Удушье (Choke)

If the Mommy was a compassionate genius or a slut, you don't know.

Sex pretty much cures everything.

She was the best therapist in the business, or she was a whore that fucked with your mind. She didn't like being so slam bam with her clients, but she'd never planned to earn a living this way.

This kind of session, the sex kind, had first happened by acci­dent. A client who wanted to quit smoking wanted to be re­gressed to the day he was eleven and took his first puff. So he could remember how bad it tasted. So he could quit by going back and never starting. That was the basic idea.

On his second session, this client wanted to meet with his fa­ther, who was dead of lung cancer, just to talk. This is still pretty much normal. People want to meet with famous dead people all the time, for guidance, for advice. It was so real that on his third session, the client wanted to meet Cleopatra.

To each client, the Mommy said, let all the tension drain from your face to your neck, then from your neck to your chest. Relax your shoulders. Allow them to roll back and press into the couch. Imagine a heavy weight pressing your body, settling your head and arms deeper and deeper into the cushions of the couch.

Relax your arms, your elbows, your hands. Feel the tension trickle down into each finger, then relax and imagine the tension draining out through each fingertip.

What she did was put him in a trance, hypnotic induction, and guide the experience. He wasn't going back in time. None of it was real. What was most important is he wanted this to hap­pen.

The Mommy, she just gave the play-by-play story. The blow-by-blow description. The color commentary. Imagine listening to a baseball game over the radio. Imagine how real it can seem. Now imagine it from inside a heavy theta-level trance, a deep trance where you hear and smell. You taste and feel. Imagine Cleopatra rolling out of her carpet, naked and perfect and every­thing you've always wanted.

Imagine Salome. Imagine Marilyn Monroe. If you could go back to any period in history and get with any woman, women who would do everything you could imagine. Incredible women. Famous women.

The theater of the mind. The bordello of the subconscious.

That's how it started.

Sure, what she did was hypnosis, but it wasn't real past-life re­gression. It was more a kind of guided meditation. She'd tell Mr. Jones to focus on the tension in his chest and let it recede. Let it flow down to his waist, his hips, his legs. Imagine water spiraling down a drain. Relax each part of your body, and let the tension flow down to your knees, your shins, your feet.

Imagine smoke drifting away. Let it diffuse. Watch it vanish. Disappear. Dissolve.

In her appointment book, next to his name it said Marilyn Monroe, the same as most guys here for their first time. She could live on just doing Marilyn. She could live on just doing Princess Diana.

To Mr. Jones, she said, imagine you're looking up at a blue sky, and imagine a tiny airplane skywriting the letter Z. Then let the wind erase the letter. Then imagine the plane writing the let­ter Y. Let the wind erase it. Then the letter X. Erase it. Then the letter W.

Let the wind erase it.

All she really did was set the stage. She just introduced men to their ideal. She set them up on a date with their subconscious be­cause nothing is as good as you can imagine it. No one is as beau­tiful as she is in your head. Nothing is as exciting as your fantasy.

Here you'd have the sex you'd only dreamt about. She'd set the stage and make the introductions. The rest of the session, she'd watch the clock and maybe read a book or do a crossword puzzle.

Here you'd never be disappointed.

Buried deep in his trance, a guy would lie there and twitch and hump, a dog chasing rabbits in a dream. Every few guys, she'd get a screamer or a moaner or a groaner. You have to wonder what the people in the room next door would think. Guys in the waiting room heard the fuss, and it would drive them wild.

After the session, a guy would be soaked with sweat, his shirt wet and sticking to him, his pants stained. Some could pour the sweat out of their shoes. They could shake it out of their hair. The couch in her office was Scotchgarded, but it never really got a chance to really dry out. Now it's sealed inside a clear plastic slipcover, more to keep the years of mess inside it than to protect it from the outside world.

So guys each had to bring a towel, in their briefcases, in paper bags, in their gym bags with a clean change of clothes. In be­tween clients, she'd spray around air fresheners. She'd open the windows.