The Call of the Weird (4 page)

In pride of place, in a gold frame, was a painting of an androgynous man with long blond hair and blue eyes and a large square pendant.

“That’s Korton,” Bob said.

“He looks a little bit like, maybe, Jesus might look,” I said.

“I don’t know,” Bob said, and laughed lightly. “That’s something I can’t prove one way or the other.”

Bob put on slippers and rested his feet on a cushion. The lamps in the room were off and the only light came through the edges of the blind, which had been pulled down. Bob closed his eyes and wheezed with a sound like a car skidding on gravel. He rocked in his chair and snorted and gurgled and twitched from side to side.

Bob’s vocal chords gave voice to several distinct personalities, operators working a kind of interdimensional telephone exchange. One of them, called “Addy,” spoke in a tremulous old voice with his head cocked to the side. Korton, the headliner, declaimed in a booming monotone with rolled Rs and posh Yankee vowels.

“THIS IS THE HONORABLE KORTON REPRESENTAH- TEEVE CALLING YOU ON BEHALF OF THE PLANET YOU CALL JUPITER!” Korton said.

“What will happen in the upcoming election?” I asked.

“MANY WHO ARE INCUMBENTS WILL, UM, BE TURNED AWAY,” Korton said.

“I was wondering about George Bush and the . . . ”

“AN HONORABLE INDIVIDU-ILL BUT THEN, UM,” Korton began, and spoke for several minutes about oil cartels and the invasion of Kuwait.

Trying a different tack, I asked about my relationship with my dad. Oddly, Korton seemed to think he was dead. I assured him he was alive and well, whereupon Korton said, as if to excuse himself, that he was “ADVANCED IN AGE.”

“Well, he’s sixty-three.”

And so it went on. Korton said he couldn’t give out information about the pop star Michael Jackson because of certain “LAW CODES,” that my car’s electrical system needed updating and that I should check the “TREADWEAR, UM” on the “AS YOU TERM IT, TIRES”; advised getting my eyes tested; and when asked generally about my journey said I interrupted too much in my interviews.

“IT IS VERY DIFFICULT FOR INDIVIDU-ILLS TO, UM, PROVIDE INFORMATION, UM, IN YOUR VERNACULAR, UM, IN ANY THUMBNAIL SKETCH.”

In spite of myself, and somewhat unreasonably, I found myself feeling irritated with Korton and/or Bob. Little things bothered me like his accent slipping and bouts of coughing. Intending to make it my final question, I asked whether I might have the right stuff to be a space channel myself. Korton said possibly, but that I would have to “CHANGE A GREAT DEAL” in my “LIFESTYLE.” He explained that at the moment I drank too much and smoked too much pot.

“WE WOULD INVITE YOU TO SEEK OUT, UM, THAT WHICH YOU TERM ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS AND/OR NARCOTICS ANONYMOUS, IS THAT UNDERSTOOD, UM?”

I took issue with Korton on this, and the session ended in something close to an argument between myself and the honorable representative from Koldas.

When it was over, Bob snorted with his face in a towel. I wandered round the chapel, examining religious icons and newsletters, pamphlets by people describing their adventures in outer space. Unaccountably, I was feeling a little cheated. I say “unaccountably,” because, after all, what had I been expecting?

“Korton had me down as a pothead for some reason,” I said.

“He doesn’t tell you anything unless it’s really true,” Bob said. “If it’s given, it’s given.”

I sensed that Bob could tell I’d been disappointed in the channeling. The subject of the paranormalist Uri Geller came up. I said I doubted his ability to bend cutlery with his mind. Bob went and got a bag of gnarled silverware and flung it on the table. The forks were so mangled that each tine was splayed out and twisted. He seemed pleased with this coup de théâtre.

“You can’t sleight of hand that,” he said.

“You do that by twisting it.”

“No no no no,” Bob said. “You hold it and rub it and it gradually begins to melt.”

“Well, could you do it now?” I said this softly, because I was aware I was challenging him and I didn’t wish to sound rude.

“I’m NOT GOING TO DO A DEMONSTRATION FOR YOU, LEWIS! OKAY? I’m a little bit tired, getting a little bit irritated, so just be careful, okay? I’ve got some things I need to do here.”

On the way back from Arizona, driving up to Las Vegas, I reflected that there was a lesson in my encounter with Bob. Just because I wanted to know someone better didn’t mean they wanted to be known better. Because I myself am literal-minded and perhaps a little self-doubting, I assume other people are happy to examine their contradictions. But it wasn’t so. And in many cases those whose faith was most important to them—like Bob—were those least able to hold their beliefs up to question. (Later, I sent Bob a book about crop circles and a written apology and we patched it up.)

With Thor, I felt on safer ground. I had him pegged as hardheaded— a profiteer. This was what I’d sensed about him and liked on the first visit, I realized—there was a kind of healthy-mindedness behind Thor’s bad faith. I was fairly sure he was no longer in the UFO field. He’d left so little impression on that world that I had to assume it hadn’t worked out for him and he’d moved on. But to what? Then in late June, I made a breakthrough. I discovered he had once collaborated on a book by a hypnotist friend of mine named Ross Jeffries. Ross said he’d only met Thor twice, briefly both times, but that Thor sometimes went by the name James Templar. A search on that name revealed a number of books for sale on the Internet of which he was coauthor. I found an email for one of his collaborators, Pat Ress, in Omaha, Nebraska.

Pat is an expert in time travel. “I have written four books on time travel and researched it extensively,” she wrote. “It happens! There are slippage points all around and with an electromagnetic push—walla! Off you go!” She went on to mention a mysterious secret guild of “technoshamans” to which Thor had once belonged. She put me in touch with a man named Steve Gibbs, an inventor of a time-travel device about whom she’d written a book. Thor had apparently sold copies of Steve’s pamphlet about the device. According to Pat, Steve claimed Thor was himself either a warlock or an alien. “Don’t ask me how he would know that!” She gave me Steve’s number in Kansas.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Steve seemed somewhat mentally troubled when I reached him on the phone. If the believers so far fell somewhere on a spectrum that ran from fragile/sincere to hardheaded/unscrupulous, Steve was skewing heavily toward fragile. He said he’d time-traveled back to 1986, but that his friend Carl traveled to the 1600s and got thrown in jail for wearing a T-shirt. “They thought he was making fun of the king.”

He said he’d spoken to Thor over the phone a couple of times but he stopped answering Thor’s calls because he kept getting into his head and causing his nose to bleed. Thor, he said, was a “reptilian shapeshifter” and had been sent to Hell. Or possibly he’d time-traveled and accidentally set up a “paradox,” erasing his own timestream. Either way, it wasn’t proving a fruitful line of inquiry.

I had better luck with the organization Pat mentioned. The mysterious guild of technoshamans turned out to have a website, with pages of magical products for sale: “Aladdin’s lamps,” “spell books,” “ritual kits,” “all-purpose voodoo-doll kits.” It was like an Argos for budding Harry Potters. Thor’s fingerprints were all over it, phrases I’d heard him use: “warrior monks,” “mystery schools,” “grimoires.” There were several books previously credited to Thor that now appeared with his name taken off. There was also a whiff of Thor’s opportunism: Gas prices had recently gone up, and one of the websites was selling a disk that you could stick on to your car to improve its mileage.

“We are an ancient yet futuristic mystery school. We were the builders of Atlantis and played an important part in the leadership of that society . . . I am sure you have hundreds of questions about the above facts. Of course you do. That is your slave mind talking, questioning the real. After all, you are programmed to buy into the created history of the ‘well’-educated professors, the men of letters and science . . . There is only one answer: FIGHT, FIGHT, FIGHT! . . . HACK AND CUT!! THIS IS THE ONLY WAY. Let the cowards fall away! LET THE FIGHTERS SHOW THE WAY!”

I sent an email asking about Thor, and received a terse reply. It said: “Hello, Sorry, we have no info on this person. We are a new company that bought rights to some old products and publications. Thanks.”

It was official: Thor did not want to speak to me.

My original question had been answered. What do you do after you’ve been Lord Commander of the Earth Protectorate? Why, you found an ancient yet futuristic mystery school that helped build Atlantis and now sells voodoo dolls.

Now what? Should I phone up? Should I pretend to be an interested customer? Should I stake out his building? Until now, I’d excused myself by imagining that Thor might actually want to get together and hang out. Not that I’d given it a great deal of thought, but I suppose I imagined meeting his family and loved ones and trying to put him in some kind of social context. I had a hunch that at some level he didn’t really believe that he’d killed ten aliens, but I wanted to find out for sure, or hear how he rationalized it. I wanted to meet his mother and say, “Do you really believe Thor killed ten aliens?” I wanted to find out his real name.

But if he didn’t want to meet, where did that leave me?

One morning in Las Vegas I drove to the address listed for Thor’s outfit. It was a soulless stretch of shopping plazas and franchise outlets on the west of the strip: I counted a Wendy’s, a McDonald’s, a 7-11, and a KFC, all within a block. The address in question turned out to be a “postal center” where he rented a mailbox.

So I called a number on the website, putting on an American accent, and asked about the mileage disk.

“Ah, yes,” said a voice. “You glue it on your gas tank. It works using energy rays. It changes the structure of the gas. It improves your gas mileage 20 to 40 percent. Costs one hundred and fortynine dollars.”

It was definitely him. The same self-serious intonation, the tendency to overexplain. But speaking to him under false pretenses— deceiving someone for whom I basically felt affection—didn’t feel right, and I wasn’t sure how to get off the phone.

“That sounds rather a lot,” I said, in my assured voice.

“You can send money orders. You can also send cash registered.” Thor sounded ready to close the deal.

“I don’t have a credit card at the moment,” I said, and rang off. A few weeks later, I called up as myself.

The first few moments were a little awkward. I explained who I was, reminded him of the TV show we made. He sounded shaky, as though he knew he’d been found out.

“Oh yes,” he said, recovering himself. “I remember. I’m sorry, I spaced out a little there . . . I’m not really active in that alien area any more. It just didn’t pan out for us as any kind of reality. So we’ve kind of stepped away from that . . . The major problem of our time is superillnesses. That’s where our emphasis is. There’s an amazing number of healing tools we’re trying to get to people.

AIDS, chronic fatigue, cancer. Who really cares if we’re invaded by aliens, we’ll all be dead from diseases . . . ”

I told him I’d seen websites for the Alien Resistance Movement still going on the Internet.

“They’re all a bunch of goofball jerks with either Christian fanatical leanings or kids that want to play army. I contacted them and told them, look, we own that name and logo, that’s our organization. But it was going nowhere anyway. They’re comic-book characters shooting machine guns at the sky, which doesn’t even work. I think our threats are much greater from our politicians than from extraterrestrials.”

This turned out to be Thor’s new theme: the disaster of the Bush presidency.

“Quite frankly, I’ve come to sympathize with the aliens. If they need the human crud we have on this planet to propagate, they’re welcome to it. I just wish they’d start by abducting Adolf Bush and his cronies. The guy did not win the election. If he was a president in Central America we would have invaded by now . . . We’ve got body bags coming back from a no-win war where all the people hate us. He’s a stumblebum moron. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s a clone because his chip ain’t working right.”

He said he lived an hour or two outside Vegas, in Nevada, in “an isolated location,” still with Liz. He didn’t seem averse to meeting up. We made a plan to go for coffee in September. We spoke for an hour or so, mainly about politics, finding much to agree on. That I should find so much political common ground with a one-time alien hunter struck me as curious.

At the end of the conversation, his tone changed a little. “You know,” he said, “I’m surprised at the number of sites you’re on with your show. I wish we could get on as many sites, heh heh heh.

” “Yes,” I said.

“Interviews with you, talking about meeting the different characters. There were several different postings on our interview.”

“Yes,” I said. “Sometimes I spoke about the show—well, I think in some interviews I crossed the line.”

“I liked your show. I watched it all the time when it was on Bravo.” He mentioned the wrestling episode. “You looked pretty scared when you were with those wrestlers and that psycho drill instructor. He really lost it with you.”

“I may be wrong, but you changing your name, that wasn’t anything to do with me and the exposure you got on the show, was it?”