Michael C. Keith is the author of numerous books, articles, and stories. He teaches communication at Boston College. http://www.michaelckeith.com/

Word Play (June 20, 2010. Issue 18.)

“We would see a sign!”
The word within a word . . .
To be eaten, to be divided, to be drunk
-- George Eliot

Phillip began to notice that words he had not typed were appearing in his emails. For example, in his sentence, “I might be there if I get rid of this headache,” “might” was followed by “to” and “headache” by “come”—“I might to there if I get rid of this headache come.” At first he paid little attention to it figuring he just had too much on his mind to send intelligible signals to his fingers, but the incidents became more frequent and he began to suspect he might have a problem. The concern drove him to his primary care doctor, who referred him to a neurologist. The brain scans he was administered revealed no evidence of anything abnormal.

“Probably overwork, Mr. Halprin. You admit to being a world-class multitasker, and that can have a toll. Take a break and slow down a little,” advised the medical specialist. “The mind needs a breather once in a while, too. It’s like any other organ in the body. Taxing it affects its performance. I don’t know how you guys out there on the stock market floor keep things straight with all the yelling and chaos.”

Phillip had been a commodities broker for five years and loved every minute he spent in the pit, but he had to admit there were days he left work more than a little addled. In fact, he had a significantly impaired eardrum as the result of his colleagues’ ground shaking bellows during moments of frenzy on the trading floor. To Phillip it was the cost of his chosen profession and he held no grudge against his fellow workers, because they were only doing their job and many suffered similar hearing problems after years of working the boards. It was after a particularly clangorous day of bidding that he realized his left ear was damaged, but it took a week before he knew the ringing and rumbling were not going away. He wondered if it was possible that something more than his auditory system had been compromised. Perhaps the verbal blasts had screwed up the wiring on that side of his head causing his current communication problem, and maybe it would have gone undetected by his brain scan, he anxiously speculated.

In the couple of days following this disturbing thought, Phillip felt relieved because his emails had not revealed any further anomalies. However, his tranquility was broken when the short-circuiting happened several times on a late Friday afternoon. The words “to” and “come” appeared again as he composed an email to his newest girlfriend, this time after “plan,” “at,” “regardless,” and “the.”

“Let’s plan to a meeting at come the lake regardless come of the to weather.” 

His practice of reviewing emails before sending them kept him from embarrassment, although mistake riddled text was far from uncommon in the email he received. People just didn’t give much thought to errors in their cyber messages, and this irritated Phillip. In fact, it was high on his list of pet peeves. Didn’t anyone think writing errors in emails counted, he wondered? As a former English major, the debasement of language rankled him, and he was determined not to slide down that slippery slope, although it seemed the rest of world already had.

For a week Phillip encountered the same phantom words in several of his emails, but when a new one cropped up, he began to panic. Now, in addition to the ubiquitous “to” and “come,” “mount” appeared in the text of his emails, and one of his messages managed to slip past his scrutiny. It baffled his cousin, who was its recipient.

“Hey Phillip, what is ‘Next time to you’re here come we’ll mount visit Carla?’ Are you suggesting a threesome with old auntie Carla?”

“Sorry, Dan, my fingers seem to be working independently of my mind lately,” apologized Phillip, his anxiety reaching new levels. “I meant the next time you’re here we’ll visit Carla. She’s not doing too well, and I know she’d like to see you.”

“You had me scared there for a moment, cuz. I thought your canoe tipped.”

“I think maybe it has,” answered Phillip flush with worry.

“What’s going on?” inquired his cousin.

“Probably nothing. You know me. Always get a bit jumpy about things,” answered Phillip.

“What things?”

“Oh, my brain is misfiring, is all. Got a bum ear, and I think it’s causing me some cognitive issues,” replied Phillip.

“Cognitive? Hey, big word, dude. I like that one. So, what you’re saying is you can’t get it up, eh? I’m just kidding, cuz. I went to junior college, so I can Google that one,” joked his cousin.

“You’re smarter than you look, but just by a millimeter,” quipped Phillip.

“Really, if there’s anything I can help with, don’t hesitate to call someone else.”

“I’m okay. I’ll take my malfunctioning cerebral cortex to my IT-person,” replied Phillip.

“Well, you know what your dad always said?” inquired his cousin.

“Yeah,” replied Phillip. “’Why worry about life, you’ll never get out of it alive,’ was his favorite saying. It’s really ironic, too, because he worried about everything, and as the genes would have it, I seem to have inherited that wonderful attribute. How lucky is that?”

* * *

Throughout his adulthood emotional crisis, big or small, would invariably resurrect memories of the greatest trauma of Phillip’s life--the disappearance of his twin brother, Davy. It had been almost 15 years since he failed to come home, but the experience remained fresh in his mind, and now with the bizarre email thing, Phillip was in turmoil. He could not sleep and his appetite, usually enormous, had all but vanished.

His brother’s unsolved abduction opened the floodgates to bad fortune for the Halperin family. A year later Phillip’s father died of pancreatic cancer and less than two years after that devastating blow his mother succumbed to a broken neck resulting from a fall down the basement stairs on her way to the laundry room. All of this upheaval before Philip had reached his eighteenth birthday instilled in him a profound sense that the world was essentially a dark and dangerous place.

A series of unsuccessful personal relationships added to his pessimistic outlook and he found that his only real solace came with the recollection of his childhood. His happiest memories were the times he spent playing with his identical twin. The world was such a different place then, reflected Phillip. Indeed the sky had seemed bluer, the grass greener, and the sun brighter to him. Every aspect of his early boyhood with Davy seemed sweeter and more vibrant than what was to follow.

Amongst Phillip and Davy’s favorite pastimes were games, particularly those with words. The hours would evaporate as they lost themselves in Scrabble, Hangman, Anagrab, and Jumble, often to their mother’s dismay.

“You boys need to get outside and get some sun. You look like cave dwellers. Pale as ghosts,” she would half-lament, telling them to take their obsession to the picnic table in the backyard.

Phillip’s love of language would lead him to a career in book editing, a profession he thought his sibling would have pursued as well, and likely with more success, because Davy had the greater talent when it came to using words. This never upset or made Phillip jealous because he admired and loved his brother above anyone else, and since they were twins, he felt he won when his brother did. There simply was no runner-up or second best in their relationship. While sadness also accompanied Phillip’s childhood reveries, they kept him from going under during life’s low points, and the mystery of his garbled emails was becoming one of the lowest.

* * *

In the ensuing days it became an even greater trial for Phillip to write or answer emails, since yet another miscreant word—“now”––appeared. The phantom words cluttered his business correspondence requiring him to invest more and more time purging them. A sample email looked like this:

Dear Mr. Cosgrove,

The Soondai now stock is up come ten percent to this week, and showing	
impressive growth.  I recommend purchase of mount three hundred shares 
to immediately. Please advise to ASAP so that mount I may take now action.

Phillip Halperin, CFP

On the verge of panicking, Phillip made another appointment with the neurologist hoping that further tests might explain what was happening to him. The breaking point came when every other word he typed produced “Meropis,” as in:

I’ll Meropis be Meropis over Meropis to Meropis the Meropis gym . . .

With that last email, Phillip left the stock market floor and went to the men’s room taking refuge in a stall while he tried to quell his trembling.

“Please, God, what’s going on with me?” he whimpered, his arms wrapped around his quaking body.

He left work early and went to his apartment where he lay on his bed in the dark.

“Meropis . . . Meropis,” he repeated hoping that by doing so it would reveal its meaning, and then he decided to Google the strange word fully expecting it to assert itself several times before he could access the search engine.

To his relief he was able to reach the word’s denotation unimpeded.

Meropis is a mountain located in Kutchie Forest in Western Tennessee. 

Explained Wikipedia.

It’s an actual place, muttered Phillip. It then occurred to him to excise the other errant words from his emails to see if they might mean something when assembled. After arranging the words several different ways, he came up with a coherent sentence.

“Come to Mount Meropis now.”
     
* * *

It did not take Phillip long to decide to follow the mysterious entreaty. He booked a flight to Memphis and rented a car for the one-and-a-half-hour drive northeast to Kutchie Forest. It was past sunset when he arrived at the isolated area miles from any serviceable commerce, so he spent the night in the rental before setting out on foot on what appeared to be the main trail into the dense woodland.

Phillip had no idea why he was being beckoned to the hinterland but believed it was something he had to do for reasons still unclear to him. For most of the day, he followed the ascending trail, which eventually became steeper and narrower and unfolded into little more than a tenuous footpath. The angle of the incline caused Phillip to breathe heavily and stop to rest every few yards. It was during one of these respites that a shotgun blast shattered the silence prompting him to lunge to the ground. It was not far off, he concluded, while remaining motionless for fear he might be the target.

Eventually he slowly rose to his feet and it was then that he saw a figure emerging from the distant brush. Again he took to the ground as a large bearded man carrying a lifeless turkey strode away. The sight of the stranger made Phillip’s heart rate accelerate, but he followed him at a safe distance, because of a gnawing sense that he had some connection with the hunter. But what, he wondered, as he continued to trail him?

Phillip calculated he had traveled about a quarter of a mile when a small wooden shack appeared against a rocky knoll and his quarry entered it. It was then that he felt the presence of his twin brother, and he began to suspect the person he had followed had something to do with him. His thoughts raced. Was Davy here? Was he inside the dilapidated structure?

With his mind swirling, Phillip crept to the only window in the dwelling, but dirt and grime blocked any view inside. The sound of a door opening alerted him that its occupant was on the move again. From behind a shrub, he watched as the stooped hulk headed for the adjacent rise and vanished behind a massive boulder. Phillip followed catching sight of his subject as he entered a dark aperture in the hill. It reminded him of the entrance to a small cave he and Davy had discovered and declared their hideout just weeks before he disappeared. Phillip had searched it repeatedly hoping to find his brother there. When he finally accepted the fact that his twin was really gone, he stopped visiting the cave because it was too painful to be there without Davy.

Phillip remained behind the boulder waiting for the man to emerge and while there he realized he had left his cell phone in the car, and without it he suddenly felt more vulnerable. No good, he thought. No good. After several long minutes the curious figure that reminded Phillip of something out of a bad 3D horror film came lumbering out carrying a large plastic garbage bag in his burly arms. When the path was clear and the man back in his house, Phillip entered the cavern drawn to it by an inexplicable force. A candle flickered inside the den causing shadows to dance across the rock walls. He lifted it from where it sat and cast its glow in different directions of the dank cave.

The first thing he noticed was a metal table and a rack containing a wide assortment of cutting devices. Several floor lamps surrounded the area. When he redirected the candle he saw small piles of clothes, which appeared to belong to children. He dug through the heaps of garments--some now little more than decaying rags that once were pants, shirts, and underwear—and came across a familiar object. It was a swatch of cloth with Scrabble pieces and “Champion” printed on it. He knew instantly that it was from a T-shirt that had belonged to his brother. In fact, Davy had been wearing it the day he went missing.

In horror and disgust, he spun around and the candle’s light fell on some bloody body parts apparently belonging to a young boy. For one split second, Phillip feared it was Davy, but then realized that was impossible. This was a fresh corpse, not one a decade-and-a-half old. At that moment, he knew he had come upon the work of Davy’s kidnapper and killer.

A few feet outside the cave, he threw up while trying to muffle the sound of his gagging for fear he would be heard, but despite his efforts he was discovered. The monster responsible for his life’s misery and obviously that of countless others came at him in a fury.

“What are you doing here?” he screamed, as he lunged at Phillip, who quickly stepped aside with his leg extended causing his assailant to trip and fall just inside the entrance to the cavern.

“You killed my brother, you bastard!” shouted Phillip bringing a rock down on his attacker’s head.

Phillip was about to strike the man again, when he realized the malefactor was out cold. He desperately wanted to finish the job but instead went to the shack searching for some rope or twine to tie up the killer. He found a plentiful supply of both, along with more grisly evidence of his young victims—the bones of little limbs and skulls piled ceiling high on makeshift shelves. Phillip returned to his captive, who was beginning to stir, and pressed his knee against his lower spine, securely tying his wrists and ankles. He then set out for his car and upon reaching it at breakneck speed dialed 911. An hour later the police arrived and took charge of the slaughterer of children.

* * *

It took weeks before Phillip’s life returned to some semblance of normalcy. In the days immediately following his discovery and apprehension of the serial killer, he was hounded by reporters and reluctantly gave accounts of his experience. Three publishers approached him to write a book about it, but he refused. Recounting the event would force him to relive it and he had no intention of doing that. There were no more apparitions in his emails until his birthday, which was also his twin’s. In an email to his cousin about their pending visit to their elderly aunt, Phillip found two precious words that drew bittersweet tears to his eyes:

“Good Brother”