The Supernatural Enhancements

by Edgar Cantero

  “Sounds like quite a challenge.”

  “And an addiction. It becomes a full-time activity. One can hardly cut down on it; besides, you’ll dream with it anyway. As soon as he could, Wells quit his job in railway engineering, sold his stocks while they were high, which incidentally spared him the Depression, invested in land here, and became one of those jobless characters from Jane Austen’s novels whose only work is writing letters. Other members did the same. That’s why the Society was not founded; it happened. The Eye took over their lives, so why not at least formalize it? Some of them were British, after all.”

  “So the Society is just … an attempt to rationalize an obsession.”

  “And our obsession is to rationalize the Eye. In the Society we join forces to solve our common problem: What is this object, what is it telling us? The Society is like group therapy. We share our admiration and revulsion for the Eye. We play it down.”

  “Really?” I inserted. “Because from here it looks like with your codes and your secrecy you might be giving yourselves some importance.”

  “It is quite the contrary,” he opposed docilely. “The secrecy is necessary, of course; an extraordinary object remains so only as long as it’s not divulged. The rest is just us being melodramatic. Having fun in a British way, with social meetings and club rules. For the founders, it made the obsession easier to manage. They turned it into a game.”

  “A bourgeois pastime,” I quoted.

  “Certainly. Not everyone can afford a game consuming so much time. Or resources. Or health.”

  Niamh was stirring in her sleep, her head on my lap, my fingertips back on the fuzz behind her ears. Help lay by her side, his head down, eyes fixed on Niamh’s face.

  Caleb lit a new pipe. His tone had dropped an octave or so.

  “You know how some young people seem aged or worn-out?” he asked bitterly. “I think it runs in our group.”

  It was funny that he mentioned it, for I had determined, at some not-that-interesting point of the explanations, that Caleb Ford looked like an old man of forty-two. He blamed the weariness. I’d say his clothes helped.

  “Ironically, though,” he went on, “the fatigue makes us all the more eager to return here every year—if not for the Eye, for the comfort of being among peers. Then, having caroused with old friends, repeated the old rites, released our worries, and dined copiously, consulting the Eye just seems the natural thing to do.”

  “Does it?” I was recalling the Prometheus letter. He said he was looking forward to seeing Ambrose again, but wasn’t particularly keen about the reunion.

  “The Eye only speaks for about a minute a year. Chances are too rare to forfeit. No one in my lifetime has declined an invitation to a meeting,” he said with a smirk.

  “Not verbally, at least,” I slapped back, smirkless.

  His eyes returned to The Sacred Fount. Mine to Niamh.

  “What happens when someone deserts?” I asked, carefully picking the word.

  “We have a list of runner-ups, so to speak: people whom members recommend, based on personal trust and availability. In Wells’ case or mine, membership comes in families. But that is infrequent now. Most of us don’t have families anymore. The game takes too much time.”

  This air of surrender dumped some extra years on him too. And the pipe, and the rocking chair.

  “How do you allow it to?” I wondered.

  “Oh, it is immensely gratifying when you win. Believe me. I just have the blues now because I recently learned that my best friend defenestrated himself. But to have a vision, to savor it, to dissect it, to extract a clue from it, to place it in space and time; then to travel to a country, a region, and finally to pinpoint the right person … it pays. To look at them and marvel at their uniqueness, which goes unnoticed by everyone around them, even themselves … It compensates for the nightmares, for everything. It’s like a little victory over the Eye. It spotted someone in the world; it pointed me at a man in six billion.” He in turn pointed at his briefcase. “And I found him. His name was Julien Mugiraneza.”

  “The torture victim,” I said, on recalling the driver’s license I had failed to identify. “He was a Tutsi. But you say he’s dead now.”

  “Doesn’t matter. I found a special person. I won.”

  “Just like … numbers 4, 7, and 15?”

  “Yes. Four wins this year.”

  He fell silent then. After a while he added, wincing at the irony, “It would have been a good year after all.”

  “Have you ever found all twenty?”

  “In our dreams,” he said, chortling sadly. “Six is the standing record. And this is easier than ever now. They didn’t have any crystal balls before.”

  “Oh,” I said, spotting the start of a new subchapter. “So the others are just crystal balls.”

  “Sure, nothing mystic about those. They are man-made recording devices containing every year’s showdown since 1973—something our fathers would have killed for. It all started when the Eye took Ambrose and Curtis to the Eastern bloc. Let me tell you, traveling there wasn’t easy back then; you really needed a good reason. Anyway, in East Berlin they met a group of neuroscientists—”

  “Dänemarr!”

  “Very good,” he acknowledged, positively impressed. “Dr. Dänemarr was searching for a medium to transmit electric signals that trigger specific ideas in the brain, sensations without stimuli, like what you see, hear, smell in dreams. Ambrose and Curtis listened to him and thought that the Eye fit that description. Of course, secrecy forbade talking about it … But they reasoned it was in the Society’s best interest to make an exception. They exchanged letters with Dänemarr, and referred him to some bibliography, like the one you just read. Dänemarr visited Ambrose in ’seventy-two; Ambrose visited him back in ’seventy-three and Dänemarr showed him a prototype. A crystal ball. With his resources he never got much further; he can’t record but a minute’s worth of oneiric activity, in a chaotic way at best. However, it happens to suit our needs like a charm. Perhaps because the Eye’s electric signal is clearer than that of the human stream of thought, the visions are recorded to the smallest detail. So Ambrose exalted his work and offered to buy more crystal balls.”

  “So Ambrose sponsored Dänemarr’s research.”

  “In a way, yes. His prototypes haven’t evolved much, but they haven’t gotten any worse either. They have been of invaluable help. Before ’seventy-three, we could only replay the visions in dreams, but dreams, as you’ll know, favor only the most shocking visions in every Twenty.”

  “Too much of the pitchfork murderer and too little of the tomboy schoolgirl on the roof,” I whispered darkly.

  “We used to set clocks back then to wake us every sixty to ninety minutes, the usual time between REM phases, so as to retrieve the subtler episodes as we dreamed them. That’s all we had: dreams and notes. The first minutes after the showdown were crucial. Have you ever read a crystal ball?”

  It took me a while to understand that he meant just touching one. I remembered the one we first found in the secret room, how I neared a fingertip to it and the images jumped on me.

  “That was a recording,” he said, pointing at my thoughts. “Reading the Eye is more intense. Imagine pulling yourself out of that, grabbing paper and pen, and starting to take notes before it fades away. We still do that, but having a backup is a great comfort. Then we compare notes—if one doesn’t obtain twenty, he must have blinked through one or had two muddled up. Then we discuss them while they are still fresh: Did anyone recognize a clear landmark, a language, or even a face? A public person seldom makes it onto the list; it happens with fifteens every now and then. And finally, once the Twenty are set, there’s the draw.”

  “You draw the visions?”

  “No, we draw lots. To assign the roles.”

  “Roles,” I chorused. I was eager to get to that. “You mean the host, the secretary, and all that?”

  “No, those are more like positions. I am the
secretary, either for life or until I resign. Roles change every year.”

  “Leonidas, Hector, Archimedes, and such,” I guessed again.

  “Right. The role you land with decides which vision you work on: Leonidas takes the first, Hector takes the second, and so on. The names are a relatively modern invention. One of Ambrose’s first, in fact—he was the one with the classical education.”

  “I know Ambrose was Leonidas; which one are you?”

  “The twelfth. Phoenix,” he replied, as if I were supposed to have inferred that. I guess I could have. Just two days ago I had given him up for dead in Africa. Now he was here in my music room, lighting his pipe again, which tended to go out during the longest monologues.

  Later the true meaning struck me: Phoenix. I’m in the dark for a million years hearing them giggling at my eyeball. Then I wake up and kill them.

  “Exactly,” Caleb said. I wasn’t aware of having thought that aloud. “Number twelves are consistently some of the worst. That’s why we draw lots—nobody would ever choose to be the Phoenix. Although we all share and dream with all of the Twenty, it feels quite different to focus your efforts on the schoolgirl or the tortured man.”

  “Wait wait wait wait again,” I begged, my mind pushing the fast-forward button through the escape from the torture chamber and the fuel tank–exploding scenes. “You mean, like … all number twelves are the same?”

  “Pass me that book,” Caleb said, with a sigh that seemed to indicate he was finally taking pity on my puzzlement. “The one with the metal straps.”

  It was one of the books in Latin I had pretended to read. I remembered having noticed it before in the library, on a shelf with other old, megalithic volumes. The leather binding was furnished with straps; the pages were worn thin as onionskin, and similarly colored. The type was small and thick, with hook-shaped lowercase s’s.

  “The Wells were the ones to live with the Eye, so they studied it closely. Even before the Society had reached twenty members, Horace Wells had made out some patterns. Such as, ‘The tenth vision is always someone who can’t be seen’: the Ngara girl in 1896. Number twelves are people on the verge of death who suddenly escape: the Tutsi, last year. Number thirteens are living people who can see ghosts.”

  “The couple in the poppy field,” I said. “She was a ghost.”

  “You noticed. Eventually, Horace discovered the Eye’s criteria.”

  He turned the book toward me now, open at a spread with print on the left page and an engraving on the right. The engraving showed a naked man holding a spear. The style reminded me of the pictures in the study upstairs.

  “Each year’s Twenty match the twenty signs of a millennia-old canon mentioned by Byzantine and Persian sources as a sort of zodiac, and possibly descended from Indian Brahmanism, where it represented the stages in the path of spiritual evolution. First, the Warrior.”

  I knock down the two policemen in under five seconds.

  “The Watcher.”

  I pick up the grenade. The pin’s off.

  “The Sage.”

  I play the piano, one key at a time, and write ideograms.

  “The Genius.”

  I stand at the altar between the liquid crowd and the UV lights.

  “The Wizard.”

  I’m reading under the clopping kitchenware. The yuppie drops his chopsticks.

  “The Nobleman.”

  The books falls out of my hand. A fountain sings outside the Moorish windows.

  “The Mother.”

  Flies buzzing dumbly across the line between my shotgun and the countermen.

  “The Twins.”

  Fling the stone through the teeth of the hideous man holding me.

  “The Lover.”

  I smell her hair, the snow on my soles melting deep inside the bed.

  “Soul.”

  The African boy peers over his shoulder, sees through me; his skin feels me.

  “Bones.”

  The ocean expels me and my surfboard into a tempest of chrome clouds.

  “The Phoenix.”

  I shoot at the fuel tank; the ball of fire roasts them alive.

  “The Oracle.”

  The poppy flower disassembles at a kiss of her pellucid skin.

  “The Fortune.”

  I lay a thirteen-letter Greek word across the Scrabble board.

  “The King.”

  I shake his black hand; something explodes among the ramshackle rooftops.

  “The Monster.”

  I fork him to the ground, see his organs collapse.

  “The Wolf.”

  Pull the tubes; a Styx of blood trickles down my skin.

  “The Crab.”

  I’m holding two fives. Poker face.

  “The Juggernaut.”

  I crash-land on the tropical island. The cement cracks.

  “And the God.”

  I solve the Rubik’s cube. She smiles at me.

  Caleb closed the book.

  I felt an inexplicable joy.

  “Any more questions?” he cued.

  My mind was too crowded. I felt as if I were lucid-dreaming while being awake. I felt I was hallucinating. I felt I was too many.

  I had to wait for them to fade away.

  “Was the skeleton Bones?”

  “No, Bones is number eleven; it was the surfer. The skeleton was the Crab. Don’t ask why.”

  “Why?”

  “Look, we only understand so much, okay? It’s just a canon; the number and the general order fit, but some fits are obvious; some aren’t. The King is always someone with power; Sages are scientists; Geniuses are artists. The Mother’s a mother, seldom a father; the Twins are twins, sometimes just siblings. Souls are invisible. Wolves are often people just waking up. Crabs are … probably nonhuman. And Juggernauts and Gods … we never made any sense out of them, really.”

  Much to Help’s delight, Niamh stretched her limbs like a tiny cute mountain and forced herself to wake up. She wrote on her notepad, her hand slanting as though the letters were falling asleep or tumbling like dominoes, Did I miss much?

  I showed her the voice recorder. She nived.

  Since she had been quiet enough for the last hours, I advised her to go to bed. On her exit, she wrote a farewell line for Caleb. He stood up and bowed.

  “You are very kind, miss,” he said. “I too am pleased to be back. Please go to bed; you will feel much better in a couple hours.”

  Help escorted her upstairs.

  Caleb and I remained in the music room. Although our conversation had taken the best of the day, according to the grandfather clock, I felt far from satisfied. Caleb hadn’t sat down again; he was standing by one of the French windows, watching it, but not through it.

  He turned around and leaned his hand on a nearby chair. Not for support, more like comforting the chair itself.

  “I should contact Curtis Knox immediately.”

  I realized then I’ve been retaining a message from Ambrose to Knox for weeks. I’ll have to fix that soon. And come up with an explanation.

  “Knox is convinced you’re dead,” I said in the meantime.

  “I’ll be bringing him news from the underworld then,” he replied, his expression vicepresidentially empty. “A message from Ambrose. We have much to discuss.”

  “Really? What is to be discussed? Knox seemed determined to carry on. Do you think different?”

  He turned to me. “Jesus, Ambrose is dead!”

  The remark, albeit obvious, deserved a silence. I stayed on the sofa, unfazed.

  “Please excuse me if I sound too bold,” I began, “but this must have happened a few times before. How many suicides during your membership alone?”

  He looked down shyly. “Two confirmed.” Then, resolute: “But this is different. Ambrose wants us to stop.”

  “Yeah, like the others didn’t care.”

  “Now you’re being bold,” he reprimanded me.

  “Stay with me; I can be bolder. Ambrose didn�
��t commit suicide. His letters say so. This was an accident. A recording sphere in the secret room rolled off a shelf and leaned on a gas pipe. Full spheres have some electric charge, about four to five volts; we measured it. The charge spread through the pipe to the bedroom above and onto the brass bed. The canopy acts like a sort of antenna, radiating on the sleeper. He wasn’t dreaming like the rest of you: He was being subliminally fed the recordings over and over. He just thought his nightmares were getting more vivid this year, and felt the end coming because he was the age of his father when he took the leap, but it was overexposure that killed him.”

  Weak as it sounded for a consolation, that idea seemed to put down roots in Caleb’s mind. He noticed too; he tried to rebel against it.

  “Putting an end to the Society with his own life was not spur-of-the-moment. He planned it all his life. He chose bachelorhood. He chose childlessness. He meant to cut the line.”

  “That was his mind in February, when he wrote those letters,” I fought back. “But he died in September. That’s seven months to change his mind.”

  “How do you know he did?”

  “What the hell am I doing here?!” I proclaimed. “If he wanted to cut the line, why did he come for me? Why would he suddenly start looking for a next of kin in another continent? Why would he hand me down everything, after having given you the keys? He wanted this. He wanted us to have this argument!”

  With this I ended my exposition.

  Caleb took a chair, this time to sit on it. I took his place by the window, and said nothing.

  About two minutes later, I heard him fishing a paper from the mess of five-by-five grids and playing cards littering the table. He had retrieved the ledger page with the code names.

  “This needs updating,” he said, as he pulled a pen out of his waistcoat pocket.

  I spied over his shoulder as he filled out some squares in his fin-de-siècle handwriting.

  “Prometheus … I mean Silas Long sent a letter saying he gave up,” I tipped him. “And also Tyche, Ken Matsuo. And a guy called Kingston; he sent a postcard this week.”