Thumbsucker Read Free

fingerswent numb. At night he checked for fadedness and smearing. He promised me a portable TV if I managed to go a whole month, but I knew from experience he’d forget the deal if I succeeded in keeping up my end of it. He had a way of forgetting the bargains we struck.
    “You
swear
?” I said the second night, after Mike inspected my thumb. “You swear it won’t be like the Honda and the chin-ups?” Two years ago, Mike had promised me a dirt bike if I won the President’s Physical Fitness certificate. I’d missed the award by two chin-ups and gotten nothing, a bitter reminder that a deal’s a deal.
    “What Honda? When?” Mike said.
    I couldn’t believe this. “I want you to buy that TV tomorrow morning and keep it in its box with the receipt.”
    One afternoon Rebecca startled me by asking what the writing on my thumb was. She had a chest cold and was at her house, wrapped in an electric blanket. She shared her codeine cough syrup with me. Her wet brown eyes looked drugged and trusting, and for a light-headed moment or two I considered telling her the truth. I felt the confession slowly rising inside me like a bubble in honey.
    Then I panicked.
    “MFC,” I said. “ ‘Motherfucking cocksucker.’ ”
    Tears came into Rebecca’s staring eyes. Her line on me had always been that I was afraid of mature conversation, unwilling to share my fears and weaknesses. Sheassured me that doing this would bring us closer, but I noticed that she expected me to go first.
    “Why do you have to act so tough?” she said. “Have I done something to hurt you? Don’t you trust me? What’s the point of spending time together if it doesn’t lead to openness?”
    “Motherfucking cocksucker,” I said.

    I shut my eyes and let my shoulders fall as music featuring harp, piano, and birdsong drifted from the tape player on Perry Lyman’s desk. His voice was low and smooth. “Safety surrounds you. Peace pervades your being. Security such as you’ve never known descends.” He circled me as he spoke, stirring currents in the Lysoled air. The sticky, peeling sound of his crepe-soled shoes made me wonder how often he mopped his floors.
    “Imagine yourself on a path,” he said after a few more minutes of warm-up. “You’re deep in the forest. You glimpse a clearing. In its center, a shaft of yellow light shines down, illuminating a wild animal.”
    I wondered if I was “under” and concluded that if I could be wondering this then I wasn’t. Perry Lyman’s voice, annoyingly smooth and aware of its own resonance, kept on about the animal, calling it my “power animal” and urging me to see it in detail. Eventually, I managed to picture a deer. Seen straight on andeye-to-eye, it had the face of Ned Lesser, the diaper boy, but when it looked away it was a deer again.
    “When you feel like sucking your thumb,” said Perry Lyman, “call your power animal for help. It will comfort you and give you strength. Call it to you now.”
    “Come here,” I whispered.
    “Do it in your
mind
.”
    I did it in my mind.
    When I got up from the chair, I was surprised at how limp and warm my legs felt. I remembered reading an article about a professional hockey team that had been hypnotized before a play-off game. I asked Perry Lyman if he used self-hypnosis to help himself win races.
    “In fact, I do. I find it sharpens me.”
    “What’s your power animal?” I said.
    Perry Lyman glanced at the poster above his desk, a poster from the Sierra Club.
    “That’s personal.”
    “Come on.”
    “I’m sorry. It’s just not the same, I’m afraid, if other people know.”
    The poster showed a pack of running wolves.

    When people try to quit things, other things take their places. A woman stops smoking and starts inhaling pizza. A man cuts out doughnuts and heads off to Las Vegas. After Perry Lyman hypnotized me, my desire to suck justdrained away, and so did all the pleasure. My thumb became a neutral object, like the end of a