Human.4

… is this thing on?

Testing, testing.

One two. One two. Two.

Ha. You know those roadies who get up on stage and test all the band’s gear before a gig? And they do all that "testing testing one two one two" stuff into the microphones, to make sure they’ll work when the singer finally takes the stage. Well, Simon once said that the reason they said "one two one two" was because roadies couldn’t count to three.

Made me laugh, but I guess you had to be there.

Anyway—how can you tell if these things are even working?

I mean, low-tech or what?

Still, of course it’s low tech, it’s a tape recorder. An old and battered relic of a time before digital storage and CDs; iPods and MP3s; memory sticks and SD cards.

At least it works. I wasn’t sure it would, it had been abandoned and left to rot in the cupboard under the stairs.

I kinda know how it feels.

Anyway, the tape player is old—it was made by Amstrad, the company started by that rude bloke off The Apprentice. Mum used to love that show. Even went through a phase of saying "You’re fired" for a while when we did something stupid or naughty.

Funny the things you miss.

Oh well. I’d better get on with putting this on to tape; the story I have come back home to record. I’ve been making notes for weeks, jotting down the things I remember, the conversations, the impressions I had at the time, just so I could do this. Make this tape. Tell you these things in my own voice.

I’m doing it in the hope that someone will listen and realize that everything has changed.

Changed forever.

That the world they are living in is not the one it has always been. That there are a few of us left who can remember the way things were—the way they were meant to be.

Looking back is easy, but there’s a temptation to fill in blanks. I’m going to try to tell it as it happened to me, all in the right order and everything, without filling in any of the stuff I learned later. That’s why my notes are going to be important.

I’ve worked it through in my head and reckon that tenses are going to be a problem; you know, whether "has" and "is" should be "had" and "was", but the first set sounds better in my head because it’s how things were at the time, and not how they are now.

If that makes sense.

My English teacher would probably throw a fit, but then he’s probably changed too, and it’s my story anyway, so I’ll tell it the way that feels natural, the way that feels right.

I even know the way the story starts, the very moment it all started to change. The crazy thing that Danny said, that summer afternoon. And, yes, Dad, I’m taping over one of your Dire Straits albums. Something you should have done a long time ago.

Chapter 1

When Danny Birnie told us that he had hypnotized his sister we all thought he was mad.

Or lying.

Or both.

The sister in question is a couple of years older than him and never struck me as the kind of girl who’d fall for any of Danny’s nonsense.

She had to be used to it.

She lived with him.

So she had seen his short-lived preoccupations with stamp collecting, and the difficult withdrawal from his Pokémon addiction. She was even used to his new obsession with becoming the next David Blaine, and the hours he spent practicing with packs of cards.

She always struck me as the kind of girl who’s going to be a star. Some people are just like that. You know that they will, as my grandad used to say, land butter-side-up.

There was no way that Danny—who, no matter how hard he tried, would always end up butter-side-down—could have done what he had told us he had.

Danny’s face was pale and thin, with dark semicircles under each eye, and his hair was a dirty brown color, tousled on top. He was small for his age. Heck, it was my age too—and that’s fifteen and a half, thanks for asking—and I was almost a full head taller than him. And he seemed to exaggerate that smallness by hunching his shoulders and bending his back.

"You should have seen it," he said, his eyes sparkling with excitement. "It actually worked. I mean, I knew it could work, but still, I didn’t really think it would."

He ignored our disbelieving looks.

"I got her to relax. And I guided her into a hypnotic state. I didn’t even need to say “sleep” like they do on the telly. As I relaxed her, her eyes closed and her body went . . . sort of floppy. I hadn’t even thought about what I’d get her to do when she was hypnotized, to be honest. So I told her that she was late for school—it was well past eight in the evening—and suddenly she flew into a panic, running around, throwing stuff into her school bag and complaining about the alarm clock not waking her up."

He shook his head.

"It was priceless," he said.

He waited for one of us to say something.

And waited.

There was me, Simon McCormack, Lilly Dartington and Danny. We all lived down the same road in the small village of Millgrove, and we’re all roughly the same age, so we tend to hang out together.

We were in "the shed", the bus-shelter that squats by the side of the village green, and it was one of those long, hazy summer days that seem to stretch out into something closer to a week. To local kids the shed was a place to meet up, hang out, practice some inept graffiti, and generally waste some time.

Across the green from the shed is the Methodist church, and next to that the combined infants and junior school that we all went to before moving to secondary school in the next village over, Crowley.

There’s not a whole lot to do in Millgrove.

We couldn’t get high-speed broadband yet and we were in the middle of a mobile-phone dead spot that meant you couldn’t get a signal within the village itself. We were one of the last generations in the country that didn’t rely on mobile phones, although there were rumors that a new mast was going to help us catch up with the rest of the twenty-first century one day soon.

There’s a tiny playing field where the older kids try out smoking and train for future binge drinking, so we tended to avoid that. Then there are the three shops—a Happy Shopper, a family butcher’s shop and a newsagent.

The shed is pretty much in the center of the village, near enough to the shops in case we needed supplies, and it has a roof in case of English summer rain.

Simon and I have been friends for years. In all honesty I can’t even remember how our friendship came about. Sure, we have a lot of the same interests and attitudes about things, but all that came later . . . I mean, it was revealed over time, so there must just be some . . . I don’t know… instinct for friendship that’s separate, somehow, from all of that.

Without the friendship we’d never have discovered the reason we were friends.

You can drive yourself mad going round in paradoxical circles like that.

Simon and Lilly had been going out with each other for a while now, and seeing as Simon is my best friend I seem to get pulled along with them a lot these days. It’s weird getting used to sharing a friend . . . and . . . well, Lilly and I weren’t getting on if the truth be told.

Danny lives next door to me and kind of just clings on to my coat-tails. Again, I don’t know exactly why. Simon and I make him the butt of a lot of jokes but he just shrugs it all off.

That day we were just trying to fill up the day while using as little energy as we could.

And then, of course, Danny told us that he had hypnotized his sister.

Simon stared at him, with a disbelieving look that summed up how the rest of us felt about Danny’s revelation.

"You hypnotized Annette?" he said, and the spare disbelief he hadn’t managed to put into his stare was crammed into the scathing way he said those three words. There was even a snort at the end of it.

Danny seemed to miss the incredulity and nodded.

"I’ve been reading a lot of books on the subject," Danny said, "and I’ve been watching lots of Paul McKenna and Derren Brown on DVD. With the talent show coming up I thought I might ditch the magic act this year and do a bit of stage hypnotism. You know, make people bark like dogs, or eat an onion as if it’s an apple."

Simon groaned.

Of all of the area’s customs and traditions, the Millgrove talent show is by far the oddest. Every summer since Queen Victoria was sitting on the British throne—with a two-year gap during the Second World War—the people of Millgrove have gathered on the green to compete in the competition. Even when local lads were dying in the trenches in the First World War, the tradition continued.

Local folklore says the talent show began because of a dispute between two farmers, who’d fallen out over a woman and needed some way to settle the matter. Rather than firing pistols at each other, they each wrote a song for the girl and performed it on the green in front of the entire village, who were the judges of the competition. The village might have forgotten the men’s names, but a version of their way of settling the argument was resurrected over a hundred years ago and still continued.

The talent show.

Weeks, even months in some extreme cases, were spent preparing acts (and I’m using that term loosely, most of them were lame Karaoke offerings to amateur-sounding backing tracks) for the grand prize—a battered old cup and some WHSmith gift tokens. As long as it was a slow news week there was a chance of a feature about the show in the Cambridge Evening News, with the winners grinning at the camera, holding their prizes.

Who was it who said something about everyone in the world having their fifteen minutes of fame?

In Millgrove it was more like fifteen seconds.

To me the talent show has always been a bit of a cringe, really. When I was eight years old my dad told that me that, as I was always cracking jokes and making people laugh, I should have a go at being a stand-up comedian at the show.

All in all they were the most embarrassing minutes of my life so far, even beating the moments Mum spent getting out the baby photographs the first time I brought a girlfriend (Katy Wallace, it lasted three weeks) home to meet the folks.

I discovered that there is a huge difference between knowing a few jokes and being a stand-up comic. I don’t think I got a single gag right. I fluffed a punch line early on and then made a mistake in the set-up of the next joke that made its punch line irrelevant. Sweating on the makeshift stage, with hundreds of faces staring at me, I dried up and just looked out at them in the grip of a huge panic attack.

I haven’t entered the talent show since.

I rarely drag myself along for it, if I’m honest. I always seem to find something else to do. Like pairing socks, or cataloging my comics.

You know, important stuff.

"You will come and watch?" Danny asked, and there was a note of something close to desperation in his voice. "You will, won’t you?"

"Well, I wouldn’t miss it for the world," Lilly said, finally dragging her gaze away from the area of Simon’s neck it had been focused on for most of Danny’s "I’m a hypnotist" revelation.

I nodded.

A part of me even wanted to see Danny do well. To knock ’em dead. Become the talk of the village. Maybe even get his picture in the Cambridge Evening News.

But there was another part of me—and I’m not proud of this—that actually wanted to see him fail.

Miserably, horribly and painfully.

It would be like exorcising a ghost.

It would be like therapy.

"Sure," I said, "I’ll be there."

Lilly looked at me oddly and a strange expression passed across her face, like a cloud across the sun. I had a sudden sense of discomfort, as if Lilly had seen—or maybe felt—something that I should have seen or felt but didn’t.

I raised an eyebrow to query it, but Lilly looked away, leaving me feeling foolish and confused.

Foolish, confused, and something else.

A dark sense of foreboding, as if a storm were brewing.

Chapter 2

That night—one of the last nights of my ordinary life—I mentioned Danny’s intentions to my parents over the dinner table.

"Good on him," my dad said around a mouthful of vegetarian stew. "We haven’t had a hypnotist before."

Of course we hadn’t, I thought. Who, apart from someone as mad as Danny, would suddenly decide they were going to become one?

"It should make a nice change," he continued, looking at something on his fork with suspicion. A lump of beef-style Quorn stared back at him. "It’s going to be great this year."

Yeah, great, I thought.

I could already pencil in a few of the high spots.

Mr Bodean and his trombone.

Those creepy Kintner twins and their version of "Old Shep" that I’m sure was used in Guantanamo Bay to get Al Qaeda terrorists to talk.

Mr Peterson, the village postman, and his annual ventriloquism act with a hideous homemade dummy called Mr Peebles.

A whole bunch of hyperactive kids doing bad impersonations of Britney or Kylie or—shudder—Coldplay.

A recorder recital.

Some truly mind-numbing dance routines.

I shook my head.

Poor Danny.

"Are you going to be doing a turn this year?" my mum suddenly asked me. She actually wasn’t joking, although it could easily be mistaken for some kind of sick humor.

I felt the usual prickle of shame pass from my stomach, up my spine, and on to my face, where it magically made my cheeks go red.

"I don’t think so," I said quietly, and prodded some semicircles of carrot on to the far side of my plate with my fork.

Just let it go, I prayed silently, please just let it go.

No such luck.

"He’s scared he’ll choke again," my idiot little brother Chris said, grinning.

I scowled at him.

"Christopher Straker!" Mum said sternly.

With Mum, full name equals big trouble.

Chris’s goofy grin fell from his lips.

"Well, he did choke," he muttered, trying to defend his comment by rephrasing it slightly.

Mum growled.

Dad, it seemed, was utterly oblivious to the exchange and was still thinking about Danny’s star turn.

"I’ve always wondered how stage hypnotists get people to do all those things," he said. "I mean, it has to be some kind of trick, hasn’t it? The people can’t really be hypnotized, can they?"

"I’m sure I don’t know," Mum said. "Wasn’t there a man who was hypnotized and then died and carried on living because no one had given him the command to wake up?"

"That was a film, dear," Dad said.

"It was a story by Edgar Allan Poe," I offered.

"I didn’t know the Teletubbies had first names," Mum said, and I rolled my eyes at her.

"Danny says he hypnotized Annette," I said. "Made her think she was late for school."

Mum screwed her face up. "That was a bit mean of him," she said.

"Was she late for school?" my dad asked, missing the point, as usual, by about twenty-five meters.

Chris pulled a face at me, but I turned the other cheek and ignored him.

"The point is that she must have been hypnotized ," I said.

Blank looks from Mum and Dad said I needed to explain a little further.

"It’s the summer holidays," I said. "You don’t get ready for school when there’s no school to go to."

"Oh yeah," Dad said.

"And it was night time," I finished.

Mum was looking over at Dad with one of the strange expressions that had become all too frequent in our house.

Even the simplest, most innocent statements could be met with tension, with Mum and Dad always on the lookout for traps and pitfalls in everything said within the walls of the house.

Because, I guess, they spent so much of their time setting them for each other.

This is a portrait of the Straker family before the talent show.

So, when things get crazy you have a suitable base for comparison.

You see, Mum and Dad were "having problems", and were "trying to make a go of things". Both of those phrases, it turns out, are a sort of grown-up code for "their marriage was in trouble".

My dad had left us almost a year before, and he’d only come back a couple of months ago.

Anyway, to trim a long story not quite so long, Mum couldn’t cope when he was away. And so I stepped in to help her. I became the honorary "man" of the family, with responsibilities that I really didn’t want or need placed upon my shoulders.

I ended up being responsible for Chris an awful lot.

Which meant I ended up telling Chris off an awful lot.

It wasn’t something that sat very easily with me.

It certainly didn’t sit very easily with him.

Mum was too emotionally drained to do battle with Chris, so it fell to me to make sure he did his homework, cleaned up his room, ate everything on his plate.

I became a miniature dictator.

I might have been helping Mum, but I sure as heck wasn’t helping myself.

Or Chris, for that matter.

Then Dad came back, begging for forgiveness.

Things had been weird ever since he moved back in.

Every silence, action or look held hidden meanings.

And I suddenly wasn’t so important any more. I went back to being a kid again. Any power I had assumed was gone in an instant.

I had been forced into a role that I didn’t want, so why should I feel bitter about being squeezed out again?

Powerlessness, I guess.

Chris doesn’t let me forget.

He resents any attention our parents offer me, and rejoices in seeing me fail.

Mum and Dad act as if nothing has changed, when even I can see everything has.

That’s my family.

Drive you absolutely crazy.

But you miss them when they’re no longer here.

When the bad stuff comes—and it always will—you look back on those moments with longing.

The bad stuff was just around the corner.

The talent show changed everything.

Forever.

That’s why I like to think about the way things were, however imperfect they seemed at the time.

In extraordinary times, the ordinary takes on a glow and wonder all of its own.

Chapter 3

The talent show loomed.

Danny kind of dropped off the radar and Simon joked that it wasn’t as if he was sitting in his room practising by himself—surely a hypnotist needed people to practice on.

A few days before the show Dad even toyed with the idea of entering the show himself, announcing that his Elvis impersonation "wasn’t half bad". Good sense prevailed when Mum pointed out it wasn’t "half bad" because it was "completely awful". He sulked a bit, but I reckon he was a little bit relieved when the original bravado had worn off.

The day of the show arrived and people got up just as they always had. They went shopping. They cleaned their cars. They read newspapers. They gossiped over garden fences.

They made their way to the green.

Simon, Lilly and I were near the back, cross-legged on the grass, drinking reasonably cold Cokes from the Happy Shopper, and watching Mr Peterson’s act with something close to horror.

Mr Peebles was even more hideous than I remembered.

A grotesque papier-mâché head, like a dried-up orange, sat on top of a square, unnatural-looking body. The dummy’s eyes sort of moved about—they were actually little more than very poorly painted ping-pong balls—but they only went from one impossible cross-eyed position to another.

Every time Mr Peterson operated the thing’s mouth there was this horrible, hollow knocking sound that was often louder than the thin, falsetto voice that was supposed to come from Mr Peebles.

To call Mr Peterson a "ventriloquist" is to insult the profession because there was no art to what he did. It implies that his lips didn’t move and there was at least an illusion that it was the dummy doing the talking.

Not Mr Peterson.

Mr Peterson’s lips always moved.

They moved when he was doing his straight man routine as himself, and they seemed to move even more when he was speaking for his dummy.

To be brutally honest, I don’t think Mr Peterson ever practises. Between one talent show and another I think Mr Peebles went back into his box and stayed there.

And the weird thing is that at no point in the proceedings did Mr Peterson seem to draw any pleasure from his own act. He looked, by turns, utterly terrified, and on the brink of tears: as if this wasn’t entertainment but some strange kind of punishment he was putting himself through.

Year after year.

He stood there, sweating in the heat of the afternoon sun—the body of Mr Peebles hanging limply from his hand—wearing the wide-eyed look of a rabbit dazzled by headlights.

"What’s up, Mr Peebles?" he said. "You look sad."

The head of the dummy swiveled through so many degrees that it would have broken a real creature’s neck.

"I get you don’t really care ooh-ats wrong with ne," came the reply.

"Of course I care, Mr Peebles. Now, what’s wrong?"

"I’ve groken ny gicycle."

Mr Peterson tried to move the dummy’s head, and then spent a couple of seconds trying to stop the head falling off.

The smaller kids were chuckling and occasionally roaring with laughter.

"It’s like a traffic accident," Simon whispered to me, "it’s horrible, and wrong, but you can’t take your eyes off it."

"The act?" I asked. "Or the whole thing?"

Lilly leaned forwards. "You know Britain’s Got Talent?" She asked.

I nodded.

"They lied," she said.

Mr Peterson stumbled on for a few more minutes that felt much longer, before he took his applause and shuffled offstage.

The show’s host—Eddie Crichton, who ran the village’s sports and social club—wandered on to the stage looking mildly baffled.

"Er . . . well . . . um…" he said, possibly trying to work out how year after year Mr Peterson failed to improve his act. "Now for a little bit of a change from the ordinary." He was regaining enthusiasm. "As we set off on a voyage into the mysteries of the human mind. I’d like to hear a big Millgrove welcome for . . . THE GREAT DANIELINI!"

Simon nudged me in the ribs, really hard and raised his eyebrows.

"Danielini?" he whispered. "What kind of name is that?"

"Not a particularly good one," I whispered back.

I looked around at the people watching, acutely aware of just how badly this could all go for Danny if his act didn’t match up to the billing he’d just been given.

I could see Danny’s mum a couple of rows forwards of us watching the whole thing through the viewfinder of a tiny camcorder. I remember thinking how cruel it was to be filming him, and how at least I had been spared the humiliation of having my own talent show appearance filmed by my parents.

For some reason I had a sudden urge to check the crowd for Danny’s sister, but I couldn’t see her anywhere.

Maybe she was sensible and had found something more fun to do.

Like hammering nails into her feet.

Then Danny stepped on to the stage.

Chapter 4

You know sometimes you see a person you know, but there’s something different about them and you have to look again—do a double take—because you’re suddenly not certain it’s the person you thought it was. Maybe it’s a haircut that makes you suddenly uncertain, or a look on their face that you’ve never seen there before.

And often you’re absolutely right, it’s not who you thought it was, it’s just someone who looks a little like them and you’re relieved that you didn’t call out their name.

Or feel like a total ass because you did.

When Danny walked out I had the same thing happen inside my brain. I mean I knew it was Danny, but then I doubted it and had to look again.

It wasn’t just that he’d got himself a smart dinner suit that actually fitted him—although that helped. It wasn’t that his usually random-angled hair had been gelled and slicked back—although that helped too.

It was something that was both of those things, plus something else.

"He looks older," Lilly said, almost breathlessly, and Simon laughed at her comment.

He was wrong to laugh.

It was true.

Danny did look older.

Taller, too, because he’d lost his habitual slump.

And his face had an intensity to it that made him look a whole lot wiser than the kid who was the constant butt of our stupid jokes.

He stood in the middle of the stage as helpers lined up four chairs behind him. He was looking out across the audience with a confident expression that seemed spooky on a kid his age, almost as if we were seeing a glimpse of Danny as he was going to be, twenty or so years in the future.

"Good afternoon," he said calmly and commandingly. "Welcome to my demonstration of the powers of the human mind."

He unbuttoned his jacket and reached for the inside breast pocket, pulling out a brand new deck of cards. He took them from their box, cracked the seal and removed the cellophane, then mixed them up with a series of overhand shuffles.

Danny was a master with a pack of cards—he practiced card magic in front of his bedroom mirror—and I was suddenly afraid that he had bottled out of his hypnotism act in favor of some more of what he’d been doing at the talent show for the last couple of years.

"A deck of cards, new and shuffled," he said, squaring the deck in his hands. "But I only require nineteen of them."

He counted off the top nineteen cards and threw the rest over his shoulder.

"Although, actually, it’s not really nineteen cards that I require," he said, fanning the cards out in front of him so that we could only see their backs. "I need something else. Only the cards can tell me what."

He continued to fan them out, and then turned them around to the audience with a flourish.

Instead of the usual hearts, clubs, diamonds and spades there was a single letter on each card. Danny had fanned them out in such a way that there were gaps between certain cards that made the word breaks in the sentence the cards spelled out.

The cards read: I NEED FOUR VOLUNTEERS.

"Ah," Danny said, as if the cards had just solved a difficult problem for him. "I guess I need four volunteers. Any takers?"

Chapter 5

It was a good trick.

Actually it was an impressive trick, and I know some of the sleight of hand and false shuffles that Danny used to do it.

The rest of the audience thought it was pretty cool, too. There was a round of applause.

At the end of it no one had their hand up.

Danny was looking out across the sea of faces, but there were no takers.

Moments passed and still no one volunteered. It felt like the longer it went on, the less likely he was to get someone to put their hand up. I realized that I was gritting my teeth and holding my breath.

And still Danny looked around the audience, and there was a moment where the stage persona seemed on the brink of slipping.

No Danny, I thought, don’t bottle it.

It was only then that I realized my hand had raised itself above my head. I had been thinking about how maybe I should put it up, but I hadn’t got much past the initial thought, and certainly hadn’t reached a proper decision yet.

To this day I can’t remember lifting my hand.

Danny saw it and the calm returned to his features.

"Ladies and gentlemen, we have TWO volunteers," he said, and that threw me. He was looking over at me and gesturing for me to join him on stage.

Then I caught a movement out of the corner of my eye and realized that Lilly had her hand up too.

She caught my eye, smiled an odd kind of smile, and then shrugged.

If I’d known Lilly was going to stick her hand up, I’d never have volunteered. I only put it up because I thought it might, you know, spare a friend some embarrassment.

Still, it was too late now. I couldn’t put my hand down and pretend it had never gone up.

I saw Simon looking at me with a look like I’d grown an extra head or something.

"That’s two people my own age," Danny said as Lilly and I made our way to the front. "How about a couple of brave adults to make up the numbers?"

So there I was. There was Lilly. There was Mr Peterson—without Mr Peebles. And there was Mrs O’Donnell, an ex-teacher who served behind the counter at the Happy Shopper.

Four volunteers.

We stood there, in front of the whole village just about, and I reckon we were all wishing we had kept our hands firmly down at our sides.

I could see my parents in the crowd. My dad was smiling and pointing. He had his phone out and was taking a photo. That’s all mobile phones are good for in Millgrove. I immediately felt self-conscious.

Danny went down the line of four and welcomed us on stage and then got us to sit on four chairs, Lilly, then me, then Mrs O’Donnell, with Mr Peterson at the end.

I felt awkward, and not just because this was the same stage I’d died on as a comedian, but simply because I was next to Lilly. There’s . . . oh, it’s complicated . . . an odd dynamic . . . er . . . look, I’ll leave this for now because I’m talking about Danny.

"I want you to answer me truthfully," he said to us, but it was clear that the performance was for the sake of the gathered crowd. "It’s very important that the answers you give are absolutely honest. Can you do that?"

We sort of nodded and mumbled, unsure as to what Danny wanted.

"Good," he said. "Have I prepared any of you for this moment? Have I coached you or in any way influenced you?"

Shakes of heads and muttered "no"s.

"OK. Thank you."

He turned to the audience.

"Now, what I’m going to attempt today is no less than the hypnosis of our subjects here." The statement caused a small buzz of excitement among the crowd. "While I haven’t had the time to put our courageous volunteers into a deep hypnotic trance, I am going to try to relax them to the point where they can carry out a few . . . er . . . tasks for me, just to show that they are indeed in a suggestible state."

He smiled, suddenly seeming miles away from the gawky, socially useless kid I’d lived next door to all my life.

"Give me a couple of minutes, can you?" he asked the audience, then spun on his heel, came back to where we were sitting, and squatted in front of us.

"I want you to relax." His voice was quiet, mellow, soothing. "I want you to close your eyes and study the darkness you find there."

OK, I thought, I’ll play along.

I closed my eyes.

"Concentrate on my voice," Danny said. "Let it be your guide. You must not open your eyes until I tell you. If you understand me, nod your heads now."

I nodded. Already my head felt heavy. It stayed nodded down.

"Good." Danny’s voice was even more soothing. "There is so much weight inside your heads, too many thoughts. We need to let go of them. I want you to imagine that the darkness you are seeing now is the screen of a television set. All dark. Dark. Dark and empty.

"Now, imagine a ball of light in the center of the screen. It’s bright. Too bright. It’s a circle of light that is really, really bright at its center, but gets hazy towards the edges. See the ball of light. See the hazy edges. See the darkness that surrounds it. Imagine it precisely, and hold it in your mind. You must see it. You must see it clearly. You can see it. I know you can."

As he spoke, the image he wanted me to see settled into my mind. I saw it in perfect detail, could even see the hazy edges, and it was too bright.

Uncomfortably so.

"Now concentrate. Concentrate and let your body relax. Let your fingers relax, one by one. Notice that when you relax those fingers, the ball of light becomes dimmer. You are turning down the light, just by relaxing your fingers. Relax them some more. Turn the brightness down some more."

I let my fingers relax. The light lost some of its brightness.

"Now I want you to start to relax your hands, let them become weightless. Watch the light dimming as you do it. Feel the relaxation spread to your arms, making them weightless. The light dims some more. It’s all hazy now, that light, and as you relax it gets hazier. Let your body relax, let your mind become soothed by the light as it fades, relax your arms, your shoulders, your neck. Let your mind grow as dark as the screen, as the light fades, as your body relaxes. Let go of all the thoughts that are weighing you down."

I felt my mind do just that, letting go of all the baggage, all the chatter.

As the light faded out into perfect darkness I realized that Danny’s voice was fading out with it.

It didn’t seem odd, in fact I welcomed the darkness.

Soon there was nothing else.

Just darkness.

And peace.

Peace, perfect peace.

I’d never realized that my head was so darned noisy, that thoughts and images and sounds are ringing around it constantly. You don’t think of your head as being a particularly chaotic place to live.

I wasn’t asleep, I knew that, but I must have been in a state pretty close to sleep.

I could still hear things outside my head, but I couldn’t focus on them.

There’s a difference between hearing something and listening to it.

It’s kind of hard to say much more about the experience—soon I wasn’t thinking, or seeing, or hearing: I wasn’t anything really.

As it turned out, however, it didn’t last long and…