weight on holiday; women gain it.’
Gordon:‘Ooh yeah… kinky. What else are you going to do to me?’
(Julian):I think, therefore I am. ‘Balls!’ he thought. More like – I absorb, therefore I regurgitate.
Julian and Gordon:He glanced upwards, and though the sky was clear, he made out not a single star. Starlight that had travelled centuries across vast vacuum was drowned out in the last fraction of a second by the luminous metropolis, light from which diffused in a black sky and left it merely dark. A whole universe lay out there, but was veiled as though inconsequential. You can’t look out; you can only look in, he thought. That’s why they’re called inner cities.
Forslagg:‘There’s something else. Doesn’t prayer now strike you as rather similar to something?’
Gordon looked blank, now beginning to fear the worst again.
‘Suggestion?’ the hypnotist prompted.
Gordon let out an aspirated, ‘Ah…’
‘Prayer is autohypnosis,’ the hypnotist said heavily.
Julian to Gordon:No idea exists in a vacuum.
Julian to Gordon:‘It’s worse than that, I realized. What if you pray to God, but instead of asking for an end to suffering, say, you ask to be given revenge on your enemies?’
Julian to Gordon:‘I have this suspicion of why I couldn’t make the self-hypnosis work. To forewarn is to forearm. One’s own mind can be a powerful adversary, perhaps the most powerful.’
Gordon to Julian:‘Because I want you to kill the thing that haunts me. That taunts me in my dreams. That taints me when I wake. That spoils my palate for all that is beautiful in the world with its bitterness. I want to forget what I can’t forgive.’
Julian:‘I think I’ll use the er… the spiral-graphic mesmerizer. Where is it?’
Gordon to Julian:Happiness comes from happy thoughts.
Julian to Gordon:‘Survival of our selfish genes, isn’t it? We’re just along for the ride.’
Julian to Gordon:‘If the question isn’t important, who cares what the answer is!’
(Gordon):‘A message, astronomical in scale and written in blood – surely the message can only be that they had a hand in our creation.’
He could see that every situation would be imbued with this new possibility, the possibility to craft the world to his liking. He could already sense it happening. In everything, he could see the lure of hypnosis.