The Best of Connie Willis

by Connie Willis

  Kildy looked skeptical. “Her promotional material doesn’t say anything about multiple entities.”

  “Maybe she’s tired of Isus and wants to switch to another spirit. When you’re a channeler, you can’t just announce, ‘Coming soon: Isus II.’ You’ve got to make it look authentic. So she introduces him with a few words one week, a couple of sentences the next, etcetera.”

  “She’s introducing a new and improved spirit who yells at the audience and calls them imbeciles and rubes?” she said incredulously.

  “It’s probably what channelers call a ‘dark spirit,’ a so-called bad entity that tries to lead the unwary astray. Todd Phoenix used to have a nasty voice break in in the middle of White Feather’s spiel and make heckling comments. It’s a useful trick. It reinforces the idea that the psychic’s actually channeling, and anything inconsistent or controversial the channeler says can be blamed on the bad spirit.”

  “But Ariaura didn’t even seem to be aware there was a bad spirit, if that’s what it was supposed to be. Why would it tell the audience to go home and stop giving their money to a snake-oil vendor like Ariaura?”

  A snake-oil vendor? That sounded vaguely familiar, too. “Is that what she said last week? Snake-oil vendor?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Why? Do you know who she’s channeling?”

  “No,” I said, frowning, “but I’ve heard that phrase somewhere. And the line about the Chautauqua.”

  “So it’s obviously somebody famous,” Kildy said.

  But the historical figures channelers did were always instantly recognizable. Randall Mars’s Abraham Lincoln began every sentence with “Four score and seven years ago,” and the others were all equally obvious. “I wish I’d gotten Ariaura’s little outburst on tape,” I said.

  “We did,” Kildy said, reaching over the backseat and grabbing her orange pillow. She unzipped it, reached inside, and brought out a micro-vidcam. “Ta-da! I’m sorry I didn’t get last week’s. I didn’t realize they were frisking people.”

  She fished in the pillow again and brought out a sheet of paper. “I had to run to the bathroom and scribble down what I could remember.”

  “I thought they didn’t let people go to the bathroom.”

  She grinned at me. “I gave an Oscar-worthy performance of an actress they’d let out of rehab too soon.”

  I glanced at the list at the next stoplight. There were only a few phrases on it: the one she’d mentioned, and “I’ve never seen such shameless bilge,” and “You’d have to be a pack of deluded half-wits to believe something so preposterous.”

  “That’s all?”

  She nodded. “I told you, it didn’t last nearly as long last time. And since I wasn’t expecting it, I missed most of the first sentence.”

  “That’s why you were asking at the seminar about buying the videotape?”

  “Uh-huh, although I doubt if there’s anything on it. I’ve watched her last three videos, and there’s no sign of Entity Number Two.”

  “But it happened at the seminar you went to and at this one. Has it occurred to you it might have happened because we were there?” I pulled into a parking space in front of the building where The Jaundiced Eye has its office.

  “But—” she said.

  “The ticket-taker could have alerted her that we were there,” I said.

  I got out and opened her door for her, and we started up to the office. “Or she could have spotted us in the audience—you’re not the only one who’s famous. My picture’s on every psychic wanted poster on the West Coast—and she decided to jazz up the performance a little by adding another entity. To impress us.”

  “That can’t be it.”

  I opened the door. “Why not?”

  “Because it’s happened at least twice before,” she said, walking in and sitting down in the only good chair. “In Berkeley and Seattle.”

  “How do you know?”

  “My publicist’s ex-boyfriend’s girlfriend saw her in Berkeley—that’s how my publicist found out about Ariaura—so I got her number and called her and asked her, and she said Isus was talking along about tribulation and thee being the universe, and all of a sudden this other voice said, ‘What a bunch of boobs!’ She said that’s how she knew Ariaura was really channeling, because if it was fake she’d hardly have called the audience names.”

  “Well, there’s your answer. She does it to make her audiences believe her.”

  “You saw them, they already believe her,” Kildy said. “And if that’s what she’s doing, why isn’t it on the Berkeley videotape?”

  “It isn’t?”

  She shook her head. “I watched it six times. Nothing.”

  “And you’re sure your publicist’s ex-boyfriend’s girlfriend really saw it? That you weren’t leading her when you asked her questions?”

  “I’m sure,” she said indignantly. “Besides, I asked my mother.”

  “She was there, too?”

  “No, but two of her friends were, and one of them knew someone who saw the Seattle seminar. They all said basically the same thing, except the part about it making them believe her. In fact, one of them said, ‘I think her cue cards were out of order,’ and told me not to waste my money, that the person I should go see was Angelina Black Feather.”

  She grinned at me and then went serious. “If Ariaura was doing it on purpose, why would she edit it out? And why did the emcee and the ushers look so uneasy?”

  So she’d noticed that, too.

  “Maybe she didn’t warn them she was going to do it. Or, more likely, it’s all part of the act, to make people believe it’s authentic.”

  Kildy shook her head doubtfully. “I don’t think so. I think it’s something else.”

  “Like what? You don’t think she’s really channeling this guy?”

  “No, of course not, Rob,” she said indignantly. “It’s just that … you say she’s doing it to get publicity and bigger crowds, but as you told me, the first rule of success in the psychic business is to tell people what they want to hear, not to call them boobs. You saw the woman next to you—she was all ready to walk out, and I watched her afterward. She didn’t sign up for a private enlightenment audience, and neither did very many other people, and I heard the emcee telling someone there were lots of tickets still available for the next seminar. Last week’s was sold out a month in advance. Why would she do something to hurt her business?”

  “She’s got to do something to up the ante, to keep the customers coming back, and this new spirit is to create buzz. You watch, next week she’ll be advertising ‘The Battle of the Ancients.’ It’s a gimmick, Kildy.”

  “So you don’t think we should go see her again.”

  “No. That’s the worst thing we could possibly do. We don’t want to give her free publicity, and if she did do it to impress us, though it doesn’t sound like it, we’d be playing right into her hands. If she’s not, and the spirit is driving customers away, like you say, she’ll dump it and come up with a different one. Or put herself out of business. Either way, there’s no need for us to do anything. It’s a non-story. You can forget all about her.”

  Which just goes to show you why I could never make it as a psychic. Because before the words were even out of my mouth, the office door banged open, and Ariaura roared in and grabbed me by the lapels.

  “I don’t know what you’re doing or how you’re doing it,” she screamed, “but I want you to stop it right now!”

  He has a large and extremely uncommon capacity for provocative utterance …

  —H. L. MENCKEN

  I hadn’t given Ariaura’s acting skills enough credit. Her portrayal of Isus might be wooden and fakey, but she gave a pretty convincing portrayal of a hopping-mad psychic.

  “How dare you!” she shrieked. “I’ll sue you for everything you own!”

  She had changed out of her flowing robes and into a lilac-colored suit Kildy told me later was a Zac Posen, and her diamond-studded necklace and earrings rattled. Sh
e was practically vibrating with rage, though not the positive vibrations she’d said were necessary for the appearance of spirits.

  “I just watched the video of my seminar,” she shrieked, her face two inches from mine. “How dare you hypnotize me and make me look like a complete fool in front of—”

  “Hypnotize?” Kildy said. (I was too busy trying to loosen her grip on my lapels to say anything.) “You think Rob hypnotized you?”

  “Oh, don’t play the innocent with me,” Ariaura said, wheeling on her. “I saw you two out there in the audience today, and I know all about you and your nasty, sneering little magazine. I know you nonbelievers will stop at nothing to keep us from spreading the Higher Truth, but I didn’t think you’d go this far, hypnotizing me against my will and making me say those things! Isus told me I shouldn’t let you stay in the auditorium, that he sensed danger in your presence, but I said, ‘No, let the unbeliever stay and experience your reality. Let them know you come from the Existence Beyond to help us, to bring us words of Higher Wisdom.’ But Isus was right, you were up to no good.”

  She removed one hand from my lapel long enough to shake a lilac-lacquered fingernail at me. “Well, your little hypnotism scheme won’t work. I’ve worked too hard to get where I am, and I’m not going to let a pair of narrow-minded little unbelievers like you get in my way. I have no intention—Higher Wisdom, my foot!” she snorted. “Higher Humbug is what I call it.”

  Kildy glanced, startled, at me.

  “Oh, the trappings are a lot gaudier, I’ll give you that,” Ariaura said in the gravelly voice we’d heard at the seminar.

  As before, the change had come without a break and in mid-sentence. One minute she had had me by the lapels, and the next she’d let go and was pacing around the room, her hands behind her back, musing, “That auditorium’s a lot fancier, and it’s a big improvement over a courthouse lawn, and a good forty degrees cooler.” She sat down on the couch, her hands on her spread-apart knees. “And those duds she wears would make a Grand Worthy bow-wow of the Knights of Zoroaster look dowdy, but it’s the same old line of buncombe and the same old Boobus Americanus drinking it in.”

  Kildy took a careful step toward my desk, reached for her handbag and did something I couldn’t see, and then went back to where she’d been standing, keeping her eyes the whole time on Ariaura, who was holding forth about the seminar.

  “I never saw such an assortment of slack-jawed simians in one place! Except for the fact that the yokels have to sit on the floor—and pay for the privilege!—it’s the spitting image of a Baptist tent revival. Tell ’em what they want to hear, do a couple of parlor tricks, and then pass the collection plate. And they’re still falling for it!”

  She stood up and began pacing again. “I knew I should’ve stuck around. It’s just like that time in Dayton—I think it’s all over and leave, and look what happens! You let the quacks and the crooks take over, like this latter-day Aimee Semple McPherson. She’s no more a seer than—of allowing you to ruin everything I’ve worked for! I …” Ariaura looked around bewilderedly. “… what? … I …” She faltered to a stop.

  I had to hand it to her. She was good. She’d switched back into her own voice without missing a beat, and then given an impressive impersonation of someone who had no idea what was going on.

  She looked confusedly from me to Kildy and back. “It happened again, didn’t it?” she asked, a quaver in her voice, and turned to appeal to Kildy. “He did it again, didn’t he?” and began backing toward the door. “Didn’t he?”

  She pointed accusingly at me. “You keep away from me!” she shrieked. “And you keep away from my seminars! If you so much as try to come near me again, I’ll get a restraining order against you!” She roared out, slamming the door behind her.

  “Well,” Kildy said after a minute. “That was interesting.”

  “Yes,” I said, looking at the door. “Interesting.”

  Kildy went over to my desk and pulled the Hasaka out from behind her handbag. “I got it all,” she said, taking out the disk, sticking it in the computer dock, and sitting down in front of the monitor. “There were a lot more clues this time.” She began typing in commands. “There should be more than enough for us to be able to figure out who it is.”

  “I know who it is,” I said.

  Kildy stopped in mid-keystroke. “Who?”

  “The High Priest of Irreverence.”

  “Who?”

  “The Holy Terror from Baltimore, the Apostle of Common Sense, the Scourge of Con Men, Creationists, Faith Healers, and the Booboisie,” I said. “Henry Louis Mencken.”

  In brief, it is a fraud.

  —H. L. MENCKEN

  “H. L. Mencken?” Kildy said. “The reporter who covered the Scopes trial?” (I told you she was too good to be true.)

  “But why would Ariaura channel him?” she asked after we’d checked the words and phrases we’d listed against Mencken’s writings. They all checked out, from “buncombe” to “slack-jawed simians” to “home of the imbecile and the ass.”

  “What did he mean about leaving Dayton early? Did something happen in Ohio?”

  I shook my head. “Tennessee. Dayton, Tennessee, was where the Scopes trial was held.”

  “And Mencken left early?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, and went over to the bookcase to look for The Great Monkey Trial, “but I know it got so hot during the trial they moved it outside.”

  “That’s what that comment about the courthouse lawn and its being forty degrees cooler meant,” Kildy said.

  I nodded. “It was a hundred and five degrees and ninety percent humidity the week of the trial. It’s definitely Mencken. He invented the term ‘Boobus Americanus.’ ”

  “But why would Ariaura channel H. L. Mencken, Rob? He hated people like her, didn’t he?”

  “He certainly did.” He’d been the bane of charlatans and quacks all through the twenties, writing scathing columns on all kinds of scams, from faith healing to chiropractic to creationism, railing incessantly against all forms of “hocus-pocus” and on behalf of science and rational thought.

  “Then why would she channel him?” Kildy asked. “Why not somebody sympathetic to psychics, like Edgar Cayce or Madame Blavatsky?”

  “Because they’d obviously be suspect. By channeling an enemy of psychics, she makes it seem more credible.”

  “But nobody’s ever heard of him.”

  “You have. I have.”

  “But nobody else in Ariaura’s audience has.”

  “Exactly,” I said, still looking for The Great Monkey Trial.

  “You mean you think she’s doing it to impress us?”

  “Obviously,” I said, scanning the titles. “Why else would she have come all the way over here to give that little performance?”

  “But—what about the Seattle seminar? Or the one in Berkeley?”

  “Dry runs. Or she was hoping we’d hear about them and go see her. Which we did.”

  “I didn’t,” Kildy said. “I went because my publicist wanted me to.”

  “But you go to lots of spiritualist events, and you talk to lots of people. Your publicist was there. Even if you hadn’t gone, she’d have told you about it.”

  “But what would be the point? You’re a skeptic. You don’t believe in channeling. Would she honestly think she could convince you Mencken was real?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “She’s obviously gone to a lot of trouble to make the spirit sound like him. And think what a coup that would be. ‘Skeptic Says Channeled Spirit Authentic’? Have you ever heard of Uri Geller? He made a splash back in the seventies by claiming to bend spoons with his mind. He got all kinds of attention when a pair of scientists from the Stanford Research Institute said it wasn’t a trick, that he was actually doing it.”

  “Was he?”

  “No, of course not, and eventually he was exposed as a fraud. By Johnny Carson. Geller made the mistake of going on The Tonight Show and doing it in front of
him. He’d apparently forgotten Carson had been a magician in his early days. But the point is, he made it onto The Tonight Show. And what made him a celebrity was having the endorsement of reputable scientists.”

  “And if you endorsed Ariaura, if you said you thought it was really Mencken, she’d be a celebrity, too.”

  “Exactly.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing? You’re not going to try to expose her as a fake?”

  “Channeling isn’t the same as bending spoons. There’s no independently verifiable evidence.” I looked at her. “It’s not worth it, and we’ve got bigger fish to fry. Like Charles Fred. He’s making way too much money for a medium who only charges two hundred a performance, and he has way too many hits for a cold-reader. We need to find out how he’s doing it, and where the money’s coming from.”

  “But shouldn’t we at least go to Ariaura’s next seminar to see if it happens again?” Kildy persisted.

  “And have to explain to the L.A. Times reporter who just happens to be there why we’re so interested in Ariaura?” I said. “And why you came back three times?”

  “I suppose you’re right. But what if some other skeptic endorses her? Or some English professor?”

  I hadn’t thought of that. Ariaura had dangled the bait at four seminars we knew of. She might have been doing it at more, and The Skeptical Mind was in Seattle, Carlyle Drew was in San Francisco, and there were any number of amateur skeptics who went to spiritualist events.

  And they would all know who Mencken was. He was the critical thinker’s favorite person, next to the Amazing Randi and Houdini. He’d not only been fearless in his attacks on superstition and fraud, he could write “like a bat out of hell.” And, unlike the rest of us skeptics, people had actually listened to what he said.

  I’d liked him ever since I’d read about him chatting with somebody in his office at the Baltimore Sun and then suddenly looking out the window, saying, “The sons of bitches are gaining on us!” and frantically beginning to type. That was how I felt about twice a day, and more than once I’d muttered to myself, “Where the hell is Mencken when we need him?”