Hypnotizing Maria

drove from Florida to California with a detour through Seattle, stopped at the little airport where I had landed after a hailstorm ...” He halted at the edge of a long story. “You’re right. It was not possible for us to meet, but it happened.”
    “That was... ?”
    “Ten years ago.” It had been a lovely marriage, he thought. It still is.
    “I say there’s no such thing as coincidence, you say there’s no such thing as destiny.”
    “Coincidence is destiny.” He said it as a joke.
    She set down her fork, crossed her arms in front of her. “Do you know what you just said?”
    “No coincidence,” he said. “Sounds like you may not be as out-there as I thought you were.”
    “Remember to put it together, please,” she said, no smile. “If it weren’t for your miseducation, if it weren’t for the suggestions you’ve accepted, if it weren’t for your conditioned awareness by the culture you chose ... you could walk through that wall.”
    He rankled at the you. “What about Dee? Are you miseducated?”
    “I was, indeed.”
    “Not now?”
    “No.”
    “You can walk through that wall?”
    A smile, utter confidence. “Easy.”
    “Do it, please?”
    “No.”
    “Why not?”
    “You’ll find out in a few hours. It’s not time for you to know.”
    “Dee,” he said. “Are you trying to frighten me?” Instead of answering, she did a strange thing. She reached toward him, her hand open, passed it slowly from left to right in front of his face, looked into his eyes. “After this hour,” she said, “you will never see me again in your life on Earth. We met, no coincidence, because it’s important for you to know: What's suggestion got to do with destiny? The answer will change everything you believe and everything you see.”
    If there was anything she could have said to strike him dumb, that was it.
    “She was right!” she said next minute, bright and happy, so disconnected a note it ran him off his tracks.
    “Who was right?”
    “The waitress! This is wonderful salad!”
    “It is. A truly remarkable salad.” He forgot his questions about coincidence, destiny, walking through walls, reminding anybody about anything.
    She pulled a notebook from her pocket, read him The Truckers Code , copied from the sun visor of that Kenworth eighteen-wheeler, her ride from North Platte:

You are the fabric that holds America together, and you are a child's best friend.
It is the trucker who delivers the farmer's crops to the grocer so children don't go hungry.
It is the trucker who carries the fuel that keeps them warm.
It is the trucker who hauls the lumber to the carpenter to build the homes that keep them safe and secure.
And it is the trucker's sacrifice of loneliness, by enduring empty nights and lonely miles, that ties America together, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific .

    She looked up from the notebook. “Isn’t that beautiful?”
    The two of them talked about that, in the restaurant in Ponca City, Oklahoma, how true the words and how much we owe the ones who choose difficult dangerous work to make our lives what they are.
    Dinner was over. She wished him happy flying, then Dee Hallock said good-bye, left the table, and was gone.

    In his room that evening, he set his travel computer on the hotel Internet, searched her name. There were several Gwendolyn Hallocks, of course, but only one brief mention, the one he was looking for, a fragment in some genealogy site:

Samuel Black (1948-1988), stage hypnotist; m. Gwendolyn Hallock (1951-2006); daughter Jennifer (b. 1970).

    The Internet gets numbers wrong all the time, it mangles quotes, it credits words to people who never said them, its facts are often fiction.
    Once in a while, however, the Web manages to get it right. If that was so, Dee Hallock, with whom Jamie Forbes had just finished a fine salad, had died two years before they met.



CHAPTER TWELVE
    I t wasn’t much of a sleep, that night.
    That’s why she could walk through the wall, he thought, thrashing sheets aside: she no longer accepts suggestions that she’s mortal. If it weren't for miseducation, you could walk through that wall.
    Is that all dying is, he thought, a dramatic change in what we believe is true about ourselves? And why do we have to die to make the change?
    Because we’ve conditioned ourselves to believe we have to, he thought. We’ve married the deep suggestions of spacetime, till death do us part.
    Connections like meteors: Why shouldn't we have to