Hypnotizing Maria: A Story

by Richard Bach

  All right, then: I want to be on my way.

  A suggestion which I accept, which I feel like accepting: I feel happy, leaving, walking across the ramp to the airplane, climbing again into the familiar cockpit, drying off from a flood of wild ideas, the wilder for they could be true.

  Seat belt and shoulder harness buckles snapped into place, helmet on, radio cords connected, gloves on. What a pleasure, sometimes, is routine with a purpose:

  Mixture—RICH

  Propeller Lever—FULL INCREASE

  Magnetos—BOTH

  Battery—ON

  Boost Pump—ON, two-three-four-five, OFF

  Propeller area—CLEAR

  Starter Switch—START

  The propeller rotated three blades slowly, in front of the windshield, then vanished the instant the engine started, blue smoke wreathed for a second and gone in the blast.

  Oil Pressure—CHECK

  Alternator—ON

  It had never gotten old for him, flying. Never gone boring. Every engine start was a new adventure, guiding the spirit of a lovely machine back into life; every takeoff blending his spirit with its own to do what's never been done in history, to lift away from the ground and fly.

  Lifted, too, from tea and toast with Dee Holland; he gave it not another thought during takeoff.

  We're flying.

  Wheels up.

  Airspeed and rate of climb are good. Oil pressure and temperature, manifold pressure and engine revolutions and fuel flow and hours remaining, cylinder head and exhaust gas temp in the green, fuel level's fine; check the sky clear of other aircraft, check the Earth unrolling softly below.

  Once one masters the basics of flying an airplane, there's plenty of room for split personalities in the cockpit. One mind flies the airplane, the other solves mysteries for the fun of it.

  Minutes later, level at 7,500 feet heading one-fourzero degrees to Arkansas, one of Jamie Forbes’ minds fell to wondering why, if it were no coincidence, he had met Ms. Harrelson this morning, on her mission to prove what she's so sure is true.

  Not every event needs to be labeled, he thought, coincidence or destiny. It's what happens after, that matters—whether we do something with our little lifescenes or let them slip downstream from our heart, washed to the Sea of Forgotten Encounters.

  Had he hypnotized Maria into landing safely? Had he hypnotized himself that he could help her do it? Is hypnotism so common, we do it every minute of every day to ourselves and to each other and never notice?

  Hypnotism doesn't pretend to tell us why we're here, he thought, but it sure chatters on about how we come to this place and how we continue playing along.

  What if the hitchhiker were right, with her version, Maria landing in trance; what if it were true?

  If hypnosis is nothing but suggestions accepted, then a whole lot of the world we see around us must be paintings from our own brush.

  “Hello Pratt traffic, Swift 2304 Bravo's entering forty-five to a left downwind Runway Three Five Pratt.” Faint on the radio, the airplane was miles away.

  What suggestions? For the first time in his life, in the high noisy silence of the cockpit, he opened his eyes to see.

  He flew back through time; time with himself and with others, through marriage and business, through the years in the military, through high school, grammar school, through home as a child, life as an infant. How do we become part of any culture, any form of life, save by accepting its suggestions to be our truth?

  Suggestions by the thousands, millions, there's seas of suggestions; accepted, worshipped, reasonable and un, declined ignored . . . all of them pouring unseen through me, through every human being, every animal, every life-form on Earth: got to eat and sleep, feel hot and cold, pain and pleasure, got to have a heartbeat, breathe air, learn all physical laws and obey, accept suggestions that this is the only life there is or ever was or ever will be. Dee Hartridge had only been hinting.

  Any statement, he thought, with which we can agree or disagree, on any level—that's a suggestion.

  He blinked at that, airplane forgotten. Any statement? That's nearly every word he had seen spoken heard thought and dreamed, non-stop day and night continuously, for more than half a century, not counting the non-verbal suggestions to be conservative ten thousand times more.

  Every split instant we perceive a wall, we reaffirm solid-can't-go-through-that. How many nano-instants during one day do our senses include walls? Doors? Floors? Ceilings? Windows? For how many milliseconds do we accept limits-limits-limits without even knowing we're doing it?

  How many micro-instants in a day, he wondered— a trillion? That many suggestions each day in the category of architecture alone, before we move on to something simultaneously flooding suggestions about its own limits, let's say perception, biology, physiology, chemistry, aeronautics, hydrodynamics, laser physics, please insert here the list of every discipline ever conceived by humankind.

  That's why infants are helpless as long as they are, even learning quicker than lightning every second. They need to accept a foundation, a critical mass of suggestions, acclimate from spirit to our customs of space and time.

  Infancy is basic training for mortality. Such a savage bursting dam-break of suggestions on the poor little guys, no wonder it takes years for them to swim to the first still water, talk ideas on their own. Amazing their first word isn't “Help!” Probably is, that cry.

  One hour ten minutes after takeoff, engine instruments in the green, groundspeed 150 knots in the headwind, sky clear, air smooth, ETA Arkansas an hour plus.

  In the midst of all that, we mortals have to learn to be afraid, he thought. When we're mortal, danger's necessary, destruction has to be possible, if we're going to play the game.

  Got to play, got to dive down deep, deep, deeper in that ocean of suggestions that we're mortal, limited, vulnerable, blind to all but the chaff-storm of what our senses tell us; turn lies to unshakable belief, no questions asked and while we're doing this avoid dying so long as possible and while we're dodging death figure out why we came here in the first place and what possible reason we might ever have had to call this game entertainment.

  Oh, and all the real answers are hidden. The game is to find 'em on our own in the midst of clouds of fake answers that other players say are fine for them but which somehow don't seem to work for us at all.

  Don't laugh, infant. Mortals find the game fascinating, and you will too when you accept the belief that you're one of them.

  As a flying cadet, Jamie Forbes had been to classes about altitude sickness, supposed to happen when you fly high. Is there such a thing as altitude awareness, he wondered now; you understand some things, having flown some secret number of years, that you never would have known on the ground?

  If you don't follow rules, you're not allowed to play.

  Life in Spacetime Rule One is obvious: You've got to believe in spacetime.

  After just a few billion suggestions about the limits of four dimensions, that is, around the time we turn two days old, confirmation comes quick. We're lost in the I Am A Helpless Human Baby trance, but we're players.

  What about the ones who change their minds, who decide to withdraw their consent to this planet's sandstorm of suggestion? The ones who say, “I am spirit! I am not limited by the beliefs of this hallucinated world and I won't pretend I am!”

  What happens to them is, “Poor thing: stillborn. Little tyke lived less than an hour ain't that a shame. Wasn't sick, it just didn't make it. Who said life's fair?”

  The ones who go along, give their consent to be hypnotized, thought Jamie Forbes, cruising level at seven thousand five, that's us. That's me.

  Groundspeed down to 135. He reset the GPS, changed his destination from Arkansas to Ponca City, Oklahoma. Never been there, he thought; will be soon.

  CHAPTER NINE

  “Where do you keep your books on aviation?”

  The used-book store near the airport in Ponca City was promising because i
t had musted up in the same spot, it looked, for eighty years or so.

  “What we'd have on Aviation,” said the clerk, “would be, go down that way to where it says Travel and turn left. It's at the end of the aisle, right side.”

  “Thank you.”

  What they had was not a whole lot, the pilot found; nothing on his current flame, seaplane history. Three fine books, though, right together: the rare old Brimm and Bogess two-volume Aircraft and Engine Maintenance, way underpriced, marked three dollars each for two forty-dollar books, and Nevil Shute's Slide Rule, about the author's life as an aircraft engineer.

  The shelf was at eye level, and when he pulled the three books together, they left a considerable hole. Normally he would have moved on, but as he was in no hurry he noticed another book in the shadows, somehow wedged behind the others. Hoping it might be Seaplanes of the Twenties, he pulled it forward.

  No such luck. Wasn't even a flying book: Winston's Encyclopedia of Stage Entertainers.

  Yet, struck by the title, he flashed back to Long Beach, California, the Lafayette Hotel, and looked up the only stage entertainer he'd seen in person:

  SAMUEL BLACK, AKA BLACKSMYTH THE GREAT

  American stage hypnotist (1948–1988). Through the mid-1970s, Black is said to have had no equal on the circuit.

  “What if we believed we were chained by something that doesn't exist?” he asked a Variety interviewer. “And what if the world around us is the perfect mirror of whatever we believe?”

  Black left the stage in 1987, at the height of his popularity.

  Journal entries recorded that he was exploring what he termed “different dimensions,” and that he had made “. . . some discoveries greatly interesting to me, and I have decided to leave my body, and return to it, while in excellent health.” (Los Angeles Times, 22 June, 1987)

  He was found dead of no apparent cause on 12 November of that year.

  Black is survived by his wife Gwendolyn (b. 1951), a hypnotherapist.

  Jamie Forbes set the three flying books on the bookstore counter, feeling guilty at the price on Brimm and Bogess, then handed the encyclopedia to the clerk, whom he suspected might own the place.

  “This was in Aviation. It's Stage Entertainers.”

  “Thank you. Sorry about that, I'll restack it.” He set the book aside. “That'll be three dollars each for these two, and four dollars for the Nevil Shute. Does that sound good?” As though he were willing let them go for less.

  “Sounds fine. He's a terrific writer.”

  “The Rainbow and the Rose, Round the Bend, Trustee from the Toolroom,” said the clerk, with a grin at their shared good taste. “He wrote twenty-three books, you know. Everybody remembers him for On the Beach, but it wasn't his best book, I don't think.”

  He was the owner, all right.

  “You know your Brimm and Bogess is way underpriced,” said Jamie. “I'm taking advantage of you, that price.”

  The man waved his hand, dismissed the thought. “That's the way I priced it. I'll charge more next time.”

  They chatted for a while about Nevil Shute Norway, the writer all at once alive and with them in the bookshop, whose stories erased the distance between two folks he'd never lived to meet.

  Jamie left half an hour later with the Brimm and Bogess, Slide Rule, and two other Nevil Shute books, paperbacks that needed rereading, and decided to stay the night in Ponca City.

  Is it cheating, he wondered, to pay a store's asking price for books?

  No, he decided, it isn't.

  CHAPTER TEN

  That evening, still happy for meeting old friends on old pages, Jamie Forbes went down for dinner in the motel restaurant.

  “Welcome to Ponca City,” said the waitress, with a smile that earned a lavish tip before ever she heard his order. She handed the menu and whispered a secret: “We've got great salads.”

  He thanked her for that, scanned down the list when she left. There was a lot to read, and the salads did look good.

  “Hot chocolate and toast, I suppose.”

  He startled up from the page to a different smile.

  “Miss Hammond!”

  “Hallock,” she said. “Dee Hallock. Mister Forbes, are you following me?”

  Impossible. Four hundred miles from breakfast at North Platte, not in Arkansas where he said he'd be, no way for her to know, no way for him to know . . .

  “You hitchhiked. To Ponca City.”

  “A trucker. Eighteen wheels. Three-thousandpound pallets of North Platte sod to turn parched Ponca City green overnight. Some of the most caring, courteous people in the world. Do you know they have a Trucker's Code?”

  “Come on, Ms. Hallock, this is not possible! You cannot possibly be here!”

  She laughed. “Very well, I'm not here. May I join you for dinner or shall I . . . disappear?”

  “Of course,” he said, half rising from his place. “Forgive me. Please join me. How did you . . . ?”

  “Mr. Forbes, there's no how-did-you. It's coincidence. You're not going to tell me something different, are you?”

  What does one say, this happens? Does one go on in word fragments, sputtering wrecked sentences, this can't be possible this can't be happening when it's calmly happening anyway no matter what's possible?

  He decided to shut up about it, but his mind tumbled, rattling on within, an empty birdcage dropped from a speeding train.

  There was nothing to do but pretend this was the same world as ever, no matter how clearly it wasn't.

  “She says the salads are good.”

  Dee laughed.

  What was she thinking, the explorer of coincidences?

  “Things happen for a reason,” she said. “This I know. Things happen for a reason.”

  They ordered salads, a pasta of some kind, he didn't much care, and sat in silence. Things happen for what reason?

  “I couldn't help thinking about what you said,” he told her. “That suggestions hypnotize us.”

  “If we accept them,” she said.

  “When we're two days old, we don't have much choice. Much after that, it's too late.”

  She shook her head. “No. We always have choice. We accept because we want to accept. It's never too late to decline a suggestion. Don't you see, Jamie? It's no mystery: Suggestion, affirmation, confirmation. That's all there is to it, over and over. Suggestions from everywhere all funneled into consciousness by our own mind.”

  Then he decided, all this hypnotism business, to tell her something that he didn't know at all.

  “Remember you said we may have a mutual friend?” he asked.

  She looked up from her menu, nodded.

  “We do.”

  She smiled anticipation. “Oh?”

  “Sam Black.”

  No surprise, no shock, the smile changed to loving.

  “You know Sam . . .” she said.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Jamie Forbes watched her for a while, watched the face he hadn't a clue what was going on within. She just smiled that warm smile, as if, knowing Sam, he knew it all.

  “How did Gwendolyn turn into Dee?” he asked. If he'd made the wrong guess about this person, that question would be crazy words.

  It wasn't. “I didn't change my name when we married. But after Sam . . .” that loving smile again, “. . . died, I guess, Gwendolyn changed to Wendy, then our granddaughter, Jennifee's little girl, said it: ‘Gra'ma Dee.’ Everybody else agreed, while I was there.”

  “While you were there?”

  “Her granddaughter still does, and Jennifee.”

  A few questions those words did raise. All of them personal, not the sort the pilot felt much comfortable asking.

  “I read about him,” he said.

  “Stage Entertainers?”

  He nodded.

  “Let me guess. You found it by coincidence.”

  She found his story not surprising but delightful, the book squashed back behind the Aviation shelf of a usedbook store in a town he
never intended to land in, when he was absorbed with the question of hypnotism, on the day he met Gwendolyn Hallock Black after a lifetime not knowing she existed and hours before he was to meet her for the second time when meeting her was spectacularly impossible.

  Their salads arrived, hers barely touched for his questions.

  “What is it,” he asked, “with you and coincidence?”

  “You haven't figured that out.”

  “It's got something to do with hypnotism.”

  “You have figured that out. Do you remember my hypothesis, which you've just today helped become my theory?”

  “There's no such thing.” He felt like a monkey mystified by large kindergarten puzzle-pieces, dead simple to fit together, unable to make it work.

  “Look at anybody meeting anybody significant in their lives, well along in the game. With your permission, may I ask . . . ?”

  “Of course.”

  “How did you meet your wife?”

  He laughed. “That's not fair! Catherine took a leave of absence from NASA, 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.”