Also, he will massage an idea into your mind and you won’t even realise. Not until you are triggered into action by seeing those four words on a page that urge you towards the next bridge.

And even though you have no issue with people who choose to go into therapy or analysis – members of your own family have done this to great success – you are different. The reaction of your peers scares you. Everybody wants an edge, to be a little crazy about something, but nobody wants the stigma of self-help.

That’s the reason he told nobody about those sessions at the ERMA offices.

In a world where we show everyone pictures of the meals we are about to eat or we share videos of landmark events in our children’s lives that should be just for us, where thoughts are our latest status and kindness appears to have lost its currency, it’s often the things we don’t say that cause most damage.

This young man should never have seen the things that he did, but keeping it secret that he was trying to come to terms with that horrific event strips him of any pity he may have deserved. Not speaking out means others will suffer. He has inadvertently perverted the course of justice. But, then, that’s why he was chosen.

104

THERE IS NO RISK

There’s a thing about magic tricks: Everybody thinks they want to know how you did it.

It’s the same with lies. Everybody thinks they want the truth.

And crime. They want the murder to be solved and the culprit to be caught.

That’s what they think.

If you’ve ever sat through an hour-long TV show or theatre performance by a mentalist, you’ll note that it builds. It seems that there are steps throughout that are leading to that final test of an unwittingly compliant volunteer, that all the tests they have undergone have led to one final trial.

There is uncertainty from you as an audience member because part of you believes that something could go wrong; this is the human mind, after all. So complex. So random. So infinitesimally different from person to person that there is a risk it will not go as planned.

There is no risk.

The plan is foolproof.

And that thing you think you want to know, well, you don’t. It would ruin it. You don’t need to know everything to be satisfied.

Here’s the rub. That final trial, that’s the trick. That’s the money shot. That’s the five minutes of joy. Everything that comes before is for show. It’s goddamned entertainment. Hell, it all is. But that first part is foreplay.

The trick is the way they get the participant to push a stranger off the roof of a building to save themselves. Or they stand in front of a bullet to protect somebody they don’t even know. The bits before, where they’re seemingly being implanted with information or they’re passing things on the street that they don’t see but apparently informs a decision they will make later on, that’s all horse shit.