Phar T’Les

He was sure that there was something there when he first realized that a healthy diet with lots of fiber caused an increase in gas in the intestinal track. His girlfriend had gone on the healthy life style band wagon and he was forced to join her or be left behind. A part of her healthy life style included a lot of the physical activity that he was learning to love. It wasn’t the kind of activity that involved a lot of equipment or hours of running in the great outdoors. But it could be practiced in almost any room of the house, and they had tried it in almost every room. Although the back deck of the house he rented was a little scary, but they had waited until after midnight so there were fewer neighbors awake.

He was just finishing his chemistry degree and had a job lined up in a town some two hundred miles away. She still had two more years left and wasn’t about to leave just to keep him company. It was what some would have called serendipity that he decided to try to do something about the excess gas he seemed to be generating. After a little research he discovered that activated charcoal was the main ingredient in most of the gas relief products on the market.

He realized that most people found the idea of eating charcoal unappetizing. In fact no matter what the packaging, the product was used by only a few of the bravest souls. He was finished with his class work and had the summer off before he started the job, so he decided to see what he could come up with. He thought that the main problem was the idea of eating charcoal, so he decided from the start that he wouldn’t use the product’s actual contents as a selling point.

It had to be delivered in a capsule form. There were plenty of those on the market so it wasn’t a problem to get a cheap supply. As he sat there looking at the clear capsule he realized that he could still see inside the capsule, which meant that a user would still be facing the idea of eating charcoal. That wasn’t going to be good for sales. He made a note to make the capsules opaque. He knew that the charcoal inside the capsules wouldn’t actually be in contact with the user until the capsules dissolved in the person’s stomach. That meant that the user would only taste the capsule and not the charcoal.

He took one of the capsules and placed it in his mouth. There wasn’t much taste to it but what there was certainly wouldn’t be called appealing. He wrote another note to make the capsules more flavorful. As he looked down at the paper he sub-noted that since it was supposed to improve the person’s odor perhaps a mint flavoring might be a good try.

He had the makings of the product and he thought that he could probably manufacture it for a reasonable cost, but why would people buy it. There were other products already on the market that could do the same thing. Also, they were being marketed by companies with far larger budgets to promote their products. How could he get people to buy his pills instead?

He remembered reading that people liked to know what they were buying. Products that had strange names didn’t do well as those that told the buyer what they were getting. That household cleaner with the bald guy was one of the best-selling products in its region since I had the word “clean” in its name. So he made another note that said think up name that said what it did.

He started to write down ideas of what the stuff would actually do to see what would work. “Stop your gas,” “relieve intestinal gas pressure,” “Don’t fart,” all of them told a story, but none seemed appealing. He closed his note book and decided to sleep on it.

At three in the morning he suddenly was awake. He had dreamed the answer to his question in his sleep and now his mind was telling to write it down before he forgot the answer. His body was telling him something else in the way of tremendous pressure from the cabbage and bean salad he had for diner the previous night. Since he was sleeping alone that night he let the gas go. It was loud and powerful. So strong that he got out of bed and pulled off the covers. He swore that he saw a brown haze rise from the sheets.

He went into the kitchen and brought out the notebook he was working on the night before. He started to write down what his dream-self had discovered. “Foreign promoters were more believable. If the product did something that people didn’t want to discuss disguise the product’s name. Mysterious is popular. People are used to product names that are almost unpronounceable, after all look at all the drugs on the market. Even the supplements have strange names.”

So that left him with the need to come up with a name of his product idea that was foreign and mysterious. It didn’t have to reveal what it was used for and it didn’t have to be easily pronounceable. He sat there trying to come up with some ideas. He realized it might take some time but then again he was in no hurry to return to the bedroom with the remnants of cabbage salad still in the air.

He thought about some of the mysterious things he had come across, and remembered that servant of the rich guy who adopted that orphan. He was pretty mysterious and he was foreign to boot. “What was his nationality?” he asked aloud. He didn’t know but Egyptian seemed to be about right.

How would an Egyptian talk about his activated charcoal capsules? He might ask, “What does this stuff do?” 

“Why it stops gas,” the kitchen bound creator would reply. No wait, he thought, it doesn’t stop gas it just relives some of the pressure and the charcoal absorbs some but not all of the gas.

“So there’s less gas?” the Egyptian would inquire.

“Yes,” our developer would reply.

“Is that good?” the foreign guy in the room would ask.

“It is,” our brave creator would reply. “It makes you feel better, and you pass less gas so you friends feel better.” 

“Pass less gas?” he would question.

“Yes,” our original thinker would reply. “You know you’d…”

“Oh I get it,” the man in the turban would say. “You mean I’d fart less.”

The Kitchen occupant stopped there and thought, “No that’s not right. He wouldn’t say it that way. Because he’s foreign he’d say it differently.” He sat there for a minute or two trying to phrase it like an Egyptian. He looked up and suddenly could see the large turbaned gentleman saying, “You mean I’d phar t’les.”

And there he had it all wrapped up in one big package. He would call the product “Phar T’Les.” It would tell the user what it was for without actually using the words. The words sounded foreign, and if he continued with the Egyptian theme it almost seemed to be a mysterious drug.

A week later he had convinced a member of the school’s drama club to done a turban and costume and pretend to be an Egyptian. He manufactured a digital back drop of the pyramids and wrote a semi-funny script for the actor to use that claimed to be passing on a mysterious medication favored by the pharos. 

He posted it on the internet video sharing internet site along with a web contact address. Then he created a web site for Phar T’Les and tied it to the commercial. He supposed stranger things had happened, but in less than two weeks he was flooded with requests for Phar T’Les. Two weeks after that he had called his future employers to say that he wouldn’t be joining them.

By the end of the summer break he had five of his fellow graduates working for him filling the mint flavored capsules with the activated charcoal. The art department had whipped up a really snazzy package for the capsules that included the pyramids and several camels.

Health food stores bought it up and that TV doctor who seemed to have a cure for everything even mentioned it on his TV show. A year later he married the girl who had caused it all, and while she finished her degree he finished building the plant for the product with a huge sign on the front that read, “For a home where you can Phar T’Les."

That Insidious Mechanism

There exists in almost every American home an insidious mechanism that can destroy every person in the house. It remains silent waiting for its chance to create havoc and distrust. In families it is not uncommon for some members to praise it and others to curse its existence.

Those who use it often feel betrayed, as if the mechanism had a real life of its own and could think of ways to destroy the peace of mind of those who come within its sphere. They come with hope and often leave in despair.  And yet they return to it day after day as if the new dawn will bring a change in their relationship and all will be well again.

Those who refuse to fall under its sway can pass it by with an ease that would make a circus fire eater envious. It calls to them but they do not answer. They say they distrust it. That they can live their lives perfectly well without it. There are simpler ways to get what it promises to provide.

It must be true since in less sophisticate countries it rarely appears. In fact it would be completely unneeded in many countries where every day brings challenges to life itself. When a bowl of rice can bring the promise of survival, the mechanism is preposterous. In fact it would be totally misunderstood. It would be incomprehensible to those living in the day-to-day challenge for existence to even believe that the mechanism is used elsewhere.

But here in America it has wormed its way in to most homes. It can turn husband against wife and parent against child. Where couples live together without having made their way down the aisle it can part young lovers in a way that they never would have thought possible before it showed its tempting face. “Listen to me,” it will say to one. To the other who hears it revelations from their loved one they will believe deceit. “That can not be,” they shout. “But it is the truth, after all the mechanism can’t lie,” comes the reply.  “If it can’t lie then you must be.” And so a wedge is driven between them.

Wives yell, “You must ask it. Only then will you know the truth.” Husbands reply, “I don’t need to ask, I know perfectly well what the answer will be and I don’t like it.”

The young who hear its messages despair. “I am weak,” they say. “The mechanism tells me so and it must be the truth.” They sigh and tell themselves, “I’m a failure here and I will always fail.”

For some select few the mechanism presents a challenge that they can accept as doable. They take its statements as facts that they can deal with. They can work with those statements as guidance on the path they choose to follow.

But for the rest of us there is anger and rage at its messages. “Why do I come to it? Why did I ever bring this work of the devil into my home?”

It has a name this mechanism. It is called the bathroom scale.

With apologies to the following:

Anne Rice, Stephen King, and Edgar Allan Poe together could not have created a scene as horrible as yesterday. Thousands of people going to work at jobs both routine and essential are suddenly attacked and killed by someone that they, in almost every case, have never met or known. Reality has trumped fiction in a most terrible way.

The Boy Who Cried Wolf

                He first did it when he was just four years old. His dad was away at work and his mother was in the kitchen when she heard him. He was playing on the deck at the back of the house all by himself. Since they lived at the edge of a national forest and there was only one road that led up to the house, his mother thought it was safe for her to leave him out there alone.

When she heard that sound she dropped the pot she had been washing and ran to the deck. She slammed through the screen door so hard that she knocked it off of its rail. She grabbed her son and turned back into the house so fast that her head was spinning on the inside and she was dizzy for a minute or two. Her boy was wiggling in her arms and she realized that she must have been holding him too tight, so she put him down on the floor. As soon as she did that he aimed right for the door and started to go back out side.

She grabbed him again and this time she slowly went back outside to look around. She wasn’t a stranger to the sounds of animals. She had been married to a forest ranger now for over fifteen years and they had lived in and around the forests he protected most of that time. Still the idea of her son being threatened by a wild animal sent shivers down her spine.

As soon as she thought that she looked at her boy in her arms. She asked, “How are you Luke? Did that mean old wolf scare you?”

Luke looked at her as if she had asked if the sun had come out that morning. Then he said, “No Mommy. Why would a wolf scare me? You know they never come up to the house. I just saw him in the trees looking at me and I called hello.”

She didn’t know what to make of what her son just told her, “You called to the wolf?”

The boy was wiggling again and she thought she’d risk putting him down. He half crawled over to the edge of the deck and grabbed the railing to help himself stand. Then he put his hands to his mouth and made the sound that she had heard in the house. It did sound like what she had heard in the night when the wolves were prowling near to their cabin.

She asked, “Is that how the wolves say hello?”

Luke turned around to her and almost lost his balance. “Don’t be silly Mommy. Wolves can’t talk. They do make that sound to let each other know where they are.”

He made the sound again and she thought she saw some movement in the trees, but she couldn’t be sure what made the brush move. It could have been a wolf or just a squirrel jumping away from the loud sound coming from the house.

She thought to bring Luke back into the house to be safe, but then she thought he was right, the wolves never come up to the house. Her husband had cleared a wide swath of land next to the house the first year they had moved here just in case there ever was a forest fire. The animals seemed to respect that cleaned area as a sort of a fence and they didn’t come up to the house.

She turned to go back in to the house and realized she’d have to get Mark to fix the door when he got home since it now it was hanging half way off of its rail. She called back to Luke, “You going to be OK out here by yourself?”

Luke gave her a casual, “Sure” and went back to the log cabin he had been building before she grabbed him.

Back in the kitchen she returned to the pot washing. She thought, “Luke really is amazing. Even with the spinal deformity he had been born with he never seems to realize he looks different. That and he love the forest we live in.” Here he was safe and could do everything by himself. If he crawled almost as much as he walked it didn’t matter. He moved almost as fast as anyone. He just couldn’t stand straight, and that meant he didn’t walk very well.

She worried what would happen when he started to go to the school in town. How would the other children react to him? He was very bright and she knew that he could learn as well as anyone, maybe even better. But he couldn’t move as well. They had a wheel chair that he could ride in when they went into town but he hated it. They could carry him but that wouldn’t work when he was in school. She had tried to talk to Luke about it but he really didn’t see himself as different and in the end she had let it drop.

She could just see the deck from the window. He was out there still playing with the logs. She laughed, “So now he’s talking to the wolves. I hope he gets along with the other kids as well.”

By the time he was old enough for school he was not only talking to the wolves but many of the other animals he heard in the trees. He was a natural mimic and could copy almost any sound he heard. Some of the bird calls were a little beyond him but otherwise wolves, bears, squirrels, and every other imaginable animal could be heard coming from his bedroom before he fell asleep. It was a little unnerving at first but they got used to it

The first day they took him to school she almost panicked and tried to make the argument that she could home-school him. Her husband was adamant that Luke should be able to go to school with other kids his own age and in the end she agreed. They watched him walk down the hall in his sort of shifting gate and she started to cry. He husband put his arm around her and pulled her out of the building before the other parents and the children started to wonder what was wrong. 

They had met with Luke’s teacher before the school year started and she wasn’t troubled by his difficulty with walking. As she said, most of the time he children sat at their desks and Luke could sit just fine.

When the bus dropped him off that afternoon she rushed out to meet him. He seemed OK as he ambled over to her and she didn’t want to scare him but she had to ask, “How was school?”

He smiled and said, “Great. Are there any of your chocolate chip cookie left? They had some at school but they aren’t as good as yours.”

That night at dinner they got a little more information but not much. Luke said he thought he would do OK in school because everything they were learning he already knew.

Mark asked, “How are the other kids?”

Luke stopped stuffing carrots in his mouth long enough to say, “Fine.”

She didn’t know how to ask what she was burning to know. So she tried an end around question. “Did you go outside to play at recess?”

Again Luke was as informative as any other five year old when he answered, “Yep.”

She tried again. “What did you play?”

This time he was a little more giving. “Soccer. You know, what we watched in the Olympics.”

Mark could see the panic in her face so he asked, “Did they let you play?”

Luke stopped eating and said, “Sure. Everybody plays.”

Mark didn’t want to push it too far but he tried one more question. “What position did they give you?”

Luke looked surprised at the question, “Why Goalie of course. You know I can’t run very well. But I can block pretty good.”

They gave up trying to get anything else out of him and Mark talked about a bald eagle that was nesting at the northern edge of the forest. Luke of course wanted to know what kind of sound the eagle made, and Mark said that they could take a ride over there on Saturday.

On Friday, Mark was home to meet the bus and she went in to talk with Luke’s teacher. She found out that the other kids found Luke’s way of walking funny and laughed at him for the first minute or so. Luke laughed right along with them and after that no one mentioned it again. They didn’t find it a problem and neither did she.

At the end of the half hour his teacher had convinced Luke’s mother than he was doing fine and she had nothing to worry about. Of course she continued to worry about him. After all it was her right as his mother. She worried all the rest of that year and the next as well. Finally at the end of Luke’s third grade year she gave up. There just didn’t seem to be any trouble Luke couldn’t handle.

He was regularly bringing home children from his class. Although many of them had been into the forest before they found that Luke’s way with the animals to be fascinating. He would get them on the deck and then he would make one of his animal calls and darned if that animal wouldn’t show up in a few minutes. She made him promise not to make the bear sounds since she still didn’t believe that he could make the bears go away when they were finished “talking”. 

The years passed and Luke finally agreed to use a cane to help him walk. That made all the difference. Although some found it odd to see a ten year old walking with a cane, they lost all of that interest as soon as they saw him on the soccer field. Ever since that first day at school Luke had always played the goalie. It turned out that what was a disability on the street was a distinct advantage on the field. Luke’s lateral movement was phenomenal.  Almost nothing could get past him and his kicking style while different was deadly accurate. He would line up his shot and fall on the ground as soon as he kicked. But wherever he wanted the ball to go, there it went.

By eighth grade they had gotten calls from a high school in the next county asking if they would consider enrolling Luke in their school. They never considered it and Luke just laughed and asked why in the world people would think that he would leave his friends.

It was during that first year of high school that Luke’s animal mimicking talents came to light. There was a talent show that spring and Luke announce that he was going to enter. His parents had long ago given up seeing Luke as disabled, but since he didn’t play an instrument and he didn’t seem to want to sing in the church choir, they were at a loss as to what he would do for the show. When they asked he simply made the sound of an attacking grizzly bear and went on eating his dinner.

The night of the show Luke wore his favorite leather vest that they had bought when they visited an Indian reservation two years before. The announcer introduced Luke and said that he was going to make animal sounds. There was a wave of laughter in the crowd, which stopped as soon as Luke opened with his wolf call. For the next twenty minutes there wasn’t a single sound in the hall except for Luke stating what the next animal would be and then presenting the sounds of that beast.

Luke didn’t win the show, but he did get a ribbon for coming in second place. One other thing that he got was the attention of the Chief Ranger whose daughter went to the school. He called Mark and asked if it would be alright if he stopped by their house the next day. “Of course it would be OK,” Mark answered.

The Chief Ranger came over and then spent an hour on the back deck with Luke going through every animal sound he could make. The Ranger was particularly amazed when Mark said that he could call the wolves and he did just that. Minutes after Luke called out for the wolves two of them peaked through the trees to look up at the house.

Luke was about to call one of the bears when his mother stopped him. Mark explained that when Luke called the bears they sometimes came but seemed very confused at not finding another bear at the house. It often took quite a while for them to give up.

It was a year later when the Chief Ranger came calling again. There had been several bear attacks on the camp grounds on the western side of the forest and something had to be done about it. They proposed to tranquilize the bear which was molesting the campers and then move him or her to a different forest too far away from camp grounds to bother people. The chief Ranger said they hadn’t been able to find the bear and it almost seemed as if it knew they were after him and kept away whenever they went looking for it. The Ranger wanted to have Luke call to the bear and then they would dart the bear and move it. The ranger assured Luke’s parents that he would be safe in the blind that they had set up by the camp grounds.

Luke’s mother didn’t want him to risk it, but his father said that they had done this sort of thing before and it should be safe. So several days later Luke was up in the blind by the camp grounds and when told, he called out to the bear. It took several more tries but then they hear a reply from the bear and soon after they saw the bear enter the grounds. The ranger in the blind took aim and fired his rifle. Just as he pulled the trigger the bear turned around. There was a cub following the bear and the cub had called out at the same time as the shot was fired. Instead of the dart hitting the hind quarters of the bear it struck its face. In fact the dart entered the bear’s eye and penetrated its brain. 

The bear died that day, but not before making sounds that Luke had never heard before. The cub also made sounds that Luke never wanted to hear again. They captured the cub and it was taken to an animal preserve in the next state. It cried out the entire time it was being removed from the body of its mother. That was the last time Luke ever made an animal sound for anyone else. When they returned home he left the house and went out back to the forest and stayed away for two days.

His mother cried the whole time he was away but his father wouldn’t let her look for Luke. He needed to be alone for a while and they needed to allow him to grieve in his own way. He came back after those two days and seemed almost normal, but he never again made an animal sound for anyone else. Every so often he would go out into the forest and they would hear him calling to the animals but he wouldn’t talk about what had happened with the bears to anyone.

Luke finished high school with honors and he was offered several scholarships, both academic and for his skills on the soccer field. He chose to go to the state university which was about one hundred miles from his forest. It was far way enough so that he would be alone but close enough for him to get back fairly often. The big day came and they loaded up the family SUV to the top with stuff they were sure he would need when away from home.

After they unpacked and his mother insisted on helping arrange his room. Then they went out to dinner. Finally with only a few tears from her and several embarrassing hugs they parted and left him to get to know his new roommate. It turned out that Luke and his roommate both had been embarrassed by their overly affectionate families. The talked well into the night about independence they were going to enjoy now that they were on their own.

It was two days later that Luke was called to the Dean’s office. His parents had been in an accident on their way back from dropping him off and had both been killed. The dean offered Luke every service the school could provide from its counseling services. He thanked the man but said he needed to get home.

Three days later Luke was alone at the cabin. There had been a double funereal for his mother and father, and many of his friends had come to the cabin afterward to try to console Luke for his loss. He seemed very quiet but assured them all that he would be OK. There weren’t any other relatives besides his parents and so once the friends left he was all alone.

He sat there on the back deck for nearly an hour. Then he leaned out and called. He told his friends the wolves that he had lost a part of his pack. He called out to all of the others to tell of his loss. Then finally he called out hose awful sounds that they bear cub had made when it lost its mother.

When he was finished he looked down and saw that the wolves were down at the edge of the trees looking up at him. He took off his shoes and tossed his cane to the deck. He crossed to the stairs and went down. He walked toward the where the wolves stood. With one final look back he went into the forest with the wolves.