Moving back home from college brought a kind of stupor to my daily life, and my nights became a waking dread. If I wasn't pounding out yet another imitation on the piano, I was behind the bar, tending to the usual crowd with demons of their own. I had fallen into a routine at Oscar's when the strangest of them all arrived and ordered a shot of whiskey. He slid the glass against the rail and stared at it. I went on to the next customer, poured a beer, sliced a lemon, and came back to the guy, and the drink was sitting undisturbed. He was a pixy fellow, clean, sober, in a cheap suit and tie, and as far as I could tell, he hadn't lifted his hands from his lap.
　　"What's the matter, mister? You haven't touched your drink."
　　"Would you give it to me on the house if I can make that glass move without touching it?"
　　"What do you mean, 'move'? How far?"
　　"How far would it have to move for you to believe?"
　　"Not far." I was hooked. "Move it at all, and you have a deal."
　　He reached out his right hand to shake on it, and beneath him, the glass started sliding slowly down the bar until it came to a halt about five inches to his left. "A magician never reveals the secret to the trick. Tom McInnes."
　　"Henry Day," I said. "A lot of guys come in here with all sorts of tricks but that's the best I ever saw."
　　"I'll pay for this," McInnes said, putting a dollar on the bar. "But you owe me another. In a fresh glass, if you please, Mr. Day."
　　He gulped the second shot and pulled the original glass back in front of him. Over the next several hours, he suckered four people with that same trick. Yet he never touched the first glass of whiskey. He drank for free all night. Around eleven, McInnes stood up to go home, leaving the shot on the bar.
　　"Hey, Mac, your drink," I called after him.
　　"Never touch the stuff," he said, slipping into a raincoat. "And I highly advise you not to drink it, either."
　　I lifted the glass to my nose for a smell.
　　"Leaded." He held up a small magnet he had concealed in his left hand. "But you knew that, right?"
　　Swirling the glass in my hand, I could now see the iron filings at the bottom.
　　"Part of my study of mankind," he said, "and our willingness to believe in what cannot be seen."
　　McInnes became a regular at Oscar's, coming in four or five times a week over the next few years, curiously intent on fooling the patrons with new tricks or puzzles. Sometimes a riddle or complicated math game involving picking a number, doubling it, adding seven, subtracting one's age and so forth, until the victim was right back where he'd started. Or a game involving matches, a deck of cards, a sleight of hand. The drinks he won were of small consequence, for his pleasure resulted from the gullibility of his neighbors. And he was mysterious in other ways. On those nights The Coverboys performed, McInnes sat close to the door. Sometimes between sets he'd come up to chat with the boys, and he hit it off with Jimmy Cummings, of all people, a fine example of the artless thinker. But if we played the wrong song, McInnes could be guaranteed to vanish. When we started covering The Beatles in '63 or '64, he would walk out each time at the opening bars of "Do You Want to Know a Secret?" Like a lot of drunks, McInnes became more himself after he'd had a few. He never acted soused. Not more loquacious or morose, merely more relaxed in his skin, and sharper around the edges. And he could consume mass quantities of alcohol at a sitting, more than anyone I have ever known. Oscar asked him one night about his strange capacity for drink.
　　"It's a matter of mind over matter. A cheap trick hinged upon a small secret."
　　"And what might that be?"
　　"I don't honestly know. It's a gift, really, and at the same time a curse. But I'll tell you, in order to drink so much, there has to be something behind the thirst."
　　"So what makes you thirsty, you old camel?" Cummings laughed.
　　"The insufferable impudence of today's youth. I would have tenure now were it not for callow freshmen and the slippery matter of publication."
　　"You were a professor?" I asked.
　　"Anthropology. My specialization was the use of mythology and theology as cultural rituals."
　　Cummings interrupted: "Slow down, Mac. I never went to college."
　　"How people use myth and superstition to explain the human condition. I was particularly interested in the pre-psychology of parenting and once started a book about rural practices in the British Isles, Scandinavia, and Ger-many."
　　"So you drink because of some old flame, then?" Oscar asked, turning the conversation back to its origins.
　　"I wish to God it was a woman." He spied the one or two females in the bar and lowered his voice. "No, women have been very good to me. It's the mind, boys. The relentless thinking machine. The incessant demands of tomorrow and the yesterdays piled up like a heap of corpses. It's this life and all those before it."
　　Oscar chewed on a reed. "Life before life?"
　　"Like reincarnation?" Cummings asked.
　　"I don't know about that, but I do know that a few special people re-member events from the past, events from too long ago. Put them under a spell, and you'd be amazed at the stories that come out from deep within. What happened a century ago, they talk about as if it were just yesterday. Or today."
　　"'Under a spell'?" I asked.
　　"Hypnosis, the curse of Mesmer, the waking sleep. The transcendent trance."
　　Oscar looked suspicious. "Hypnosis. Another one of your party tricks."
　　"I've been known to put a few people under," said McInnes. "They've told tales from their own dreaming minds too incredible to believe, but with such feeling and authority that one is convinced that they were telling the truth. People do and see strange things when they're under."
　　Cummings jumped in. "I'd like to be hypnotized."
　　"Stay behind after the bar is closed, and I'll do it."
　　At two in the morning after the crowd left, McInnes ordered Oscar to dim the lights and asked George and me to stay absolutely quiet. He sat next to Jimmy and told him to close his eyes; then McInnes started speaking to him in a low, modulated voice, describing restful places and peaceful circumstances in such vivid detail that I'm surprised we all didn't fall asleep. McInnes ran a few tests, checking on whether Jimmy was under.
　　"Raise your right arm straight out in front of you. It's made of the world's strongest steel, and no matter how hard you try, you cannot bend it."
　　Cummings stuck out his right arm and could not flex it; nor, for that matter, could Oscar or George or I when we tried, for it felt like a real iron bar. McInnes ran through a few more tests, then he started asking questions to which Cummings replied in a dead monotone. "Who's your favorite musician, Jimmy?"
　　"Louis Armstrong."
　　We laughed at the secret admission. In his waking life, he would have claimed some rock drummer like Charlie Watts of the Stones, but never Satchmo.
　　"Good. When I touch your eyes, you'll open them, and for the next few minutes you'll be Louis Armstrong."
　　Jimmy was a skinny white boy, but when he popped open those baby blues, the transformation came instantaneously. His mouth twisted into Armstrong's famous wide smile, which he wiped from time to time with an imaginary handkerchief, and he spoke in a gravelly skat voice. Even though Jimmy never sang on any of our numbers, he did a passing fair rendition of some old thing called "I'll Be Glad When You're Dead, You Rascal You," and then, using his thumb as a mouthpiece and his fingers as the horn, blatted out a jazz bridge. Normally Cummings hid behind his drums, but he jumped up on a table and would be entertaining the room still, had he not slipped on a slick of beer and fallen to the floor.
　　McInnes raced to him. "When I count to three and snap my fingers," he said to the slouching body, "you'll wake up, feeling refreshed as if you have slept soundly each night this week. I want you to remember, Jimmy, that when you hear someone say Satchmo, you'll have the uncontrollable urge to sing out a few bars as Louis Armstrong. Can you remember that?"
　　"Uh-huh," Cummings said from his trance.
　　"Good, but you won't remember anything else except this dream. Now, I'm going to snap my fingers, and you'll wake up, happy and refreshed."
　　A goofy grin smeared on his face, he woke and blinked at each one of us, as if he could not imagine why we were all staring at h............