On the morning of prot’s next session I got a call from Charlie Flynn, the astronomer from Princeton and my son-in-law Steve’s colleague, who was studying the planetary system prot claimed to have come from. His voice reminded me of a squeaky wheel. “Why didn’t you tell me he was back?” he demanded, without even a “Hello.” “I—”
“Whoa. You have to understand that prot is a patient of mine. He’s not here for your benefit, nor anyone else’s.”
“I disagree.”
“That’s not for you to decide!” I snapped. I hadn’t slept well the night before.
“Who does decide such matters? There is a great deal he can tell us. The things we’ve learned from him already have changed our way of thinking about certain astronomical problems, and I’m sure we’ve only scratched the surface. We need him.”
“My first responsibility is to my patient, not the world of astronomy.”
There was a brief pause while he reconsidered his approach. “Of course. Of course. Look. I’m not asking you to sacrifice him on the altar of science. All I’m asking is that you let us talk with him when he’s not undergoing therapy or whatever.”
I could understand his position and, indeed, the refrain was beginning to sound familiar. “I’ll offer you a compromise,” I told him.
“Oh, no. Submitting a list of questions like last time just won’t do it.”
“If I let you talk to him directly, then every astronomer in the country is going to be banging on the door.”
“But I banged first.”
“No you didn’t. Someone got here before you did.”
“What? Who?”
“The reporter who helped us fill in his background five years ago. Giselle Griffin.”
“Oh. Her. But what has she got to do with this? She’s not a scientist, is she?”
“Nevertheless, here’s my proposal. You and everyone else can talk to him through her. Is that acceptable?”
Another pause. “I’ll make you a counteroffer. I’ll agree to your proposition if I can speak directly with him just once. We were in on this thing five years ago, too, and we helped identify him as a true savant, remember?”
“Okay, but you’ll have to work it out with her. She has him for an hour a day.”
“How do I reach her?”
“I’ll ask her to contact you.”
After grumbling something about reporters, he hung up. I immediately called the head of our secretarial pool to request that she direct all requests for information about prot to Giselle.
“Does that include the stack of mail we’ve gotten over the past few years?”
“Everything,” I told her, eager to get this can of worms out of my hair.
When Giselle’s article featuring prot came out in 1992, it precipitated a flurry of calls and letters to the hospital. Most were requests for information about prot’s home planet and directions on how to get there. When K-PAX appeared three years later, several thousand more queries came in from all over the world. A lot of people, it seemed, wanted to find some way, short of suicide, to get off the planet. Since we had no answers to these questions, most of the correspondence was filed away without response.
On the other hand, all the requests for copies of his “report,” an assessment of life on Earth and his dim prognosis for the future of Homo sapiens, have been honored. This treatise, “Preliminary Observations on B-TIK (RX 4987165.233),” has generated a certain amount of controversy among scientists, many of whom believe that his prediction of our imminent demise is greatly exaggerated, that only a crazy person would call for an end to established social customs, which, in prot’s eyes, fuel the fire of our self-immolation.
As for myself, I take prot’s report, and all his other observations and pronouncements, for what they are—the utterances of a remarkable man who may be able to utilize part(s) of his brain unavailable to the rest of us, except, perhaps, for those suffering from other forms of savant syndrome. In prot’s case, however, a substantial portion of his brain belonged to someone else: his alter ego, Robert Porter. It was Robert, a desperately ill patient, whom I so badly needed and wanted to help, even if it came at prot’s expense.
“Peaches!” prot exclaimed as he strode into my examining room. He was wearing his favorite attire: sky-blue denim shirt and matching corduroy pants. “I haven’t had one of these in years! Your years, that is.” He offered me a taste and then opened wide to bite into a ripe one himself. A jet of saliva squirted halfway across the room.
This was one of the few fruits whose seeds he did not consume. I asked him why.
“Hard on the teeth,” he explained, clanking one of the pits back into the bowl. “Dentist fodder.”
“You have dentists on K-PAX?”
“Heaven forbid.”
“Lucky you.”
“Luck has nothing to do with it.”
“While you’re eating, let me just ask you: Are you planning to write another report on us?”
“Nope,” he replied with a great slurp. “Not unless there have been some major changes since my last visit.” He paused and gave me his sincere, innocent look. “There haven’t been, have there?”
“You mean on Earth.”
“That’s where we are, ain’t it?”
“Not that you would call major, I suppose.”
“I was afraid of that.”
“No world wars, though,” I said brightly.
“Just the usual dozens of regional ones.”
“But that’s progress, don’t you think?”
He grinned at this, though it looked more like an animal baring its teeth. “That’s one of the funniest things about this place. You kill millions and millions of beings every day, and if you murder a few less on the next one, you nearly break your arms patting yourselves on the back. On K-PAX you humans are a riot.”
“C’mon, prot, we don’t kill ‘millions and millions’ of people every day.”
“I didn’t say ‘people.’” Another pit rang into the bowl like the peal of a cheerful bell.
I had forgotten that he considered all animals equally important, even insects. I decided to change the subject. “Have you spoken with any of the other patients since I last saw you?”
“They have spoken to me, mostly.”
“I suppose they all want to go back with you.”
“Not all of them.”
“Tell me: Are you able to communicate with everyone in Ward Two?”
“Of course. So could you if you tried.”
“Even the ones who don’t speak?”
“They all speak. You just have to learn how to listen.”
I have long believed that if we could understand what certain unintelligible patients were saying, i.e., how their thoughts differed from normal, we could learn a lot about the nature of their afflictions. “What about the schizophrenics? I mean the ones whose words seem garbled—can you understand what they’re saying?”
“Certainly.”
“How do you do that?”
Prot threw up his hands. “You remember the tape you played for me five years ago? The one of the whale songs?”
“Yes.”
“What a memory! Well, there you are.”
“I don’t—”
“You’ve got to stop treating your patients as if they were carbon copies of yourself. If you were to treat them as beings from whom you might learn something, you would.”
“Can you help me do that?”
“I could, but I won’t.”
“Why not?”
“You have to learn it for yourself. You’d be surprised how easy it is if you forget everything you’ve been taught and start over.”
“Are you talking about my patients, or the Earth again?”
“It’s the same thing, wouldn’t you say?” He pushed the bowl of pits away and sat gazing contentedly toward the ceiling, as if he hadn’t a care in the world.
“What about Robert?” I asked.
“What about him?”
“Have you spoken to him in the last day or so?”
“He’s still not saying much. But...”
“But—what?”
“I have the feeling he’s ready to cooperate with you.”
I sat up straighter. “He is? How do you know? What did he say?”
“He didn’t say anything. It’s just a feeling I have. He seems—I don’t know—a little tired of hiding. Of everything.”
“Everything? He’s not planning to—”
“Nah. He’s just tired of being tired, I think.”
“I’m very glad to hear that.”
“I suppose that’s what you would call ‘progress.’”
I stared at him for a moment, wondering whether Robert might be willing to come out even without hypnosis.
“He’s not that tired, gene,” prot remarked.
I could feel my shoulders slumping. “In that case, we’ll begin now. If you’re ready.”
“Whenever you are.”
“Good. Do you remember the little spot on the wall behind me?”
“Of course. One-two-three-four-five.” And he was out like a light.
“Prot?”
“Yes, dr. b?”
“How do you feel?”
“A little spacey.”
“Very funny. Now—do you remember what happened the last time I spoke with you in this setting?”
“Certainly. It was a hot day and you were sweating a lot.”
“That’s right. And Robert wouldn’t speak to me— remember?”
“Of course.”
“Will he speak to me now?”
There was a pause before prot abruptly slouched down in his chair.
“Robert?”
No response.
“Robert, the last time I spoke with you was under very different circumstances. I didn’t know much about you then. Since that time I have learned why you are suffering so much, and I want to try to help you cope with that. I’m not going to make any promises this time. It won’t be easy, and you’ll have to help me. For now, I only want to chat with you, get to know you better. Do you understand? Let’s just talk about the happy times in your life or anything else you’d like to discuss. Will you speak to me now?”
“I want you to consider this room a safe haven. This is a place where you can say anything that’s on your mind without fear or guilt or shame, and nothing will happen to you or to anyone else. Please remember that.”
No response.
“I’ll tell you what. I’ve got some information here on your background. I’m going to read it to you, and you stop me if I say anything that’s incorrect. Will you do that?”
Again there was no response, but I thought I detected a slight tilt of Robert’s head, as if he wanted to hear what I had to say.
“All right. You were a star wrestler in high school with an overall record of 26-8. You were captain of the team and finished second in the state tournament your senior year.”
Robert said nothing.
“You were a good student and won a scholarship to the state university. You were also awarded a community-service medal by the Guelph Rotary Club in 1974. You were vice president of your class for three years running. All right so far?”
Still no response.
“You and your wife Sarah and your daughter Rebecca lived in a trailer for the first seven years of your marriage, and then you built a house in the country near a forest with a stream. It sounds like a beautiful place. The kind of place I’d like to retire to someday....”
I glanced at Robert and, to my surprise, found him staring at me. I didn’t ask him how he felt. He looked terrible. “I’m sorry,” he croaked.
I wasn’t clear what he was sorry about—it could have been any number of things. But I said, immediately, “Thank you, Robert. I’m sorry, too.”
His eyes slammed shut and his head dropped down again. Apparently the only reason he had come out was to offer this pathetic apology to me, or perhaps to the world. I gazed at him sadly for a moment before he sat up and stretched.
“Thank you, prot.”
“For what?”
“For—never mind. All right, I’m going to wake you up now. I’m going to count back from five to one. You will awaken slowly, and when I get to—”
“Five-four-three-two-one,” he sang out. “Hiya, doc. Did Rob say anything to you yet?” Note: When awake, prot could not remember anything that transpired while he was under hypnosis.
“Yes, he did.”
“No kidding? Well, it was only a matter of time.”
“The question is, how much time do we have?”
“All the time in the WORLD.”
“Prot, do you know anything about Rob that I don’t know?”
“Such as?”
“Why he feels so worthless?”
“No idea, coach. Probably has something to do with his life on EARTH.”
“But you talk to him, don’t you?”
“Not about that.”
“Why not?”
“He doesn’t want to.”
“Maybe he does now.”
“Don’t hold your breath.”
“Okay, I’ll let you off the hook for today. See if you can find out anything more from Robert, and I’ll see you again on Friday.”
“Put plenty of fruit on that hook,” he advised as he ambled out.
I was on the “back forty” watching a badminton game played without shuttlecocks when Giselle came running toward me. I hadn’t seen her since her encounter with prot two days earlier. “It’s like you said,” she panted. “He’s just the same!”
I asked her whether he had told her when he was leaving.
“Not yet,” she confessed. “But he doesn’t seem to be in any hurry!” She looked absolutely moonstruck.
I reminded her to try to find out when it would be and to let me know “ASAP.” “But be subtle about it,” I added inanely.
It didn’t surprise me to learn that she had already gone through all the correspondence the hospital had received about prot and K-PAX. What did, however, was the information that more letters were beginning to come in.
“But nobody knows he’s back.”
“Somebody does! Or maybe they just anticipated his return. But the amazing thing is that a lot of them were addressed specifically to prot, care of MPI, or to prot, K-PAX. Or to the hospital with the notation to ‘please forward.’ In fact, some were just addressed to ‘prot,’ no address given.”
“So I heard.”
“But don’t you see what that means?”
“What?”
“It means that a lot of people wanted their letters or calls to go directly to prot, not to anyone else.”
“Isn’t that what you would expect?”
“Not really. Furthermore, a lot of it was marked PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL.”
“So?”
“So I think most people don’t trust us with the letters. I wouldn’t, would you?”
Perhaps she was right. I had read some of those addressed to me, many of which began: “You idiot!”
While I was mulling over this unwanted development, she added, “Besides, you may have a legal problem if you don’t turn them over to him.”
“What legal problem?”
“Tampering with the U.S. mails.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Prot is a patient here, and we have a right—”
“Maybe you should ask your lawyer.”
“Maybe I will.”
“No need. I already spoke to him. There was a case in 1989 in which evidence obtained from the correspondence of a patient at one of the state institutions was thrown out of court as illegal search and seizure. On top of that the hospital was fined for tampering with the mails. Anyway,” she argued further, “if he’s just a part of Robert’s personality as you seem to think, what harm can it possibly do?”
“I don’t know,” I answered truthfully, thinking more about Robert than about a stack of Santa Claus mail or what prot might do with it. “All right. But just give him the ones specifically addressed to him.” I suddenly felt like a Watergate criminal trying to minimize the damage, though I didn’t know what the fallout might be.
“Next item. I got a call from Dr. Flynn last night.”
“Oh, yes. I was going to ask you to call him.”
“I guess he couldn’t wait. Anyway, I arranged for him to meet with prot.”
“Just don’t let him take too much of prot’s time. He won’t be the last caller you’ll have.”
“I know. I’ve already heard from a cetologist and an anthropologist.”
“Maybe that’s enough for now....”
“We’ll see.” She skipped away, leaving me alone with Jackie, a thirty-two-year-old “child,” who was sitting on the damp ground (the lawn had been watered during the lunch hour) near the outer wall, digging a hole and ecstatically smelling each spoonful of the soft earth before squeezing it into a ball and carefully stacking it on top of the others. She had a mustache of soil, but I wasn’t about to stop her and suggest she wash her dirty face.
Like many of our patients, Jackie has a tragic history. She was raised on a sheep farm in Vermont and spent most of her time out-of-doors. Home-schooled and isolated from close contact with other children, she developed an early interest in nature in all its color and variety. Unfortunately, Jackie’s parents were killed in an automobile accident when she was nine, and she was compelled to live with an aunt in Brooklyn. Almost immediately after that, on the playground of her new school, she was accidentally shot in the stomach by a ten-year-old boy trying to avenge the murder of an older brother. When she came out of the hospital she was mute, and she hasn’t spoken a word, nor mentally aged a day, since that time. In fact, one of the nurses still puts her hair up in pigtails, as her mother used to do when she was a girl.
Though she suffered no brain damage, nothing we have tried has proven successful in bringing her out of her dream world, the childhood she loved so much. She appears to live in a hypnotic state of her own making, from which we cannot arouse her.
But how she enjoys that world! When she plays with a toy or one of the cats she throws her entire being into it, focusing her concentration to the point of ignoring all outside stimuli, much like our autists. She takes in a sunset, or the sparrows flocking in the ginkgo trees, with rapture and serenity. It is a pleasure to watch her eat, her eyes closed and her mouth making little smacking noises.
It was patients like Jackie, and Michael, and others at the hospital that I vaguely hoped prot, before he disappeared again, might be able to help. God knows we weren’t doing much for them. Already he was instrumental in getting Robert to come out for a moment, if only to say he was sorry. But about what? Perhaps that he wasn’t going to be able to go through with it, to cooperate in his treatment. Or maybe it was, in fact, what it appeared to be: a hopeful sign, an attempt to communicate, a small beginning.
That afternoon, as I was hurrying to get to a committee meeting, I spotted prot in the rec room talking with two of our most pathetic patients. One of these is a twenty-seven-year-old Mexican-American male who is obsessed with the notion that he can fly if he simply puts his mind to it. His favorite author, of course, is Gabriel García Márquez. No amount of medication or psychotherapy can convince him that only birds, bats, and insects can take to the air, and he spends most of his waking hours flapping back and forth across the lawn, never rising more than a foot or two above the ground.
How did this sorry condition come about? Manuel was the fourteenth of fourteen children. As such, he was the last into the bathtub, never got his share of the limited food, never had any new clothes, not even underwear or socks. On top of that, he was the “runt” of the bunch, barely making five feet in height. As a result he grew up with almost no self-esteem, and considered himself a failure before his life had even begun.
For reasons known only to himself he set an impossible goal: to fly. If he could accomplish this, he decided, he would be fit to join the ranks of his fellow human beings despite all his other “failures.” He has been at it since he was sixteen.
The other is an African-American homosexual—I’ll call him Lou—who firmly believes he is pregnant. What makes him think so? If he places his hand on his abdomen he can feel the baby’s pulse. Arthur Beamish (who is gay himself), his staff physician and our newest psychiatrist, has not been able to convince him that everyone’s abdomen pulses with the beat of the abdominal aorta and other arteries, or to persuade him that fertilization in a man is impossible due to the absence of a major component of the reproductive system, namely an egg cell.
What has led to this bizarre conception? Lou has the mind of a woman trapped in a man’s body, a not uncommon gender-identity problem known as transsexualism. When he was a child he enjoyed dressing in his big sister’s clothing. His unmarried mother, who had problems of her own, encouraged this practice and insisted he urinate sitting down, and it wasn’t until he was twelve years old that the truth was discovered during a routine school physical. By that time Lou’s sexuality was firmly established in his mind. Indeed, he refers to himself as “she,” something the staff does not encourage as it would only make things worse. Oddly, a benign cyst in his bladder caused some occasional minor bleeding, a fact he used to “prove,” at least to himself, that he was menstruating.
Although a subject of intense verbal abuse throughout high school, he stubbornly maintained his female characteristics, wearing skirts and bras, using makeup, etc. He padded his breasts, of course, but so did some of the girls. After graduation, he and his mother moved to a different state where no one knew them, and Lou’s identity was secure. He got a job as a secretary for a large corporation, and it wasn’t long afterward that he fell in love with a man who happened to notice his five o’clock shadow in the elevator late one afternoon. A passionate relationship followed, and it was only a few months later that the urinary bleeding mysteriously stopped and Lou took this to mean he was pregnant. He was ecstatic. He badly wanted to have a child in order to validate his existence. Almost immediately thereafter he was afflicted with morning sickness, abdominal pains, fatigue, and all the rest. He has been wearing maternity clothes ever since.
The “father” of his child, frightened by something he did not understand, convinced Lou to seek psychiatric help, and he ended up with us at MPI. That was six months ago, and the baby is “due” in a few weeks. What will happen when it comes to term is a matter of conjecture and concern among staff members and patients alike. Lou, however, awaits that fateful day with sublime anticipation, as do some of the other inmates, who are already suggesting possible names for the new arrival.