The Best of Connie Willis: Award-Winning Stories

  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—”

  “—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.

  —H. L. MENCKEN

  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.

  When Kildy and I left for the seminar an hour and a half later (on our way out, I’d pretended I forgot my keys and left Kildy standing in the hall while I went back in, bound The Baby in the Icebox with Scotch tape, and hid it down behind the bookcase), I still hadn’t come up with a plausible theory, and the Santa Monica Hilton, where the seminar was being held, didn’t yield any clues.

  It had the same “Believe and It Will Happen” banner, the same Tom Cruiseish bodyguards, the same security check. They confiscated my Olympus and my digital recorder and Kildy’s Hasaka (and asked for her autograph), and we went through the same crystal/pyramid/amulet-crammed waiting area into the same lilac-and-rose-draped ballroom. With the same hard, bare floor.

  “Oh, I forgot to bring pillows, I’m sorry,” Kildy said and started toward the ushers and stacks of lilac plastic cushions at the rear. Halfway there she turned around and came back. “I don’t want to have had an opportunity to send some kind of secret message to Ariaura,” she said. “If you want to come with me . . .”

  I shook my head. “The floor’ll be good,” I said, lowering myself to the wooden surface. “It may actually keep me in touch with reality.”

  Kildy sat down effortlessly beside me, opened her bag, and fumbled in it for her mirror. I looked around. The crowd seemed a little sparser, and somewhere behind us, I heard a woman say, “It was so bizarre. Romtha never did anything like that. I wonder if she’s drinking.”

  The lights went pink, the music swelled, and Brad Pitt came out, went through the same spiel (no flash photography, no applause, no bathroom breaks) and the same intro (Atlantis, Oracle of Delphi, Cosmic All), and revealed Ariaura, standing at the top of the same black stairway.

  She was exactly the same as she had been at that first seminar, dramatically regal in her purple robes and amulets, serene as she acknowledged the audience’s applause. The events of the past few days—her roaring into my office, asking frightenedly, “What’s happening? Where am I?” and slapping her knees and exploding with laughter—might never have happened.

  And obviously were a fake, I thought grimly. I glanced at Kildy. She was still fishing unconcernedly in her bag.

  “Welcome, Seekers after Divine Truth,” Ariaura said. “We’re going to have a wonderful spiritual experience together here today. It’s a very special day. This is my one hundredth ‘Believe and It Will Happen’ seminar.”

  Lots of applause, which after a couple of minutes she motioned to stop.

  “In honor of the anniversary, Isus and I want to do something a little different today.”

  More applause. I glanced at the ushers. They were looking nervously at each other, as if they expected her to start spouting Menckenese, but the voice was clearly Ariaura’s and so was the Oprah-perky manner.

  “My—our—seminars are usually pretty structured. They have to be—if the auratic vibrations aren’t exactly right beforehand, the spirits cannot come, and after I’ve channeled, I’m physically and spiritually exhausted, so I rarely have the opportunity to just talk to you. But today’s a special occasion. So I’d like the tech crew”—she looked up at the control booth—“to bring up the lights—”

  There was a pause, as if the tech crew was debating whether to follow orders, and then the lights came up.

  “Thanks, that’s perfect, you can have the rest of the day off,” Ariaura said. She turned to the emcee. “That goes for you, too, Ken. And my fabulous ushers—Derek, Jared, Tad—let’s hear it for the great job they do.”

  She led a round of applause and then, since the ushers continued to stand there at the doors, looking warily at each other and at the emcee, she made shooing motions with her hands. “Go on. Scoot. I want to talk to these people in private,” and when they still hesitated, “You’ll still get paid for the full seminar. Go on.”

  She walked over to the emcee and said something to him, smiling, and it must have reassured him because he nodded to the ushers and then up at the control room, and the ushers went out.

  I looked over at Kildy. She was calmly applying lipstick. I looked back at the stage.

  “Are you sure—?” I could see the emcee whisper to Ariaura.

  “I’m fine,” she mouthed back at him.

  The emcee frowned and then stepped off the stage and over to the side door, an
d the cameraman at the back began taking his videocam off its tripod. “No, no, Ernesto, not you,” Ariaura said. “Keep filming.”

  She waited as the emcee pulled the last door shut behind him and then walked to the front of the stage and stood there completely silent, her arms stiffly at her sides.

  Kildy leaned close to me, her lipstick still in her hand. “Are you thinking the prom scene in Carrie?”

  I nodded, gauging our distance to the emergency exit. There was a distant sound of a door shutting above us—the control room—and Ariaura clasped her hands together. “Alone at last,” she said, smiling. “I thought they’d never leave.”

  Laughter.

  “And now that they’re gone, I have to say this—” She paused dramatically. “Aren’t they gorgeous?”

  Laughter, applause, and several whistles. Ariaura waited till the noise had died down and then asked, “How many of you were at my seminar last Saturday?”

  The mood changed instantly. Several hands went up, but tentatively, and two hoop-earringed women looked at each other with the same nervous glance as the ushers had had.

  “Or at the one two weeks ago?” Ariaura asked.

  Another couple of hands.

  “Well, for those of you who weren’t at either, let’s just say that lately my seminars have been rather . . . interesting, to put it mildly.”

  Scattered nervous laughter.

  “And those of you familiar with the spirit world know that’s what can happen when we try to make contact with energies beyond our earthly plane. The astral plane can be a dangerous place. There are spirits there beyond our control, false spirits who seek to keep us from enlightenment.”

  False spirits is right, I thought.

  “But I fear them not, for my weapon is the Truth.” She somehow managed to say it with a capital T.

  I looked over at Kildy. She was leaning forward the way she had at that first seminar, intent on Ariaura’s words. She was still holding her mirror and lipstick.