Enhanced

by Cosca, Paul

  It’s raining here in Seattle, but that is a surprise to absolutely no one. John and I sit down at his favorite coffee shop, naturally. I prefer tea to coffee when I can get it, but not drinking coffee in Seattle is like passing on wine in Italy. So we sit and sip our coffee. Mine is dark and aromatic, but bitter. I don’t want to look too much like an out-of-towner, so I just keep quiet about it.

  JOHN: I’ve known for about ten years now. Actually, a little more than that, because I remember the night that I found out about it all. See, my body does all kinds of things with static electricity. Absorbs it, stores it, sends it out. Everyone can do that, just not on the kind of scale that I can. I get it through the air…as I’m walking around…it’s like a million socks rubbing against a million carpets all at the same time, and I’m wearing all of them. That’s a horrible analogy, but you get what I mean. I’ve learned to control it but…

  I was sixteen when I found out about it. Ah Christ, this is embarrassing. Okay. I was sixteen and with my first real serious girlfriend. Her name was Jessica…man, isn’t that weird? You can be with someone for like, three years and not even remember their name. Hober! Oh, sorry. Hober. Jessica Hober. Wait, is it OK if I use her last name? I mean…I guess you can edit that out later. Anyway, Jessica Hober was the first girl I was ever really serious about. And her parents were away for the weekend, so we

  decided we were going to…you know…we were going to have sex. Which…I’m sure everyone’s been there. I was losing my mind all that week. It would have been bad enough, the pressure I mean, if it was just waiting one day. But I had a whole week to get all ramped up about it. Nervous. Excited. Terrified that I was going to completely screw it up somehow.

  So, it’s Friday night. I get over there and…this is seriously embarrassing. It’s not like a secret or anything but…hell. All right. So we’re having sex and I…you know…orgasm. No, I won’t say how long it was (I’ve got some pride, after all). But when I do, she makes this really loud noise and she screams. She’s like, “Oh my god!” And me, I was thinking…hey, I must have been pretty awesome at this whole sex thing. So I was pretty pleased with myself. But I found out pretty soon after that I…well, I mildly electrocuted her. Just mildly, I want to point out. She said she liked it up till that point, but…you know, a little electrocution can really kill the mood.

  It didn’t take us too long to figure out what it was. What it meant. And we weren’t together too long after that. Kids…kids get scared of what they don’t understand. Adults do too, really. I mean, we all do. It scared me just as much as it scared her. Maybe more, because I was the one who suddenly had to live with all this, you know? It was a long time before I could really get a handle on it. I wore gloves all the time because I knew if I came in contact with someone, they’d get shocked. It could happen dozens, sometimes hundreds of times a day. It was horrible.

  It’s better now though. I’ve got a steady girlfriend. No electroshock therapy with her or anything. People…they ask if I do anything with it. Like, I find out I’m Enhanced and I’m supposed to put on a cape and go become “ElectroBoy” or something like that. I’ll admit, I thought about it. But not much more than any other kid imagines being a superhero. Really, it’s just not practical. It’s not logical, and it sure as hell isn’t safe. What kind of person…who really thinks things through and then goes out to put on a

  costume and fight crime? I mean, I thought about being an astronaut once, but I didn’t slingshot myself into orbit.

  No, I went and got myself into a really great engineering program. And not electrical engineering, either. I just want to live a normal life. Nothing crazy or super about it. But…I’ll admit I do wonder about it all. I know I’m not alone. There are a lot of us out there, and there’s no real solid answers about how it all happened. Was this just evolution? Just some random thing that made some of us a little different from everyone else? One day, when I have kids, I want to be able to sit down and tell them why I am the way I am. And maybe why they’re like that too.

  May 3rd, 1997

  I’m sitting in the kitchen of a small apartment in Cheyenne, Wyoming. The outside of the complex is very drab and more than a little depressing, but it’s apparent that someone has gone to great lengths to make the inside of this apartment as cheerful as it possibly can be. The kitchen towels match the drapes (red and white polka dots). The slipcover on the loveseat matches the pillows (bright blue with yellow accents). There are pictures everywhere. Dozens and dozens of pictures.

  Darlene was younger in those pictures, and thinner too. But the tolls of time and tragedy do not stay their hand, even for the cheeriest of people. Darlene and I sit at her small kitchen table (she drinks Coke from the can with a straw. I’m having iced tea) and she shows me her favorite picture: The setting is a place of great beauty and large amounts of snow (Yellowstone, I learn). Everyone is bundled up in winter coats. Cheeks are red from the wind and cold, but everyone is smiling. Darlene is snuggled up close to a tall, handsome man with a five o’clock shadow and a thick mustache. Three young girls sit in front. The two girls on the outside are blonde, with round cheeks and big grins. The girl in the middle is equally happy, but looks much more like her father than the others. Her dark hair is long and straight, and her skin is very fair. This, without a doubt, is a picture of a family at the peak of happiness. I look up at Darlene and believe we are sharing a thought: where did the time go?

  DARLENE: The most proud thing I can say is that I’m a mom. Pride’s a sin, I guess. But I think you should be proud of your kids. And I really am. See, my parents went to college, and they really wanted that for me too. But I knew I wasn’t made for all that. I wasn’t made to go out and get a job and punch a clock. I wanted to be a mom. Wanted that for as long as I could remember. When I had Krissi at nineteen, everyone talked about how young I was. Jerry’s a little older than me, so he was twenty-four then. Already in the army a few years. They all said “They’re so young. So young. Look at how young they are”. But I didn’t feel young. By that time, all my friends

  were in college or starting big jobs or whatever. Why would it be weird for me to want to start my life too?

  Jerry and I had three girls, pretty much right in a row. We always knew we wanted three, and we were pretty sure we wanted them all close in age. Well, I was sure. And since child rearing was more my department anyways, I might have made more of the decision on that. Krissi was two when Chloe was born, and Chloe was about twenty months when Jessica was born. I wanted them close in age because I wanted them to be close, you know? Your family, siblings especially, there’s not anyone closer. A sister is the closest friend you’ll ever have. And yeah, that closeness meant there were plenty of fights. Over toys. Over boys too, eventually. But they were still close. Even Krissi was close to Jessica, though they had that age gap. Krissi always admired Jessica, since she’s so creative. Krissi can do that complex math stuff in her head, and lord knows she didn’t get that from me, but Jessica was helping her older sister with English stuff when she was still in junior high.

  When they all were little, they were just totally inseparable. The Three Musketeers. That’s what Jerry called them. Riding their bikes down the road together or playing in the backyard. Creating all kinds of worlds together to play in. But that’s when they were young. Before Chloe turned twelve.

  I’m negative for the virus. No one in my family ever had it, so that was never a concern. But Jerry had it. He was like most people who have it. Carriers, you know? No effects or anything. We had two girls who were totally negative for the virus, and one that wasn’t. I guess that’s a weird way of putting it. Positive things are usually good things, aren’t they? Having a positive attitude, that’s what it makes me think of. But in medicine it’s all backwards. If you’re positive, you’re in trouble. Positive for…I don’t know. Cancer or AIDS. Or the virus. I hate that I feel that way, but we were really hoping that the girls would all be negative. It’s not anything like…not loving


  them or loving them less or anything. I’m not prejudiced. I just know firsthand how tough it can be when you’ve got the virus. Jerry had a real hard time finding work at some places. We even lost out on an apartment because of it when we were young. Oh they didn’t come right out and say it, but they made it pretty clear they didn’t want him living there. So we knew that things were going to be tougher for Chloe. If anything, I loved her more for it, because I wanted to try to protect her. I prayed like crazy that she’d be neutral like her daddy. Just makes sense, right? He didn’t have any Enhancements, so why should she? I guess…I guess I was a little bit in denial. Is denial a sin?

  Right around when Chloe turned twelve, things started to get real weird around the house. I’m a Christian, you know. So I believe that there’s all kinds of things around us. There’s angels. Demons, even. My grandma said she talked to grandpa for years after he died, and I never had a reason not to believe her. So when weird stuff started happening, that’s where my mind went.

  It was just small stuff at first. You’d be walking around the kitchen, close a drawer, then turn around and it’d be open again. The faucet would turn on and off all by itself. Plates would rattle in the cupboards sometimes. Nothing scary. When the stove burner popped on one day, I yelled at whatever had done it that they better not do it again, and they didn’t.

  Jerry laughed when I told him about it, and I guess I understand. He was always the more skeptical one. And if you’re not around to actually see stuff happen, it can definitely sound like someone’s just being paranoid. But I grew up with all those movies. The stories and all that. When stuff starts moving around in your house, you think ghosts.

  The little things went on for six or seven months, then it all started to get worse. There were three times where Krissi got locked in her room. Or trapped, more like it. You could turn the knob, bang on the door, and nothing would happen. It was like the door itself was frozen in the frame.

  Jerry took a look at it and said something about the door being warped, but I knew that wasn’t it. I knew it because when the door got unstuck, it would be completely free. Like nothing was wrong with it in the first place.

  And the door wasn’t nearly the worst thing. The whole thing…the whole situation was just getting worse by the day. Jessica had her hair pulled. She’d feel it, turn around, and there’d be no one there. How in the Lord’s name are you supposed to feel about that when you’re just a kid? She’d get pinched. Punched, sometimes. Poor girl was just scared to death over it.

  The straw that broke the camel’s back, if you want to put it that way, came on around Christmas. Krissi was walking up the stairs and she fell. Fell all the way down. Hit her head pretty bad. Sprained one of her wrists. I mean, thank Jesus it wasn’t worse than it was, but it was still real scary. Krissi, she’s always been a big klutz, so I just figured she fell. But she kept saying “No momma. I was pushed. I was pushed, momma.” And...maybe this is tough to understand, but a mother knows things. You know when you’ve got a kid who’s lying and you especially know when you’ve got one who’s telling the truth. And I believed her. The last thing in the world you want to think is that someone...or something is out to hurt your kids. But with everything that’d happened in the house, it became harder and harder for me to try to deny it.

  I brought it all to Jerry. He was skeptical. I’ve said that. He wasn’t even real religious like me. He had trouble believing things he couldn’t see himself. So when I talked about calling someone...like someone to come out and investigate, he was totally against it. He didn’t want the attention...didn’t want the neighbors saying things. But I put my foot down right there. I said “Jer, it’s my job to make sure that we’re all safe. You put the roof over our heads, I make sure it doesn’t fall down on us.” So he agreed.

  I wasn’t really sure what to expect with the paranormal people. The…I guess ghost hunters is what you’d call ‘em. I wasn’t sure if they were gonna come in chanting and burning sage or something. But they were very

  professional. Had a lot of equipment. Cameras, recorders. Things to detect...all kinds of stuff. I didn’t understand it all. They had a psychic lady with them, but she didn’t give off weird vibes or anything. She was real sharp.

  They wanted to put up cameras all over the place, to see if they could catch anything But Jerry was real against that because...you know...he wanted to make sure we had some privacy. So they didn’t put one in our room, but they put ‘em in all the other rooms. Recorded for a couple of nights, then came back and collected everything.

  They came back a few days later. I guess they usually call, but they came back

  to show us what they’d found. The first video was in Krissi’ room. And like I said before, Krissi was always a big klutz. So her fallin’ out of bed wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. You’d hear a big thump come from her room and you’d just laugh a little. But this video...there wasn’t nobody laughing.

  There was a time stamp on the film, so you could see that it is about three in the morning. Krissi is dead asleep. And all by itself, without anything else touching it, you see her blanket start to pull down off of her. And it keeps on going till it’s on the floor. And it’s not like she’d kicked it off. It’s like someone was pulling it. But there wasn’t anyone there. And then she moves a little, like someone’s pushing her. Then...Lord. Then, she just slides off the bed and onto the floor. She doesn’t roll off the bed. She slides. Do you get what I mean?

  The second video...I don’t even like to think about that. If I close my eyes I can still see it, right behind my eyelids. You could see on the timestamp that it was right before the first video, but this one is in Chloe’s room. It’s all green, you know how the night vision stuff on camcorders looks, right? Chloe’s asleep, then her eyes pop right open. In the night vision, her eyes were glowing like a cat. I hated myself for it, but there was a part of me that was afraid. I didn’t even know why. In the video, Chloe sits up in bed, then

  puts her fists up to her head, like it hurts or something. She closes her eyes, and a few seconds later you hear the thump of Krissi hitting the floor in the next room. Chloe gets this big smile on her face and goes back to sleep.

  My heart stopped. I wanted to think there was some kind of coincidence. But I knew then what was really going on. It was Chloe. All of it. The cupboards opening, the hair pulling, Krissi falling down the stairs. We didn’t have a ghost in the house. We had...no, I’m not gonna say that. I won’t say that about her.

  I asked her about it, and she denied it. She lied to me, right to my face. I showed her the video...she couldn’t lie about it then. But she wouldn’t talk about it either. Just ran up to her room. I asked her...”What’s wrong with you?” It’s a horrible thing to say to your own child. I know that, but it’s true. There was something wrong with her. She was wrong. I tried taking her to a doctor. Getting the insurance to pay for anything is just one heck of a hassle, so I took money out of our savings and took her to a child psychologist in the city. He tried to talk to her, but she wouldn’t do anything besides stare at him. She was so cold. God, it terrified me to see her like that. After a half hour of not saying anything, he scooted his chair toward her, and she...pushed it. With her mind. Pushed it all the way across the room. He wouldn’t see her after that.

  Over the next year things just got worse and worse. She terrorized her sisters. Terrorized all of us. Things flew around the house. Nobody could sleep through the night. And she wouldn’t talk to any of us. I asked her, almost every day I asked her “Why, Chloe? Why are you doing this? Just tell me what’s wrong!” But she wouldn’t. She got kicked out of school when she hurt a boy. He called her a name, and she threw him all the way down the front steps of the school. She...God help us, she was horrible. She was a monster. A real, true-to-life monster.

  She stops for a moment. Sips her coke. She takes hold of the picture we were

  looking at before, the picture of the smiling family at Yellowstone, and lo
oks at it for a long while. I give her the silence.

  It was April when it all happened. When it ended. Jerry and I had been fighting a lot. I was so worried about Chloe...worried about everything that had been going on. We weren’t husband and wife anymore. We were jail-keepers. Or maybe we were the ones in jail. Trapped in that house with something that hated us. Hated us...and we couldn’t figure out why. So we fought. And the fights were real bad. Jerry was just so tired. He worked so early in the morning and we couldn’t get any sleep. Jerry wanted to send her away but...she was our daughter. Our problem. I didn’t want all these other people knowing that we couldn’t even talk with our own child. I...oh Lord, I’m sorry. I hate this.

  It was April, and the snows had really just started to melt off. Roads were still muddy, but it had been sunny all that week and I was basking in the sunshine like a lizard on a rock. I sat on the front porch a lot that week, both because it was beautiful outside, and because I couldn’t stand to face what was going on in there. Even sitting on the porch I could hear pots and pans rattling on the floor. She’d sit up there in her room and just push the pots and pans back and forth all day.

  It was Thursday of that week. Nobody had been getting any sleep, with all the noise. Thursday night at the end of a long week, and Chloe just wouldn’t let up. She started slamming one of the cabinet doors. Slamming it over and over and over. Louder and louder. Bam. Bam. BAM. This went on for...two hours? Maybe three? Finally, Jerry just couldn’t take it anymore. He went up to her room and banged on the door, and the cabinet just slammed harder. He yelled at her. He called her...just...awful things. I’d never in my life heard him...or anyone that angry. He tried to break down her door, but it wouldn’t budge. Finally, he left the house. He grabbed the keys to his truck and I heard the front door slam.