The Best of Connie Willis (21 page)

And I’d sat through a bunch of them. Back at the height of their popularity (and before I knew better),
The Jaundiced Eye
had done a six-part series on them, starting with M. Z. Lord and running on through Joye Wildde, Todd Phoenix, and Taryn Kryme, whose “entity” was a giggly four-year-old kid from Atlantis. It was the longest six months of my life. And it didn’t have any impact at all on the business. It was tax evasion and mail fraud charges that had put an end to the fad, not my hard-hitting exposés.

Ariaura Keller didn’t have a criminal record (at least under that name), and there weren’t many articles about her. And no mention of any gimmick. “The electric, amazing Isus shares his spiritual wisdom and helps you find your own inner-centeredness and soul-unenfoldment.” Nothing new there.

Well, whatever it was that had gotten Kildy interested in her, I’d find out on Saturday. In the meantime, I had an article on Charles Fred to write for the December issue, a book on intelligent design (the latest
ploy for getting creationism into the schools and evolution out) to review, and a past-life chiropractor to go see. He claimed his patients’ backaches came from hauling blocks of stone to Stonehenge and/or the Pyramids. (The Pyramids had in fact been a big job, but over the course of three years in business he’d told over two thousand patients they’d gotten their herniated discs at Stonehenge, every single one of them while setting the altar stone in place.)

And he was actually credible compared to Charles Fred, who was having amazing success communicating highly specific messages from the dead to their grieving relatives. I was convinced he was using something besides the usual cold reading and shills to get the millions he was raking in, but so far I hadn’t been able to figure out what, and every lead I managed to come up with went nowhere.

I didn’t think about the “electric, amazing Isus” again till I was driving over to the Hilton on Saturday. Then it occurred to me that I hadn’t heard from Kildy since her phone call. Usually she drops by the office every day, and if we’re going somewhere calls three or four times to reconfirm where and when we’re meeting. I wondered if the seminar was still on, or if she’d forgotten all about it. Or suddenly gotten tired of being a debunker and gone back to being a movie star.

I’d been waiting for that to happen ever since the day just over eight months ago when, just like the gorgeous dame in a Bogie movie, she’d walked into my office and asked if she could have a job.

There are three cardinal rules in the skeptic business. The first one is “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” and the second one is “If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.” And if anything was ever too good to be true, it’s Kildy. She’s not only rich and movie-star beautiful, but intelligent, and, unlike everyone else in Hollywood, a complete skeptic, even though, as she told me the first day, Shirley MacLaine had dandled her on her knee and her own mother would believe anything, “no matter how ridiculous, which is probably why her marriage to my father lasted nearly six years.”

She was now on Stepmother Number Four, who had gotten her the
role in the surprise top grosser, “which made almost as much money as
Lord of the Rings
and enabled me to take early retirement.”

“Retirement?” I’d said. “Why would you want to retire? You could have—”

“Starred in
The Hulk IV
,” she said, “and been on the cover of the
Globe
with Ben Affleck. Or with my lawyer in front of a rehab center. I know, it was tough to give all that up.”

She had a point, but that didn’t explain why she’d want to go to work for a barely-making-it magazine like
The Jaundiced Eye
. Or why she’d want to go to work at all.

I said so.

“I’ve already tried the whole ‘fill your day with massages and lunch at Ardani’s and sex with your trainer’ scene, Rob,” she said. “It was even worse than
The Hulk
. Plus, the lights and makeup
destroy
your complexion.”

I found that hard to believe. She had skin like honey.

“And then my mother took me to this luminescence reading, she’s into all those things, psychics and past-life regression and intuitive healing, and the guy doing the reading—”

“Lucius Windfire,” I’d said. I’d been working on an exposé of him for the last two months.

“Yes, Lucius Windfire,” she’d said. “He claimed he could read your mind by determining your vedic fault lines, which consisted of setting candles all around you and ‘reading’ the wavering of the flames. It was obvious he was a fake—you could see the earpiece he was getting his information about the audience over—but everybody there was eating it up, especially my mother. He’d already talked her into private sessions that set her back ten thousand dollars. And I thought, Somebody should put him out of business, and then I thought, That’s what I want to do with my life, and I looked up ‘debunkers’ online and found your magazine, and here I am.”

I’d said, “I can’t possibly pay you the kind of money you’re—”

“Your going rate for articles is fine,” she’d said and flashed me her
better-than-Julia-Roberts smile. “I just want the chance to do something useful and sensible with my life.”

And for the last eight months she’d been working with me on the magazine. She was wonderful—she knew everybody in Hollywood, which meant she could get us into invitation-only stuff, and heard about new spiritual fads even before I did. She was also willing to do anything, from letting herself be hypnotized to stealing chicken guts from psychic surgeons to proofreading galleys. And fun to talk to, and gorgeous, and much too good for a small-time skeptic.

And I knew it was just a matter of time before she got bored with debunking—and me—and went back to going to premieres and driving around in her Jaguar, but she didn’t. “Have you ever
worked
with Ben Affleck?” she’d said when I told her she was too beautiful not to still be in the movies. “You couldn’t
pay
me to go back to that.”

She wasn’t in the parking lot, and neither was her Jaguar, and I wondered, as I did every day, if this was the day she’d decided to call it quits. No, there she was, getting out of a taxi. She was wearing a honey-colored pantsuit the same shade as her hair, and designer sunglasses, and she looked, as always, too good to be true. She saw me and waved, and then reached back into the taxi for two big throw pillows.

Shit. That meant we were going to have to sit on the floor again. These people made a fortune scamming people out of their not-so-hard-earned cash. You’d think they could afford chairs.

I walked over to her. “I take it we’re going in together,” I said, since the pillows were a matching pair, purple brocade jobs with tassels at the corners.

“Yes,” Kildy said. “Did you bring the Sony?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I still think I should have brought the Hasaka.”

She shook her head. “They’re doing body checks. I don’t want to give them an excuse to throw us out. When they fill out the nametags, give them your real name.”

“We’re not using a cover?” I asked. Psychics often use skeptics in the audience as an excuse for failure: The negative vibrations made it
impossible to contact the spirits, etc. A couple of them had even banned me from their performances, claiming I disturbed the cosmos with my nonbelieving presence. “Do you think that’s a good idea?”

“We don’t have any choice,” she said. “When I came last week, I was with my publicist, so I had to use my own name, and I didn’t think it mattered—we never do channelers. Besides, the ushers recognized me. So our cover is, I was so impressed with Ariaura that I talked you into coming to see her.”

“Which is pretty much the truth,” I said. “What exactly is her gimmick, that you thought I should see her?”

“I don’t want to prejudice you beforehand.” She glanced at her Vera Wang watch and handed me one of the pillows. “Let’s go.”

We went into the lobby and over to a table under a lilac-and-silver banner proclaiming
PRESENTING ARIAURA AND THE WISDOM OF ISUS
and under it,
BELIEVE AND IT WILL HAPPEN
. Kildy told the woman at the table our names.

“Oh, I loved you in that movie, Miss Ross,” she said and handed us lilac-and-silver nametags and motioned us toward another table next to the door, where a Russell Crowe type in a lilac polo shirt was doing security checks.

“Any cameras, tape recorders, videocams?” he asked us.

Kildy opened her bag and took out an Olympus. “Can’t I take
one
picture?” she pleaded. “I won’t use the flash or anything. I just wanted to get a photo of Ariaura.”

He plucked the Olympus neatly from her fingers. “Autographed eight-by-ten glossies can be purchased in the waiting area.”

“Oh,
good
,” she said. She really should have stayed in acting.

I relinquished the videocam. “What about videos of today’s performance?” I said after he finished frisking me.

He stiffened. “Ariaura’s communications with Isus are not performances. They are unique glimpses into a higher plane. You can order videos of today’s experience in the waiting area,” he said, pointing toward a pair of double doors.

The “waiting area” was a long hall lined with tables full of books, videos, audiotapes, chakra charts, crystal balls, aromatherapy oils, amulets, Zuni fetishes, wisdom mobiles, healing stones, singing crystal bowls, amaryllis roots, aura cleansers, pyramids, and assorted other New Age junk, all with the lilac-and-silver Isus logo.

The third cardinal rule of debunking, and maybe the most important, is “Ask yourself, what do they get out of it?” or, as the Bible (source of many scams) puts it, “By their fruits shall ye know them.”

And if the prices on this stuff were any indication, Ariaura was getting a hell of a lot out of it. The 8×10 glossies were $28.99, or $35 with Ariaura’s signature. “And if you want it signed by Isus,” the blond guy behind the table said, “it’s a hundred. He’s not always willing to sign.”

I could see why. His signature (done in Magic Marker) was a string of complicated symbols that looked like a cross between Elvish runes and Egyptian hieroglyphics, whereas Ariaura’s was a script
A
followed by a formless scrawl.

Videotapes of her previous seminars—Volumes 1–20—cost a cool sixty apiece, and Ariaura’s “sacred amulet” (which looked like something you’d buy on the Home Shopping Network) cost nine hundred and fifty (box extra). People were snapping them up like hotcakes, along with Celtic pentacles, meditation necklaces, dreamcatcher earrings, worry beads, and toe rings with your zodiac sign on them.

Kildy bought one of the outrageously priced stills (no signature) and three of the videos, cooing, “I just
loved
her last seminar,” gave the guy selling them her autograph, and we went into the auditorium.

It was hung with rose, lilac, and silver chiffon floor-length banners and a state-of-the-art lighting system. Stars and planets rotated overhead, and comets occasionally whizzed by. The stage end of the auditorium was hung with gold Mylar, and in the center of the stage was a black pyramid-backed throne. Apparently Ariaura did not intend to sit on the floor like the rest of us.

At the door, ushers clad in mostly unbuttoned lilac silk shirts and
tight pants took our tickets. They all looked like Tom Cruise, which would be par for the course even if this weren’t Hollywood.

Sex has been a mainstay of the psychic business since Victorian days. Half the appeal of early table-rapping had been the filmy-draperies-and-nothing-else-clad female “spirits” who drifted tantalizingly among the male séance goers, fogging up their spectacles and preventing them from thinking clearly. Sir William Crookes, the famous British chemist, had been so besotted by an obviously fake medium’s sexy daughter that he’d staked his scientific reputation on the medium’s dubious authenticity, and nowadays it’s no accident that most channelers are male and given to chest-baring Rudolph Valentino–like robes. Or, if they’re female, have buff, handsome ushers to distract the women in the audience. If you’re drooling over them, you’re not likely to spot the wires and chicken guts or realize what they’re saying is nonsense. It’s the oldest trick in the book.

One of the ushers gave Kildy a Tom Cruise smile and led her to the end of a cross-legged row on the very hard-looking floor. I was glad Kildy had brought the pillows.

I plopped mine down next to hers and sat down on it. “This had better be good,” I said.

“Oh, it will be,” said a fiftyish redhead wearing the sacred amulet and a diamond as big as my fist. “I’ve seen Ariaura, and she’s wonderful.” She reached into one of the three lilac shopping bags she’d stuck between us and pulled out a lavender needlepoint pillow that said, “Believe and It Will Happen.”

I wondered if that applied to her believing her pillow was large enough to sit on, because it was about the same size as the rock on her finger, but as soon as they’d finished organizing the rows, the ushers came around bearing stacks of plastic-covered cushions (the kind rented at football games, only lilac) for ten bucks apiece.

The woman next to me took three, and I counted ten other people in our row, and eleven in the row ahead of us, shelling out for them. Eighty rows times ten, to be conservative. A cool eight thousand bucks,
just to sit down, and who knows how much profit in all those lilac shopping bags. “By their fruits shall ye know them.”

I looked around. I couldn’t see any signs of shills or a wireless setup, but unlike psychics and mediums, channelers don’t need them. They give out general advice, couched in New Age terms.

“Isus is absolutely astonishing,” my neighbor confided. “He’s so
wise
! Much better than Romtha. He’s responsible for my deciding to leave Randall. ‘To thine inner self be true,’ Isus said, and I realized Randall had been
blocking
my spiritual ascent—”

“Were you at last Saturday’s seminar?” Kildy leaned across me to ask.

“
No
. I was in Cancun, and I was just decimated when I realized I’d missed it. I made Tio bring me back early so I could come today. I desperately need Isus’s wisdom about the divorce. Randall’s claiming Isus had nothing to do with my decision, that I left him because the prenup had expired, and he’s threatening to call Tio as—”