do.”
Amy shook her head and gave one of those ironic
laughs that mean the person doesn’t think you’ve got a
snowball’s chance in hell.
“I’ll tell you what. Yes, there is something you can do:
Volunteer at a suicide hotline. Then come talk to me. No
guarantees, got it?” she said. “Now, seriously, go away.”
My conversation with Amy kicked off my awareness of the
complex and hidden subtleties of conversation, the power of
certain words, the seemingly unintelligible emotional truths
that so often underlie intelligible exchanges.
A trap into which many fall is to take what other people
say literally. I started to see that while people played the
game of conversation, it was in the game beneath the game,
where few played, that all the leverage lived.
In our chat, I saw how the word “No”—so apparently
clear and direct—really wasn’t so simple. Over the years,
I’ve thought back repeatedly to that conversation, replaying
how Amy so quickly turned me down, again and again. But
her “No’s” were just the gateway to “Yes.” They gave her—
and me—time to pivot, adjust, and reexamine, and actually
created the environment for the one “Yes” that mattered.
While assigned to the JTTF, I worked with an NYPD
lieutenant named Martin. He had a hard shell, and whenever
asked for anything he responded with a terse negative. After
I’d gotten to know him a bit, I asked him why. “Chris,” he
said, proudly, “a lieutenant’s job is to say, ‘No.’”
At first, I thought that sort of automated response