The Cure for Dreaming (3 page)

Henri turned to me and said in a quieter tone, “Come with me, Miss Mead. You have nothing to fear.”

I drew a shaky breath and allowed him to lead me to the chairs in the middle of the stage. The echo of our footsteps ricocheted across the entire theater and sounded far too loud to my ears. Genevieve transitioned into Brahms's “Lullaby.”

“Please, sit down.” Henri held the back of the chair on the left.

I seated myself on a springy burgundy cushion, my posture tense and rigid, my back a solid board of oak. I never laced my corset to a point where I couldn't breathe, yet the steel stays dug against my ribs and kept oxygen from settling into my lungs. Every part of me ached and itched.

Henri, still standing behind me, removed his white gloves. “Ladies, Miss Mead will need to remove her gloves and hold
my hands directly. I am going to transfer my energy into her, which will enable her to fall into the desired state of relaxation and open her mind to me. I apologize if I offend anyone, but this has been the tradition ever since Franz Anton Mesmer popularized this astounding technique.” He stepped around me to the other chair and took a seat. “Miss Mead, please take off your gloves and hold my hands.”

I swallowed and hesitated. Prickly beads of sweat bubbled across my forehead. Genevieve's lullaby strengthened in volume, perhaps to assuage my fears.

Don't be rude and delay the show
, I scolded myself the way Father would complain whenever I dawdled before leaving the house for an event.
What are you waiting for? Chop-chop!

I slipped off my gloves with my eyes directed toward my nut-brown skirt. Henri's bare right hand reached my way, and, with trembling fingers, I took it. Our other hands joined as well. His skin, smooth and hot, smoldered against mine.

“Look into my eyes,” he told me.

I gave his face a brief glance, noting how blue his irises were, but the idea of staring into the face of a stranger felt unnatural. I tittered and focused instead on the starry backdrop.

“Miss Mead,” he said in the gentlest male voice I'd ever heard, “are there any worries you would like to escape?”

My smile faded. My mind skipped back to a scene from earlier that day. I saw a small group of women with yellow ribbons pinned to their left shoulders. They shouted for
equality on the steps of the courthouse. My own voice, along with Frannie's and Kate's, rang through the air in support. A barrage of rotten eggs smacked my arms and chest and oozed milky gray yolk down the lace of my blouse with a stink that made me gag. Fierce-eyed men—men who might have known my father—barked at us to go back to our homes where we belonged, and I ran off to scrub away the filth and my guilt until my fingers turned red and raw.

“Miss Mead?” asked Henri Reverie. “Would you like me to take you away from the world for a while?”

I glanced back at him, and his eyes held mine. Such arresting blue eyes—bright river blue, without any flecks of green or gold to distract from the principal color. They pulled me toward them and beckoned me to stay. They wouldn't let me go. Nor did I want to leave them.

“You are going to feel a great deal of warmth pass from my fingers into yours.” He squeezed my hands—not enough to hurt, but enough to show me he was there. The balls of his thumbs pressed against mine. “It is going to feel like gentle flames, starting in your palms and fingertips . . .”

Heat tingled down my thumbs and spread across my hands.

“And then it will move into your wrists and slowly, slowly up your arms.”

The warmth glided through my blood, past my elbows, and up to my shoulders in a strange, pacifying wave. Henri's blue eyes continued to hold my full attention.

“You may feel your arms grow numb, and that is perfectly
fine,” he said, and my arms indeed felt strange and heavy. “The heat and numbness will make you tired. Very tired.” He inhaled a deep breath that inspired me to do the same. My lungs expanded with air that soothed me down to my bones.

“As the warmth pours down through your torso like heated milk,” he continued, “and travels slowly, gently across your hips and to your legs, you are going to find yourself so relaxed, you cannot keep your eyes open.”

My eyelids fluttered.

“Close your eyes.”

They fell shut.

“Keep them closed. Fall into a deep, deep sleep.”

My hands, weighing several tons, dropped away from his fingers, and my chin slumped to my chest. I sank deep inside the darkness in a languid, dreamlike fall. Nothing hurt or troubled me any longer.

I felt divine.

“As I pass my hands over you,” said Henri, “you will travel farther into this wonderful stage of sleep and be unable to open your eyes. Keep going downward, downward, and hear only my voice. Turn off all your other senses. You will only hear, taste, feel, smell, and see if I tell you to do so. For now, just focus on my voice and the magnetic force of my hands passing over your body. Sleep.
Sleep
. Keep going farther into sleep.”

Downward I kept sinking. Downward, downward, downward. Gentle nips of heat sizzled across my skin, all the way to
my toes, and my body melded into the chair until I became a part of the batting and the nails and the wood.

I continued to hear Henri's voice, directed to the audience. The word
test
came up, and
cymbals
, and
Remarkable, isn't it?
But nothing else mattered until he told me, “Stand up, Miss Mead.”

I did as he asked. My eyes remained closed, and my body may as well have been made of stone, but somehow I was able to get to my feet.

“I am going to press my hand against you, and my touch will cause every muscle inside your body to go rigid.”

His fingers cupped the back of my head, and a hardening sensation spilled down to my feet, as if he had unscrewed the top of my skull and poured a fast-drying plaster inside me.

“Rigid!” he called near my ear. “You are an iron bar that cannot bend. Every part of you is stiff. Nothing can cause you to falter. You are as solid as a board.”

He spoke again to the audience, calling up “strong male volunteers.” Firm hands lifted me into the air, beneath my shoulders and legs. I rose up high, my arms glued to my sides, and settled across two bars, one behind my neck and the other below my ankles.

Henri's voice whispered inside my mind. “Lift yourself out of your body, Miss Mead. Float up to the top of the stage, and I will return you safely after you have had some time to enjoy yourself. You can hear Genevieve's organ music again . . .”

The organ filled my ears with a rich and dreamlike melody.

“Open your eyes.”

I did.

“See the shine of the lights. Let their radiance beckon you to them. Allow Genevieve's music to carry you away. Do not fight it, lovely girl. Just go.”

I rose out of my petrified bones.

“Yes . . . go.”

I drifted upward—a weightless feather immune to the burden of gravity, lured by the pull of the vast ceiling above with its rows of metal catwalks and blinding lights that breathed wispy plumes of smoke. Genevieve's music carried me up to the bulbs and allowed me to lie in a foggy bath of golden rays without a worry or a pain. Henri disappeared. Memories of gaseous eggs on my chest disappeared. Fears of what Father would say about the courthouse rally slipped away. I was nothing but a feather.

I floated for hours . . . or so it seemed.

I could have drifted much longer if Henri's voice didn't call up to me. “Miss Mead,” he said. “Are you ready to come back now?”

I tried to hold myself up there in that luxurious land of electricity.

“I need to bring you back so someone else may have a turn. You have done beautifully, but it is time to wake up.”

“No,” I said, but I felt myself deflating. A withering hot-air balloon with the gas turned low.

“I am going to sweep my hands upward, starting at your feet, and count from one to ten.”

“No.”

“Yes, Miss Mead . . . and by the time I reach ten, you will feel wide awake and rested.” His presence burned at my feet. “One, two—you feel the magnetic force between us fading—”

I sank back to the ground, closer to the stage.

“Do not fight it. Three, four—you are slowly stirring back to life. Five—your senses are returning to your body. You can feel the heat from the stage lights again . . .”

My hair warmed, and my mind was able to recognize the music playing: “Evening Prayer” from the opera
Hansel and Gretel
. The sheet music was part of my collection back home.

“Six, seven—do not fight it, Miss Mead, please do not fight it. Eight—very good, you are almost there—nine . . .” He placed his hot hand against my forehead. “Ten. Awake.”

I opened my eyes, and the hum and the glare of the lights made me jump. I found myself standing upright at the center of the stage again.

“Let us give a warm round of applause for the lovely and cooperative Mademoiselle Mead.” Henri lifted my hand in the air, and applause assaulted my ears like the blasts of gunshots at a sharpshooter show. My legs wobbled as if made of sand, and I had to grab hold of Henri's coarse sleeve to keep my knees from sinking to the ground.

Henri put his arm around my back and guided me to
the stairs. I resisted the urge to lean against his shoulder to support my drooping head.

The clapping died down.

Genevieve finished her music.

The hypnotist let me go.

He didn't say another word to me as I clutched the handrail and descended from the stage with my gloves somehow back in my hand—not a whisper in my ear or a simple
Thank you for joining me
. At the bottom step, I peeked over my shoulder and caught him watching me, as a doctor would monitor a patient he was releasing from the hospital after a surgery. But then he smiled. A warm smile that heated my blood and made me forget Percy Acklen sitting high in his box seat above the darkened theater.

The hypnotist then turned back to his show.

I returned to my seat.

Our relationship seemed to be over.

hen I sat back down, Kate covered her mouth as if she were stifling a laugh and Frannie whispered, “Oh dear, Livie. That went much differently than expected.”

“How do you mean?” I asked, but the woman behind us shushed us, and Frannie murmured that she'd explain later.

The next volunteers ventured onto the stage in a group of ten, and they were a motley collection of males and females of varying sizes, shapes, and ages. Under Henri's spell they
waltzed to “The Blue Danube,” forgot their names, and performed other embarrassing but relatively harmless feats.

During all the demonstrations, I was nothing more than a heap of melted butter that oozed against my red velvet chair in the audience. I felt as if I had awoken from a hundred-year nap, every part of me rested and content, aside from an odd, smarting sensation in one wrist. I almost possessed the confidence to go home and tell Father I had participated in a women's suffrage rally in the center of the city.