Time is the Fire

by Connie Willis

  “What’s she up to?” I whispered to Kildy.

  She shook her head, still intent on the stage. “It’s not her.”

  “What?”

  “She’s channeling.”

  “Chan—?” I said and looked at the stage.

  “No spirit, no matter how dark,” Ariaura said, “no matter how dishonest, can stand between me and that Higher Truth.”

  Applause, more enthusiastic.

  “Or keep me from bringing that Truth to all of you.” She smiled and spread out her arms. “I’m a fraud, a charlatan, a fake,” she said cheerfully. “I’ve never channeled a cosmic spirit in my life. Isus is something I made up back in 1996, when I was running a pyramid scheme in Dayton, Ohio. The feds were closing in on us, and I’d already been up on charges of mail fraud in ’94, so I changed my name—my real name’s Bonnie Friehl, by the way, but I was using Doreen Manning in Dayton—and stashed the money in a bank in Chickamauga, Virginia, my hometown, and then moved to Miami Beach and did fortune-telling while I worked on perfecting Isus’s voice.”

  I fumbled for my notebook and pen. Bonnie Friehl, Chickamauga, Miami Beach—

  “I did fortune-telling, curses mostly—‘Pay me and I’ll remove the curse I see hanging over you’—till I had my Isus impersonation ready and then I contacted this guy I knew in Vegas—”

  There was an enormous crash from the rear. Ernesto had dropped his shoulder-held video camera and was heading for the door. And this needed to be on film. But I didn’t want to miss anything while I tried to figure out how the camera worked.

  I glanced over at Kildy, hoping she was taking notes, but she seemed transfixed by what was happening onstage, her forgotten mirror and lipstick still in her hands, her mouth open. I would have to risk missing a few words. I scrambled to my feet.

  “Where are you going?” Kildy whispered.

  “I’ve got to get this on tape.”

  “We are,” she said calmly, and nodded imperceptibly at the lipstick and then the mirror, “Audio . . . and video.”

  “I love you,” I said.

  She nodded. “You’d better get those names down, just in case the police confiscate my makeup as evidence,” she said.

  “His name was Chuck Venture,” Ariaura was saying. “He and I had worked together on a chain-letter scheme. His real name’s Harold Vogel, but you probably know him by the name he uses out here, Charles Fred.”

  Jesus. I scribbled the names down: Harold Vogel, Chuck Venture—

  “We’d worked a couple of chain-letter scams together,” Ariaura said, “so I told him I wanted him to take me to Salem and set me up in the channeling business.”

  There was a clank and a thud as Ernesto made it to the door and out. It slammed shut behind him.

  “Harold always did have a bad habit of writing everything down,” Ariaura said chattily. “‘You can’t blackmail me, Doreen,’ he said. ‘Wanna bet?’ I said. ‘It’s all in a safety deposit box in Dayton with instructions to open it if anything happens to me.’”

  She leaned confidingly forward. “It’s not, of course. It’s in the safe in my bedroom behind the portrait of Isus. The combination’s twelve left, six right, fourteen left.” She laughed brightly. “So anyway, he taught me all about how you soften the chumps up in the seminars so they’ll tell Isus all about their love life in the private audiences and then send them copies of the videotapes—”

  There were several audible gasps behind me and then the beginnings of a murmur, or possibly a growl, but Ariaura paid no attention.

  “—and he introduced me to one of the orderlies at New Beginnings Rehab Center, and the deep masseuse at the Willowsage Spa for personal details Isus can use to convince them he knows all, sees all—”

  The growl was becoming a roar, but it was scarcely audible over the shouts from outside and the banging on the doors, which were apparently locked from the inside.

  “—and how to change my voice and expression to make it look like I’m actually channeling a spirit from beyond—”

  It sounded as though the emcee and ushers had found a battering ram. The banging had become shuddering thuds.

  “—although I don’t think learning all that junk about Lemuria and stuff was necessary,” Ariaura said. “I mean, it’s obvious you people will believe anything.”

  She smiled beatifically at the audience, as if expecting applause, but the only sound (beside the thuds) was of cell phone keys being hit and women shouting into them. When I glanced back, everybody except Kildy had a phone clapped to their ear.

  “Are there any questions?” Ariaura asked brightly.

  “Yes,” I said. “Are you saying you’re the one doing the voice of Isus?”

  She smiled pleasedly down at me. “Of course. There’s no such thing as channeling spirits from the Great Beyond. Other questions?” She looked past me to the other wildly waving hands. “Yes? The woman in blue?”

  “How could you lie to us, you—?”

  I stepped adroitly in front of her. “Are you saying Todd Phoenix is a fake, too?”

  “Oh, yes,” Ariaura said. “They’re all fakes—Todd Phoenix, Joye Wildde, Randall Mars. Next question? Yes, Miss Ross?”

  Kildy stepped forward, still holding the compact and lipstick. “When was the first time you met me?” she asked.

  “You don’t have to do this,” I said.

  “Just for the record,” she said, flashing me her radiant smile and then turning back to the stage. “Ariaura, had you ever met me before last week?”

  “No,” she said. “I saw you at Ari—at my seminar, but I didn’t meet you till afterward at the office of The Jaundiced Eye, a fine magazine, by the way. I suggest you all take out subscriptions.”

  “And I’m not your shill?” Kildy persisted.

  “No, though I do have them,” she said. “The woman in green back there in the sixth row is one,” she said, pointing at a plump brunette. “Stand up, Lucy.”

  Lucy was already scuttling to the door, and so were a thin redhead in a rainbow caftan and an impeccably tailored sixty-year-old in an Armani suit, with a large number of the audience right on their tails.

  “Janine’s one, too,” Ariaura said, pointing at the redhead. “And Doris. They all help gather personal information for Isus to tell them, so it looks like he ‘knows all, sees all.’” She laughed delightedly. “Come up onstage and take a bow, girls.”

  The “girls” ignored her. Doris, a pack of elderly women on her heels, pushed open the middle door and shouted, “You’ve got to stop her!”

  The emcee and ushers began pushing their way through the door and toward the stage. The audience was even more determined to get out than they were to get in, but I still didn’t have much time. “Are all the psychics you named using blackmail like you?” I asked.

  “Ariaura!” the emcee shouted, halfway to the stage and caught in the flood of women. “Stop talking. Anything you say can be held against you.”

  “Oh, hi, Ken,” she said. “Ken’s in charge of laundering all our money. Take a bow, Ken! And you, too, Derek and Tad and Jared,” she said, indicating the ushers. “The boys pump the audience for information and feed it to me over this,” she said, holding up her sacred amulet.

  She looked back at me. “I forgot what you asked.”

  “Are all the pyschics you named using blackmail like you?”

  “No, not all of them. Swami Vishnu Jammi uses post-hypnotic suggestion, and Nadrilene’s always used extortion.”

  “What about Charles Fred? What’s his scam?”

  “Invest—” Ariaura’s pin-on mike went suddenly dead. I looked back at the melee. One of the ushers was proudly holding up an unplugged cord.

  “Investment fraud,” Ariaura shouted, her hands cupped around her mouth. “Chuck tells his marks their dead relations want them to invest in certain stocks. I’d suggest you—”

  One of the ushers reached the stage. He grabbed Ariaura by one arm and tried to grab the other.

 
; “—suggest you check out Metra—” Ariaura shouted, flailing at him. “Metracon, Spirilink—”

  A second usher appeared, and the two of them managed to pinion her arms. “Crystalcom, Inc.,” she said, kicking out at them, “and Universis. Find out—” She aimed a kick at the groin of one of the ushers that made me flinch. “Get your paws off me.”

  The emcee stepped in front of her. “That concludes Ariaura’s presentation,” he said, avoiding her kicking feet. “Thank you all for coming. Videos of—” he said, and then thought better of it, “—personally autographed copies of Ariaura’s book, Believe and—”

  “Find out who the majority stockholder is,” Ariaura shrieked, struggling. “And ask Chuck what he knows about a check forgery scam Zolita’s running in Reno.”

  “—It Will Happen are on sale in the . . .” the emcee said, and gave up. He grabbed for Ariaura’s feet. The three of them wrestled her toward the wings.

  “One last question!” I shouted, but it was too late. They already had her off the stage. “Why was the baby in the icebox?”

  . . . this is the last time you’ll see me . . .

  —H. L. MENCKEN

  “It still doesn’t prove it was Mencken,” I told Kildy. “The whole thing could have been a manifestation of Ariaura’s—excuse me, Bonnie Friehl’s—subconscious, produced by her guilt.”

  “Or,” Kildy said, “there could have been a scam just like the one you postulated, only one of the swindlers fell in love with you and decided she couldn’t go through with it.”

  “Nope, that won’t work,” I said. “She might have been able to talk Ariaura into calling off the scam, but not into confessing all those crimes.”

  “If she really committed them,” Kildy said. “We don’t have any independently verifiable evidence that she is Bonnie Friehl yet.”

  But the fingerprints on her Ohio driver’s license matched, and every single lead she’d given us checked out.

  We spent the next two months following up on all of them and putting together a massive special issue on “The Great Channeling Swindle.” It looked like we were going to have to testify at Ariaura’s preliminary hearing, which could have proved awkward, but she and her lawyers got in a big fight over whether or not to use an insanity defense, since she was claiming she’d been possessed by the Spirit of Evil and Darkness, and she ended up firing them and turning state’s evidence against Charles Fred, Joye Wildde, and several other psychics she hadn’t gotten around to mentioning, and it began to look like the magazine might fold because there weren’t any scams left to write about.

  Fat chance. Within weeks, new mediums and psychics, advertising themselves as “Restorers of Cosmic Ethics” and “the spirit entity you can trust,” moved in to fill the void, and a new weight-loss-through-meditation program began packing them in, promising Low-Carb Essence, and Kildy and I were back in business.

  “He didn’t make any difference at all,” Kildy said disgustedly after a standing-room-only seminar on psychic Botox treatments.

  “Yeah, he did,” I said. “Charles Fred’s up on insider trading charges, attendance is down at the Temple of Cosmic Exploration, and half of L.A.’s psychics are on the lam. And it’ll take everybody a while to come up with new methods for separating people from their money.”

  “I thought you said it wasn’t Mencken.”

  “I said it didn’t prove it was Mencken. Rule Number One: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

  “And you don’t think what happened on that stage was extraordinary?”

  I had to admit it was. “But it could have been Ariaura herself. She didn’t say anything she couldn’t have known.”

  “What about her telling us the combination of her safe? And ordering everybody to subscribe to The Jaundiced Eye?”

  “It still doesn’t prove it was Mencken. It could have been some sort of Bridey Murphy phenomenon. Ariaura could have had a babysitter who read the Baltimore Sun out loud to her when she was a toddler.”

  Kildy laughed. “You don’t believe that.”

  “I don’t believe anything without proof,” I said. “I’m a skeptic, remember? And there’s nothing that happened on that stage that couldn’t be explained rationally.”

  “Exactly,” Kildy said.

  “What do you mean, exactly?”

  “By their fruits shall ye know them.”

  “What?”

  “I mean it has to have been Mencken because he did exactly what we asked him to do: Prove it wasn’t a scam and he wasn’t a fake and Ariaura was. And do it without proving he was Mencken because if he did, then that proved she was on the level. Which proves it was Mencken.”

  There was no good answer to that kind of crazy illogic except to change the subject, which I did. I kissed her.

  And then sent the transcripts of Ariaura’s outbursts to UCLA to have the language patterns compared to Mencken’s writing. Independently verifiable evidence. And got the taped The Baby in the Icebox out of its hiding place down behind the bookcase while Kildy was out of the office, took it home, wrapped it in tinfoil, stuck it inside an empty Lean Cuisine box, and hid it—where else?—in the icebox. Old habits die hard.

  UCLA sent the transcripts back, saying it wasn’t a big enough sample for a conclusive result. So did Caltech. And Duke. So that was that. Which was too bad. It would have been nice to have Mencken back in the fray, even for a little while. He had definitely left too soon.

  So Kildy and I would have to pick up where he left off, which meant not only putting “The sons of bitches are gaining on us” on the masthead of The Jaundiced Eye, but trying to channel his spirit into every page.

  And that didn’t just mean exposing shysters and con men. Mencken hadn’t been the important force he was because of his rants against creationism and faith healers and patent medicine, but because of what he’d stood for: the truth. That’s why he’d hated ignorance and superstition and dishonesty so much, because he loved science and reason and logic, and he’d communicated that love, that passion, to his readers with every word he wrote.

  That was what we had to do with The Jaundiced Eye. It wasn’t enough just to expose Ariaura and Swami Vishnu and psychic dentists and meditation Atkins diets. We also had to make our readers as passionate about science and reason as they were about Romtha and luminescence readings. We had to not only tell the truth, but make our readers want to believe it.

  So, as I say, we were pretty busy for the next few months, revamping the magazine, cooperating with the police, and following up on all the leads Ariaura had given us. We went to Vegas to research the chain-letter scam she and Chuck Venture / Charles Fred had run, after which I came home to put the magazine to bed and Kildy went to Dayton and then to Chickamauga to follow up on Ariaura’s criminal history.

  She called last night. “It’s me, Rob,” she said, sounding excited. “I’m in Chattanooga.”

  “Chattanooga, Tennessee?” I said. “What are you doing there?”

  “The prosecutor working on the pyramid scheme case is on a trip to Roanoke, so I can’t see him till Monday, and the school board in Zion—that’s a little town near here—is trying to pass a law requiring intelligent design to be taught in the public schools. This Zion thing’s part of a nationwide program that’s going to introduce intelligent design state by state. So, anyway, since I couldn’t see the prosecutor, I thought I’d drive over—it’s only about fifty miles from Chickamauga—and interview some of the science teachers for that piece on ‘The Scopes Trial Eighty Years Out’ you were talking about doing.”

  “And?” I said warily.

  “And, according to the chemistry teacher, something peculiar happened at the school board meeting. It might be nothing, but I thought I’d better call so you could be looking up flights to Chattanooga, just in case.”

  Just in case.

  “One of the school board members, a Mr.—” she paused as if consulting her notes, “Horace Didlong, was talking about the lack of scien
tific proof for Darwin’s theory, when he suddenly started ranting at the crowd.”

  “Did the chemistry teacher say what he said?” I asked, hoping I didn’t already know.

  “She couldn’t remember all of it,” Kildy said, “but the basketball coach said some of the students had said they intended to tape the meeting and send it to the ACLU, and he’d try to find out if they did and get me a copy. He said it was ‘a very odd outburst, almost like he was possessed.’”

  “Or drunk,” I said. “And neither of them remembers what he said?”

  “No, they both do, just not everything. Didlong apparently went on for several minutes. He said he couldn’t believe there were still addlepated ignoramuses around who didn’t believe in evolution, and what the hell had they been teaching in the schools all this time. The chemistry teacher said the rant went on like that for about five minutes and then broke off, right in the middle of a word, and Didlong went back to talking about Newton’s Second Law making evolution physically impossible.”

  “Have you interviewed Didlong?”

  “No. I’m going over there as soon as we finish talking, but the chemistry teacher said she heard Didlong’s wife ask him what happened, and he looked like he didn’t have any idea.”

  “That doesn’t prove it’s Mencken,” I said.

  “I know,” she said, “but it is Tennessee, and it is evolution. And it would be nice if it was him, wouldn’t it?”

  Nice. H. L. Mencken loose in the middle of Tennessee in the middle of a creationism debate.

  “Yeah,” I said and grinned, “it would, but it’s much more likely Horace Didlong has been smoking something he grew in his backyard. Or is trying to stir up some publicity, à la Judge Roy Moore and his Ten Commandments monument. Do they remember anything else he said?”

  “Yes, um . . . where is it?” she said. “Oh, here it is. He called the other board members a gang of benighted rubes . . . and then he said he’d take a monkey any day over a school board whose cerebellums were all paralyzed from listening to too much theological bombast . . . and right at the end, before he broke off, the chemistry teacher said he said, ‘I never saw much resemblance to Alice myself.’”