Hypnotizing Maria

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
    O nce 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 cafés 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,