Connie Willis - The Best of Connie Willis

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.

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.