Hypnotizing Maria: A Story Read online

  It would be years before he learned that Blacksmyth was to her what hypnotists call a negative hallucination—she couldn't see him, blocked as he was by the positive hallucination of the stone she saw close by, locking her in.

  In that moment Jamie Forbes thought that nothing in the world could wake her but the snap of Blacksmyth's fingers, no matter she was starving, or dying of thirst. Not true, but that's what he believed, watching.

  “Have you tried,” said Blacksmyth, “every possible way, to get out?”

  She nodded, head down, both hands pushing against the stone of her belief.

  “Give up?”

  She nodded, pitiful, exhausted.

  “Here's the answer,” came his voice, filled with drama. “Lonnie, walk through the wall!”

  She did nothing. Already she was pushing against the stone, leaning in an odd posture that seemed impossible to hold, pushing against empty air.

  How could she walk through, how could her body go where her hands could not?

  “Lonnie, I'm going to tell you the truth. I'm not kidding. The wall is in your mind. You can walk through it if only you believe you can.”

  How many times had Blacksmyth said those words? What does it do to your heart, telling the truth to someone incapable of believing it?

  “I'll give it all away for you, Lonnie, right now.” He turned and spoke this drama to the audience. “You've been hypnotized. There are no walls around you. You are standing on a stage in the Lafayette Hotel in Long Beach, California, and you are the only person in this hall who believes that you're locked in that prison.”

  “Please don't hurt me,” she said.

  “I will not hurt you, I promise. I will help you help yourself,” he said. “We need never be prisoner of our own beliefs. We can remember who we are. At the count of Three I shall walk through the wall at one side of the room, I shall take your hand in mine and we shall walk together through the other side. And you will be free.”

  Lonnie coughed a short hopeless laugh. Just let me out.

  “One,” said Blacksmyth. “Two.”

  “Three.”

  The hypnotist did what anyone in the audience could have done. He took four steps and stood beside her.

  Lonnie gasped and screamed at the sight of him, freezing blood to ice.

  Blacksmyth offered his hand, but she threw her arms around him, clinging to her rescuer.

  “Together now,” he said. He took her wrist. “We'll walk together through . . .”

  “NO!” she screamed. “NO! NO!”

  “We'll use the door,” he said, calm and even.

  This had happened before, Jamie knew it at once. Lonnie had gone far enough over the edge that the hypnotist moved to Plan B: Suggest the Door.

  What was Plan C, he wondered. That would be a snap of the fingers, wake her now into the world of the stage, the audience; she had volunteered . . .

  She shook free, desperate relief, grabbed the invisible handle to an invisible door, ran a few steps and halted, breathing hard, turning to the hypnotist. He reached for her hand and this time she took it. He raised his other hand by his cheek, smiling into her eyes, and snapped his fingers.

  It was as though he had slapped her face. She jolted back, eyes wide.

  Next second came a shock-wave of applause, shattering unbearable tension in the hall, some folks standing already, transfixed by what had happened before their eyes.

  Blacksmyth bowed, and as he was holding her hand, she bowed also, bewildered.

  The roar filled the hall, astonished wonder.

  In the midst of it, Lonnie brushed her tears, and even from row S, Jamie Forbes read her distress: What did you do to me?

  Blacksmyth answered a few words only she could hear, turned, and mouthed thank-you to the applause, his expression: Don't underestimate the force of your own belief!

  Jamie Forbes was lost in the strange demonstration for days after, turned it this way and that in his mind till it washed away without answer, fading before his lifelong obsession with flying.

  He buried that mystery till a long time later, till well after first light of a day in North Platte, Nebraska.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Eight-thirty in the morning, the airport café was crowded. He found a place for himself, opened a menu.

  “Mind if I share your table?”

  Jamie Forbes looked up at her, one of those folks you like the minute you meet. “Share away,” he said.

  She set a backpack alongside. “Is this where I learn how to fly?”

  “Nope,” he said, pointed out the window at the sky. “You learn to fly up there.”

  She looked, and nodded. “Always said some day I'd get to it. Learn to fly. I promised myself; didn't quite make it come true.”

  “It's never too late,” he said.

  “Oh . . .” she said, a wistful smile. “I think it is for me.” She extended her hand. “Dee Hallock.”

  “Jamie Forbes.”

  They looked at the menu. Something light, just a bit, he thought. Orange juice and toast would be healthy.

  “You're traveling,” he said.

  “Yes. Hitchhiking.” She put the menu down, and when the waitress arrived, she said, “Tea and toast, please. Mint and wheat.”

  “Yes, ma'am,” said the waitress, memorizing an easy one, and turned to him.

  “Hot chocolate and rye toast, if I could.” Hitchhiking?

  “You're flying today,” said the waitress. “All these light orders, this morning.”

  “Light is good,” he said. She smiled and left to another table, their orders in her mind.

  “Are you hitchhiking cars,” he asked, “or airplanes?”

  “I hadn't thought of airplanes,” said Dee. “Can one do that?”

  “Never hurts to ask. You want to be careful, though.”

  “Oh?”

  “This is high country. Some airplanes don't fly as well as others, up high, with passengers.” Early forties, he thought. Businesswoman. What's she doing hitchhiking?

  “To answer your question,” she said, “I'm testing an hypothesis.” Dark brown hair, brown eyes, that magnetic beauty that curiosity and intelligence bring to a woman's face.

  “My question?”

  “‘How come she's hitchhiking?’”

  He blinked. “You're right. I was thinking something like that. What's your hypothesis?”

  “There's no coincidence.”

  Interesting, he thought. “What kind of coincidence, there isn't?”

  “I'm an equal-opportunity explorer,” she said. “What kind doesn't matter. You and I, for instance; I wouldn't be surprised if both of us knew some important mutual friend. Wouldn't be surprised there's a reason we're meeting. Not at all.” She looked at him as though she knew there was.

  “Of course there's no way to tell,” he said.

  She smiled. “Except by coincidence.”

  “Which there's no such thing as.”

  “That's what I'm finding out.”

  Nice quest, he thought. “And you're finding more coincidences per mile on the road than you do in your office?”

  She nodded.

  “You don't find it dangerous, hitchhiking? An attractive woman asking to be picked up by anybody on the road?”

  A that's-impossible laugh. “I don't attract danger.”

  I'll bet, he thought. Are you so sure of yourself, or are you just naïve? “How's your hypothesis holding up?”

  “I'm not ready to call it a law, but I think it'll be my theory, at least, before long.”

  She had smiled about attracting danger—he wouldn't understand that yet.

  “Am I a coincidence?” he asked.

  “Is Jamie a coincidence?” She said it as though she were asking someone he couldn't see. “Of course not. I'll tell you later on.”

  “I think you're a coincidence,” he told her. “And there's nothing wrong with that. I wish you well on your journey.”

  “There's been no word across th
is table of any meaning to you,” she asked, “nothing that's changed you so far?”

  “‘So far’ is the operative term,” he said. “Tell me something that shocks me, ma'am, something lifechanging I can't possibly know, and I'll agree you're not coincidence.”

  She thought about that, a little smile. “I'll tell you something,” she said. “I'm a hypnotist.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Once in a while, some word found the power to tumble Jamie Forbes and he could hear it happen, like white noise on the airplane radio when nobody's transmitting, all of a sudden the volume spikes and a rush of static in the mind.

  Maybe it's thought slammed into overdrive, spun against something there's no explaining. He counted without counting . . . in seven seconds he could hear again.

  How does this odd person pick my table to sit down at, the one time ever that I'm wondering did I hypnotize Maria Ochoa in the air, and remembering when it happened to me?

  —The café’s crowded, that's how.

  How does she know what I'm thinking? She reads minds? She's somebody who looks human but maybe isn't? Why is the Unexplained happening to me here in North Platte, Nebraska some alien's got me trapped? How'd she guess my life's changing when I've never seen her before?

  —Chance. Coincidence, is why. Most likely she's not from Mars.

  It had been a long silence. He glanced up at the sky outside the window, then back to her eyes. “So what makes you think I think your job's going to change my life?”

  The waitress arrived with breakfast. “Will there be anything else?”

  He shook his head no.

  “No thank you,” said the hypnotist.

  Alone with their toast, he looked his question at her again—why'd you think I'd care?

  “I thought you'd find it interesting,” she said. “I'm getting out of my own way. I'm trusting imagination instead putting it down every minute, saying it's silly. And sure enough, you're interested.”

  “I am,” he said. “May I tell you why?”

  “Please.”

  He told her about what had happened yesterday, sketched the story for her then this morning when Maria told the reporter he'd hypnotized her into an airline captain, he'd been wondering if he had.

  She looked at him, cool and professional. “A lot more than the airline captain, you did.”

  “Oh. What's hypnotism?” When Jamie Forbes was curious to learn, he didn't care if somebody thought he was stupid.

  “Hypnotism,” she said, as if it weren't a dumb thing to ask, “is suggestion accepted.”

  He waited.

  She shrugged.

  “That's it?”

  She nodded.

  “That's kind of broad, isn't it?”

  “No. Tell me your story again, what you remember; I'll stop you every time you hypnotized your subject.”

  He looked at the clock over the lunch counter, art deco with stylized chrome propeller blades at nine and three o'clock.

  “I need to be on my way.”

  “Have a good flight,” she said. “This is important.”

  He blinked at the go-stop message. Maybe she's right. The weather's improving to the east, a front moving through. It's early, I can let it improve a little more.

  “All right,” he said, “here's what happened.” He went over yesterday again, best he could recall, knowing she'd stop him come the airline part.

  “First she said, ‘Somebody God help me he's died!’ And I told her ‘Maybe so, ma'am, but maybe not.’”

  “Stop,” said the hypnotist. “You suggested that she may be wrong, her husband may still be alive. That was a new thought for her; she accepted it and it gave her hope, and more than that, a reason to live.”

  He hadn't considered that. “I told her she could fly the airplane without him.”

  “Stop,” said Dee Hallock. “You suggested that she could fly the airplane. Another new option.”

  “I said, ‘We'd better get him on the ground.’ I used ‘we’ because I thought I knew what she'd say next:”

  “Stop. Not only are you hypnotizing her, you know you're doing it.”

  “She said, ‘I can't fly an airplane,’ so I said, ‘OK, then you and I, we'll land it together.’”

  “Stop. You're denying her suggestion that she can't fly, and your tone of voice, your confidence is affirming the opposite. Denial and affirmation—suggestions leading to a demonstration.”

  So it went, the woman stopping him nearly every sentence. Forbes had suggested that she had flying skills, she said; he gave her affirmation and confirmation, he used non-verbal cues, suggested she accept his authority as an instructor, suggested she could trust him to bring her down safely, confirmed suggestions with humor . . . her list went on, footnoting every sentence he remembered.

  He nodded, convinced. Now this breakfast partner had him accepting her suggestion that he was guiding Maria's mind. Is hypnotism so easy?

  . . . “‘I'm going to talk to the control tower a bit on another radio. Don't worry, I'll be listening on this radio, too. You can talk to me any time you want, OK?’”

  “Stop,” she said. “What are you telling her now?”

  “She hardly has to do anything. Mister Authority is watching her every move, even though he's talking to somebody else.”

  “Exactly.”

  . . . “I told the tower, ‘Negative, but it wouldn't hurt to roll an ambulance and a fire truck. Keep the vehicles behind the landing aircraft, will you? We don't want to distract her, equipment driving alongside when she's landing.’”

  “Stop. What are you doing now?”

  He smiled. “I'm hypnotizing the tower operator.”

  She nodded, solemn. “Yes. You are suggesting that you are in control, and that he will accept that you are.”

  . . . “‘There's the runway ahead of us, Maria. We're going to do a big gentle turn to line up with it. Real smooth, no hurry. This is easy for you.’”

  “There you have it,” she said. “Suggesting a future already finished, successful.”

  “I was, wasn't I?”

  “What do you think?” said Dee Hallock. “Telling me the story, how many suggestions, two dozen, three dozen? How many didn't you tell me about? My clients are in moderate trance after a single sentence.” She lifted her teacup, didn't drink.“Suggestion-Affirmation-Confirmation, round and round, like the spirals they used to put in movies, to show someone's . . . hyp-no-tized. . . .”

  “It isn't just me, you're saying? Anybody can hypnotize us? Everybody can do it?”

  “Not only everybody can do it, sir, but everybody does it, every day. You do it, I do, all day, all night.”

  He guessed from her look that she thought he didn't believe.

  She leaned forward, earnest. “Jamie, every time we think or say: I am . . ., I feel . . ., I want . . ., I think . . ., I know . . ., You look . . ., You can . . ., You are . . ., You can't . . ., You ought . . ., I should . . ., I will . . ., This is . . ., This isn't . . . Every time we use some value judgment: good, bad, better, evil, best, beautiful, useless, terrific, right, wrong, terrible, enchanting, magnificent, waste-of-time . . .”

  Her look said you can imagine how far it goes. “On and on, every statement we make isn't a statement, it's a suggestion, and every one we accept slides us deeper. Every suggestion intensifies itself.”

  “I tell myself I feel wonderful when I feel bad,” he said, “and ‘wonderful’ is intensified?”

  “Yes. Tell ourselves we feel wonderful when we feel bad, the badness fades with every suggestion. Tell ourselves we feel terrible when we feel bad, we get worse every word. Suggestions intensify.”

  She stopped, raised her eyebrows for a second. Surprised, he guessed, at her own intensity.

  “That's interesting,” he said, his words underlining themselves, slipping him into a trance of knowing that what she said was wildly more than interesting. If what she said were a quarter true, a tenth true . . .

  “Hypnotism's no my
stery, Jamie. That's all there is to it: repetition, over and over. Suggestions from everywhere, from ourselves, from every other human being we see: think this, do this, be this. Suggestions from rocks: they're solid, they're substance, even when we know that all of matter is nothing but energy, patterns of connections, which we perceive as substance. There's no such thing as solid anything, beyond seems to be.”

  As though she were determined not to go plunging deep again, she held her teacup, silent.

  Suggestion, affirmation, he thought. The lady is right. From all the suggestions we've ever heard or seen or touched, our truth is the crowd of those we've accepted. It's not our wishes that come true, or our dreams; it's the suggestions we accept.

  “You did it to Maria,” she said at last, “put her so deep in trance it wasn't Maria landing the airplane, it was you. Your mind borrowing her body just long enough to save her life.”

  She set her teacup down as carefully as though she knew that tea must never be tilted. “Tell me this . . .” She fell silent.

  “Tell you what?” he said, after a while.

  “Was it possible, in your mind yesterday, that she wouldn't land that airplane safely?”

  Silence from the pilot. Unthinkable. It was no more possible Maria couldn't land her machine than he couldn't land his own.

  “When we accept our own suggestions,” said his strange companion, “it's called autohypnosis.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Having worn his mind on his sleeve a few years too many, Jamie Forbes had been practicing the opposite, till by now it was nearly habit.

  This Dee Harmon, he thought, the hitchhiker after coincidence, has given me more to think about than she knows.

  He glanced at the clock, put two ten-dollar bills on the café table. “I've got to be on my way,” he said. “Anything over twenty dollars, I'm afraid you'll have to pay for it.”

  “Thank you,” she said, “I'll do that. Where are you off to?”

  “Arkansas by noon, probably. Southeast from there.”

  She stayed at the table as he rose. “A pleasure to meet you, Jamie Forbes,” she said.

  I've got to be on my way, he thought, walking from the place. I don't got to be at all. I could stay here and talk with this person all day, learn all she knows, a few hours worth, at least.