In March 1995, I published an account of sixteen sessions with a psychiatric patient who believed he came (on a beam of light) from a planet called K-PAX. The patient, a thirty-three-year-old male Caucasian who called himself “prot” (rhymes with “goat”), was, in fact, a double personality whose alter ego, Robert Porter, had been devastated by a severe emotional trauma. The latter survived only by hiding behind his formidable “alien” friend. When prot “returned” to his home planet at precisely 3:31 A.M. on August 17, 1990, promising to reappear “in about five of your years,” Robert was left behind in a state of intractable catatonia, kept alive by constant monitoring and attentive care.
Many of the patients in residence at the Manhattan Psychiatric Institute at the time of prot’s tenure have since departed. These include Chuck and Mrs. Archer (all names have been changed to protect individual privacy), who only recently moved out to a retirement complex on Long Island, thanks to an annuity established by her late husband; and Ed, a psychopath who gunned down six people in a shopping mall in 1986, but who has evinced little tendency toward violent behavior since a chance encounter with prot in 1990. He now lives in a community care home with La Belle Chatte, a former feline resident of MPI. The only patient mentioned in K-PAX who was still with us in 1995 was Russell, our resident “chaplain,” who had nowhere else to go.
Nevertheless, all our inmates, even the most recent arrivals, were well aware of prot’s promised return, and as the miserably hot, rainless summer days oozed by, the tension began to mount among patients and staff alike. (Only Klaus Villers, our director, remained unperturbed. In his opinion, “He vill neffer be back. Robert Porter vill be here foreffer.”)
No one anticipated prot’s return more than I, however, not only because of a paternal fondness I had developed for him during the course of our sessions together, but also because I still hoped to get Robert out of the catatonic ward and, with prot’s help, on the long road to recovery. But “about five years” from the time of prot’s departure could have been anytime in 1995 or even later, so my wife and I went ahead with our usual plans to spend the middle two weeks of August at our Adirondack retreat.
That was a mistake. I was so preoccupied with the possibility of his imminent reappearance that I was very poor company for Karen and our friends, the Siegels, who tried every possible means to get my mind off my work. In hindsight I probably realized unconsciously that “five years” meant, to a mind as precise as prot’s, sometime within minutes or hours of that exact interval. In fact, it was on Thursday, August 17, at 9:08 A.M., that I received a tearful call from Betty McAllister, our head nurse. “He’s back!” was all she could say, and all she needed to.
“I’ll be there this afternoon,” I assured her. “Don’t let him go anywhere!”
Karen (a psychiatric nurse herself) merely smiled, shook her head, and began to pack a lunch for my return trip to the city while I grabbed up unread reports and unfinished manuscripts and stuffed them into my briefcase.
The drive gave me a chance to reflect once more on the events of 1990, which I had reviewed only a few weeks earlier in preparation for his possible return. For the benefit of those who are not familiar with the history of the case, a brief summary follows:
Robert Porter was born and raised in Guelph, Montana. In 1975, when he was a high-school senior, he married a classmate, Sarah (Sally) Barnstable, who had become pregnant. The only job he could find to support his new wife and budding family was “knocking” steers in the local slaughterhouse, the same job that had killed his father some twelve years earlier.
One Saturday in August 1985, Robert arrived home from work to find a stranger coming out the front door. He chased the man through the house, past the bloody bodies of his wife and daughter, and into the backyard, where he broke the intruder’s neck. Numb with grief, he attempted suicide by drowning in the nearby river. However, he washed ashore downstream, and from that moment forward was no longer Robert Porter, but “prot,” a visitor from the idyllic planet K-PAX, where all the terrible things that had befallen his alter ego could never happen.
Indeed, his was a truly Utopian world, where everyone lived happily for a thousand years without the tiresome need to work for a living, where there was little or no sickness, poverty, or injustice, nor, for that matter, schools, governments, or religions of any kind. The only drawback to life on K-PAX seemed to be that sexual activity was so unpleasant that it was resorted to only to maintain the (low) population levels.
After prot, a true savant who knew a great deal about astronomical matters, was brought to MPI (how he got to New York is still a mystery), it took me several weeks to understand that he was a secondary personality behind whom his primary psyche was hiding and, with the help of Giselle Griffin, a freelance reporter, to identify that tragic soul as Robert Porter. But this revelation came too late. When prot “departed” the Earth on August 17, 1990, Robert, no longer able to hide behind his alter ego, retreated deep into the recesses of his own shattered mind.
Nothing, including a series of electroconvulsive treatments and the most powerful antidepressant drugs, had been of any use in arousing Robert from his rigor. I even tried hypnosis, which had proven so effective in revealing what had happened to him in 1985. He ignored me, as he did everyone else. Thus, it was with mounting excitement that I arrived at the hospital that hot August afternoon and hurried to his room, where I somehow expected prot to be ready and eager to get on with whatever he had “come back” to do. Instead, he was weak and unsteady, though a bit impatient to be up and going, as anyone who had spent five years in the fetal position would be. He was asking (more of a croak) for his favorite fruits, of course, and blamed his feeble state on his recent “voyage.” Betty had already seen that he had some liquid nourishment, including a little apple juice, and Dr. Chakraborty, our chief internist, had ordered a sedative to help him sleep, which he did almost immediately after I arrived.
It may seem odd to the reader that prot needed rest after five years of inactivity, but the fact is that the catatonic patient, unlike the comatose, is neither asleep nor unconscious but rigidly awake, like a living statue, afraid to move for fear of committing further “reprehensible” acts. It is this muscle rigidity (sometimes alternating with frenetic activity) that results in the utter exhaustion the patient feels when he is finally aroused.
I decided to let him recuperate for a few days before bombarding him with the list of questions I had been compiling for half a decade and getting on with his (Robert’s) treatment and, I fervently hoped, successful recovery.