The Supernatural Enhancements

by Edgar Cantero

—Like in Mysteries of Old Peking?

  (I pluck holes in a napkin & lay it over the cipher.)

  —I see: The letters showing through spell the message. So Caleb must have a perforated card to read this.

  —& Ambrose too.

  —Isn’t it a big giveaway? To have a perforated card lying around?

  (Shrug.)

  —And besides, the cipher is short as it is. If only a few letters count, how long is the real message? Three words?

  —Strückner didn’t need more.

  —No, I guess not.

  —You think I wrong.

  —No, I don’t think you’re wrong. Maybe it is a grille. All I’m saying is, Ambrose wouldn’t have a perforated card sitting in his desk. In any of them. For a start, we would’ve found it.

  —So he destroyed it?

  —No, because it’s not a single-use device either. Caleb needs the same grille to read it, so it’s something they both have, or know. Maybe it’s not a physical object, but more like a rule. Like, read every five letters, or three letters forward and two down, or as a knight moves in chess. Check the puzzle section in the newspaper; there might be more.

  (I find a story in the newspaper. Show him.)

  —Did we know THIS?

  AN ARTICLE IN THE SOUTH VIRGINIA COURANT, NOVEMBER 22, 1995

  * * *

  Extended Rwandan Genocide Kills 100 a Month

  By Meredith Cohen—Associated Press

  KIGALI—About one hundred Rwandan Tutsis a month are still killed by Hutu refugees settled in bordering eastern Zaire, from where they make incursions into Rwanda and threaten to tumble the young government.

  Despite the end of the hundred-days genocide with the rise to power of the left-wing Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) in July 1994, ethnic tensions have not decreased between the Hutu majority and the decimated Tutsis under the appeasing government of new Rwandan president Pasteur Bizimungu.

  Génocidaires who fled the country, supposedly fearing retaliations, are now settled in massive refugee camps in eastern Zaire. From there they continue to launch attacks on the Tutsi population in the province of South Kivu and lead violent incursions into Rwandan territory.

  “[Zairian dictator] Mobutu is not only permitting and supporting these attacks, but plotting to weaken our new state and eventually conquer it,” denounced Henri Umutoni, spokesman for the Kigali government.

  The Rwandan genocide of 1994, perpetrated by members of the FAR (Forces Armées Rwandaises) together with extremist Hutu militias (Interahamwe), killed half a million to one million Tutsis and moderate Hutus across the country.

  LETTER

  * * *

  Axton House

  1 Axton Rd.

  Point Bless, VA 26969

  Dear Aunt Liza,

  Sorry about our silence. I just realised A. hasn’t written any letters in the last 2 days. I hardly see him writing now. He reads & naps most of the day. Nights getting a little too hard. We drove to Midburg yesterday to see Ambrose’s psychotherapist. I didn’t like her very much. He did. Paid for a session & everything. Hasn’t made things better so far. She said she a Mason. Are there Mason women?

  He left me to crack the cipher letter to Caleb (he told you about the cipher, right?) & he just reads what Ambrose’s letters & Dr Belknap (that’s her name) talked about: German madmen trying to transmit thoughts thru wires & stuff—conductive telepathy, Dr B. said. He found the literature in the library, but most of it in German. I wish again Strückner were here. I liked him a lot. He could help me look after him. He won’t let me help him. He wakes me up at night dreaming & I don’t dare to wake him because he gets so angry at me, like I interrupted. He doesn’t get any rest & then he just falls asleep around the house & his right eye is still red brimmed & he doesn’t want me to take pictures. I told him to change beds & he said I should move to the 2nd floor! You should tell him something. He’d listen to you.

  I miss you a lot. I wish you were here.

  Love,

  Niamh

  A.’S DIARY

  * * *

  Of course it’s excruciating to have an eye pulled out and be forked on the ground every night. It’s fucking agony.

  But I long for the rest. I want the proud look of the woman in lingerie driving. I want the peace of the Arab reader dying. I want the peach-fuzz warmth beneath the redhead’s blanket, and to hear her love in the dark.

  NOVEMBER 23

  DREAM JOURNAL

  * * *

  Waves ripple gently through the waist-tall grass, tingling the red paper flowers afloat, breaking tenderly on my torso and hers, a colorless shirt knotted over her navel.

  I pick one big clunky poppy and give it to her, and she takes it between two fingers to her face, but the breeze disassembles the petals as soon as her fluffy lips touch it. There’s something wrong with her. In the way her normal-girl skin glows under the sun like a burned Polaroid.

  I sit reading a magazine under the clopping of wind-chiming kitchenware. My stall is an insect among mammoth skyscrapers. At the counter, before a bowl of noodles, the yuppie just dropped his chopsticks.

  The book falls out of my hand.

  I fall. And the monster comes behind me yielding his pitchfork, and I just flinch, hoping it won’t hurt this time, but it always does.

  SECURITY VIDEOTAPE: RAY’S HARDWARE AND ELECTRONICS

  * * *

  1995-11-23 THU 10:01

  A girl with one shaven temple exposing loads of metal on her ear is browsing through the back shelves. The WOMAN in the down vest and wool hat comes behind the counter.

  WOMAN: Oh, there you are.

  NIAMH: [Waves a hand at her, continues checking boxes.]

  WOMAN: [Calling inside.] Sam, it’s the girl from Axton House again! [To NIAMH.] Haven’t seen your brother for a while; how’s he doing?

  NIAMH: [Just nods.]

  [SAM, under a baseball cap and holding a mug of coffee, joins the woman.]

  SAM: Hi, there! Buying ourselves a new toy, are we?

  NIAMH: [Flashes a quick grin in his direction.]

  [She finally chooses a box, approaches the counter, starts checking her wallet. Sam slips the box toward the woman.]

  SAM: So how’s that security kit we got you?

  NIAMH: [One hand raises a thumb while the other one produces a bunch of notes.]

  SAM: Yeah, had it myself for six months now. Full color, sound, one tape a day …

  WOMAN: [On the cash register.] Two hundred ninety-five, dear.

  NIAMH: [Starts counting money on the table.]

  SAM: [Inspecting the goods.] Another camera? Girl, I’m looking forward to seeing that film you’re doing. Gonna be some blockbuster.

  WOMAN: [Taking the money.] Thank you very much.

  SAM: Will there be any ghosts in it?

  [Niamh stops; stares at the man.]

  [An extremely indecisive second lingers by, pondering whether to elapse or not, and finally does.]

  SAM: [Handing her the goods.] Just kidding.

  NIAMH: [She takes the box, smiling, waves at them, and starts to leave.]

  WOMAN: Good-bye. Say hi to your brother!

  SAM: [Together.] Have fun!

  [They wait, following her off frame until the doorbell is heard twice.]

  WOMAN: [Now cold.] You’re an asshole.

  SAM: I was being nice!

  HANDHELD CAMERA

  * * *

  An aquarelle blur of indecisive objects is laboriously morphing into Virginia, with a big house in the foreground with a conservatory and breeze breathing on the mike. Then the country sways lightly and the camera motions forward with a crunching sound of Converse-trodden gravel, and casually zooms into the arthropod vine crawling down the windows, and the many broken slats on the rotten wooden shutters, but the image quality is too bad to capture the beauty of its ugliness. So the camera keeps gliding across the field of hungover rain puddles toward the verdant wall at the end of the garden, then swerves right into the dese
rt backyard of the once cheerful house that gazes down at the camera like a grumpy grandmother flash-smiling just for the album’s sake, until the camera turns again onto the magnetic green form of the box hedge forming the outer wall of the maze, and it is ensnared toward the gate in the middle, closing in, until it spies the flakes of white paint peeling off the iron archway supporting the hedge transom overhead.

  And inside, the camera checks the two passageways on the left and the two on the right, and a myriad dead leaves and insect carcasses down below where Niamh’s imitation Chuck high-tops meet the floor as they step in frame for the first time and walk, choosing the first passage on the right.

  There a tunnel of green walls runs into a long dead end, but the camera follows the blind road anyway, hoping to discover a gap in one of the walls, which actually happens, and there it turns left around the wall, panning into another green passageway, and it crabs along it, indistinct leaves flowing past, swarming, rubber footfalls accelerating; then it takes a right turn before the end, checks the right side, then chooses left, then turns right again, then it slows down as it dollies forward. Then a U-turn to the left. Then the camera tilts down, mike closing into the breakfast sound of ground leaves, the zigzagging right and left and right too quick for the autofocus, and finally into a square where the camera reveres the frozen sculpture in the middle.

  It is Ariadne, sitting against a sky of television static, her marble skin blackened by mold between her lips, and fingers winding a ball of petrified yarn. [Stop.]

  Look up at the iron archway of the gate. The camera tilts down. A gentle-veined hand comes into view, macramé bracelets dangling around the delicate wrist, and that hand grabs a twig and draws an arrow on the gravel, pointing left. Then the Chucks follow the arrow, run all the length of a long passageway. They take a right turn at the end, and the camera wonders at the many gaps opening onto each side. It looks down again, and the twig draws a left arrow. The Chucks follow the arrow. [Stop.]

  One Chuck wipes the arrow. The twig, like a Baba Yaga’s forefinger, scrapes a new arrow on the sweet putrid ground, pointing in the opposite direction. The Chucks follow it, run across another green tunnel, and stop at the new path on the left. The twig draws an arrow pointing at it. [Stop.]

  The Chuck wipes the arrow, then pivots a hundred and eighty degrees, runs forward to the next dead end. [Stop.]

  The twig draws an arrow somewhere. [Stop.]

  The Chuck wipes a different arrow, turns around. [Stop.]

  The camera looks upward, pining for some other color. [Stop.]

  Heavy breathing through the nose saturates the mike. [Stop.]

  A notepad lies on the floor, a section of an unfinished labyrinth penciled on the top page, behind the miniature wall of umber leaves in sharp focus, their crisp borders nibbled by sugar grain–size insects. The parallel walls of a green unfocused corridor run into oblivion. Then Niamh whistles, overloading the mike. When the sound waves settle, a magpie is heard fluttering in fear of a train engine.

  The silence slowly ebbs in again, like the shadow of a ripe black rain cloud coming from the north. Niamh whistles again. The silence is not held back much longer.

  Niamh jumps into the frame, running forward, reaching the spot in the passage where Help comes crashing through the left green wall, and she hugs the dog, kisses his head, and Help licks her face in return, and he follows Niamh delightedly as she runs toward the camera again, which has time to spot the dirt on the Chucks’ tips like mold on Ariadne’s lips before being grabbed, and it just confusedly records the final moments in the maze as Help and Niamh crawl back into the hole where— [Stop.]

  VIDEO RECORDING

  * * *

  LIBRARY THU NOV-23-1995 13:02:26

  NIAMH sitting on the floor, petting HELP, listening to A.’s rambling.

  A.: But I told you, and you know it by heart! It’s right, right, left, right, ahead, right, and you reach the center!

  NIAMH: [Slaps her notepad on the floor, writes wrathfully. Then shows.]

  A.: [After reading.] So you want to map the whole maze. Why?

  [Niamh stands up, strides to the desk, grabs the ciphered message to Caleb. With her finger, she draws an imaginary path through the letters.]

  A.: [Realizing.] Oh! [Later, softer.] Oh.

  [Looking more perplexed than keen.] Okay. Good idea.

  NIAMH: [Writes.]

  [For long.]

  [Then shows.]

  A.: Yeah, I see what you mean. And having a map of your own maze on your desk is hardly a telltale.

  [She relaxes. Looks up at him as though waiting for instructions.]

  Okay, so you should … take an aerial shot. Can you see the maze from the tower?

  NIAMH: [Shakes her head.]

  A.: No. We could strap a camera onto a pigeon; they did that in World War One.

  NIAMH: [Writes. Then shows.]

  A.: Jesus, Niamh, I told you it’s a good idea; what do you want me to do, jerk off to it?

  [After an ellipsis, Niamh turns around in a snit, stomps out through the west door.]

  [Help follows shortly after.]

  [On the dog leaving.] Yeah, sure, take your mother’s side.

  HANDHELD CAMERA

  * * *

  A wide Novembral sky fills the screen, its bottom rim cracked by the phalanxes of distant trees like the edges of a very old mirror. The obnoxious wind blows into the mike. A flapping scarf is heard every now and then.

  The camera booms up as it is lifted, and it sees a column of brick, with a rope tied around it, and then it dollies back to prove that the column of brick is actually a chimney, as tall as the cameraman, sprouting from the roof on the very edge of the steeper rafter, which falls at an approximate sixty-degree angle. Slack rope swings in the wind, stretching from the distant chimney ahead, and the camera pans east, where the gentler pitch of the upper slope allows it to see the whole roof, a field of blue slate punctured by colorless chimneys and a silhouetted tower at the far end. And meanwhile the rope is dropped around the base of a lightning rod, and Niamh’s hand pulls the rope gently, forcing the hemp to rasp on the metal with a hoarse sawing sound, peeling the rust off, and the camera turns around, and not two inches away from the white tip of the Chuck the lower slope plummets to the void. [Stop.]

  The camera sits lower now, fixed on the western stratus veiling the sky, Niamh’s scarf occasionally whipping the lens, rocked by the ululating wind; and then, like a roller coaster reaching the highest summit and looking down into the deepest fall, the camera peers over the edge of the upper slope of the roof. It sits next to the pair of Chucks at the end of trim legs in striped leggings, wiggling excitedly.

  The shoes in the end slowly creep down the blue shingles that now fill the high-angle shot as—

  CLANG—the whole sled composed of legs and Chucks and scarf and the camera slides down at high velocity in an oblique line, runs onto the spine of a dormer window, ski-jumps off it, the empty sky filling the frame for a fraction of a second, and then it lands back on the roof and slides farther until Niamh’s heels hit the ledge of the building’s wall, protruding an inch above the drain at the bottom of the slope, and miraculously the shoes and the legs and the scarf and the camera stop.

  And the broken lightning rod comes clanging behind, doesn’t stop, tumbles over the edge, and is heard bouncing on the ground, far away.

  MUSIC ROOM THU NOV-23-1995 14:46:08

  [A. stops writing on a CLANGING noise. He opens the French doors and calls outside.]

  A.: Niamh, are you doing anything stupid?

  The air stays jaw-dropped. The camera is picked up and raised, and it gazes over the edge like Simba the lion king on the monkey’s hands, and it takes in the bleared birches in the back, and an emerald-shiny maze. Zoom in.

  (In the foyer, me carrying a lightning rod.)

  —Were you on the roof just now?

  (Nod.)

  —All alone?

  (Nod.)

  —Wow. Good j
ob.

  VIDEO RECORDING

  * * *

  MUSIC ROOM THU NOV-23-1995 22:37:15

  The fireplace is roaring. Dirty dishes on the floor. A., NIAMH, and HELP lie prone on the carpet, watching E.R.

  A.: Oh, c’mon. X-Files is so much better than this. Scully is in love with Mulder and we don’t need piano-music scenes to know. It’s just there. It’s in the way she says, “Mulder, you’re out of your mind”; her eyes are saying, “I’d fuck the soul out of you.” That’s sexual tension. Not this. This is emotional porn.

  [Sips from his Cherry Coke.]

  Scully is all the romance subplot I need.

  [They stay watching.]

  VIDEO RECORDING

  * * *

  KITCHEN FRI NOV-24-1995 05:13:14

  Lights yawningly flicker ON.

  (The kitchen: stainless Streamline Moderne and silvery appliances aligned side by side with wooden beams and paneled windows and a redbrick oven.)

  [A. walks in from the hall. He opens the fridge. Checks a glass in the dish rack. He pours himself some milk, standing by the counter.]

  [The lights flicker again. A. looks up.]

  [The lights glow brighter.]

  A.: [Pissed.] Now what?

  [Droning brightness saturates all whites in the image, swelling in a luminous aura like icy embers.]

  [A fluorescent tube at the back of the room explodes in splashing sparks and smashes onto the counter. A. turns in that direction as the video fills with blazing white and the audio burns with a deafening buzz. He blocks his ears, shouts.]