Connie Willis - The Best of Connie Willis

The woman next to Kildy glanced questioningly at us and then back at the stage. Two of the ushers standing along the wall exchanged frowning glances, and I could hear whispering from somewhere in the audience.

“Have you yaps actually fallen for this mystical mumbo-jumbo? Of course you have. This is America, home of the imbecile and the ass!” the voice said, and the whispering became a definite murmur.

“What in the—?” a woman behind us said, and the woman next to me gathered up her bags, stuffed her “Believe” pillow into one of them, stood up, and began to step over people to get to the door.

One of the ushers signaled someone in the control booth, and the lights and Holst’s “Venus” began to come up. The emcee took a hesitant step out onto the stage.

“You sit there like a bunch of gaping primates, ready to buy anyth—” Ariaura said, and her voice changed abruptly back to the basso of Isus, “—but the Age of Spiritual Enlightenment cannot begin until each of thou beginnest thy own journey.”

The emcee stopped in mid-step, and so did the murmuring. And the woman who’d been next to me and who was almost to the door. She stood there next to it, holding her bags and listening.

“And believe. All of you, casteth out the toxins of doubt and skepticism now. Believe and it will happen.”

She must be back on script. The emcee gave a sigh of relief, and retreated back into the wings, and the woman who’d been next to me sat down where she’d been standing, bags and pillows and all. The music faded, and the lights went back to rose.

“Believe in thine inner soul-self,” Ariaura/Isus said. “Believe, and let your spiritual unfoldment begin.” She paused, and the ushers looked up nervously. The emcee poked his head out from the gold Mylar drapes.

“I grow weary,” she said. “I must return now to that higher reality from whence I cameth. Fear not, for though I no longer share this earthly plane with thee, still I am with thou.” She raised her arm stiffly in a benediction / Nazi salute, gave a sharp shudder, and then slumped forward in a swoon that would have done credit to Gloria Swanson. Holst’s “Venus” began again, and she sat up, blinking, and turned to the emcee, who had come out onstage again.

“Did Isus speak?” she asked him in her original voice.

“Yes, he did,” the emcee said, and the audience burst into thunderous applause, during which he helped her to her feet and handed her over to two of the ushers, who walked her, leaning heavily on them, up the black stairway and out of sight.

As soon as she was safely gone, the emcee quieted the applause and said, “Copies of Ariaura’s books and videotapes are available outside in the waiting area. If you wish to arrange for a private audience, see me or one of the ushers,” and everyone began gathering up their pillows and heading for the door.

“Wasn’t he wonderful ?” a woman ahead of us in the exodus said to her friend. “So authentic!”

Is Los Angeles the worst town in America, or only next to the worst? The skeptic, asked the original question, will say yes, the believer will say no. There you have it.

Kildy and I didn’t talk till we were out of the parking lot and on Wilshire, at which point Kildy said, “Now do you understand why I wanted you to see it for yourself, Rob?”

“It was interesting, all right. I take it she did the same thing at the seminar you went to last week?”

She nodded. “Only last week two people walked out.”

“Was it the exact same spiel?”

“No. It didn’t last quite as long—I don’t know how long exactly, it caught me by surprise—and she used slightly different words, but the message was the same. And it happened the same way—no warning, no contortions, her voice just changed abruptly in mid-sentence. So what do you think’s going on, Rob?”

I turned onto La Brea. “I don’t know, but lots of channelers do more than one ‘entity.’ Joye Wildde does two, and before Hans Lightfoot went to jail, he did half a dozen.”

Kildy looked skeptical. “Her promotional material doesn’t say anything about multiple entities.”

“Maybe she’s tired of Isus and wants to switch to another spirit. When you’re a channeler, you can’t just announce, ‘Coming soon: Isus II.’ You’ve got to make it look authentic. So she introduces him with a few words one week, a couple of sentences the next, etcetera.”

“She’s introducing a new and improved spirit who yells at the audience and calls them imbeciles and rubes?” she said incredulously.

“It’s probably what channelers call a ‘dark spirit,’ a so-called bad entity that tries to lead the unwary astray. Todd Phoenix used to have a nasty voice break in in the middle of White Feather’s spiel and make heckling comments. It’s a useful trick. It reinforces the idea that the psychic’s actually channeling, and anything inconsistent or controversial the channeler says can be blamed on the bad spirit.”

“But Ariaura didn’t even seem to be aware there was a bad spirit, if that’s what it was supposed to be. Why would it tell the audience to go home and stop giving their money to a snake-oil vendor like Ariaura?”

A snake-oil vendor? That sounded vaguely familiar, too. “Is that what she said last week? Snake-oil vendor?”

“Yes,” she said. “Why? Do you know who she’s channeling?”

“No,” I said, frowning, “but I’ve heard that phrase somewhere. And the line about the Chautauqua.”

“So it’s obviously somebody famous,” Kildy said.

But the historical figures channelers did were always instantly recognizable. Randall Mars’s Abraham Lincoln began every sentence with “Four score and seven years ago,” and the others were all equally obvious. “I wish I’d gotten Ariaura’s little outburst on tape,” I said.

“We did,” Kildy said, reaching over the backseat and grabbing her orange pillow. She unzipped it, reached inside, and brought out a micro-vidcam. “Ta-da! I’m sorry I didn’t get last week’s. I didn’t realize they were frisking people.”

She fished in the pillow again and brought out a sheet of paper. “I had to run to the bathroom and scribble down what I could remember.”

“I thought they didn’t let people go to the bathroom.”

She grinned at me. “I gave an Oscar-worthy performance of an actress they’d let out of rehab too soon.”

I glanced at the list at the next stoplight. There were only a few phrases on it: the one she’d mentioned, and “I’ve never seen such shameless bilge,” and “You’d have to be a pack of deluded half-wits to believe something so preposterous.”

“That’s all?”

She nodded. “I told you, it didn’t last nearly as long last time. And since I wasn’t expecting it, I missed most of the first sentence.”

“That’s why you were asking at the seminar about buying the videotape?”

“Uh-huh, although I doubt if there’s anything on it. I’ve watched her last three videos, and there’s no sign of Entity Number Two.”

“But it happened at the seminar you went to and at this one. Has it occurred to you it might have happened because we were there?” I pulled into a parking space in front of the building where The Jaundiced Eye has its office.

“But—” she said.

“The ticket-taker could have alerted her that we were there,” I said.

I got out and opened her door for her, and we started up to the office. “Or she could have spotted us in the audience—you’re not the only one who’s famous. My picture’s on every psychic wanted poster on the West Coast—and she decided to jazz up the performance a little by adding another entity. To impress us.”