The Hidden Man by Anthony Flacco Read Free Book Online

that much only took care of the setup. For the twist, he had each one demonstrate a few basic bends or stretches “to prove they were fit for the task,” but which actually served to reduce their physical inhibition. While each one did the moves he asked of them, J.D. still remembered what he was doing well enough to praise their movements as if they each showed real talent.
    As always, while each subject bent and twisted his way through the requested physical movements, J.D. whispered their priming instructions to them under the guise of giving individual encouragements.
    Tonight, at that very moment, he assumed that he had done so. But to save his life, he could not actually recall doing it.
    He guessed, from the young men’s demeanor, that he had done his job as expected and that all were successfully primed. More than anything, it was his sense of balance that told him he still had a few seconds to bring this disaster to some sort of a closing. If only he could remember tonight’s trigger phrase while the audience still laughed at the young men, who were dutifully holding the poses that J.D. had molded each one into while he spoke to them.
    The man on the audience’s left side, downstage right, had been bent into a capital
C.
    The next man was bent straight over, arm out touching the floor with the other arm bent to connect the two lines, to make a capital
A.
The others were all bent into the letters to form C-A-L-I-F-O-RN-I-A out of their ten bodies.
    The men would hold it for as long as J.D. wanted them to, with little or no sense of pain from the exertion. Not one of them realized what he was doing. Each one’s mind was relaxed and filled with pleasant images of what a fine fellow he was, cued up by J.D.’s combination of physical touch, public instruction, audience pressure, and whispered indoctrination.
    But the trigger—what was the damned
trigger
? He had milked this elementary bit for all the juice it had; now it was time to send these quietly prepared young men back into the audience. They were primed to end his show for him, living proof of his abilities, surefire in assuring that the folks would come back to see another performance, and another after that, always trying to figure out how ol’ J.D. made things happen.
    He stalled by letting them go back to their seats and by whipping everyone up to applaud the boys off the stage. It only bought him a few moments. Soon they were in the process of sitting back down and everything was all stacked up to set off, upon his command.
    Of course he had given each man a trigger. You always give them a trigger. He did it in the same way he tied his shoes, without having to think about it. Habit had protected him, but memory was failing him, one tiny piece at a time. The loss of the trigger phrase was about to leave him with one fat turkey egg, broken and running down his face.
    Now he was flailing away, stealing time by loudly praising the cooperative young rubes while he goaded the house into a few more rounds of applause for them. He noted the young men’s dizzy smiles of embarrassed gratification. He could see that each one of them felt as if he had really taken part in something. The young men threw grins to one another across the audience rows, now bonded like a wolf pack.
    So the prime was set and everything was ready.
    But already he could see the first traces of confusion rising up on the folks’ faces. Some of them—the damned quick ones—sensed that this thing was running out of steam. He could feel the floor beginning to tilt.
    A flash of prickly frustration and hot anger rushed through him. He wanted to scream, tear open the top of his skull, pull out his brain, and shake it like wet laundry until the trigger phrase fell out. The magic of the elixir lay in its ability to keep his head clearer and his memory sharper, to prevent his spirits from falling into that awful abyss that always waited for him. But in the wrong dosage, it was like riding a