Connie Willis - The Best of Connie Willis

I had one of those flyers in my file on mediums, and I was pretty sure I’d been at that séance. I’d gone to three, working on a piece on his use of funeral home records to obtain information on his victims’ dead relatives. I’d never published it—he’d been arrested on tax evasion charges before I finished it. I looked questioningly at Kildy.

“I was there researching a movie I was thinking about doing,” Kildy said, “a comedy about a medium. It was called Medium Rare . Here’s the screenplay.”

She handed me a thick bound manuscript. “I wouldn’t read the whole thing. It’s terrible. Anyway, I saw you there, talking to this guy with hair transplants—”

Magaputra’s personal manager, who I’d suspected was feeding him info from the audience. I’d been trying to see if I could spot his concealed mike.

“I saw you talking to him, and I thought you looked—”

“Gullible?”

Her jaw tightened. “No. Interesting. Cute. Not the kind of guy I expected to see at one of the yogi’s séances. I asked who you were, and somebody said you were a professional skeptic, and I thought, Well, thank goodness! Magaputra was patently fake, and everyone was buying it, lock, stock, and barrel.”

“Including your mother,” I said.

“No, I made that up, too. My mother’s even more of a skeptic than I am, especially after being married to my father. She’s partly why I was interested—she’s always after me to date guys from outside the movie business—so I bought a copy of The Jaundiced Eye and got your address and came to see you.”

“And lied.”

“Yes,” she said. “It was a dumb thing to do. I knew it as soon as you started talking about how you shouldn’t take anything anyone tells you on faith and how important independently verifiable evidence is, but I was afraid if I told you I was doing research for a movie you wouldn’t want me tagging along, and if I told you I was attracted to you, you wouldn’t believe me. You’d think it was a reality show or some kind of Hollywood fad thing everybody was doing right then, like opening a boutique or knitting or checking into Betty Ford.”

“And you fully intended to tell me,” I said, “you were just waiting for the right moment. In fact, you were all set to when Ariaura came along—”

“You don’t have to be sarcastic,” she said. “I thought if I went to work for you and you got to know me, you might stop thinking of me as a movie star and ask me out—”

“And incidentally pick up some good acting tips for your medium movie.”

“Yes,” she said angrily. “If you want to know the truth, I also thought if I kept going to those stupid past-life regression sessions and covens and soul retrieval circles, I might get over the stupid crush I had on you, but the better I got to know you, the worse it got.”

She looked up at me. “I know you don’t believe me, but I didn’t set you up. I’d never seen Ariaura before I went to that first seminar with my publicist, and I’m not in any kind of scam with her. And that story I told you the first day is the only thing I’ve ever lied to you about. Everything else I told you—about hating psychics and Ben Affleck and wanting to get out of the movie business and wanting to help you debunk charlatans and loathing the idea of ending up in rehab or in The Hulk IV —was true.”

She rummaged in the pile and pulled out an olive-green-covered script. “They really did offer me the part.”

“Of the Hulk?”

“No,” she said and held the script out to me. “Of the love interest.”

She looked up at me with those blue eyes of hers, and if anything had ever been too good to be true, it was Kildy, standing there with that bilious green script and the office’s fluorescent light on her golden hair. I had always wondered how all those chumps sitting around séance tables and squatting on lilac-colored cushions could believe such obvious nonsense. Well, now I knew.

Because standing there right then, knowing it all had to be a scam, that the Hulk IV script and the credit card bills and the phone bills didn’t prove a thing, that they could easily have been faked and I was nothing more than a prize chump being set up for the big finale by a couple of pros, I still wanted to believe it. And not just the researching-a-movie alibi, but the whole thing—that H. L. Mencken had come back from the grave, that he was here to help me crusade against charlatans, that if I grabbed the wrist holding that script and pulled Kildy toward me and kissed her, we would live happily ever after.

And no wonder Mencken, railing against creationists and chiropractic and Mary Baker Eddy, hadn’t gotten anywhere. What chance do facts and reason possibly have against what people desperately need to believe?

Only Mencken hadn’t come back. A third-rate channeler was only pretending to be him, and Kildy’s protestations of love, much as I wanted to hear them, were the oldest trick in the book.

“Nice try,” I said.

“But you don’t believe me,” she said bleakly, and Ariaura walked in.

“I got your message,” she said to Kildy in Mencken’s gravelly voice. “I came as soon as I could.” She plunked down in a chair facing me. “Those goons of Ariaura’s—”

“You can knock off the voices, Ariaura,” I said. “The jig, as Mencken would say, is up.”

Ariaura looked inquiringly at Kildy.

“Rob thinks Ariaura’s a fake,” Kildy said.

Ariaura switched her gaze to me. “You just figured that out? Of course she’s a fake, she’s a bamboozling mountebank, an oleaginous—”

“He thinks you’re not real,” Kildy said. “He thinks you’re just a voice Ariaura does, like Isus, that your disrupting her seminars is a trick to convince him she’s an authentic channeler, and he thinks I’m in on the plot with you, that I helped you set him up.”

Here it comes, I thought. Shocked outrage. Affronted innocence. Kildy’s a total stranger, I’ve never seen her before in my life!

“He thinks that you—?” Ariaura hooted and banged the arms of the chair with glee. “Doesn’t the poor fish know you’re in love with him?”

“He thinks that’s part of the scam,” Kildy said earnestly. “The only way he’ll believe I am is if he believes there is no scam, if he believes you’re really Mencken.”

“Well, then,” Ariaura said and grinned, “I guess we’ll have to convince him.” He slapped his knees and turned expectantly to me. “What do you want to know, sir? I was born in 1880 at nine P.M., right before the police went out and raided ten or twenty saloons, and went to work at the Morning Herald at the tender age of eighteen—”

“Where you laid siege to the editor Max Ways for four straight weeks before he gave you an assignment,” I said, “but my knowing that doesn’t any more make me Henry Lawrence Mencken than it does you.”

“Henry Louis ,” Ariaura said, “after an uncle of mine who died when he was a baby. All right, you set the questions.”

“It’s not that simple,” Kildy said. She pulled a chair up in front of Ariaura and sat down, facing her. She took both hands in hers. “To prove you’re Mencken you can’t just answer questions. The skeptic’s first rule is: ‘Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.’ You’ve got to do something extraordinary.”

“And independently verifiable,” I said.

“Extraordinary,” Ariaura said, looking at Kildy. “I presume you’re not talking about handling snakes. Or speaking in tongues.”

“No,” I said.

“The problem is, if you prove you’re Mencken,” Kildy said earnestly, “then you’re also proving that Ariaura’s really channeling astral spirits, which means she’s not—”