The Amazing Grundy

Publication: The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction

Publication Date: 01-AUG-01
Author: Arkin, Alan

THE AMAZING GRANDY made his way slowly through the plane, suffering the first 
class passengers as they stowed their mountains of carry-on luggage: their enormous 
garment bags, their meticulously picked out yet casual underseat bags, the overhead 
shopping bags from Bloomingdale's and F.A.O. Schwarz. He looked balefully off in the 
distance, pretending not to be there while they grunted and groaned and filled the aisles, 
keeping him from his work. He moved briskly forward through business class where 
everyone was already at their computers, and into the tourist section. The place, he told 
himself, where he preferred to be. He found his aisle seat in the rear of the plane and sat 
down with authority, pushing his large black briefcase under the seat in front of him, 
kneading and shoving it deeply into the inadequate crevice and wedging his feet on either 
side.

With his peripheral vision he sized up the man sitting next to him in the window seat, the 
person he would try to avoid for the next several hours. Warning signals screamed at 
Grandy, telling him to stay buried in reading material. The man next to him was some 
kind of throwback from the sixties, no doubt on his way to Topanga Canyon or Big Sur 
or was it Taos, now? He was wearing a robe tied with a coarse rope; he had long hair and 
a beard, and wore sandals on his unsocked feet. Someone to avoid at all costs.

Grandy pulled out his briefcase again. He snapped it open, pulled out a manila folder, and 
hunched into it with a frown and a privacy hand held up over his eyes like a visor. The 
beautiful yet married stewardess passed through the plane smiling cheerily, checking 
seatbelts and taking drink orders from the passengers. The plane taxied down the runway 
and they were off.

At somewhere around twenty thousand feet Grandy could feel eyes on him. He knew that 
particular stare. The pilgrim to his right had recognized him. Grandy braced himself for 
the inevitable question, or review, or critique, and he automatically began the game he'd 
devised over the years of trying to guess from the man's appearance which one it would 
be. He decided the man would be generally approving at first so he could slide into the 
main agenda, which was demonstrating to Grandy the keen edge of his critical faculties. 
A fan's initial statement always revealed as much about the fan as Grandy needed to 
know. Sometimes the encounter was pleasant; mostly it was annoying and time-
consuming. An essential element in encounters with a fan was the ability to get away. 
Impossible in this situation.

Trapped in the seat which was an inch and a half too small in each direction, he armed 
himself against the invasion of privacy by pulling out a pencil and starting to write 
furiously. The pilgrim cleared his throat and moved closer to him. Intimately. 
Conspiratorially.

"Excuse me," he said, leaning into Grandy with an unearned intimacy, "I don't mean to 
bother you ... but are you who I think you are?"

Grandy hated that question with all his heart. For twenty years he'd heard it and for 
twenty years an adequate response eluded him. There was no way to answer it without a 
degree in nineteenth-century German philosophy. If he answered "Yes," simply, 
graciously, it made him an egomaniac. If he said, "I'm not sure who you think I am," it 
was an invitation to an endless dialogue, and if he said "no" he was lying and no one 
would believe him anyway. If someone asked that particular question, they knew who he 
was. "How the hell should I know who you think I am?" was what he wanted to say, but 
he never did. On this occasion he hunched over his notes and mumbled "I don't know 
who you think I am." He said it quietly enough so that it was inaudible yet polite.

"You are, aren't you?" the hippie said, beaming. "You're the Amazing Grandy, right?"

"Yes," Grandy nodded, affecting disinterest in his own celebrity.

"All right!" the hippie said predictably. He threw his head back, laughed a short "HA!" 
gleefully at the ceiling, then leaned close into Grandy. "I really don't want to bug you," he 
said. "You've probably got work to do, but I just want to tell you I've been a fan of yours 
for a long time. I'm not into magic very much, but you turn it into something more than 
that. You make it an art form."

"Thank you," Grandy said, warming up a bit. The man had taste and he was not going to 
embarrass Grandy by speaking loudly and making spectacles of the two of them.

"I think I saw you on TV a couple of weeks ago, didn't I?" the hippie said.

"You could have," said Grandy, maintaining a warm neutrality in case things turned sour.

"What was it?" the man said, "Jay Leno?"

"Probably Letterman," said Grandy.

"Letterman, right," the man said, "You did that thing with the handkerchiefs and the 
bananas. It was dazzling, man, and very funny too. In a literary way. It wasn't just jokes; 
there was real wit in your material. You're talented in a lot of different directions and you 
have something to say."

"Thank you very much," said Grandy, starting to thaw.

"It must be hard to figure out what to do on television these days," the man went on. 
"They can play around with the media so easily that people have become blase and 
cynical. It must be hard to amaze anybody anymore."

"It's not easy," said Grandy.

"But you found a way to do it," the pilgrim went on. "No one watching could think it was 
faked."

"It was faked," said Grandy. He smiled knowingly.

"Well, yes, in the sense that it was a magic trick, but I meant.... "the pilgrim said, trying 
to continue, but Grandy stopped him with a cautionary finger.

"I take this very seriously," he said. "What you meant to say is that my trick couldn't be 
manipulated by TV technicians."

"Exactly, exactly," the man agreed, "that's what I meant."

"What I do is illusion," Grandy said, lecturing to the man. "It's not reality. I always make 
that very clear."

"Right, right," the man said, bobbing his head up and down excitedly, anticipating and 
almost enjoying the reprimand. "But I think you know what I was trying to say."

"I know what you were trying to say," said Grandy, "but it's an important distinction. I 
have a thing about it, in fact."

"Right, right," the man said, laughing, his head bobbing up and down many times in 
hipness and agreement. "I should have remembered. You're into this debunking thing, 
aren't you?"

"That's right," said Grandy, "and if you know about that, you know I take this very 
seriously."

"As well you should," said the man, "as well you should." Since it seemed that they might 
be talking for a bit, the man near the window relaxed a little, and held out his hand. "My 
name's Jesus, incidentally," he said casually.

The Amazing Grandy took the man's hand gingerly and gave him a furtive glance. 
Dangerous to continue, impossible not to. "That's an unusual name," he said.

"I suppose so," the man said easily, "and you know what? he went on, looking slightly 
sheepish, "I have a confession to make. I don't have a lot of spare time, but when I saw 
you do that thing with the two ladies, the gasoline, and the dolphin? Where was that? On 
the `Caesar's Palace Special,' wasn't it?" Grandy nodded. "I was so excited that I went out 
and got some paraphernalia to try and duplicate it. I'm embarrassed to even admit it. I 
don't know what came over me. I didn't get the ladies and the dolphin, obviously, I got 
small inanimate replicas, you understand, but I couldn't make it work. I couldn't even 
figure out the principle. What was it, mirrors or what? I don't suppose you'd tell me how 
you did it? No, no, no," he said, pushing Grandy away as if Grandy was tempting him, 
"forget I said that." He backed up to the window to get a wide angle view of Grandy. "I 
can't tell you what an absolute gas it is to be sitting next to you," he said, beaming.

"Isn't it supposed to be bad karma or whatever you call it to give yourself the name of 
Jesus?" Grandy said dubiously.

"I'm the Jesus," the man said casually, "but never mind me, I want to talk about you."

"You're Jesus Christ?" Grandy said, his interest piqued.

"I'm the Jesus!" the man said, in a self-mocking sort of way. "What an arrogant thing to 
say. There are half a million Mexicans out there named Jesus and I say `I'm the Jesus.'"

"Listen, pal," said Grandy with an appreciative chuckle, "If you're Jesus Christ, that 
makes you `the' Jesus, let's face it. Hay-soos Gonzales isn't going to feel the least bit 
slighted, take my word for it. And if I can give you a little advice, don't play yourself 
down. People don't appreciate it. They expect someone who's `made it' to act special and 
if you come on humble they'll resent it and take advantage of you." Grandy loosened his 
tie and relaxed into the conversation. The two of them had something to talk about now. 
Something in common. "Everyone knows who Jesus is," he continued, "and if you're him, 
then you go ahead and call yourself `the' Jesus. You've earned it, flaunt it." The 
stewardess came by and gave Grandy his Bourbon and soda, Jesus his Virgin Mary.

Jesus swizzled his drink and began sipping it with a straw. "It must be a blessing for you 
to have a certain amount of anonymity," he said to Grandy.

Grandy stiffened slightly. "What do you mean by that?" he said.

"Well, you haven't reached superstar status," Jesus said easily, "so you can pretty much 
come and go as you please without people ragging on you. That's a blessing, don't you 
think?"

Grandy nodded and looked for the blessing. "Well, look at you," he said to his 
companion. "You're back here in tourist just like me. You seem to be getting away with 
it."

Jesus laughed. "Most people aren't very observant. They take a quick look and worry that 
I'll start singing `Michael Row the Boat Ashore' or hand out pamphlets on legalizing 
marijuana, so I usually get a wide berth. If someone gets inquisitive and I want to be left 
alone, I say I'm doing Godspell at a dinner theater in Florida. That gets rid of almost 
everyone." He sipped his drink thoughtfully. "Signing a check or a credit card can tend to 
start a commotion. I brace myself whenever that comes up." There was a small piece of 
lemon stuck in his straw and he concentrated on clearing the tip.

"So what are you up to these days?" Grandy asked as casually as he was able.

"Same old stuff," said Jesus, absorbed in his straw.

Grandy was shocked. "Same old stuff? What a jaded-sounding thing to say."

"Well, I'm still doing the same things," said Jesus, "and I've been doing them for a very 
long time. I don't mean to make it sound boring, it's not, it's just very.... familiar. It's what 
I do. I guess we all get a little blase about what we do, don't we?"

"What kind of attitude is that?" Grandy said, almost in alarm. "It's got to be great being 
Jesus. You've got everything in the world going for you. The adoration of the multitudes, 
you can come and go as you please, you could probably be flying first class right now 
you wanted to, you get almost universally good press; you've got this veil of benign 
mystery surrounding you which makes it impossible for anyone to come out and be 
critical, at least openly. That's all very good stuff. Things seem to going very well for 
you."

"Well, you've got nothing to complain about either," Jesus said. "Look at you. Magician, 
raconteur, you're an inventor, world traveler, lecturer, you have the debunking thing too 
... you're a man of many parts."

"Thank you," Grandy said, thinking about all his many parts.

"How did you get into that debunking business?" Jesus asked, "If you don't mind my 
asking."

"I don't mind at all," Grandy said. He cleared his throat and shifted himself up in his seat. 
"There are a lot of frauds and swindlers in the world," he said, warming up to a subject he 
was clearly passionate about,

"and I started getting angry at the advantage they take of innocent, gullible people. I felt I 
could do something about it."

"Who are they, these frauds and swindlers?" Jesus asked.

Grandy looked at him with mild suspicion. "You know who they are," he said.

"I'm afraid I don't," said Jesus.

"You said you know about my debunking work," said Grandy.

"I know of it," Jesus said quickly. "I've read a few headlines. I can't say that I've gone 
into it in any depth."

"Well, here," Grandy said, digging into his briefcase. "Let me show you some of my 
work on the subject." He pulled out a sheaf of papers and folders, shuffled through them 
quickly and gave Jesus a looseleaf binder filled with plastic windows. Inside the windows 
were articles from fairly reputable magazines. Pictures of Grandy jumped off every page, 
leaning into the camera at a dangerously steep angle, eyes bulging and his hands doing 
intricate gestures as if trying to hypnotize the viewer into performing a vaguely illicit act. 
The headline on the first article said, "LOOK OUT, CHARLATANS! HERE COMES 
GRANDY!" Underneath it said: "Look out, you quacks and mountebanks, you frauds and 
fakes. Here comes the Amazing Grandy and he's going to debunk you. With the zest of a 
bloodhound on a fresh trail, Grandy told us: `I can duplicate all of your miracles. I'm after 
the humbugs, the fakes who for their own self aggrandizement think they have the right 
to uproot people's sense of reality. The frauds who give people false hope with promises 
of miracle cures, who profess to have incredible powers, who claim to have a pipeline to 
the hereafter, who'd like us to believe they can move material objects from a distance, 
who tell us they have intimate relationships with aliens and God-like beings from other 
solar systems.'"

Jesus leafed through the book looking at the headlines. "My goodness," he said, "this is 
quite a crusade you're on. I had no idea."

"Let them enthrall the masses, that's fine," Grandy said, the sight of his articles refueling 
his sense of mission. "Let them make a living at it, let them make huge sums of money. 
That's fine too, but they have no right to play with people's minds. It's evil, it's 
manipulatory, and it's dangerous." He downed his drink quickly and set the glass sharply 
on the tray as punctuation. "So I go after the frauds. I get them too," he said, leaning in to 
Jesus, as if implying more than he could speak about.

"How do you expose them?" Jesus asked.

"It's actually very easy," Grandy said, "I just watch the acts. I look for the passes, the 
sleight of hand, the mechanical equipment, the shills and accomplices. If you've been 
doing this as long as I have you know what to look for. I see them a couple of times, I 
dope them out, then I simply duplicate their routines. And I do it with more style, and 
more production value, and it's over. It's the end of them."

"My goodness," Jesus said, still examining the material. "You've got everything in here. 
Flying saucers, spoon benders, all kinds of things. How do you do flying saucers?"

"Easy as pie," said Grandy, gleefully. He cleared his throat and sat up very straight. 
"Remote control model airplanes, somewhat modified with revolving lights and things, 
and an eight millimeter camera. What could be simpler?"

"What about the Philippine healers?" Jesus asked.

"That's just sleight of hand and a bag of chicken guts," said Grandy, with a shrug.

"What did you do with the spoon bender?" said Jesus.

"Uri Geller? A simple and stupid act," Grandy said, motioning to the stewardess for 
another drink, "but he has controls that are difficult to duplicate. That took several 
months to figure out, believe it or not. I ended up respecting him in a certain kind of 
way."

"Elizabeth Kubler Ross? What's she doing in here?"

"The light at the end of the tunnel business. Disembodied family members. I did that 
routine at a medical convention and it brought down the house. I got wonderful press on 
that one. Wonderful. You should try to catch it sometime. I do Edgar Cayce in the same 
evening if I have the budget. He takes a lot of time because I have to do medical checks 
on the entire audience. During the act I have doctors talking to me on an ear mike. The 
predictions are easy. You can say anything, as long as you get laughs. No one bothers to 
wait forty years to see if they come true."

"And the Maharishi?"

"The flying routine? Levitating?" Grandy said scornfully. "Come on. It's just the old rope 
trick. Oldest routine in the world. They put the kibosh on that along with the Hindu 
Fakirs decades ago. This was just a variation on that chestnut." Grandy reached over and 
turned a page in the portfolio. "This I was very proud of," he said, pointing to the Dalai 
Lama. "I did a reincarnation number for the Sony Corporation in Tokyo. I got a three-
year-old black kid from Detroit. We got him to look through about a hundred items, 
twelve of which belonged to one of their executives who died about two years before. 
The kid picked them out, said they were his, and demanded them back. The crowd went 
absolutely nuts, and that's one I'm not revealing to anyone. It was too hard and took too 
long to work out. Simple principle, but murderously difficult to perfect. Kids are always 
unpredictable."

"You've even got Padre Pio in here," said Jesus, lost in the picture.

"I had a little problem with him," said Grandy. "Not with the routine, that was easy, but 
his fans gave me a really hard time. A very zealous group. I almost had to back off and 
drop the routine.""What's the routine?" Jesus asked. "Oh, you know, the bleeding hands, 
being in two places at one time...."

"What you're doing can get dangerous," said Jesus.

"Tell me about it," said Grandy.

"What I mean is, you don't want to throw out the baby with the bathwater."

"Please," said Grandy holding up a cautionary hand, "not you too?"

"Just a thought," said Jesus, leafing through more of the book. "Do you do me?" he asked 
casually, flipping the pages.

"I've got you down," said Grandy, chuckling like a bad boy. "You're easy."

"What stuff of mine do you do ?" Jesus asked with delight.

"I do the walking on water, for example," Grandy said.

"You're kidding me," Jesus said.

"No I'm not," said Grandy. "The first time was at Four Flags in New Jersey. It was 
spectacular. We had a crowd of about ten thousand people."

"I think I had about a dozen when I did it," said Jesus.

"Yes, and if I recall they were close personal friends of yours," said Grandy, "So you 
couldn't use them for corroboration. It wouldn't hold up. No one would buy it."

"How do you walk on water.?" Jesus asked Grandy.

"Simple as can be. A moving platform under water. We started with a biblical water 
ballet to dispel the possibility of the platform, then I appear in a rowboat, I get out, and I 
walk on the water. It was simple but it was spectacular. The crowd goes crazy. I also do 
the loaves and fishes."

"Really!" Jesus said, obviously impressed.

Grandy reached over and flipped through the notebook to a picture of a throng. "Take a 
look at this. Knotts Berry Farm," he said. "Nineteen eighty seven. Eight thousand people. 
Three thousand fish and two thousand loaves of bread. What was your crowd?"

"I don't think we had more than about five or six hundred," said Jesus. "It felt like a pretty 
big group at the time."

"I do the return from the dead," said Grandy, beginning to gloat a little in spite of himself.

"What about healing the leper?" Jesus asked.

"That's a tough one," said Grandy. "I haven't done that one yet. There are a couple of 
ways to go but I haven't found anything that feels right. I could pay someone off to say 
he'd been a leper, use makeup, cheap stuff like that, that's the easy way, but I'm 
scrutinized very carefully. They go over my subjects with a fine tooth comb. That's 
something you didn't have to worry about."

"I had other things to worry about," said Jesus.

"Maybe, but they were simpler times," said Grandy. "People were easier to please."

"Do you know why I'm so impressed with you?" Jesus said.

Grandy looked for some edge of sarcasm in his voice. He found none. "Why?" he asked.

"Because you can do things. That's why," Jesus said. "And you know how you do them. 
You get an idea, you figure out a way it will work, and then it does. It works. There's a 
whole arc of experience for you. The excitement of the chase. Conquest and sense of 
mastery. Very appealing."

"So can you do things. Supposedly you've done a lot of things."

"Naaah," said Jesus with a self-deprecatory wave of his hand." I can't do anything. All I 
can do is ask that it be done. Then I sit around and wait. And hope. Sometimes it's done 
and sometimes it isn't done. And then once it is done, if it is done, I never know how it's 
done. It's frustrating. It's an anxious-making situation. I had to finally adopt the 
philosophy that if it didn't happen, then `it wasn't meant to be.' I used to wonder if that 
thought wasn't just a dodge to fend off disappointment, but I've come to think there might 
be something to it."

"Win some, lose some," said Grandy in a sort of agreement.

"Exactly," Jesus said, tapping Grandy on the chest with a finger, "win some, lose some. 
Or better yet ... `Thy Will Be Done!'" He said this rather grandly, then he looked out at 
the clouds and said it more simply; this time to the sky. He went back to Grandi's 
portfolio, leafing through it randomly. "You've got it all down," he said. "Amazing. 
You've got the goods on everyone. You've debunked the whole world. No one can get 
past you. No one can do anything that you can't duplicate." He looked at Grandy with 
appreciation, then thought of something. "Well perhaps there's one thing I can do that you 
can't," said Jesus, smiling.

"And what is that?" Grandy asked imperiously.

Jesus moved closer to him and looked into his eyes as no one had ever looked in his eyes. 
Not his mother, not the several women who had professed to love him, not his dog, not 
his most adoring fans. "I can forgive you," Jesus said simply. He smiled at Grandy, 
gently and innocently. The Amazing Grandy stared back in shock and confusion. Was it a 
joke? He looked for a hint of humor in that face, or mockery. He looked for superiority, 
for anger, for something he could give a name to. Jesus didn't turn away under his 
scrutiny, he just sat there beaming and beaming, smiling and open and compassionate.

Grandy stared back, his confusion turned to contempt, then outrage and indignation. 
"You can forgive me?" he managed to say. "For what? For what am I being forgiven? 
Who are you to forgive me?" Jesus continued to smile at him. "That's your great talent? 
That's your gift?" Grandy sputtered, maintaining enough control to keep the other 
passengers from taking notice. "That's what makes you special?" He snorted in derision 
and tried to stare Jesus down. Jesus just smiled and smiled. Grandy forced himself to turn 
away. He dug furiously

into his portfolio and buried himself in the notes for his appearance that evening, trying to 
give the impression that he was able to concentrate on something. When he left the plane 
he did not say good-bye to Jesus, he didn't offer him a ride or exchange addresses.

He went to his hotel. He took off his jacket and pants and put them neatly on the bed. He 
lay down next to them and turned on the television set. Somewhere in the middle of the 
local news he became consumed by deep uncontrollable sobs of grief and pain that 
threatened to tear him apart. "What the hell is this?" Grandy said in the middle of the 
earthquake going on inside him. Sobbing and gasping for breath, he looked down upon 
himself as at some strange specimen, some alien. The spasms continued through his 
shower, through getting dressed, and only subsided when he was in the elevator on the 
way down to meet his contact for the lecture.

Longtime readers of science fiction might recognize this author's name from the two 
stories he published in Galaxy magazine in the 1950s. Younger readers are apt to be 
familiar with Mr. Arkin's books for children, including The Clearing and Cassie Loves 
Beethoven. But popular culture being what it is, odds are better that you recognize this 
byline as belonging to the talented thespian whose work includes memorable roles in 
Catch-22, The Slums of Beverly Hills, The Seven-Percent Solution, and The In-Laws (a 
favorite around these parts). You might also remember that his was the voice of 
Schmendrick in the animated adaptation of The Last Unicom. His current projects 
include the television series 100 Centre Street and the forthcoming film America's 
Sweethearts.


In his book Why People Believe Weird Things, skeptic Michael Shermer touches on the 
question of faith and how it affects debunkers like Martin Gardner who live by applying 
reason and logic to apparent miracles. Here now is a story that addresses this issue 
directly.