“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.”