Bev walked briskly down the hall of the nursing home where she was employed in her profession as a Speech-Language Pathologist.  The majority of her caseload usually consisted of elderly residents around her mother's age who had suffered strokes and other neurological maladies that affected their speech and their swallowing.  Over the years she had experienced much success in helping many such disabled persons to improve their communicative and swallowing abilities, often resulting in some patients being able to return home to spend their final days with their families.  This gave her a tremendous sense of accomplishment and of having made a difference in other people's lives, as she often told her husband.  And even though she had been a professionally trained vocalist in her younger years and could easily have pursued a path of performance and perhaps even fame (as can be readily seen by clicking here (but don't do it yet; you haven't finished reading today's installment)), she felt in her heart that she had made the right choice for her life.  Watching the progress that she could coax from her patients and seeing the joy on the faces of their families and relatives at their loved ones' recovery was to her an infinitely greater reward than the fleeting appluase and acclaim that would have accompanied a singing career.

Occasionally, however, she would find herself working with a much younger patient who had experienced a stroke or who had been injured in an accident, someone right around her own age or even younger.  This would give her an uncomfortable sense of her own mortality, forcing her to face the possibility that in coming decades, perhaps even sooner, she or her husband could also end up a resident in a nursing home, needing help just to learn how to talk and eat again.  She felt especially great motivation to help these younger patients to recover as much of their swallowing and language skills as possible for the sake of their happiness and quality of life in their remaining years and even decades.  It was the same thing she'd want for herself.

Today she walked into the room of a resident for whom she felt a special kinship.  The young woman, a mother of three and twenty years younger than Bev, had been injured in a car wreck months earlier and had suffered head injuries that had partially paralyzed her and badly damaged the speech centers of her brain.  She would live, but her communicative abilities were almost nonexistent.  Bev had learned through her weeks of work with her that the woman's cognitive skills were intact; she knew what she wanted to say but couldn't make her mouth and tongue cooperate; the best she could do was to point weakly to people and things with her left hand and groan faintly.  Bev had felt that youth was on her side and had mounted an aggressive therapy program to help the woman's brain essentially rewire itself to learn how to talk again.  She knew that a full recovery for the young mother was most likely impossible, but if she could learn at least partially to speak again she wouldn't have to live the rest of her life unable to express her needs or to tell her kids that she loved them.

As Bev walked over to her bed she greeted her patient cheerily, as she always did.  "Good morning, Sally.  How are you feeling today?"  The young woman responded with a weak groan, lifting her left hand and pointing as well as she could to a pitcher of water on the stand next to her bed.  Bev knew that she wanted some water, but as she poured a cup for her she used the moment as a therapy exercise.

"Sally," she said, holding the cup to the woman's lips and letting her drink," I want you to say 'water.'  Say, 'Wa-ter,'" Bev repeated, drawing out the syllables for her patient.

The young woman mumbled in response, more a whisper than a spoken word.

"Say it again so I can hear you," Bev said.

Sally's lips weakly mouthed the syllables.  Good, Bev thought, she couldn't even do that two months ago.

"Once more, Sally," Bev said, leaning down toward Sally's face to try to hear her.  "Say, 'Wa-ter.'"

Sally mouthed the word again, only this time her efforts were accompanied by a faint sound from her throat. "Weh... tah..."

Bev paused for a moment, lost in thought.  "Very good, Sally," she finally replied encouragingly.  "See, I knew we'd get you talking again," she added as she prepared for the rest of the woman's morning therapy session.
 

12

Michael sat again in front of his computer screen as the other computers he was working on scanned themselves for viruses.  The scans would take at least an hour, given the vintage of the machines, and so he turned his attention to getting to the bottom of the coded message from the night before.  The fact that the house was empty and quiet now would help him to concentrate, as well as alleviating the need for the narrative to differentiate between him and his second son as "older Michael" and "younger Michael," respectively.  At least until the school day was over.

"'Pop is a climbed rogue,' eh?" he said to himself as he called up the site of the Internet Anagram Server.

The Internet Anagram Server (or "I, Rearrangement Servant," as one of its anagrams read) had for years provided Web users with a handy means of finding anagrams for words, names, phrases and indeed whole sentences, although not all of its results always made sense in English.  Michael had learned this the hard way the night before when he had "discovered" that one anagram for "Find Kerry Livgren" was "Fry Kern Driveling."  For that matter, a given result of an anagram search didn't always work in reverse; "Fry Kern Driveling" hadn't led back to "Find Kerry Livgren."  Apparently, proper names (or at least unusual ones) were beyond the "Rearrangement Servant's" reach.  Still, he had to start somewhere, and this was as good a place as any.

"'Pop is a climbed rogue,'" Michael repeated to himself as he typed the words in the site's text entry box and clicked the "Get Anagrams" button.

Seconds later the scope of his quest started to become apparent.

"Myriad," he mumbled to himself.  "See the answers as they're adding up... thousands and thousands..."
 
 

"Honey," Bev called out as she walked in the front door, "I'm home."  His car was in the driveway, so she knew he was there.

"Hmm?  What?  Oh, hi," Michael replied, waking up and lifting his head from the computer keyboard, this time bearing impressions of the keys on the left side of his face.  "I must have dozed off again."

"Did you have any luck?" she asked, walking into the room and putting down her purse and briefcase.

"Well," he said, taking a deep breath to clear his head, "both these computers had Trojan Horse viruses and a fair amount of spyware, so I..."

"I mean with the coded message."

"Oh, that," he replied, shaking his head.  "No, but no one can say I haven't tried.  I did an anagram search for 'Pop is a climbed rogue,'" he said, picking up a piece of paper from his printer, "but all I got were thousands of nonsensical results.  Then I tried moving forward one letter in the alphabet for each letter in the message, but that gave me 'Qpq jt b dmjncfe spvhf,' which isn't even pronounceable.  Then I went backward one letter, but all that was was 'Ono hr z bkhladc qntfd,' which is no better.  Finally I split the alphabet in half between 'M' and 'N' and arranged the first thirteen letters in A-B-C order on a line and the last thirteen letters in reverse order beneath them and matched up each letter in the code with the letter opposite it..."

"...but that led to 'Klk rh z xornyvw ilftv,' which is just lovely.  So, no, I've had no luck at all.  I'm beginning to think it's just a great big joke."

"Maybe..." Bev started to suggest.

"I feel like someone's just putting me on," he continued, a hint of frustration rising in his voice.

"But perhaps..." she tried again.

"It's as if someone knows I'm a Kansas and Kerry Livgren fan and they're just playing games with me," Michael said, slapping his hand on the surface of the computer desk.

"But if you would..." she tried again.

"It's like somone's disguising reality behind a great big masquerade and..."

"HONEY!" Bev said, forcefully.

"Hmm?" he replied, looking around at her.

"Maybe," she said, sweetly but firmly, "you should try working with the second line, 'We tar,' first.  It has only five letters."

"Only five letters..." he repeated softly.  "Yes, maybe so.  That would make it simpler," he added as he sat up in his chair.  "If I move forward one letter in the alphabet, 'we tar' becomes 'xf ubs'..."

"Honey," Bev said.

"No, that's no good," Michael continued.  "If I go backward, it's 'vd szq'...  Nope, nothing there either."

"Honey..." Bev said again, a bit more strongly.

"And if I use the split-alphabet reverse order grid, it's 'dv gzi.'  Nope.  Sorry, Sweetie, I'm afraid you're wrong."

"HONEY!" she finally shouted, snapping him to attention.

"Yes, dear?" he said timidly.

"Put 'we tar' in the anagram server," she replied.

He looked at her for a moment and then back to his computer.  "Ohhhhhh," he said.  "Why didn't I think of that?"

Bev held her tongue.

"We put 'we tar' in the anagram server," he said, typing, "and we get... six results."

"Which are...?" she nudged.

"'A wert,'" he began, "then there's 'tar we,' 'art we,' 'rat we' and 'taw re.'"

"That's only five," she said.

"Oh," he replied, looking back at the computer.  "And 'water.'"

Bev stared at him as he continued looking at the screen.  "Well?" she prodded.

"Well, what?" he asked.

"Well, water," she answered.

"No, honey, we're on the town system."

"I don't mean well water," she said, exasperated.  "I mean water.  That's the anagram for 'we tar.'"

"Oh,"  he replied.  "Ohhhhhh," he added, a light of realization dawning in his eyes.  "But do you really think it could be that simple?"

"It's the only anagram out of 'pop is a climbed rogue' and 'we tar' that actually does make sense.  What do you know about water that has to do with Kansas?" Bev asked.

"Well, the state of Kansas is landlocked," he replied, "smack in the middle of the country.  Middle of the continent, for that matter.  There're a few rivers, but no large bodies of water closer than the Gulf of Mexico.  Of course, there is the High Plains Aquifer underlying the western part of the state..."

"I mean the band Kansas," she interjected.

"Oh," Michael replied, thinking for a moment.  "Well, Water is the title of the painting by Italian Renaissance artist Guiseppe Arcimboldo that was used as the cover art of Kansas' third album Masque and..."

Michael suddenly stopped.  MASQUE!  He reached over to his compact disc holder and retrieved his copy of the Masque CD.  Opening the jewel case, he removed the booklet, turned to the "credits" page and scanned it until he found what he was looking for: "Cover Art: Guiseppe Arcimboldo, 'Water,' courtesy of Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna."  He stared at the artist's name for a moment to confirm its spelling and then turned to his computer and started up his Web browser.

"What are you...?" Bev asked.

"Just a moment," he replied as he typed the name into the Internet Anagram Server and sat back to wait for the results, which came after a few seconds.

"Do you...?" she started to say.

"Just a moment," he repeated softly as he scrolled down the list before stopping after a few screens.

"There," he said to his wife, pointing with the mouse arrow on the screen.  "'A climbed rogue is pop.'  An anagram for Guiseppe Arcimboldo.  I didn't find it earlier because the Anagram Server doesn't return proper names for anagram searches."  He look around at his wife.  "And, um, because... I didn't... start with the... easier line... first."

"So you're sure this is what that message means," Bev said.

"I don't see how it can be anything else," he answered, going to the Google search engine and doing a search for Guiseppe Arcimboldo.  "The numbers showing the moment of Kerry Livgren's conversion, anagrams for the title of the cover artwork of the third Kansas album and for the name of the artist who painted it, the 'P.S.: Find Kerry Livgren'... this has to be it.  Who wrote it, or why, I still don't know," he said as the search engine returned its results, the first of which Michael clicked, "but this must be it.  Look, here's a picture of Arcimboldo."

Bev leaned over.  The screen showed a picture of a mustached, full bearded, serious looking man peering out from under a tall, shapeless cap and dressed in a heavy robe with a high, ruffled collar.  "Guiseppe Arcimboldo," she read, "1527-1593."

"The Renaissance," Michael added.  Then he looked closer.  "Oh, look," he said.  "It says here that he was a student of Leonardo da Vinci."  He looked back at his wife.  "I didn't know that."