Hillary studied me for several seconds before gesturing to the chair across from her. “No one knows for sure. I know he had gone to stay with a primitive tribe in the Amazon rainforest. The Ugtatu I think is how you say it. He had been before, and though they generally didn't care for outsiders, over a few years they had grown to tolerate him well enough.”

She looked down at her folded hands and sighed. “Apparently he was much more coherent when he first reached civilization after his latest trip. He told a colleague there that he had gone through the first step of a “purification ritual" during his stay. The ritual was supposed to take three days in total, but after the first night he woke to learn that the tribe’s holy man had died in his sleep. After that, no one else would talk to him or even acknowledge his existence outside of making a sign to ward off evil.”

“After three days of trying to get back in their good graces, he had headed back out of the jungle. By this point he was already acting strange, and within another week he was much like you see him now.” She sniffled. “They don't really know what's wrong with him. I looked at his notes, but they were mainly gibberish as far as I could tell. The most I could make out was that during the first part of the ritual, the holy man had said a phrase in Elliot's right ear while holding something he calls a “whisper box" against his left. My brother said the box made a strange sound, and he seemed to think that the combination of that with the sounds of the words the holy man spoke somehow flipped a switch in his brain, making him see things. He was trying to find a way to reverse it when he slipped into a fit and then became more like what you see now. A shell of the man I knew.“

I didn't know how to respond. The story was interesting, but seemed very farfetched. Odds are, I thought, he had been slipping towards insanity for years, and when he finally had a break from reality, this hocus pocus was the form it took. After sitting through an awkward silence, I said I had to be going and let myself out.

****

It was a few days later, when I was back reading Stoffel “The Great Gatsby", that I noticed the small wooden box sitting on the table near him. I tried to focus on the Fitzgerald book, but my eyes kept being drawn back to the box. It wasn't overly ornate or special looking, but the wood had an odd luster and I found myself wondering if this could be the “whisper box" Hillary had told me about. Had he somehow brought it back with him?