The Great Suggestion

Here is something people don't know about hypnotic trance. It isn't dangerous, and it isn't sleep. It's closer to the feeling of driving home and not remembering the last three exits.

Ingrid Thorne, forty-nine, Chief Financial Officer, was lying on a couch in Collaboration Pod B in exactly that state. She was comfortable. She was breathing slowly. If I left her alone, she would drift back up on her own within a few minutes, perfectly fine.

But the cluck would come up with her. The key only fits while the door is open. And I had no key.

"How many hands do you need?" Bev had asked.

"All of them," I said.

---

First I knelt beside the couch and spoke to Ingrid. I kept my voice low and even.

"Ingrid, you're doing very well. I lost my clicker, and my snap isn't what it was. So I'd like to change the release. Is that all right with you?"

"Yes," she murmured. Then, after a pause: "Is it billable?"

Even in trance, she was Ingrid.

"No charge," I said.

"In a few minutes, you'll hear a snap. It will come from the people you work with, not just me. When you hear it, you'll wake up refreshed. And the word will be just a word again."

"Just a word," Ingrid repeated.

"That's the only change. Everything else stays exactly as it is."

She smiled slightly, eyes closed. I had never seen her smile with her guard down. It was a small, ordinary smile. It made her look about ten years younger, and about ten percent less likely to audit me.

---

Bev went out onto the floor. She didn't need a microphone. She has a voice that once silenced a county fair demolition derby.

"Everybody listen," she said. "Ingrid needs your help."

I've thought about what happened next many times. A week earlier, those hundred and forty people would have glanced up and gone back to their screens. Ingrid was the woman who rejected their expense reports. She was the closed bank vault.

On that Friday, every single one of them stood up.

Kevin took charge, which surprised me, and then didn't. Organizing a hundred and forty people into one action was the thing he had wanted his whole career. He climbed onto a chair by the ping-pong table. His face was still blotchy from the boardroom, but his voice was steady.

"Okay, everyone. We're going to snap together, all at once, on three." He took a breath. "This is the most cross-functional, team-wide, all-hands—"

Everyone held their breath. Kevin held his longest.

"—togetherization," he said carefully, "that this company has ever done."

Danny Okoro was already filming. Bev made him stop. "Ask her first," she said, and Danny put the phone away without arguing. I have rarely been prouder of my sister.

They gathered around Collaboration Pod B, pressed against the glass, crowding the doorway and spilling back into the Commons. Gordon stood at the front in his fleece vest, his hand already raised. A woman from IT was practicing, quietly, and her snap was magnificent. I envied her.

I opened the door wide so the sound would carry in.

"On three," Kevin said. "One. Two."

"Three," said a hundred and forty people.

---

I have heard a lot of applause in my life. I've heard a casino showroom on a Saturday night, and I've heard a cruise ship in a typhoon. I've heard four people clapping politely in a dinner theater in Toledo.

I had never heard a hundred and forty snaps at once.

It sounded like a dry branch breaking over the whole fourth floor. It was one clean crack, enormous and bright. It was the snap I used to have in Reno, when I was thirty and my sign still had all its letters. It just took a hundred and forty people to make it now.

Ingrid opened her eyes.

She sat up slowly on the couch. She blinked at the faces pressed against the glass. Nobody was laughing. Everybody was leaning forward, waiting, the way you lean toward a scoreboard.

"Well," she said. "That was a lot of people."

Then she turned and looked toward the doorway, where Kevin was still standing on his chair.

"Kevin," she said. "Say it."

Kevin hesitated. "Are you sure?"

"I'm volunteering," Ingrid said, and glanced at me. "For the record."

Kevin swallowed. He had the face of someone greeting an old friend at an airport. Then he said it, clearly, in front of everyone.

"Synergy."

Silence.

Ingrid's face did not change. Her jaw stayed relaxed, with no rise at the end and no farmyard. She waited three full seconds, which on that floor felt like an hour. Then she lifted her hands and gave a little shrug.

"Huh," said Ingrid.

The fourth floor came apart. People cheered and hugged.

Somebody started a slow clap, which turned into a fast clap, which turned into snapping again because nobody could stop. Kevin climbed off his chair and said "Synergy" three more times in a row, quietly, with tears in his eyes. It was a reunion. He didn't put a single dollar in the jar.

---

THE JAR held two hundred and twelve dollars. Gordon declared it the official seed money for the holiday party. Bev asked whether that included actual seeds. Gordon said it could.

Ingrid wrote my check herself, at her desk, with the ceramic hen watching. She itemized it, because she is Ingrid.

One stage show, twelve hundred dollars. Mileage. Five days of "engagement consulting" at a rate that made me sit down. Then a final line I hadn't expected.

One (1) letter N. Gold. Eight inches. Installed.

I stared at it. "How did you know about the N?"

"On the first night, I told you I didn't want to know. Then I asked your sister." She tore the check out cleanly.

"I'm a CFO, Leonard. When something's been missing from the books for twenty-eight years, I can't stand it."

She handed me the check. Then she shook my hand, firmly, once.

"You were right," she said. "It wasn't my fault. But it was a good week."

"It was," I said. "It's the best one I've had since Reno."

"I believe that," Ingrid said. "I ran the numbers."

---

Bev and I left the building at four. The van was in the parking garage, and my old sign was still in the back, waiting for its N.

Kevin walked us down to the lobby. He had all nine badges back on his lanyard. I don't know where the missing three had been. I've decided not to ask.

We stopped under the enormous silver wall. Kevin looked up at it with something like peace.

"Thank you both," he said. "Seriously. This week was the best possible synergy."

And next to me, my sister clucked.

It was small and stifled, mostly into her seed bag. But I have spent thirty-five years listening for that exact sound. I'd know it in a hurricane.

I turned slowly. Bev was staring at the elevator buttons with great concentration.

"Beverly."

"Seed," she said. "Wrong pipe."

"Since when?"

She held out for about four seconds. Then her shoulders dropped.

"Friday night. The summit." She didn't look at me.

"I was standing at the side of the stage while you put Ingrid under. I've heard that voice four thousand times, Leonard. I guess the four thousand and first was the one."

I thought about the coughing fits and the phone calls. I thought about my sister asleep in the corner chair at page thirteen of the engagement survey.

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"Because for thirty-five years, I've told you it never worked on me." She ate a seed, defiantly. "A woman has her pride."

Kevin looked from her to me, delighted and appalled.

"Do you want it out?" I asked her. "It's your call. Always."

Bev considered this for a long moment. "Yes, in the van, with the door shut. And you're buying dinner."

"Deal."

We walked out to the parking garage together. Before Bev started the engine, I asked her to close her eyes. Then I took her through it gently, start to finish. At the end, I lifted my hand.

I snapped. It was the twig sound, small and dry. In a closed van, that was enough.

Bev opened her eyes. "Synergy," she said, testing it herself. Nothing happened. She nodded, put the van in reverse, and backed out of the space.

We were halfway to the highway before she spoke again.

"Six," she said.

"What?"

"You said it had worked five times, counting Ingrid." She cracked a seed between her teeth. "It's six. Get the number right."

"Six," I said.

"And Leonard? Don't you dare enjoy this."

"I'm not."

"You're smiling."

I was. In the back of the van, my old sign rattled happily over every bump, all the way home.