I was gripped, as usual, by a strong sense of déjà vu as Karen and I waited for everyone to show up on a sunny, though relatively cool, Labor Day. It was here, five years ago, that I first became aware of the turmoil roiling deep inside prot’s (Robert’s) mind, and that I caught a glimpse of his ability to influence people’s lives, not only those of the patients but members of my own family as well.
Shasta and Oxeye, the dalmatians, sniffed about the yard, keeping an eye on the front gate as well as the picnic table. They were well aware that visitors were on their way.
Only half the family would be coming to this, the last cookout of the summer. Our oldest son Fred was on location shooting a film musical (he had a part in the chorus), and Jennifer, the internist, was unable to get away from the clinic in San Francisco. In fact, we hadn’t seen either of them for several months. One by one, it appears, your children separate the ties and slip away. At moments like this I begin to feel older and older, less and less relevant, as the drumbeat of time grows ever louder and harder to ignore. Though still (barely) in my fifties, I find myself wondering whether retirement might not be preferable to running down like an old grandfather clock.
Karen keeps asking me when I’m going to put away my yellow pad, and sometimes I think it would be quite wonderful to spend my days wandering leisurely around the wards, chatting with the patients, getting to know them intimately as prot does, a knack that Will, and a few of the nurses, seem to have been born with. A busman’s retirement, to be sure, but I know one or two drivers who love to spend their holidays riding around the country seeing things they had missed before. And no more cottage cheese!
Abigail and her husband Steve and the kids were the first to arrive. Abby greeted me warmly. As both of us have grown older she has begun to understand that I did my best as a father, as I, in turn, have come to grips with my own father’s shortcomings. We all make mistakes, we never get it right, as she is learning for herself, which (as prot pointed out) is probably the only way any of us ever really learn anything.
Abby, perhaps sensing an ally in our alien visitor, took the opportunity, which she hadn’t done in years, to ask me whether I realized yet that animal experimentation was “the most costly mistake in the history of medical science. Not that some good hasn’t come of it,” she went on before I could respond, “as there would be for almost any pissass approach to scientific problems. But we have to ask how much farther we might have progressed if better methodologies had been developed decades ago.”
I reminded my daughter, the radical, that she might get farther with her case if she cleaned up her language a little, and if the animal-rights people would stop breaking into laboratories and terrorizing researchers.
“Oh, Dad, you’re so fucking establishment. As if property and what you call ‘bad language’ were more important than the animals you kill every day. They called the war (she meant Vietnam) protesters terrorists, too, remember? Now we know that was just bullshit. They were right and everybody knows it. It’s exactly the same now with the animal-rights movement. Fortunately,” she added, only half jokingly, “all you old farts will peter out someday and things will change. The younger guys are beginning to see the folly of animal research.” Then she smiled and kissed me on the cheek. Happily, all our arguments end this way.
My astronomer son-in-law Steve knew all about Charlie Flynn’s interview with prot, and he reported that his colleague was busy searching the skies with renewed vigor for evidence of inhabited planets. Over the past few years Flynn has received a number of prestigious awards for his “discoveries” of several previously unknown worlds, including Noll and Flor and Tersipion, all of which were brought to his attention by prot in 1990. He and some of his colleagues were also working with officials at the State Department in hopes of visiting Libya or, at a minimum, of arranging to import as much excrement as possible from a certain spider indigenous to that country. And he had put all his graduate students to work shining lights into mirrors, hoping they would skip across the laboratory at superlight speeds, so far without success. “Ah love it,” Steve drawled. “It’s just like bein’ in a sci-fi novel.”
My grandsons Rain and Star, ages eleven and nine respectively, had a good time that day, primarily because of the dogs, I suppose, with whom they are great friends. As soon as they arrived the great Frisbee chase began, the boys’ shoulder-length hair flying out behind them like little flags. Shasta Daisy, now thirteen, hard of hearing and somewhat arthritic, became a puppy again in the excitement of the chase.
Betty and her husband Walt and the triplets arrived a little later with Giselle and prot, whom Shasta recognized at once from the similar visit five years earlier. Oxeye approached him as well, though somewhat more cautiously. Perhaps he instinctively realized this was not Robert, the silent companion of his puppyhood (I had brought Oxie to the catatonic ward in a feeble attempt to get Rob to relate to him). In any case, the dogs rarely left his side all afternoon.
Finally came Will, who brought his girlfriend Dawn. Will had just finished his summer stint at MPI, disappointed that he had not been able to decipher Dustin’s secret code. He was sure it had something to do with the “cigar” pantomime, but he couldn’t figure out what. He came to relax on this Labor Day, his final free day before classes began, but he was also hoping to speak with prot about how he might be able to communicate with Dustin.
Nothing extraordinary happened for most of the afternoon, and we all enjoyed a terrific backyard picnic. When that was over, and everyone was sitting around talking, I took prot aside and asked him how Robert was feeling.
“He seems to be doing okay, gino. It must be your chairside manner.”
“Thank you. Which reminds me—there’s something I need to ask you while you’re here.”
“Ask away.”
“In our last session, Robert called his father his ‘friend and protector.’ Do you know what he meant by that?”
“I never met his father. I didn’t know Rob when his father was alive.”
“I know. I just thought he might have mentioned something about him to you.” I reached into my pocket and pulled out the whistle I had used to bring Robert forward during session twenty. “Remember this?”
“Not the briar patch! Oh, dear! Oh, dear! Anything but the briar patch!” Prot wrung his hands in mock dismay, though I could tell he had been expecting this. Everyone else had been warned, and all the adults present, particularly Giselle, were glancing somewhat nervously in our direction. I winked at her reassuringly. The boys, even little Huey, Louie, and Dewey, were also sitting still, the dogs at their feet. It was suddenly very quiet.
I had no idea whether it would work here, whether Robert was ready to make an appearance outside the relative security of my examining room. As soon as I touched the whistle to my lips, his head dropped for a moment, then raised again. I didn’t even have to blow it.
“Hello, Dr. Brewer,” he said. His eyes jerked around like a pair of frightened butterflies. “Where am I?” He removed prot’s dark glasses so he could see better.
“You are at my home in Connecticut. Your second safe haven. Come on. I’ll introduce you to everyone.”
But before I could do that, Oxeye came running toward us, his tail flapping. He jumped up and began licking Robert’s face (we were sitting in lawn chairs at the back of the yard). Obviously he recognized his former companion and was very glad to see him. Shasta, on the other hand, was less demonstrative. She had met Robert only once, when he freaked out at the sight of our lawn sprinkler.
For his part, Rob was overjoyed to see Oxie again, and he hugged him for several minutes. “I’ve missed you!” he exclaimed. The dog wagged his tail from ear to ear before running joyfully all over the yard, making several close passes at Rob, as happy dalmatians will do. Later, Rob asked me whether we would keep his dog for him “a little longer.” I assured him that we would be happy to do so, pleased that his outlook had become so positive.
Out of the confines of the hospital and prot’s influence, Robert showed a side of himself I had not seen before. He was a courteous, kind, soft-spoken man who loved children, and he demonstrated for the boys a number of wrestling holds before joining in on a rip-roaring Frisbee chase with all five, and the dogs as well. If he had not been a mental patient, one would never have suspected there were demons gnawing and scratching just beneath his placid exterior.
Steve tried to engage him in a conversation about the heavens at one point, but gave up when it became apparent that Robert had only a cursory knowledge of the skies— the names of the planets and a few constellations. On the other hand, they both enjoyed comparing notes on their favorite college and professional football teams, though Robert was virtually unaware of developments in that sport since the mid-eighties.
But it was Giselle who occupied most of his time. Though she seemed to resent his presence at first, she was soon chatting quietly with him about her background and his (both came from small towns), and I certainly didn’t discourage this. The more comfortable Rob became with these new and unfamiliar surroundings, the more he was likely to trust us and the better the prognosis. As I watched them I wondered whether it would be Robert or prot who would be returning to the hospital with Betty and her family.
But Rob didn’t last out the afternoon. When he went into the house to use the bathroom it was prot who came out, dark glasses and all. Whether the interior had reminded him of that fateful day in 1985 I wasn’t sure, but I made no attempt to recall his alter ego. I was delighted he had made an appearance at all.
When Will discovered that prot had returned he immediately pressed him about Dustin’s “secret code.”
“You mean you haven’t worked that out yet? About the carrot and all? Ehhhh”—chomp, chomp, chomp—“what’s up, doc?”
“Carrot?” Will stammered. “I thought it was a cigar.”
“Why would he be munching a cigar?”
“Well—okay—what does the carrot mean?”
“You’re smarter than your father. You figure it out.”
Some of the others wanted to talk to prot as well. Steve pumped him about his own specialty, the formation of stars, and Giselle tried to get him to “speak” with Shasta, to find out whether he could learn anything about her background. Abby wanted to know how to get more people to sympathize with the plight of animals the world over. “Don’t stifle your children’s natural feelings toward them,” he advised her. And even they were grilling him, wanting to know more about what life was like on K-PAX. Star, for example, wondered whether K-PAX was as pretty as the Earth.
Prot’s eyes seemed to glaze over. “You can’t imagine how beautiful it is,” he murmured. “The sky changes from deep red to bright blue and back again, depending on which sun the illuminated side is facing. Rocks, fields of grains, faces—everything—glow in the radiant energy of the suns. And it’s so quiet you can hear korms flying and other beings breathing far off in the distance....”
I never did get a chance to ask him any of the host of questions I had been saving for him myself. That, like so many other matters, would have to wait for another time.
* * *
Although I had already brought Robert forth after hypnotizing prot, for certain technical reasons I wanted to bypass the latter and deal directly with Rob. I had scheduled Robert’s hypnosis-susceptibility (Stanford) test for early Tuesday morning, but was not surprised that it was prot who showed up. I took the opportunity to ask him, with no little trepidation, about my family and how they were doing (it was prot who put me on to Will’s drug problem five years earlier).
“Your wife makes a great fruit salad,” he said, stuffing his mouth to the brim with raspberries.
As patiently as I could manage, “Anything else?”
He squished the berries around in his mouth; a little stream of bloodred juice ran down his chin. “Abby seems to be one of the few human beings who understand what it will take to save the EARTH from yourselves. Of course she has some rough edges....” He grinned wryly and a masticated berry tumbled from his mouth. “I like that.”
“Dammit, prot, what about Will?”
“What about him?”
“Is he taking any drugs?”
“Only sex and caffeine. You humans never cease trying to find something to fulfill your boring lives, do you?”
“It may surprise you to learn, my friend, that there’s no one on Earth more human than yourself.”
“No need for insults, gino.”
I laughed at that, perhaps out of relief. “So you think Will is doing all right, then?”
“He’ll be a great doctor, mon ami”
“Thank you. I’m very happy to hear that.”
“Anytime.”
I could see from the lopsided grin that he still wasn’t going to tell me when he would be leaving or who he planned to take with him. However, something else had occurred to me as I was driving in that morning. “Prot?”
“Yeth thir?” in his Daffy Duck voice. I thought: He’s been hanging around Milton too long.
“Betty told me she saw you in the quiet room reading K-PAX.”
“I was curious.”
“Did you find any inaccuracies in it?”
“Only your absurd speculation that I am merely a figment of robert’s imagination.”
“That brings up an interesting question I’ve been meaning to ask you. How come I’ve never seen you and Robert at the same time?”
He slapped his forehead. “Gene, gene, gene. Have you ever seen me and the world trade center at the same time?”
“No.”
“Then I presume you think the world trade center doesn’t exist?”
“You know, there’s a better way to conclusively prove or disprove that you and Robert are the same person. Will you give us a blood sample?”
“You already sampled it when I was here the first time, remember?”
“Unfortunately, it was accidentally discarded. May we have a little more?”
“There are no accidents, my friend. But why not? I’ve got plenty.”
“I’ll set it up with Dr. Chakraborty for later this week, okay?”
“Hokay, joe.”
“Now—I need to speak to Robert for a while. Will you tell him, please?”
“Tell him what, Dr. Brewer?”
“Oh, hello, Robert. How are you feeling?”
“All right, I guess.”
“Good. I brought you here to see how good a candidate you would be for hypnosis, remember?”
“I remember.”
“All right. Just relax for a moment.” I explained the procedure to him. He listened carefully, nodded at the appropriate times, and we began.
The procedure took almost an hour. Robert was tested for a number of simple responses to hypnotic suggestion, such as arm immobilization, verbal inhibition, etc. Whereas prot had obtained a perfect score of twelve on the same test, I was surprised to find that Robert did very poorly with a four, considerably below average. I wondered whether this represented a genuine lack of aptitude or he was fighting it. Having no good alternative, I decided to go ahead with the next session as planned, though with less confidence than I would have liked.
If Robert was going to get well there would have to be better reasons for him to stay out of his protective shell than to retreat into it. Thus, I wanted and needed Giselle’s help in his treatment, despite her stronger feelings for prot. She was strategically placed to act as a sort of liaison between Rob and the world. I asked her, over lunch, what she thought of him.
“He’s okay. A nice enough guy. In fact, I like him.”
“I’m glad to hear that. Giselle, I have to ask you a favor. Robert is struggling to maintain his identity, even in my examining room. He made a brief appearance yesterday at my home, but that’s about it. As far as I know he’s never shown up in the wards. Have you ever seen him in Two?”
“Here’s the thing. Somehow fate has placed you in a unique position to help him. Will you try to do that? As a favor to me as well as him? I’ll give you free access to him—no more time limits.”
“Why not just whistle him out like you did before?”
“That was a special occasion. I don’t want to shock him by bringing him out in the wards before he’s ready.”
“What can I do?”
“What I don’t want you to do is to try to entice Rob to come forward. What I’d like you to do is to make him feel comfortable so he’ll stay out when he does show up.”
Her eyebrows lifted. “How do I do that?”
“Just be nice to him. As nice as possible. Talk to him. Find out what he’s interested in. Play games with him. Read to him. Anything you can think of to keep him around. I want him to like you. I want him to depend on you. I want you to be there for him.” I almost said, “Try to love him”—but that was asking a bit too much. “Are you up to such a challenge?”
She smiled, I think, though it was hard to tell with her mouth stuffed with food. “It’s the least I can do,” she mumbled, “for letting me be with prot so much of the time.”
“Good.” I scraped my plate, wishing as usual that there were more cottage cheese. “Now—what else is happening?”
“Well, there’s an anthropologist and a chemist coming later this week. To talk to prot, I mean.”
“What do they want?”
“I think the anthropologist wants to know about the progenitors of the ‘dremer’ species on K-PAX, maybe get some idea of what our own forefathers might have been like. The chemist wants to ask him about the flora of the Amazonian rain forest, which he’s been studying for twenty years or so. He wants to know where to look for drugs to treat AIDS and various forms of cancer and so on.”
“Let me know what he tells them, if anything. Anybody else lined up?”
“A cetologist is coming next week. He wants prot to talk to a dolphin he knows.”
“He’s bringing a dolphin?”
“He’s got a big tank that he pulls around to fairs and shopping malls. He’s going to bring it and the dolphin to the front of the hospital so that prot can talk to him.”
“Good grief—what next?”
“As prot might say, ‘Anything’s possible.’”
That afternoon I met with several of the faculty in Ward Four, where the psychopathic patients are housed. The reason for this gathering was that a new inmate had been brought in, someone who had planned and carried out a series of murders in all five boroughs of the city. Such patients are usually assigned to Ron Menninger, who specializes in psychopathy, with Carl Thorstein taking the overload.
The entire faculty, except for those unable to make it owing to other commitments, usually shows up for the first “session” with a new resident of Four—not only to help his psychiatrist evaluate his condition and possible course of treatment, but also to assess the potential danger to the rest of the staff and patients.
The new inmate, wearing bright orange-plastic shackles, was brought in by two of the security guards and asked to sit at the end of the long table. Ordinarily I’m not surprised by the general appearance of a psychopathic patient because there is no mold into which such a person fits. A “path” can be young or old, hardened or timid. He can look like a derelict or the boy next door. But I winced when this cold-blooded killer was brought in. I had been informed, of course, that she was a female Caucasian, but it was hard to imagine, even with decades of experience, that such a beautiful woman could be guilty of committing the crimes alleged to her. Yet she had been tried, found not responsible by reason of insanity, and sent to MPI for killing seven young men in various parts of the city.
Serial killings, indeed most murders, are usually committed by men. Whether this has anything to do with the male (or female) psyche, or is merely a matter of opportunity, is not at all clear. Psychopathy itself is a difficult affliction to understand. As with many mental illnesses, there seems to be a genetic defect often leading to an under-arousal of the autonomic nervous system. Persons harboring this defect, for example, exhibit little anxiety when confronted with a potentially dangerous situation. In fact, they seem to enjoy it.
In addition, psychopaths are often quite impulsive, acting mainly on feelings of the moment, seeking shortlived thrills without regard to the long-term consequences. They are usually sociopathic as well, caring little for the feelings of others and evincing little regard for what other people may think of them.
On the other hand, they are often superficially charming, making it very difficult for potential victims to spot danger in ordinary interactions with them. How does one recognize that “the nice boy (or girl) next door” can be as deadly as an anaconda?
But back to our patient. The woman, only twenty-three, was thought to have murdered seven young men, perhaps as many as nine, all from outlying towns, who had come to the big city for a good time on a Saturday night. All seven were found in deserted areas, unclad from the waist down, and penectomized. She was apprehended only when she picked up a police decoy, who barely escaped with his life, not to mention his genitalia.
But charming she was, and lovely as well. She smiled as she gazed into the eyes of every doctor in the room. Her answers to routine questions were frank, sometimes humorous, not the slightest bit antisocial. And I thought: Can we ever really know a person, even one who is perfectly sane? I knew that Ron was in for a very interesting experience. Nevertheless, I didn’t envy him in the slightest, even when she wet her lips and winked at me as if to say, “Let’s have some fun.”
When I got back to my office I perused the “poop sheet” on our newest patient, whom I will call Charlotte. One by one her victims had disappeared and were never heard from again. The reason it took the police so long to find her was that young men come to town every weekend to pick up girls, and even under the best of circumstances it is virtually impossible to find an unknown killer in a city full of people. Probably no one would even take notice of a young couple leaving the bar or restaurant where they met, perhaps arm in arm, smiling warmly, Mr. Fly eagerly accompanying Ms. Spider to her web.
Perhaps that’s why I have trouble sympathizing with spiders, even when they get trapped in a sink.
Before leaving for the day I sought out Cassandra. I found her sitting on the weathered bench under “Adonis in the Garden of Eden,” her raven-black hair shining in the sun, gazing at the cloudless sky from which she gets her inspiration, or so she claims. Knowing she ignores any attempt to interrupt her, I waited.
When she finally turned her attention away from the heavens I cautiously approached her. She seemed in a pleasant enough mood, and we chatted for a while about the hot weather. She predicted more of the same. I said, “That’s not what I wanted to ask you about.”
“Why not? Everyone else does.”
“Cassandra, I wonder if you could help me with something.”
“It won’t be the Mets.”
“No, not that. I need to know how long prot is going to be around. Can you tell me anything about when he’ll be leaving us?”
“If you’re planning a trip to K-PAX, don’t pack your bags yet.”
“You mean it will be a while before he goes?”
“When he’s finished what he came to do, he’ll leave. That will take some time.”
“May I ask you—did you get this information from prot himself?”
She looked annoyed, but admitted she had talked with him.
“Anything else you can tell me about your conversation with prot?”
With a hint of amusement now: “I asked if he would take me with him.”
“What did he say?”
“He told me I was one of those being considered.”
“Really? Do you know who else is on the list?”
She tapped her head with a forefinger. “He said you would ask me that.”
“Do you know the answer?”
“Who are they?”
“Anyone who wants to go.”
But not everyone on the list will be selected, I thought dismally. A lot of them are going to be very disappointed. “All right. Thank you, Cassie.”
“Don’t you want to know who’s going to win the World Series?”
“Who?”
“The Braves.”
I almost blurted out, “You’re crazy!”