The Hypnotic Suggestion

Chapter 1 - The Suggestion

The hypnotist's consulting room was not what Cara had expected.

She'd pictured velvet drapes, a pendulum clock, perhaps a leather chaise longue worn smooth by decades of suggestible patients. What she got was a ground-floor flat in Herne Hill with good light, a pair of reading chairs, and a man in his mid-thirties who looked like he might teach secondary school history and be quite liked by his students.

"Dr Elliot Nash," she said, sitting down without being asked and opening her notebook. "I expected something more..."

"Theatrical?"

"No, err, I was going to say cliché."

He smiled. He had a pleasant, unhurried smile. "You'd be surprised how much work this room does without any help from me."

Cara Whitmore was twenty-six, had forty thousand Instagram followers, and was writing a piece for *The Correspondent* on pseudoscience in the wellness industry. Hypnotherapy had a whole section to itself, sandwiched between past-life regression and the woman in Clapham who claimed to cure anxiety with tuning forks. She'd already written the article in her head. She just needed the quotes.

"So," she said. "Make the case for yourself."

"I'd rather answer your questions."

"That is my question."

"Technically it's a request."

Nash crossed one leg over the other and considered her with what she found, somewhat against her will, to be quite a disconcerting degree of calm. He was good-looking in a way that crept up on you-not immediately obvious, but the sort of face that got more interesting the longer you looked at it.

She looked away and wrote something in her notebook. It said *charming, annoyingly.*

"Hypnosis," he said, "is a state of focused attention combined with heightened suggestibility. It's not sleep. It's not unconsciousness. The subject is aware throughout. And-this is the part that tends to disappoint people-it cannot compel anyone to do anything they don't already want to do."

"Right," Cara said. "I've heard that one. It's the get-out clause, isn't it. When it doesn't work, you say the person didn't really want it to. When it does work, you say you unlocked their hidden desire."

"It's not a get-out clause. It's a description of the mechanism."

"Convenient."

"Accurate."

She tapped her pen against her knee. "So you're saying you couldn't make me do something I genuinely didn't want to do."

"Correct."

"And you couldn't implant a desire I didn't already have."

"I could access desires you might not be consciously aware of. That's different from creating them."

Cara studied him for a moment. There was something very still about him, she thought. Like a surface that doesn't give much away about the depth beneath.

"Alright," she said. "Here's what I propose."

She laid it out crisply and watched his expression for the twitch of ego she expected. The session would be filmed on her camera, mounted on the small tripod she'd brought in her bag. When they were done, Nash could copy the SD card to his computer; she would take the card itself, seal it in an envelope, and they would both sign across the flap. Neither copy to be opened until she returned in two months. Then they'd watch it together and see what-if anything-had taken hold.

"Any suggestion you like," she added. "Within legal limits. I'm not going to rob a bank."

"Do you want to rob a bank?"

"No." She paused, briefly wrong-footed. "Why?"

Nash was quiet for a moment. Not uncomfortable-just genuinely considering.

"Before we do this," he said, "I want to be precise about something. I can't implant a desire you don't have. What I can do-what hypnosis sometimes does-is reach desires you haven't consciously acknowledged. Things you may have been actively suppressing, or simply never given yourself permission to examine."

"So you're saying you might surface something I didn't know was there."

"I'm saying that's possible. I won't know what it is until I ask. And I'll be asking you, not bringing anything with me."

Cara considered this. It was, she thought, a more interesting caveat than the usual professional disclaimers. It was also, of course, entirely unfalsifiable, which she noted in her notebook.

"That doesn't change my proposal," she said.

"I know. I just need you to mean your consent rather than perform it."

She looked at him steadily. "Start the camera."

She set up the tripod herself, angled to catch them both, and pressed record.

"For the record," she said, addressing the lens with the calm of someone who'd done a great deal of on-camera work, "I am Cara Whitmore. The date is-" she checked her phone- "the fourteenth of September. I am consenting to be hypnotised by Dr Elliot Nash, and I am consenting to whatever suggestion he chooses to make, having been informed that this process may bring unconscious desires to the surface rather than introduce new ones. I understand I will not know in advance what is suggested. I have no caveats."

She looked at Nash. "Your turn."

"I'm satisfied that this consent is informed and freely given," he said to the camera. Then, to her: "Shall we begin?"

"Yes."

-----

According to the camera the recording ran for twenty seven minutes and fourteen seconds. Of which Cara remembered precisely none. She came around during what felt like the middle of a sentence that she couldn't quite locate the beginning of. She blinked. The light in the room was exactly as it had been.

"Was that it?" she said.

"That was it."

She stood up straighter. "I don't feel any different."

"No," he agreed.

"I'm not sure you actually hypnotised me. I think I just lost concentration for a moment."

"That's one way to describe it."

She collected her things and detached the camera from the tripod. Nash showed her out with the same unhurried courtesy he'd shown throughout. At the door, she turned back.

"Just so you know," she said, "I think you're going to lose this one."

"I know you think that," he said.

She walked down the front path feeling oddly warm, which she put down to the afternoon being warmer than she'd realised.

-----

There was an Italian place two streets over that she'd had her eye on since the Overground. She got a corner table, ordered the cacio e pepe, garlic bread, and a glass of the house white, and opened her notebook.

She felt-this was the only word for it-hungry. Not the polite, manageable hunger she usually carried around as a background condition, but something rounder and more insistent. She ate all of the pasta, all of the garlic bread, and sat back with her wine.

She thought about the afternoon. She thought how fortunate she was to have the kind of metabolism that meant she never had to think twice about what she ate. She'd always been like that-could eat what she liked, didn't have to think about it. A gift, really. Some people had to work so hard just to stay the same shape, and there she was, putting away a bowl of cacio e pepe, a full side of garlic bread and a tiramisu at six in the evening and it wouldn't register at all.

She also thought, and this was slightly more uncomfortable, that it was a pity the hypnotist was almost certainly a charlatan, because she'd found him genuinely interesting and wouldn't have minded seeing him in a context that wasn't an adversarial interview for an article in which she was going to be quite rude about both him and his profession.

She wondered, briefly, what it was he'd suggested. It was a little odd that she couldn't remember a single detail of the actual phrasing, but she dismissed the slight gap in her memory as a trick of the relaxation technique.

Then she ordered the tiramisu and put him out of her mind.

-----

The gym was in Bermondsey, a fifteen-minute cycle from her flat. She'd been a member for four months.

"I want to cancel my membership," she told the man at the front desk. He had the slightly wounded look of someone trained to respond to this.

"Can I ask your reason?"

"I only joined to do a piece on gym culture," she said. "For work. And I've finished the piece, so there's no point keeping it up. I don't really need it-I'm one of those people who just stays in shape without really trying. Lucky, I know."

The man typed something. "We do have a freeze option rather than a full cancellation-"

"Just cancel it," Cara said, not unkindly.

She walked home. It was a nice evening and she was wearing a favourite jacket that felt, she noticed, like it might have gone through a hot wash by mistake. She made a mental note to be more careful.

-----

The weeks accumulated pleasantly.

She filed two pieces, attended three press events, took a weekend in Edinburgh with a friend from university, and worked her way through a restaurant she'd been meaning to visit for years at the rate of one dinner a week. She bought some new trousers-her others had, she was increasingly convinced, all been through whatever hot wash had got the jacket. She was starting to wonder if her washing machine was malfunctioning.

Intermittently, the thought of the hypnosis session would tickle the back of her brain. *What did he actually try to do?* she would wonder idly while ordering a second dessert or a late-night cheesy takeaway. It was bizarre that she couldn't retrieve the memory of the suggestion itself, but it only made her feel more smug. Clearly, his little psychological trick had entirely failed to stick, leaving her free to indulge her naturally flawless metabolism without a single consequence.

Occasionally she had the vague sense that some of her recent posts had generated more comment than usual, though she could never quite remember what specifically had caught people's attention. It didn't matter. Life was good.

At six weeks she messaged him to confirm their appointment. He replied within the hour: *Looking forward to it.* She had the irrational feeling that he was smiling when he typed it, which she found mildly annoying.

-----

He was smiling when she arrived.

"You're very pleased with yourself," she said.

"Not with myself," he said, with a small but definite satisfaction.

"Because I'm going to tell you, from where I'm sitting, nothing has changed. I've had a nice couple of months. Normal life. No compulsions, no strange behaviours, no suggestions I'm aware of."

She settled into the same chair and looked at him.

"I haven't opened my copy," she said.

"I can clearly see that," Nash said.

She held his gaze for a moment, his confidence slightly knocking her carefully prepared script, then reached into her bag and set the envelope on the desk between them, still sealed, both signatures intact across the flap.

"Shall we watch it?"

They watched it on his laptop, side by side.

-----

The footage was what she remembered: the first few minutes of calm conversation, her eyes closing, the long quiet stretch of Nash's voice. Then the audio cleared, and she heard herself:

*"I want to feel full. Soft. Heavy. I don't want to have to think about staying small anymore."*

The recording ended.

"I am so embarrassed," she said.

"Please don't be," said Nash.

She sat with this for a moment. Then she looked down at herself in the reading chair.-like a room she'd been navigating in the dark with the lights suddenly switched on. Her decisively mediocre metabolism. Every oversized plate of pasta. The entire pizza finished alone on the sofa. The persistent, companionable hunger that had quietly organised her evenings for two months.

She sat with this for a moment.

Then she looked down at herself in the reading chair.

Her clothes fit very differently than they had in September. The jeans that had been loose at the waist now held something soft and rounded above the waistband. Her coat, folded in her lap, wouldn't quite close the way it used to. She was aware, with sudden clarity, that it hadn't been the washing machine.

"I genuinely blamed the washing machine," she said.

"I figured you might."

"For six weeks. I had a whole theory." She pressed a hand flat against her stomach, almost experimentally, and felt the give of it-generous, warm, entirely hers. She kept her voice level. "You asked me what I wanted."

"I did."

"And I told you."

"Yes. In rather specific detail."

"The article," she said.

"The article?"

"I'm going to have to substantially rethink it. It might end up being more about me." She stood, and was aware of herself differently-weight redistributed, a new gravitational logic to how she occupied the room. It wasn't unpleasant. It was, precisely, what she'd asked for. "I still think there's a meaningful ethical argument about accessing desires people haven't consciously consented to."

"There absolutely is," Nash said. "You should write it. I'll look forward to reading it."

"You surfaced something real," she said. "I'm not disputing that. I'm just noting that the mechanism deserves examination."

"I agree."

She picked up her bag. At the door she paused.

She stood on the threshold for a moment, hands in her pockets, and took stock-not of herself this time, but of how she felt about what had happened. She'd expected anger, or at least its polite cousin, indignation. She reached for it carefully and found it wasn't there. He'd warned her. She'd consented on camera with her full journalist's precision, for the record, no caveats. He'd done exactly what she'd asked, found exactly what she'd told him was there, and let it run.

The person who'd walked into this room in September had thought it was a pity the hypnotist was almost certainly a charlatan, because she'd found him genuinely interesting and wouldn't have minded seeing him in a more intimate context.

It turned out he was neither a charlatan nor a villain. Just someone who had been, professionally and precisely, more right about her than she'd been about herself.

She thought about the voice on the recording-her own, unprompted, describing something she'd apparently been carrying for years without acknowledgment-and found she didn't want to be angry at either of them. The woman in the recording, or the person she'd become since.

She thought: actually, I like her.

He was, she noted somewhat begrudgingly, annoyingly cute.

Then she turned around.

"The Italian place is two streets over," she said. "I haven't been since September and I find I'm genuinely hungry. Would you like to join me?"

Nash reached for his jacket.

"I really would," he said.

THE END