Connie Willis - The Best of Connie Willis

“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—”

But Kildy had lost interest and was leaning across her to ask a pencil-thin woman in the full lotus position if she’d seen Ariaura before. She hadn’t, but the one on her right had.

“Last Saturday?” Kildy asked.

She hadn’t. She’d seen her six weeks ago in Eugene.

I leaned toward Kildy and whispered, “What happened last Saturday?”

“I think they’re starting, Rob,” she said, pointing at the stage, where absolutely nothing was happening, and got off her pillow and onto her knees.

“What are you doing?” I whispered.

She didn’t answer that, either. She reached inside her pillow, pulled out an orange pillow the same size as the “Believe and It Will Happen” cushion, handed it to me, and arranged herself gracefully on the large tasseled one. As soon as she was cross-legged, she took the orange pillow back from me and laid it across her knees.

“Comfy?” I asked.

“Yes, thank you,” she said, turning her movie-star smile on me.

I leaned toward her. “You sure you don’t want to tell me what we’re doing here?”

“Oh, look, they’re starting,” she said, and this time they were.

A Brad Pitt look-alike stepped out onstage holding a hand mike and gave us the ground rules. No flash photos (even though they’d confiscated all the cameras). No applause (it breaks Ariaura’s concentration). No bathroom breaks. “The cosmic link with Isus is extremely fragile,” Brad explained, “and movement or the shutting of a door can break that connection.”

Right. Or else Ariaura had learned a few lessons from EST, including the fact that people who are distracted by their bladders are less likely to spot gobbledygook, like the stuff Brad was spouting right now: