The Best of Connie Willis (20 page)

She handed the flimsy computer envelope to me. I tore it along the perforation. “Wait,” she said. “Before you open it, I want to say something.” She put her hand gently on my burns. “You’re wrong about the history department. They’re very good.”

It was not exactly what I expected her to say. “ ‘Good’ is not the word I’d use to describe Dunworthy,” I said and yanked the inside slip free.

Kivrin’s look did not change, not even when I sat there with the printout on my knees where she could surely see it.

“Well,” I said.

The slip was hand-signed by the esteemed Dunworthy. I have taken a first. With honors.

January 2
—Two things came in the mail today. One was Kivrin’s assignment. The history department thinks of everything—even to keeping her here long enough to nursemaid me, even to coming up with a prefabricated trial by fire to send their history majors through.

I think I wanted to believe that was what they had done, Enola and Langby only hired actors, the cat a clever android with its clockwork innards taken out for the final effect, not so much because I wanted to believe Dunworthy was not good at all, but because then I would not have this nagging pain at not knowing what had happened to them.

“You said your practicum was England in 1300?” I said, watching her as suspiciously as I had watched Langby.

“1348,” she said, and her face went slack with memory. “The plague year.”

“My God,” I said. “How could they do that? The plague’s a ten.”

“I have a natural immunity,” she said, and looked at her hands.

Because I could not think of anything to say, I opened the other piece of mail. It was a report on Enola. Computer-printed, facts and dates and statistics, all the numbers the history department so dearly loves, but it told me what I thought I would have to go without knowing: that she had gotten over her cold and survived the Blitz. Young Tom had been killed in the Baedeker raids on Bath, but Enola had lived until 2015, the year before they blew up St. Paul’s.

I don’t know whether I believe the report or not, but it does not matter. It is, like Langby’s reading aloud to the old man, a simple act of human kindness. They think of everything.

Not quite. They did not tell me what happened to Langby. But I find as I write this that I already know: I saved his life. It does not seem to matter that he might have died in hospital next day, and I find, in spite of all the hard lessons the history department has tried to teach me, I do not quite believe this one: that nothing is saved forever. It seems to me that perhaps Langby is.

January 3
—I went to see Dunworthy today. I don’t know what I intended to say—some pompous drivel about my willingness to serve in the fire watch of history, standing guard against the falling incendiaries of the human heart, silent and saintly.

But he blinked at me nearsightedly across his desk, and it seemed to me that he was blinking at that last bright image of St. Paul’s in sunlight before it was gone forever and that he knew better than anyone that the past cannot be saved, and I said instead, “I’m sorry that I broke your glasses, sir.”

“How did you like St. Paul’s?” he said, and like my first meeting with Enola, I felt I must be somehow reading the signals all wrong, that he was not feeling loss, but something quite different.

“I loved it, sir,” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “So do I.”

Dean Matthews is wrong. I have fought with memory my whole practicum only to find that it is not the enemy at all, and being an historian is not some saintly burden after all. Because Dunworthy is not blinking against the fatal sunlight of the last morning, but into the gloom of that first afternoon, looking in the great west doors of St. Paul’s at what is, like Langby, like all of it, every moment, in us, saved forever.

Like John Bartholomew, I fell in love with St. Paul’s Cathedral the moment I stepped through the west door and saw the church in all its sunny, high-arched golden glory.

I had heard about the fire watch, but didn’t know all that much about it. The note I’d written in the notebook I took with me on the trip said simply, “The priests used to sleep in the crypt of St. Paul’s during the Blitz to put out the fires as they started,” and underneath it the words “Here we lie,” the first line of a poem I had thought I might write from the viewpoint of the earlier heroes who lay buried in St. Paul’s—Nelson and Wellington and General Gordon—commenting on their modern-day counterparts.

But when I actually saw the cathedral and learned how near it had come to being destroyed, I knew I had to write the story that eventually became “Fire Watch.”

“Go away,” I told my husband and the friends we’d come to England with. “Go have tea or something. I need to get this all down,” and for the next two hours frantically took notes on everything I might possibly need: the layout of the crypt, the number of steps up to the Whispering Gallery, the locations of the chapels and
The Light of the World
and Nelson’s tomb. And then I went home and researched everything I could find about the war and the cathedral and the fire watchers.

I used to tell people that this was when I fell in love with the London Blitz, too, but a few years ago I happened upon a book and realized that that wasn’t true, that my fascination with the Blitz had actually begun much earlier.

The book was Rumer Godden’s
An Episode of Sparrows
, which my eighth-grade teacher, Mrs. Werner, had read aloud to us every day after lunch. It’s not really a YA sort of book, and I have no idea why she read it
to us, except probably for the best of all reasons—because she liked it herself. And I have no memory of how the other kids in the class responded to it. But I loved it.

It’s the story of a little girl, Lovejoy Mason, who plants a garden in the bombed-out rubble of a London church, and many years and readings later, it finally dawned on me that it’s a modern retelling of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s
A Secret Garden
.

It’s a great book—although, as I say, not exactly one you’d expect to be read to eighth-graders. Lovejoy’s a juvenile delinquent. She’s also illegitimate, her mother’s not exactly a role model, and the book treats of very adult issues like neglect and bankruptcy and unhappy marriages and cancer and death.

But it’s a wonderful book, full of peril and kindness where you’d least expect it. And hope. The best thing about it, though, was that it gave me my first glimpse of the Blitz, that it planted that first seed. A seed just like the cornflower seeds in Lovejoy’s garden, only this one didn’t germinate till the day I walked into the sun of St. Paul’s.

Moral: Teachers, read to your students. Parents, read to your kids. But not what you think they should read or what everybody’s reading or what’s age- and subject-matter-appropriate. Read inappropriate stuff, and stuff other people might think is boring. Stuff you like. You may be planting seeds that will germinate for a really long time. And burst into bloom twenty years later.

“It’s me, Rob,” Kildy said when I picked up the phone. “I want you to go with me to see somebody Saturday.”

Usually when Kildy calls, she’s bubbling over with details. “You’ve
got
to see this psychic cosmetic surgeon, Rob,” she’d crowed the last time. “His specialty is liposuction, and you can
see
the tube coming out of his sleeve. And that’s not all. The fat he’s supposed to be suctioning out of their thighs is that goop they use in McDonald’s milk shakes. You can smell the vanilla! It wouldn’t fool a five-year-old, so of course half
the women in Hollywood are buying it hook, line, and sinker. We’ve
got
to do a story on him, Rob!”

I usually had to say, “Kildy—Kildy—Kildy!” before I could get her to shut up long enough to tell me where said scammer was performing.

But this time all she said was, “The seminar’s at one o’clock at the Beverly Hills Hilton. I’ll meet you in the parking lot,” and hung up before I could ask her if the somebody she wanted me to see was a pet channeler or a vedic-force therapist, and how much it was going to cost.

I called her back.

“The tickets are on me,” she said.

If Kildy had her way, the tickets would always be on her, and she can more than afford it. Her father’s a director at Dreamworks, her current stepmother heads her own production company, and her mother’s a two-time Oscar winner. And Kildy’s rich in her own right—she only acted in four films before she quit the business for a career in debunking, but one of them was the surprise top grosser of the year, and she’d opted for shares instead of a salary.

But she’s ostensibly my employee, even though I can’t afford to pay her enough to keep her in toenail polish. The least I can do is spring for expenses, and a barely known channeler shouldn’t be too bad. Medium Charles Fred, the current darling of the Hollywood set, was only charging two hundred a séance.

“
The Jaundiced Eye
is paying for the tickets,” I said firmly. “How much?”

“Seven hundred and fifty apiece for the group seminar,” she said. “Fifteen hundred for a private enlightenment audience.”

“The tickets are on you,” I said. “Great,” she said. “Bring the Sony vidcam.”

“Not the little one?” I asked. Most psychic events don’t allow recording devices—they make it too easy to spot the earpieces and wires—and the Hasaka is small enough to be smuggled in.

“No,” she said, “bring the Sony. See you Saturday, Rob. ’Bye.”

“Wait,” I said. “You haven’t told me what this guy does.”

“Woman. She’s a channeler. She channels an entity named Isis,” Kildy said and hung up again.

I was surprised. We don’t usually waste our time on channelers. They’re no longer trendy. Right now mediums like Charles Fred and Yogi Magaputra and assorted sensory therapists (aroma-, sonic, auratic) are the rage.

It’s also an exercise in frustration, since there’s no way to prove whether someone’s channeling or not, unless they claim to be channeling Abraham Lincoln (like Randall Mars) or Nefertiti (like Hanh Nah). In that case you can challenge their facts—Nefertiti could
not
have had an affair with Alexander the Great, who wasn’t born till a thousand years later, and she was
not
Cleopatra’s cousin—but most of them channel hundred-thousand-year-old sages or high priests of Lemuria, and there are no physical manifestations.

They’ve learned their lesson from the Victorian spiritualists (who kept getting caught), so there’s no ectoplasm or ghostly trumpets or double-exposed photographic plates. Just a deep, hollow voice that sounds like a cross between Obi-Wan Kenobi and Basil Rathbone. Why is it that channeled “entities” all have British accents? And speak King James Bible English?

And why was Kildy willing to waste fifteen hundred bucks—correction, twenty-two fifty; she’d already been to the seminar once—to have me see this Isis? The channeler must have a new gimmick. I’d noticed a couple of people advertising themselves as “angel channelers” in the local psychic rag, but Isis wasn’t an angel name. Egyptian channeler? Goddess conduit?

I looked “Isis channeler” up on the Net. At first I couldn’t find any references, even using Google. I tried skeptics.org and finally Marty Rumboldt, who runs a website that tracks psychics.

“You’re spelling it wrong, Rob,” he e-mailed me back. “It’s Isus.”

Which should have occurred to me. The channelers of Lazaris,
Kochise, and Merlynn all use variations on historical names (probably from some fear of spiritual slander lawsuits), and more than one channeler’s prone to “inventive” spelling: Joye Wildde. And Emmanual.

I Googled “Isus.” He—bad sign, the channeler didn’t even know Isis was female—was the “spirit entity” channeled by somebody named Ariaura Keller. She’d started in Salem, Massachusetts (a breeding ground for psychics), moved to Sedona (another one), and then headed west and worked her way down the coast, appearing in Seattle, the other Salem, Eugene, Berkeley, and now Beverly Hills. She had six afternoon seminars and two weeklong “spiritual immersions” scheduled for L.A., along with private “individually scheduled enlightenment audiences” with Isus. She’d written two books,
The Voice of Isus
and
On the Receiving End
(with links to Amazon.com), and you could read her bio: “I knew from childhood that I was destined to be a channel for the Truth,” and extracts from her speeches: “The earth is destined to witness a transforming spiritual event,” online. She sounded just like every other channeler I’d ever heard.