Nicotine Read online

  Hypnosis! Emma repeated so loudly that the whole institute must have heard it, isn’t that dangerous?

  I’d wondered the same thing and a few scenes from literature came to mind that suggest just that, among them a wonderful chapter from Leonard Cohen’s novel The Favourite Game where a boy tries out his magical powers on a number of pets before testing them on his beautiful babysitter. The reader realizes long before the young protagonists that Heather the ukulele-playing au pair girl from Alberta is only faking her trance. It’s awkward for both parties when she finds her knickers behind the sofa after the hypnosis has ended.

  I put the cassette in my bag and ride off. The town extends out towards the north like lukewarm zabaione – it smells like it too – but after a few miles I reach Worthington, a pretty, clean suburb where the upper middle classes have resettled in order to be able to offer their children the best schools and germ-free swimming pools. It’s not that bad. There’s a Belgian-run French bakery here and a public park with several well-maintained tennis courts. You can guarantee that no one smokes in Worthington anymore. You’ll get a sharp look here for just reaching into your bag to take out a note with the address of a hypnotist on it. There are also no fumotopes here, the small, conspiratorial gatherings out in front of bars and office buildings that I’ve always considered with a mixture of envy and pity. There are only ice cream-licking children and hybrid cars and I’d rather be golfing bumper stickers.

  It’s the typical Californian arrangement, Shangri-La, which is why I’m not surprised when I cross a joyfully splashing brook and once more find myself suddenly in a place seemingly in its own world. Rush Creek Village is the name of the settlement made up of twenty or thirty prairie-style houses from the fifties, the original expression of modernist America. I take another look at my note. The hypnotist lives in the very first house. I slip the racing bike past a white off-road truck into the driveway. I suddenly see the hypnosis in a completely new light. I’ve booked myself an hour in one of these houses, I think to myself. If the hypnosis doesn’t work, I reassure myself, I can at least take a look around the house in peace, it will be fine either way. I won’t doze off, I won’t close my eyes, I think as I lock up my bike.

  I’m a little early, a couple emerges from the house, the psychologist wishes them goodbye at the door. Come in, says Perry, touching my upper arm and drawing me into the house. Three steps lead down into the drop-level living space. The house is built on a slope, the eye is drawn to a thickly forested hollow, the brook flashes through the trees in the distance. He leads me down another flight of stairs. At the end of a tight corridor we step into his study, which has a shabby, worn charm like the rest of the decor. You can’t miss that he lives alone and has done for many years. This was the house of someone who’d decorated precisely to their own tastes, everything seemed to fit with him, with his work, his entire being. A corrective hand is nowhere to be seen, no one says to him in moments of doubt that something doesn’t match.

  Perry falls into an armchair. There’s nowhere for him to stretch his legs. He folds his hands and lays them over his crotch. He definitely looks a bit like a rodent, I think, but there’s something else. It’s a while before I realize that he reminds me of Art Spiegelman’s mice, their tapered, almost mouthless faces. First he tells me that he’s Catholic and that he meditates, and that during meditation he prays, or more precisely he pray-meditates, a disclosure that I hadn’t solicited and which I acknowledge with a sceptical look. I can’t imagine how that’s supposed to work. Even if I knew how one prays, even if my God had a voice like Milton H. Erickson, I find it hard to understand how mindful meditation fuses together with fervent, imploring entreaties or even simply with friendly conversations. How can I, while I attempt to quiet all inner voices, speak with my God, the father, the all-powerful? How can I practice pure contemplation when I’m eavesdropping on the voice of a capricious God, when I’m despairingly attempting to comprehend the words being directed at me? What do I have to do to be worthy of his love? Why doesn’t he speak to me? How do I evade his wrath? Who could I pray for, what do I have to confess, where have I failed? Is awe not just a prolonged state of fear? How can I contemplate in this condition, how can I breathe freely?

  Perry’s not a wise man, I think, that’s a pity. I’ve always wanted to meet a truly wise man. I got my hopes up when I saw the house. My wish has not been granted up to now. It’s possible that it’s up to me, I’m probably not yet ready for such an encounter. The wisest man I’ve ever met is Charles J. Fillmore, a linguist born in 1929. He can plausibly and in a falsifiable way explain why it makes sense to ask what your shoes are doing on my bed, even though they’re of course not doing anything. But Fillmore lives in California. Notwithstanding Czeslaw Milosz, John Searle and Herbert Marcuse, California and wisdom are difficult for me to reconcile. It’s also not a question of age. I would guess that Perry’s in his mid-fifties and I can sense that he still won’t be a wise man when he’s eighty. When he left university at the end of the seventies and opened his practice every household at least had a cassette recorder. Back then people still knew what a TDK is.

  The bulky, dark blue armchair that Perry directs me to is clearly left over from that time. I wonder how many smokers have sat here before me. The armrests are worn; grey, rubbery netting is surfacing from under the blue pleather. Perry excuses himself, he needs to go to the bathroom. I hear the whoosh and gurgling and wonder whether there are places where wisdom just isn’t at home, whether Ohio is one such locus sine genio. It then occurs to me that the whooshing might actually be coming from the brook that’s lost in the bushes at the lower end of the estate. I try to imagine the house in its first incarnation, back when it was still practically empty. I clear it out before my inner eye, consider the simple lines, the horizontal mouldings above the windows, the toned colours of the walls. I rip out the loosely woven brown carpet and turn off the spherical music quietly billowing from some kind of loudspeaker, from the cassette recorder perhaps, I throw out a three-armed brass ceiling light fixture and the water fountain on the window sill, the painted white newspaper stand, the chequered sofa wedged between the desk and the shelf unit being used to file medical records and unopened telephone bills.

  Make yourself comfortable, relax. Perry rubs his hands together, conjures up a piece of paper and asks me the usual questions so I can at least be sure that he’s a doctor, that he’s completed his medical studies in some subject or other. Have you ever been operated on? Do you sleep well? How much alcohol do you drink? Do you get up in the night to urinate? Is there a history of diabetes in your family, your parents, grandparents or siblings? Cancer? Depression?

  Yes, no, yes.

  How many cigarettes did you smoke a day?

  I briefly mull it over, multiply it by 1.5 and say: two to three packs. I’m feeling generous. Perry gives me a sympathetic look, he probably knows what I’m up to and has likely rounded my answer back down. I tell him about my accident, that I want to be ready for any eventuality. He has, I can immediately tell, already diagnosed me with a mild anxiety disorder, probably already while on the telephone, because he believes it’s unnecessary to have this kind of pre-emptive worry that something bad will happen to me again.

  And how often do you think about smoking?

  Every day.

  How often exactly?

  Every time I see a smoker, every time I smell cigarette smoke, when my neighbour steps out onto his balcony to have a break from his many children and lights up. The smoke comes into my apartment and I have the smell in my nostrils hours later. Every form of cigarette advert gives me a thrust of longing, every scrunched up, carelessly thrown away cigarette packet at a bus stop, every trod on cigarette butt, every beautiful woman holding a cigarette between her fingers or just looking like she could be holding one. My reading chair in Columbus gives me a pang, and M.’s balcony in Berlin, and my old Jeep because I’ve smoked some of the best cigarettes while driving through Kentucky or sleepy-
hot prairies with the window rolled down in high summer – I smoked the brown Nat Sherman’s that I initially still had to buy in cartons in New York, I smoked and drove leisurely through this fruitful, truly blessed landscape and discovered lopsided barns painted blood red from the 1860s, the horse-drawn carriages of the Amish, waving children in old-fashioned clothes the colour of Easter eggs with puffy sleeves. When I’m working I feel a compulsion when I hold a pen between my fingers, when I’m hungry, when I’ve just eaten, when I drink coffee or tea or when I’m only thinking about drinking coffee or tea. The drive up the high street to the campus takes little more than four minutes. In these four minutes I pass six shops and petrol stations that I’ve bought cigarettes at. I know the brands and the prices, on every journey I recall the fat, ringed fingers of the saleswomen who’ve plucked my pack from the rack above the till. Each one of these ugly shops with their red-white-and-blue patriotic logos and the eternal discount offers give me a compulsion, each one gives me a faint, physical stitch when I drive by. (Yes, Fagerström, it’s worst in the mornings).

  When I call a break during the syntax classes I observe how the smokers separate themselves from the non-smokers, how the smokers – fewer and fewer each year – practically get in formation and drift towards the door. Then I feel a pull. The richer cigarettes taste… I later write on the board, and they know, if they’ve been paying attention, the point I’m trying to make. It’s one of those sentence beginners that under certain circumstances needs to be syntactically reanalysed and reconsidered at the end.

  The richer cigarettes taste the best.

  The richer cigarettes taste the more we crave them.

  Interesting, you’re a linguist, Perry says.

  I shouldn’t have given that away, I think. Hypnosis and syntax have a lot in common. There’s an entire school of hypnotherapy, Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), which is based on the results of linguistic research. It’s precisely sentences like these or rather the resulting minimal hesitations lasting only a fraction of a second that Milton H. Erickson used to shake the consciousness of his clients. With sentences like these he pulled the floor out from under them at precisely the right moment. I’ve also read that having this knowledge can make a person hypnosis-resistant.

  You know what, Perry says, I think you worry too much. You don’t have to be perfect and you don’t need to be prepared for every possible eventuality. Each day that you don’t smoke is a good day for you. You achieve something every day. If one day, for some reason or other, you don’t succeed, if you smoke one or two cigarettes then you just have to start from the beginning. You don’t have to be perfect.

  Excuse me?

  Look. We all make mistakes. We can’t always be strong. It’s like with driving. Everyone’s driven through a red light. You acknowledge that you’ve made a mistake and you say to yourself that it won’t happen again.

  I look at him in disbelief, in disbelief and disgust, I’d love to jump out of my chair and leave. If only I wasn’t such a polite person. What he’s suggesting to me in this conversational tone goes against everything I’ve developed in my thinking about my years of addiction and withdrawal. It’s beyond comprehension: did he really just say that it wouldn’t be so bad if I smoked a cigarette? What’s he thinking? Doesn’t he realize that there can only be one possibility: for me to believe that I’ll never, never ever again even touch a cigarette? For eight months I’ve worked towards convincing myself that one single slip up, one single cigarette would mean the end of all my efforts. And I know that I couldn’t just try again. The more often I slip, the harder it will be to give up. How would I stop again if I relapsed now, eight months after my last cigarette? How’s that supposed to work? What’s that got to do with a red light? The difference, I say, is that going through a red light doesn’t give me a thrill, my brain doesn’t reward me for it, which is why I have no interest in repeating the experience.

  Perry smiles unwisely. What am I supposed to do with this advice, I think, while he fumbles with his cassette recorder, what am I supposed to do with this person living in his wonderful, somewhat spoilt house and who has perhaps never smoked? Does he have other weaknesses? Does he even know what addiction is? Can he imagine how powerless I am when I get hold of even the tip of a justification? Why has this man, who makes these kinds of suggestions, specialized in smoking cessation? Does he not realize that if I were to take his suggestion to heart I would buy a pack at the next impulse, the next opportunity, the next moment of bad temper, probably on my way back into the city? He’s practically giving me carte blanche, he’s taken the one thing I have in my hands to defend myself: the fear of committing an unrecoverable mistake, the fear of failing irrevocably.

  He takes my cassette, uses his fingernail to try and find the end of the tear strip to open the cellophane wrapping. Give it to me, I say, when I see how clumsily he tries to do it, I’ve had practice. I run my thumb over the plastic film, feel the end of the strip and slide along it with the light pressure of the pad of my thumb until the film falls away practically of its own accord. I’ve done it for years, two or three times a day, I say. And I now know that Perry, my addiction therapist, has never smoked.

  Now lean back, Perry says.

  How? I ask. A secret mechanism is hidden deep inside my armchair. I cling on and push against the backrest, making a flap jolt out and kick up my feet. Now I know why the armrests are so worn. I’m losing my grip, and have the feeling I’m being tipped out or thrown backwards. I’m trapped. It wouldn’t surprise me if two assistants came in in white coats and strapped my wrists down like in a bad Nazi torture film. Relax, says my hypnotherapist. How? I think, I’ve never been so tense in my entire life – images from Marathon Man and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest race through my mind. Make yourself comfortable, relax your muscles, don’t fold your legs or your hands, he says. Can’t he see that I don’t have my legs crossed? I think, before I realize that this contradiction comes straight from hypnotism’s box of tricks. He wants to take away my sense of security, security in my world. Breathe with your chest and your stomach, relax your stomach muscles, look towards the ceiling, a little further back, a bit further so your eyes have to strain a little. You feel how heavy your eyelids are becoming, relax, relax your scalp… your forehead… your temples… your mouth… your jaw… your chin. Breathe gently, you can feel how heavy your eyelids are getting. You know why you’re here. You feel this ‘here’, the room, everything going on around you in the room. Listen to what’s going on around you in this room, in this house, maybe you can hear birds outside or music, maybe even a telephone ringing. No, I don’t hear a telephone and I also know that Perry can’t hear a telephone, and I know that he knows, and of course he knows that I know that he knows. We’re really making progress. I don’t believe that this Jay Perry, MS, can really achieve anything, and yet I can already feel my eyelids becoming heavy, feel your feet, he says, feel their weight, it doesn’t matter if you’re wearing shoes or not, he can see that I’m wearing shoes, I think, and have to start over. Feel how you’re being supported by the comfortable chair, feel how your weight is held and supported by the cushion, the weight of your upper body, your legs, your feet. I’m absolutely not hypnotisable, I think, especially not by an oddball Catholic that’s never smoked, but I relax a little and listen, I relax every single muscle and feel how each one gets heavier and heavier, I hear the spherical music in the background and hear how he counts ten… nine… eight… let yourself go, slowly, deeper, I could go down a flight of stairs, he suggests, seven… six… five, even deeper, he says, and now imagine that you have a cigarette between your fingers, you turn it and look at the lit end. Then someone takes the cigarette away from you and slowly moves away while you watch the spark, he takes a step backwards and another step backwards and the spark gets smaller and smaller, he takes another step, he’s five… ten… twenty metres away from you, until you can only make out a weak glimmer, four… three… two, deeper. Feel how the comfortable c
hair is carrying you, how it supports and holds you, your arms, your back, your legs, you arrive, deeper and deeper, one, even deeper, now sleep.

  The man who had taken away my cigarette disappears into the woods. It’s night, so dark that I can’t make out the contours of the trees. Sometimes I see the glimmer that disappears for seconds at a time behind the tree trunks, it flickers in a glow worm’s rhythm, while the man makes his way through the undergrowth that’s getting thicker and thicker. Then nothing. After one or two minutes I open my eyes. That was it, I think, it didn’t work. But Perry’s smiling, he leans forward and presses eject. He puts the cassette in its case and sets it down on the table on its thin spine. I desperately have to go to the bathroom, he says, standing up and leaving again. The small brook gurgles outside. I push against the footrest with my calves, the backrest springs up, I’m flung forward.

  I’d really like to keep working with you, he says when he returns. You have an incredibly low resting pulse, around 45.

  That’s from the hiking and the triathlons, I explain. Could we do a proper hypnosis next time?

  Perry laughs. Take the cassette home with you. Make yourself comfortable on the sofa, relax and listen to how I spoke to you. You were completely still, you didn’t move at all. I spoke directly to your unconscious for about thirty minutes. You can hypnotize yourself with this tape if you like, it’s completely safe. Or you can check whether I’ve done a good job. Believe me, you’re very susceptible to this kind of therapy.

  I thank him, put the cassette away in my bag and free myself from the chair with a bounce. Perry leads me to the front door. I take another look around the living room, on the window seat there’s a coffee table book with the title The Quilts of Gee’s Bend. And as I say goodbye, I am once again surprised to have come across existences that I never thought possible and that to the best of my ability could never have imagined. And I reckon that Jay Perry, MS, is thinking practically the same thing.