Kansas City is where the boy and the Mexican detective find the hypnotist after setting out west in search of her. The meeting makes the city a place of confrontation rather than resolution: the boy asks for a return to the battlefield where he believes he should have died, or for the hypnotist to accept his love, and she refuses both possibilities.

The Search Reaches Kansas City

The boy has been searching in vain for the hypnotist after she disappeared. He hires a Mexican detective, a former soldier under Pancho Villa, and accompanies him in investigating her disappearance, suspecting that the detective’s theory of parallel Earths reached through hypnosis is a swindle. Their journey west ends in Kansas City, where they find her.

An Impossible Request

At their meeting, the boy asks the hypnotist either to hypnotize him and send him back to the battlefield where he should have died, or to accept his love and stop fleeing. Her answer closes off both alternatives: neither is possible. The city therefore marks a sharp gap between the boy’s desperate demand and what the woman is willing or able to grant; neither his imagined return to the past nor the desired romantic reconciliation occurs.

Departure and Narrative Transition

While the detective shows interest in hypnosis and begins telling the hypnotist a story, the boy leaves the roadside bar and walks beneath the night sky. After a while, he stops crying. Kansas City is thus a pause in a longer passage: the search finds its object, but does not restore the relationship the boy wants. The next chapter moves ahead in time, presenting him as a twenty-five-year-old star reporter at a Moscow newspaper, a transition that leaves the Kansas City encounter behind rather than resolving it.