Crash Gordon and the Mysteries of Kingsburg (59 page)

It’s odd to hear Twinker being referred to as Isabelle, but that
is
her real name, after all. Gordon had almost forgotten.

Turning to Twinker, Doctor Lemingeller says, “Isabelle, you’re still in a very deep trance, am I correct?”

“Yes,” says Twinker, looking a little zombie-like.

“Now, in a few moments I’m going to wake you up by clicking my fingers, and when I do, you won’t be able to see Vonda. No matter where you look, Vonda won’t be there. She’ll be invisible to you.
And you won’t remember that I’ve told you this.
Now, on the count of three:
one, two, three
….” Before he clicks his fingers, Doctor Lemingeller leads Vonda over to stand right in front of Twinker, so that Twinker’s eyes are level with Vonda’s silicone-enhanced chest.

Click.

Doctor Lemingeller asks Twinker if she can see Vonda anywhere in the room.

“Nope,” Twinker says. She’s looking everywhere. She leans forward and nearly pokes her eye out on one of Vonda’s erect nipples.

“You’re sure you don’t see Vonda?” Doctor Lemingeller asks her.

“I don’t see her anywhere. Did she leave?” The audience laughs.

Doctor Lemingeller holds up three fingers behind Vonda’s back, where Twinker shouldn’t be able to see them. “How many fingers am I holding up?” he asks her.

“Three.”

“Now how many?” Lemingeller shows all five digits.

“Five.”

Weird….
The laughter dissipates.

Doctor Lemingeller calls out: “I need a volunteer from the audience. Anyone?”

“I’ll do it as long as you don’t make me quack like a duck,” Skip volunteers. It’s his girlfriend up there, after all.

“You won’t need to be hypnotized,” Doctor Lemingeller assures him. “What’s your name, son?”

“Skip,” says Skip, bounding up on the stage. “Okay. So what do I do?”

Doctor Lemingeller gets a plain white piece of cardboard from one of the stagehands and holds it up against Vonda’s back–again, where Twinker shouldn’t be able to see it. With a flourish, he produces a purple marker pen and says to Skip: “I want you to write a message to Isabelle on the back of this sign. It can be anything. Just don’t tell us what it is. When you’re done, turn it over so we can’t see it.”

Skip takes the pen and writes. When he’s done, he turns the sign over, holding it flat against Vonda’s back.

“Isabelle, can you read that sign?” asks Doctor Lemingeller.

Twinker nods her head with a bemused expression. “It says: ‘Blue monkeys are flying out from under Vonda’s skirt! Love, Skip’”

“Skip, did you write that?” Doctor Lemingeller asks.

Grinning, but obviously confused, Skip nods his head. He turns the sign over, so the whole audience can see:

“How’d she do that?” Skip asks Doctor Lemingeller. “What is it, like telepathy?”

“It very well
could
be telepathy…” Doctor Lemingeller says, unknotting his black silk tie. “In many documented cases, a melding of minds has been observed to take place between hypnotists and their subjects. See, it’s my belief that our minds are not just in our heads; they also extend outward from our bodies. You can imagine it as a morphic field of thought radiating all around us, wherever we go. It also transcends space and time by extending into the past, as memories, and into the future, as intentions. If I’m right, then Isabelle could have tapped into my thought-field when I saw what you were writing. We can test that hypothesis right now if you’ll be so kind as to blindfold Isabelle with my necktie.”

Skip obligingly wraps the grey tie around Twinker’s head and props her up as Doctor Lemingeller does his neck-pinching maneuver again, sending her into a deep trance. He says, “Isabelle, you’ll be able to taste whatever I taste. We’re mentally connected.” Then, after pausing to make sure the blindfold is secure, Doctor Lemingeller walks to the far end of the stage. Someone behind the blue velvet curtain passes him a large banana, which he promptly peels and eats with simian glee. Through a mouthful of yellow mush, he calls out:

“Isabelle! Do you taste it? What are we eating?”

“A banana!” Twinker says, clapping her hands in recognition. The audience is collectively dumbfounded.

“What now?” Doctor Lemingeller asks. The hand from behind the curtain passes him a cluster of green Thompson Seedless grapes. He pops a few of them into his mouth and chomps.

“Grapes!” says Twinker with delight, covering her lips with her fingertips.

“Okay, Isabelle, you did great!” Doctor Lemingeller says. He walks back over to her and removes the blindfold. “On the count of three, I’m going to bring you up out of your trance again–only this time you’ll be able to see Vonda. Ready?
And-a
-
one, and-a-two-ah, and-a-three!

At the click of Doctor Lemingeller’s fingers, Twinker starts like a scared rabbit and says to Vonda: “God! Were you standing in front of me the whole time?”

“I was,” says Vonda. “You just couldn’t see me.”

“Which brings us to our second hypothesis…” Doctor Lemingeller says. “What if Isabelle really
could
see through Vonda? What if she could read that sign right through Vonda’s tits?”

“I could!” swears Twinker. “I did!”

“Did he just say ‘tits’?” Skip stage-whispers.

“Did I?” asks Doctor Lemingeller. “I’m sorry… I meant to say ‘chest.’
Whoops!
I guess I’m used to the older crowds in Reno and Vegas.” The audience is laughing again. Vonda wags a finger at her boss, as if to say,
You naughty Master Hypnotist….

“Okay, so anyway… if Isabelle could see through Vonda well enough to read a sign held against her back, what does that mean?” Doctor Lemingeller asks the audience. “Well, I’ll tell you what I think. I think it means we create our own reality through our programmed unconscious beliefs. And I’m talking about the deep unconscious here, as deep as the processes that control our breathing and digestion. But that deep unconscious level can be reached, through hypnosis, and its beliefs can be changed.”

As he quickly–almost magically–reknots his necktie, Doctor Lemingeller says, “When I made Isabelle here believe that Vonda was invisible, Vonda was edited out of the reality that Isabelle’s mind constructs. And when Vonda was removed from Isabelle’s personal reality construct, then there was nothing to stop Isabelle from seeing straight through to what was behind Vonda’s back.”

“Trippy…” says Skip. The audience seems to agree.

“At the deepest level, everything is infinitely interconnected–all matter and all consciousness,” Doctor Lemingeller says, summing up. “Most of our troubles stem from the core belief that we live in the world, when really, the world lives inside us. Reality at large is a
frequency
domain. Our minds function like billions of supercomputers working in tandem to covert those frequencies into a holographic projection of the world we think we know from our five senses. Sticks and stones and broken bones–this whole flesh circus with all its props–it’s all just a
holomovement
, a four-dimensional interactive movie we can smell and taste and touch. It’s created from the vast storehouse of frequency-memories in the collective unconscious–which, in turn, is constantly being updated by our individual thoughts.”

Doctor Lemingeller pauses, then lets out a short bark of a laugh. “
Whew!
I can see
that
little speech just flew right over most of your heads. Well, if you want to learn more, you should study the work of Karl Pribram and David Bohm–a neurophysiologist and a physicist, both leaders in their fields, who independently came up with a theory called the Holographic Model of the Universe. I don’t know about you guys, but as a hypnotist who’s seen a lot of very strange things, it works for me.”

Hey, I was just reading David Bohm!
Gordon thinks.
Mere coincidence… or are Lloyd, Doctor Lemingeller, and the town librarian involved in some sort of mind-fucking conspiracy?

“I’m sure you’re all aware of what Albert Einstein had to say on the subject,” Doctor Lemingeller continues, in a somewhat snarky vein: “‘Reality is merely an illusion, albeit
a very persistent one
.’”

Suddenly, chaos erupts in the audience. Tracy and Stacy–the two blonde cheerleaders who pretended to die onstage–both stand up and yell,
“Popcorn! Peanuts!”
like roving snack vendors at a baseball game. Before Gordon even realizes what he’s doing, he’s standing, too, yelling,
“Shut up!”
Even more unsettling, Jimmy has leapt up to plant his two feet on the armrests of the chair he was sitting in–and he has a gun in a two-handed policeman’s grip pointed at Doctor Lemingeller’s chest.

“Eat lead, you cruddy hypnotist!” Jimmy shouts. Then the gun goes off.
Bam! Bam!bam!bam!bam!-bam!
He empties the barrel. Fortunately, it’s only a starter’s pistol, firing blanks.

“
Oh! You got me!”
Doctor Lemingeller says from up on the stage. He clutches his chest and staggers like a wounded giraffe–hamming it up again.

Jimmy, however, acts as if the bullets were real. He looks around, panicked, then goes vaulting across the backs of the theater seats in an uncanny show of agility that gets him to the fire exit in less than two seconds flat. He slams through the exit door, setting off the alarm, and then he’s gone. No one in the audience has ever seen anyone move so fast.

Gordon is standing there stunned, wondering what just happened. D.H. explains to him that he’d been given a post-hypnotic suggestion to stand up and yell, “Shut up!” when he heard the triggering phrase: “…
a very persistent one
.”

On the same cue, Jimmy was supposed to fire the gun at Doctor Lemingeller, but apparently he hadn’t been told it was only loaded with blanks. So now Jimmy’s a mind-controlled assassin on the run–a fugitive from hypno-injustice.

Gordon says, “I guess now he knows exactly how Sirhan Sirhan must’ve felt.”

□ □ □ □ □ □ □ □ □

After the fire alarm gets turned off, Doctor Lemingeller wraps up his show with a smarmy farewell and D.H., Skip, and Hideous make plans to go search for Jimmy in Hideous’ truck. Gordon wants to go with them, but Doctor Lemingeller has offered to meet backstage with any of the final volunteers to give them helpful hypnotic suggestions to improve their study habits, lose weight, or quit smoking–whatever they want–and Twinker has been begging Gordon to accompany her while she asks for help in kicking her addiction to methamphetamines.

“I thought you gave up speed a long time ago…” says Gordon.

“Dude, are you fuckin’ kidding me?” Skip says. “Every day, she Hoovers up enough crank to kill a goddam rhino.”

“I guess I’ve just learned to hide it better,” Twinker shrugs. “So c’mon, Gordon…
please?
Don’t make me go back there all alone. That hypnotist guy creeps me out.”

“Then why go back there at all?”

“I dunno… maybe because, if I don’t, I’m afraid I’ll end up as a totally worthless junkie whore. It’s bad enough that I have scoliosis. I’d rather not spend the rest of my life turning tricks on top of that, just to feed my habit.”

“Do it because I love her and I don’t want to see her die,” Skip says, leaning in to give Twinker a soulful kiss. As he steps away, he pats Gordon’s back. “I know you’ll look after her, man…” he says. “Just don’t spazz out and have one of your narcoleptic fits back there. I don’t like that bald-headed whack-job, either–but we’ve gotta go find Jimmy. He’s probably all freaked out by now and we’re the only people he trusts.”

“Check out the crawlspace door in his bedroom downstairs,” Gordon suggests to them. “Or wait–even better… check his Uncle Lloyd’s place. I’ll bet that’s where he’s hiding out.”

“He’s probably already asked Lloyd to stow him away on the next Space Shuttle,” D.H. says. They head out the same exit that Jimmy had so dramatically slammed through earlier, setting off the fire alarm again.

“Thanks for doing this, Crash…” Twinker says as they head up the steps to the stage. “If I wasn’t already having sex with Skip, I probably would’ve made out with you by now, just to get you to go along with me.”

“I would’ve done it, no matter what,” says Gordon, feeling chivalrous. “I’m your friend; it’s not like you have to trade sex to get me to help you.”

“I wish everyone felt that way,” Twinker mutters.

Gordon isn’t exactly sure what Twinker means by that, but he doesn’t have much time to think about it. Doctor Lemingeller greets them backstage as they pull back the edge of the blue velvet curtain and head into the darkness:

“Isabelle! Gordon! I’m so glad you could make it,” Doctor Lemingeller says, standing in front of the zombie versions of Kimmie Swenson and Daniel Fleurbundt. “Have a seat and I’ll be right with you. We were just finishing up.”

He turns back to Kimmie and says soothingly: “Now Kimmie… you’re going to become a very great athlete. Being on the boy’s varsity basketball squad is just the beginning…. Every muscle in your body will grow stronger and have perfect cellular recall of all the right athletic moves. You’ll run faster and play harder than any of your opponents… and you’ll always win the game. Later, you’ll apply that same winning attitude toward becoming the richest woman in Fresno County. I suggest you start by investing in Microsoft stock–then real estate.”