Enhanced

by Cosca, Paul

  Dr. Fosbender opens up a photo album containing a number of news clippings

  and pictures. the first is dated February 2nd, 1972: “Homeless Psychic Saves Hundreds?”

  It was early 1972, snowing like crazy, and it wasn’t unusual to see a homeless man duck into the lobby of a hotel in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. The couple of people who got a good look at him said that he was wearing a suit that might have once been nice, but had been worn to death. He walked in, grabbed his head like it was hurting him, then started yelling at everyone to get out of the building. No one listened to him, of course. Why would they? Would you listen to some screaming homeless man? Someone tried to kick him out of the hotel, and he ran and pulled the fire alarm.

  The last of the people were exiting the building when the fire trucks pulled up. A few seconds later, one of the boilers in the basement exploded. For some people, that was proof of something paranormal. For others, it was nothing but coincidence. Or worse, some thought, maybe he was the one responsible for the explosion.

  The newspapers, and in particular the Post, started publishing reports of people seeing the same homeless man all over the city. He was saving people.

  She flips through the photo album, looking at headlines of various sizes.

  He pushed a woman out of the way of a car coming around a blind turn. Grabbed the arm of a man and stopped him, just as a load of bricks from a construction site came crashing down on the sidewalk in front of them. In Brooklyn, the homeless man stepped in front of a school bus, causing it to screech to a halt. As the driver got out to yell at him, a big rig sped through the red light in front of them, jackknifing in the intersection. Over the next two months he was seen in all five boroughs, and he seemed to be saving people from things that hadn’t yet happened. Was he predicting the future? Believers will always believe, and skeptics will always doubt. But in the middle ground, some people began to think about this could really mean.

  She finds another headline in the album (again from the Post): “Homeless Psychic Foils Plane Bombing”

  On March 7th, 1972 TWA flight 7, a Boeing 707 with fifty-two people on board, was about to take off from LaGuardia. Final checks were done, everyone was on board with their luggage, and they were departing the gate when a man ran out in front of the plane, waving his arms and screaming. An air traffic controller approached the man and quickly radioed back: according to the homeless man, there was a bomb on board.

  Everyone was taken off the plane and the bomb squad was called out. And there in the cockpit was a briefcase stuffed with five pounds of C4.

  There were some who still said that the homeless man must have been involved, but that looked less and less likely. And in any case, no one could ask him, because he disappeared from the airport as quickly as he came.

  People wanted to talk to him. The media wanted to talk to him. Scientists all over the country wanted to talk to him. If he was legitimate, and it seemed more and more likely that he somehow was, then the whole world had some serious questions for him. If he was foretelling the future, everything might change. But when they were looking for him, he couldn’t be found.

  She turns to a two-page spread from the Post. There’s a long moment of silence while she reads over it. She sighs deeply.

  April 19th. He was a little thinner and his hair was a little longer, but everyone knew who he was. They saw him running down a street in Harlem. A few called out, but no one tried to stop him. He was running at a full sprint. On a mission. He busted in the front door of an old apartment building. This was a place that should have been condemned and torn down years before, but no one had bothered. People said it was a fire hazard. And people were right.

  There was a crowd gathering...though what exactly they were looking for, I don’t know. Were they expecting tragedy? Or maybe just a spectacle. Drama always seemed to follow this poor man, and they didn’t have to wait long for it. Flames busted out a window on the top floor, and a few seconds later, he came out the front, supporting a coughing elderly woman. Some good Samaritans were helping the woman, but no one would get close to the man. He was...different. As fascinating as he was, he was also terrifying. There was nothing else like him.

  ...I actually got to sit down with someone who was there that day. She said that as the fire truck was getting closer, the man got a real strange look on his face. He looked back at the building, then back out at the street.

  He was crying. He closed his eyes, then ran back into the building, even as people were yelling for him to stop.

  As the firemen were unloading their equipment, the roof collapsed. It didn’t take long to extinguish the fire, but they had to wait to go inside because the building was so unstable. They certainly weren’t expecting to find any survivors. Everyone on the lower floors had gotten out, and a few hours later they cleared the building, room by room. Up on the third floor, they found that a beam from the fourth floor had crashed right through the ceiling, crushing the homeless man. Between the beam and the fire, there was no chance for survival. But when they went to move him, they heard something incredible: a little whimper. Life.

  When they moved the man’s body, they found a little baby boy. Just a couple months old. Apart from a couple scratches and some coughing, he was just fine. He’d been sheltered from the fire, the smoke, and the collapsing building by a man he didn’t know...a man who knew everything.

  Everyone figured that the man would remain a mystery. There was no ID on the body, and they couldn’t even study his brain because of the fire. But a few days after his death, someone came forward. She traveled to New York to claim her husband’s body, and finally the world knew his name: Donald Gael. Don.

  I was ten years old in 1970. There are probably a lot of women who’d be horrified to give up their age so readily, but it’s important that I say that. Because 1970 was the last time I ever saw my father, and I was still at the age when that poor man was my whole world. I still had the kind of enthusiasm that only exists for girls for their fathers. And I cherish that. It means so much to me that I didn’t have to know him in the way he ended up.

  My father was an air traffic controller, which was, and I suppose still is, a horribly stressful job. When I was about eight, he was working sixty-five hour weeks and ended up in the hospital with a fever that just wouldn’t break.

  He was gone for a week and I hated it. No one would tell me what was going on; I didn’t really find out about it until a year after he was gone. My mom, after a couple glasses of wine, finally told me that it was there in the hospital where everything started to happen. He was unconscious, the fever punishing his brain. It got so bad that they thought they might lose him. But even though he wasn’t awake, he was speaking. Mumbling. At first, my mom just thought it was fever dreams. But she started listening closer and realized he was saying names. The names of doctors and nurses before they came in the room. He was doing it again and again. At first she chalked it up to coincidence, but then he started muttering the name of his sister, just a few moments before she walked in the room. She’d come up from Atlanta to Philadelphia to see him, and hadn’t told anyone she was coming.

  He got better, but he was never the same. When I was little, I remember my dad being so smart and funny. He always had a little joke. A word. A gesture. He always had something to make you laugh. But when he got out of the hospital, the jokes stopped. He was so tired all the time. His brain just didn’t work the same way anymore. And from then on, any time he’d come under stress, words would just come spilling out of his mouth, totally out of his control. Sometimes it would just be for a few seconds. Other times, the attacks would last for minutes at a time.

  Even though my mom didn’t tell me then, I started to figure out that he wasn’t just saying gibberish. And my mom, god bless her, did her best to keep it all together. When it would happen, we would just ignore it, so we wouldn’t embarrass him. But it quickly got to the point where it just couldn’t be ignored anymore. Not when it was happen
ing dozens of times a day.

  She took him to every doctor she could and got every test available, and there were no answers. Most of them just said he was too stressed. One said he had Tourette’s. But none of them would actually listen to what he was saying during the attacks. Oh I’m sure they heard. I’m sure they heard names

  from their own lives spilling from the lips of a man they didn’t know. But even the most educated people can be scared of the unknown. I can’t blame those doctors, not really. If I didn’t know what I do, how would I react? In the end, nothing worked, and he ended up getting fired. From there, the end was fast in coming.

  Within months, he was completely lost most of the time. The words would flow out of him like breath. You could stand right in front of him and he wouldn’t see you. Some other world...or a million worlds were flashing in front of his eyes. I didn’t understand, but I knew my heart was breaking watching him like that. I knew one day we’d lose him, and that’s just what happened.

  My mom came home one day and found the house empty. He hadn’t left a note or taken anything with him. He’d just walked out the door. It took a few hours for her to find him, walking down the streets in downtown Philadelphia, wearing his nicest suit, and talking to himself. She told me...much later on she told me that she sat with him for a half hour, trying to get through to him. And in one moment of clarity, he finally came back to her. He told her...

  She sighs again.

  My dad told her that he wanted us to be happy. And he knew that my mom could never really be happy if she had to be chained down to someone like him. He said he was sad...but that he’d be sad no matter where he was, either at home or away. So he hoped that him leaving would at least make someone happy.

  I was so angry at my mom when she told me about that. But...I can understand it now. Or at least I can imagine how hard it must have been for her. Can you imagine loving someone so utterly broken? So...I don’t blame her anymore. It hurts, but I don’t blame her.

  Instead, I tried to take all that hurt and all that sadness and make

  something good out of it. Learning about him inspired me to learn about the brain and the virus. And the ramifications...we’re still figuring all of that out. Some physicists say that there might be an infinite number of universes out there. Perhaps every time a decision is made or an event occurs, every single possibility of that event branches off into an entirely new reality. And I think what my dad saw, and what truly drove him insane, were these crossroads. He wasn’t just seeing our reality, but the possibilities of every single other reality branching off of it. Everything. All at once. A fire. A bomb. A car accident. People living. Dying. Lives changing forever or ending in an instant.

  I don’t know when he decided to start acting on those thoughts, but something drove him to it. I don’t think he meant to be a hero...but I think he was a better hero than any of those costumed people. He didn’t need glory or fame. He just needed to quiet some need he had for helping others. And that...I think is the real meaning of heroism.

  March 15th, 1998

  My plane lands roughly at O’Hare, and I take the blue line train to downtown. In the middle of the Loop, in the heart of the tourist and financial district, I come to a shockingly green and open space. It’s a bright, crisp day and there’s nothing but blue overhead. Amidst the towering buildings, this open view is a breathtaking sight. I’ve been to Chicago many times, I’ve lived here on and off, and this is definitely my favorite park in the city, if not the entire country. This isn’t a flashy place; there isn’t any equipment or any place to play. This is a place of reflection. The grounds are precisely manicured, and there are a great number of benches, all facing the same direction. This is Chicago’s Memorial Park, which looks on Memorial Tower. It is here that I meet my interview subject for today. I had planned for this trip to be a few months from now, but an unexpected phone call pushed up the schedule.

  He is bundled up in a heavy coat and scarf and looking up at the tower. I can’t help but look up too. What was once over 100 stories tall is now only sixty-five. There are no more offices there, Just the museum and a tall memorial to all those who died at the site and around it. And further up, high above the apex of the tower, is The Spot.

  Everyone seems to see The Spot a little differently. Some say that it shimmers. Others can’t see it at all. For me, it looks like a slight blur. If you quickly glance, you might not even notice it. But if you’re looking at it straight on, it’s obvious that something isn’t right. There is some slight difference in that portion of the sky.

  That is how The Spot has looked my entire life. But I know that there was a day when that spot was a great, black void. And for a moment, that void opened up the gates to Hell. It’s said that what we see through The Spot is actually the sky on the other side, still connected through that point in space. I don’t like to think about that. I hope The Spot is closed forever, but I can’t say for sure. None of us can.

  I sit next to Jackson Bennett. He looks happy to see me, much happier than he did all those years ago at the bar, but I am sure that being here has brought up some terrible memories. For quite a while we just sit, saying nothing, looking up at the tower. Finally, he

  clears his throat and speaks.

  JACKSON: I been comin’ here less and less. I should be here. And I hate that I can’t be here no more. I just don’t get anyplace no more. Damn arthritis keeps me home. Gotta love those joints when you got em, man. Love ‘em now. Take care of ‘em. ‘Cause one of these days, you gonna lose a knee or bust a hip or somethin’. Then every single damn thing you do becomes so much harder. That’s one of the hardest things about gettin’ old, man. And I didn’t do myself no favors with all the shit I did when I was young.

  I’m glad I’m here, though. Man, you gotta come down once and awhile and pay tribute. I don’t know that a whole lot of folks even think about it now. I guess I can’t blame ‘em too much. I mean, most of ‘em wasn’t even born then. So I don’t blame ‘em, but it still hurts. When it happened, it was the biggest tragedy in the country. Now...it’s just history. I’m just history.

  But shit, man. I don’t mean to get all down like that. It wasn’t all bad. Shit, it wasn’t even half bad till the end. We all had some real good times together back then. We had the whole crew together and we got ourselves into some real fun shit back in the day.

  See, I don’t know how it was in the rest of the country, but in Chicago you didn’t have to feel too bad if you was Enhanced. It didn’t feel like no bad thing. There was lots of us, especially over on the west and south side. We had a real crew goin’. There were lots of us around, but there were a few of us that was real close.

  See, there was me and there was T...T had some real weird shit with his eyes and hair and shit. He was a real weird lookin’ cat, but he also had some amazing...whaddy’a all ‘em...reflexes. Twitch reflexes. He couldn’t run for a long time, but he could snatch up a dime if you glued it to the hood of a car and drove by real fast. We did that a few times.

  There was Johnny J, who was my best friend back in the day. He was a real stand-up guy. A real cool cat. He was funny as hell, too, but the

  problem was he always had to whisper. So nobody could ever hear his jokes. Everyone always thought he was shy, ‘cause he never said much. But really, he just had this crazy voice that he had to keep quiet. You heard of folks that can break glass with their voice, right? Well Johnny J’s voice was like that times a million. It had somethin’ to do with the waves or some shit. I don’t know. He told me once, but he was so hard to hear! Let me put it this way: I made the mistake once of spookin’ him while we was driving in my car. The noise he made busted my windshield and knocked the steering wheel out of my hands. Gave me a real good nose bleed, too. I can laugh about that shit now ‘cause we didn’t end up in a ditch. But man, I didn’t never do that again.

  We had this cat named Emilio who ran with us. He was Mexican, but we didn’t worry about racial shit in our group, so he
was cool. I’ll tell ya, man. I ain’t never met nobody who could think faster than Emilio. If you had somethin’ that needed figurin’ out, you just gave that shit to Emilio and he’d hand it back to you right after. He thought so fast that when he asked you to do something, you didn't bother askin’ why because you knew he’d already figured out it was the best thing to do. Sometimes that cat could be hard to talk to, ‘cause he was always thinking about a dozen different things all the time. But he was a real cool dude, and we liked havin’ him around.

  Finally, there was Sally. And man, Sally was one hell of a girl. She was white, like T, but she’d grown up on the south side, so she was cool. There’s lots of white folks who got problems with blacks. And I guess there’s lots of blacks who got problems with whites. But we didn’t care about that. We all grew up together, and we all faced the same kind of problems. Why worry about some stupid shit like what color you got on your face?

  Anyway, Sally was real cool, but we all had one rule: You don’t never arm wrestle Sally. She looked all petite, but that chick had some strength, man! Sometimes we’d roll into some other neighborhood to hang out at the bars, and if anyone ever gave us trouble, Sally would challenge ‘em to arm

  wrestle. Man, I remember there was this big biker kind of cat, and when they arm wrestled, she slammed his arm down so hard that it broke. Broke his arm, broke the table. We had to run the hell out of there, but we laughed about that shit for years.

  That was us. T, Johnny J, Emilio, Sally, and Me. I never thought I was too much of anything, but being around them made me feel real special. I couldn’t never explain too good what my own Enhancement was...it’s not as easy as being strong or fast or nothin’. Makes me wish I went to school, man. I wish someone could tell me all the science about what my body does. I’ve tried lookin’ it up, so let me see if I can explain a little...see, energy can do all kinds of shit. Like, if you’re driving your car...some of the energy goes to makin’ the car go, and some of it becomes heat. So energy can do all kinds of shit depending on what’s going on. So when I touch things...like direct contact with my skin, and I really think about it, something cranks up the energy between me and whatever I’m touchin’. See...I see that look on your face. You got no idea what the fuck I’m talkin’ about.