Connie Willis - The Best of Connie Willis

“—the papuliferous poser I know her to be.”

“Exactly,” Kildy said, “and her career will skyrocket.”

“Along with that of every other channeler and psychic and medium out there,” I said.

“Rob’s put his entire life into trying to debunk these people,” Kildy said. “If you prove Ariaura’s really channeling—”

“The noble calling of skepticism will be dealt a heavy blow,” Ariaura said thoughtfully, “hardly the outcome a man like Mencken would want. So the only way I can prove who I am is to keep silent and go back to where I came from.”

Kildy nodded.

“But I came to try and stop her. If I return to the ether, Ariaura will go right back to spreading her pernicious astral-plane-Higher-Wisdom hokum and bilking her benighted audiences out of their cash.”

Kildy nodded again. “She might even pretend she’s channeling you.”

“Pretend! ” Ariaura said, outraged. “I won’t allow it! I’ll—” and then stopped. “But if I speak out, I’m proving the very thing I’m trying to debunk. And if I don’t—”

“Rob will never trust me again,” Kildy said.

“So,” Ariaura said, “it’s—”

A catch-22, I thought, and then, if she says that, I’ve got her—the book wasn’t written till 1961, five years after Mencken had died. And “catch-22” was the kind of thing, unlike “Bible Belt” or “booboisie,” that even Kildy wouldn’t have thought of, it had become such an ingrained part of the language. I listened, waiting for Ariaura to say it.

“—a conundrum,” she said.

“A what?” Kildy said.

“A puzzle with no solution, a hand there’s no way to win, a hellacious dilemma.”

“You’re saying it’s impossible,” Kildy said hopelessly.

Ariaura shook her head. “I’ve had tougher assignments than this. There’s bound to be something—” She turned to me. “She said something about ‘the skeptic’s first rule.’ Are there any others?”

“Yes,” I said. “If it seems too good to be true, it is.”

“And ‘By their fruits shall ye know them,’” Kildy said. “It’s from the Bible.”

“The Bible…” Ariaura said, narrowing her eyes thoughtfully. “The Bible… how much time have we got? When’s Ariaura’s next show?”

“Tonight,” Kildy said, “but she canceled the last one. What if she—”

“What time?” Ariaura cut in.

“Eight o’clock.”

“Eight o’clock,” she repeated, and made a motion toward her mid-section for all the world as if she was reaching for a pocket watch. “You two be out there, front row center.”

“What are you doing to do?” Kildy asked hopefully.

“I dunno,” Ariaura said. “Sometimes you don’t have to do a damned thing—they do it to themselves. Look at that High Muckitymuck of Hot Air, Bryan.” She laughed. “Either of you know where I can get some rope?”

She didn’t wait for an answer. “I’d better get on it. There’s only a couple hours to deadline—” She slapped her knees. “Front row center,” she said to Kildy. “Eight o’clock.”

“What if she won’t let us in?” Kildy asked. “Ariaura said she was going to get a restraining order against—”

“She’ll let you in. Eight o’clock.”

Kildy nodded. “I’ll be there, but I don’t know if Rob—”

“Oh, I wouldn’t miss this for the world,” I said.

Ariaura ignored my tone. “Bring a notebook,” she ordered. “And in the meantime, you’d better get busy on your charlatan debunking. The sons of bitches are gaining on us.”

One sits through long sessions… and then suddenly there comes a show so gaudy and hilarious, so melodramatic and obscene, so unimaginably exhilarating and preposterous that one lives a gorgeous year in an hour.

An hour later, a messenger showed up with a manila envelope. In it was a square vellum envelope sealed with pink sealing wax and embossed with Isus’s hieroglyphs. Inside that were a lilac card printed in silver with “The pleasure of your company is requested…” and two tickets to the seminar.

“Is the invitation signed?” Kildy asked.

She’d refused to leave after Ariaura, still acting the part of Mencken, had departed. “I’m staying right here with you till the seminar,” she’d said, perching herself on my desk. “It’s the only way I can prove I’m not off somewhere with Ariaura cooking up some trick. And here’s my phone,” she’d handed me her cell phone, “so you won’t think I’m sending her secret messages via text message or something. Do you want to check me to see if I’m wired?”

“No.”

“Do you need any help?” she’d asked, picking up a pile of proofs. “Do you want me to go over these, or am I fired?”

“I’ll let you know after the seminar.”

She’d given me a Julia-Roberts-radiant smile and retreated to the far end of the office with the proofs, and I’d called up Charles Fred’s file and started through it, looking for leads and trying not to think about Ariaura’s parting shot.

I was positive I’d never told Kildy that story about Mencken saying, “The sons of bitches are gaining on us,” and it wasn’t in Daniels’s biography, or Hobson’s. The only place I’d ever seen it was in an article in The Atlantic Monthly . I looked it up in Bartlett’s, but it wasn’t there. I Googled “Mencken bitches.” Nothing.

Which didn’t prove anything. Ariaura—or Kildy—could have read it in The Atlantic Monthly just like I had. And since when had H. L. Mencken looked to the Bible for inspiration? That remark alone proved it wasn’t Mencken, didn’t it?

On the other hand, he hadn’t said “catch-22,” although “conundrum” wasn’t nearly as precise a word. And he hadn’t said William Jennings Bryan, he’d said “that High Muckitymuck of Hot Air, Bryan,” which I hadn’t read anywhere, but which sounded like something he would have put in that scathing obituary he’d written of Bryan.

And this wasn’t going anywhere. There was nothing, short of a heretofore undiscovered manuscript or a will in his handwriting leaving everything to Lillian Gish—no, that wouldn’t work. The aphasic stroke, remember?—that would prove it was Mencken. And both of those could be faked, too.

And there wasn’t anything that could do what Kildy had told him he—correction, told Ariaura she —had to do: Prove he was real without proving Ariaura was legit. Which she clearly wasn’t.

I’d gotten out Ariaura’s transcripts and read through them, looking for I wasn’t sure what, until the tickets had come.

“Is the card signed?” Kildy asked again.

“No,” I said and handed it to her.

“‘The pleasure of your company is requested’ is printed on,” she said, turning the invitation over to look at the back. “What about the address on the envelope?”

“There isn’t one,” I said, seeing where she was going with this. “But just because it’s not handwritten, that doesn’t prove it’s from Mencken.”

“I know. ‘Extraordinary claims.’ But at least it’s consistent with its being Mencken.”

“It’s also consistent with the two of you trying to convince me it’s Mencken so I’ll go to that seminar tonight.”

“You think it’s a trap?” Kildy said.

“Yes,” I said, but standing there staring at the tickets, I had no idea what kind. Ariaura couldn’t possibly still be hoping I’d stand up and shout, “By George, she’s the real thing! She’s channeling Mencken!” no matter what anecdote she quoted. I wondered if her lawyers might be intending to slap me with a restraining order or a subpoena when I walked in, but that made no sense. She knew my address—she’d been here this very afternoon, and I’d been here most of the past two days. Besides, if she had me arrested, the press would be clamoring to talk to me, and she wouldn’t want me voicing my suspicions of a con game to the L.A. Times .