The morning before Rob’s next session I sat in my office thinking about him and Sally. What could possibly have happened to preclude his having an intimate relationship with his wife-to-be, whom he dearly loved? Did the fact that she was carrying someone else’s child have anything to do with it?
Even under the best of circumstances, sex one of the most difficult things human beings have to deal with. Most of us learn about it piecemeal, on school playgrounds, in the streets, from movies or TV. Some get an introductory course from their father or mother, often in the form of a how-to manual obtained from the local library. Many parents are almost as ignorant about the subject as their children.
The best place to learn about sex, just as it is for every other subject, is the schools. But that idea has come under fire in recent years. The net result of this vacuum is, of course, that teenage pregnancy and venereal diseases are rampant in our society. The kids learn plenty about sex, but they learn it from each other.
My own introduction to this mysterious subject was somewhat less than informed. One hot August afternoon my mother went shopping, leaving Karen and me home alone. We were fourteen or fifteen at the time. We turned on the sprinkler and ran through the spray, back and forth until our shorts and T-shirts were sopping wet, and nearly transparent. Then we “accidentally” bumped into each other, one thing led to another, and—well, it’s the old story. Afterward, Karen was sure she was pregnant and I thought I was a rapist. We didn’t touch each other again for two years.
Yet, despite all the taboos and other obstacles, most of us manage, through trial and error at least, to find a satisfactory partner and, eventually, to enjoy a more or less successful sex life. Why not Rob?
Later that morning, Will, now back in school but still coming to MPI in his spare time to speak with Dustin and some of the other patients, stopped by my office to see if I wanted to go somewhere for lunch. Though I rarely do so, he and I went out to a nearby restaurant.
Knowing I should eat lightly or fall asleep later on, I decided on a cup of soup and a salad. Will, always a good eater, ordered substantially more.
We chatted for a while. Usually full of restless energy, he seemed withdrawn, nervous. He only picked at his food, claiming he wasn’t as hungry as he thought. I may not be the world’s greatest father, but even I could tell that something was bothering him, and I suspected what it might be: His girlfriend Dawn was pregnant. My own father, who lived through (and never forgot) the Depression, wouldn’t let me leave food on my plate; it’s a habit I’ve never been able to break. I scraped Will’s uneaten portions into my empty salad dish.
But his girlfriend wasn’t pregnant (as far as I knew). It was worse than that. He was having second thoughts about medical school! Not an unfamiliar topic to me, as I had dealt with similar misgivings thirty-five years earlier. And I had known other students who couldn’t take the pressure and finally dropped out. One had committed suicide. A few turned to drugs. This was what was worrying me—Will already had a drug problem.
As I gobbled his lunch, I told him about my own doubts when I was his age, that it was not unusual for a student, or even a doctor, to question his abilities, to feel overwhelmed at times by his awesome responsibility for the lives of his patients. But I also reminded him that it comes with the territory. That he, like all of us, will make mistakes. That no one is perfect and we can only do our best. And in his case, the best was quite good enough. Even prot had said so.
“Prot said that, Pop?”
“He says you’re going to be a fine doctor.”
“Well, if prot thinks so, maybe I can handle it after all.”
Though a bit envious that it had been prot’s remark, and none of my own, that had swayed his thoughts and lifted his spirits, I felt relieved that the problem seemed to have been resolved. Now he was hungry. Since I had eaten all of his food, he ordered something more. To keep him company, I had a rich dessert while we discussed Dustin and some of the other patients. Finally he pushed his plate away and took a sip of coffee.
I asked him whether he was finished. He nodded. Since he hadn’t eaten everything, I scraped the leftovers onto my dessert plate.
It was a wonderful lunch, the kind I never had a chance to have with my own father. But now I had to go back and try to be a good doctor, despite my own chronic misgivings, on a Friday afternoon and a very full stomach.
“Ah, cherries! No being can eat just one!”
“Prot! Where’s Robert?”
Slurp! Munch, munch, munch. “He’s taking the day off.”
“What do you mean, ‘He’s taking the day off?”
“He doesn’t want to talk to you today. Give him the weekend. He’ll come around.” Crunch, crunch. “Cherry?”
“No, thanks. Why would he be more willing to talk on Monday than today?”
“He needs to psych himself up for it.”
“We’re running out of time, prot.”
“Haven’t we been over this before? Trust me, doc. You can’t rush these things. Or would you rather blow your little whistle and put him back the way he was a month ago?”
“It’s that bad?”
“You’re getting into something he’s been trying to run away from for most of his life.”
“What is it? Do you know what happened to him?”
“Nope. He never told me.”
“Then how do you know—”
“I’ve been coming here since 1963, remember?”
“So what do we do now?”
“He’s almost ready to deal with it. Just give him a little more time.”
The only sound on the tape at this point was that of someone’s foot tapping, probably my own. “Prot?”
“What you want, kemo sabe?”
“Do you think he would feel more comfortable talking to you about it first?”
“I don’t know. Want me to ask him?”
“Please do.”
Prot gazed at the ceiling for a long moment. Unforgivably, I yawned. Ignoring this breach of etiquette, he exclaimed, “Well done, dr. b! He does want to tell me first. But he doesn’t want me to tell you. He wants to do it.”
“Will he tell you now?”
Prot threw up his hands in a now-familiar gesture of frustration. “Gene, gene, gene! How many times do I have to say this? He wants to do it on Monday. He’ll tell me that morning and you in the afternoon. I think it’s a pretty good deal, don’t you? My advice is to take it.”
“I’ll take it.”
“Good person.”
I gazed at him through heavy-lidded eyes as he energetically devoured a couple of pounds of cherries. “Well, we’ve got some time left,” I pointed out. “Maybe you would be willing to answer a few questions.”
“Anything. Except how to build better bombs or contaminate another PLANET.”
I didn’t ask him what he figured we’d contaminate it with. Instead, I pulled out my old list of questions, the ones I had brought to the Labor Day picnic but never got a chance to ask him. Of course I had certain ulterior motives for wanting to query him. Maybe he would say something that would give me a better insight into the workings of his (and Robert’s) unpredictable mind. “There are a few things you told me during your visit five years ago that I never followed up on. May I do so now?”
“I don’t think anything could stop you from asking your relentless questions, gino.”
“Thank you. I’ll take that as a compliment. By the way, some of these were sent to me by people who read K-PAX.”
“Hooray for them.”
“Ready?”
“Aim. Fire!”
“No need for sarcasm, prot. First, what does ‘K-PAX’ mean?”
He adopted a stiff, pompous demeanor before proceeding. “‘K’ is the highest class of PLANET, the last step in the evolutionary process, the point of perfect peace and stability. ‘PAX’ means ‘a place of purple plains and mountains.’”
“Because of your red and blue suns.”
He relaxed again. “Bingo!”
“So ‘B-TIK,’ what we call Earth, is the second lowest type?”
“Kee-reck. You don’t want to know about the ‘A’ category.”
“Why not?”
“Those are WORLDS already destroyed by their own inhabitants. Before that they were ‘B’s.”
“I see. And ‘TIK’ means—?”
“Beautiful blue water dotted with white clouds.”
“Ah, I get it.”
“I was beginning to wonder.”
“All right. What about Tersipion?”
“Oh, that’s what they call it. We call it F-SOG.”
“Okay. Tell me about some of the other beings you have come across. Like the giant insects on—ah—F-SOG, for example.”
“Use your imagination, doc. Anything you can think of, and a lot you can’t, exists somewhere. Remember that there are several billion inhabited planets and moons in our GALAXY alone, not to mention a comet or two. Your species can’t seem to imagine anything that doesn’t work pretty much the same as you do. Your ‘experts’ are always saying life is impossible somewhere or other because there isn’t any water or oxygen or whatever. Wake up and smell the hoobah!”
Paxo, I assumed, for coffee. I wished I had some. I thought of a former patient of mine, whom I called “Rip van Winkle.” Rip would fall asleep even during intercourse. “Let’s go on to some more general questions.”
“Uh—Eisenhower?”
“No, not him. You told me once that K-PAXians like to contemplate the possibility of traveling forward in time. Remember?”
“Of course.”
“Does that mean you can already go backward in time?”
“Not in the sense you mean it. Think—if beings could come back here from, say, EARTH year 2050, why haven’t they?”
“Maybe they have.”
“I don’t see any of them around, do you?”
“So traveling backward in time is impossible?”
“Not at all. But maybe your future beings don’t want to come back here. Or,” he added pointedly, “maybe EARTH’s future is limited.”
“What about K-PAX? Is it crawling with beings back from the future?”
“Does that mean—”
“Who knows?”
“All right. You once mentioned a ‘spatial fourth dimension.’ Have you ever seen it?”
“Once or twice.”
“So it exists?”
“Evidently. In fact, while I was back on K-PAX, I managed to stumble into it. It was wonderful—I’ve always wanted to do that.” He paused a moment to ponder the experience. “But I fell out again right away. It must have something to do with gravity.”
“Obviously. Okay, let’s come down to Earth for a minute.”
“Nice place to visit, but...”
“Cute. Now—you told me a long time ago that we humans were going ‘hell-bent after solar, wind, geothermal, and tidal energy without any thought whatsoever about the consequences.’ What did you mean by that?”
“Look. What happens when you dam up a river and steal its energy for your own devices? You flood everything in sight and the river becomes a trickle. So what do you think would happen if you had windmills all over your PLANET?”
“I don’t know. What?”
“Use your noggin! For one thing, your climate would be changed to the point where you would think you were on another WORLD. In fact, it’s already happening, haven’t you noticed? The floods, the droughts, the endless strings of tornadoes and hurricanes—you name it.”
“But we don’t have all that many windmills on Earth.”
“Exactly! And what’s going to happen when you have more and more? Not to mention screwing around with your tides and internal temperatures. In the meantime, you insist on burning up the last of your fossil fuels and wreaking havoc as if there were no tomorrow.”
“But prot—everything causes some pollution or effect on the environment. Until we figure out nuclear fusion, what are we going to use to heat our homes? Run our machines?”
“What, indeed?”
“So there’s no way to win?”
“You might try reducing your numbers by five or six billion.”
By now I was barely able to keep my eyes open. “But don’t you think we’re making a beginning? There’s a lot of concern these days about the environment, for example.”
“The environment? You mean your environment.”
“Well, yes.”
“And to make your environment more tolerable for you, you recycle beer cans, plant trees—is that what you mean?”
“It’s a start, isn’t it?”
“Recycling is like putting a Band-Aid on a tumor, doc. And where are you going to plant a tree when there’s no place left to plant it?”
“Is that what you meant when you said in your report that we are yet children?”
Prot’s gaze shifted to the ceiling, as it often does when he’s trying to find words that I might be capable of understanding. I tried unsuccessfully to stifle another yawn.
“Let me put it this way: When you stop making killing seem admirable, when motherhood becomes less important than survival—not just your survival, but that of all the other creatures on your PLANET—you’ll be on your way to adulthood.”
“Lions kill! So do eagles and bears and—”
“They have no choice. You do.”
“Plants have no brain or nervous system. They feel no pain or anguish.”
“Is that your main criterion?”
“That is the only criterion.”
“What about insects?”
“They have nervous systems, don’t they?”
“And you think they feel pain?”
“Have you ever been stepped on?”
“Not literally.”
“Try to imagine it.”
“Bacteria? Molds?”
“Dig right in.”
“Does this mean you’re opposed to abortion?”
“I assume you’re talking about the human fetus.”
“Yes.”
“If it can feel anxiety or pain, don’t do it.”
“And does it feel anxiety or pain?”
“It certainly can the day before birth. The day after conception it is no more sensate than a grain of sand.”
“Then where do you draw the line?”
“Now, gene, that’s a nobrainer, wouldn’t you say?”
I had to end this before I fell asleep. “Prot—when are you leaving?”
His eyes rolled up for a moment—his version of a smirk. “I still don’t know, daddyo. But I can tell you this: I filed for three windows this time—-just in case.”
Suddenly I was wide awake. “Windows?”
“In case things get complicated again.”
“With Robert?”
“With everything.”
“Can you at least tell me now whether you’ll be taking any of our patients with you when you go?”
“Ad hos forgal! Not this again!”
“Cassandra?”
He shrugged.
“Jackie?”
“Nah.”
“Why not?”
“She’s the happiest being in the place!”
“What about—”
“Maybe. She’s obviously not happy here. But you have so much to learn from her!”
“From Frankie? A woman who’s incapable of love?”
He stared at me disgustedly, almost angrily. “Sometimes I think these visits with you are a complete waste of time. What you call ‘love’ is a big part of your problem. You tend to limit the concept to yourself and your immediate family. Talk to frankie, doc. You might learn something. And that goes for all your other patients, too.”
I thought: Did Robert’s problem have more to do with love than with sex? Was he somehow betrayed by his wife and daughter? Or someone else he loved? “I’ve got a lot more questions left, my alien friend, but—well, I’ll save them for later.”
“Fine with me. I’ve got plenty of other things to do.”
“That reminds me. In case I don’t get another chance— thanks for what you’ve done so far. Not only with Robert but for Rudolph and Michael and for getting through to some of the autists. You’ve accomplished more in the few weeks you’ve been here than the rest of us have in the past five years.”
“I told you before: You can do it, too. All you have to do is eliminate the crap from your thoughts.”
“Easy for you to say.”
* * *
After dinner that evening my wife wouldn’t let me work, not even to browse through a journal. Instead, she put on a videotape of Spellbound, one of my favorite movies, and suggested I contemplate the possibility of finding a home upstate for our eventual retirement. Within minutes, even before Gregory Peck’s first fainting spell, I had fallen asleep.
I dreamed that prot had become fully integrated into Robert, who was no longer shy and depressed, but confident and outgoing. Although he demonstrated no overt traits of prot (he couldn’t see ultraviolet light, for example), other signs of him were evident in Robert’s personality. His aptitude for math and science increased dramatically and he was making plans to attend college. On the other hand, he had lost none of his (and prot’s) sex hangup.
Then the dream took a sudden turn. Prot came flying by accompanied by Manuel. Both of them had sprouted wings. Robert, too, had grown wings and all three of them flew around and around, motioning for me to join in. Then Russell, who looked like an angel out of Revelations, halo and all, lifted off. The other patients appeared, flying in perfect formation, and everyone rose higher and higher, prot in the lead, until they were only a dot against the sun. Desperately I flapped and flapped, but I wasn’t able to get off the ground. I tried to call out, but couldn’t even do that. In fact, I could hardly breathe....
When I woke up I found Karen watching me with a smile, the one that says, “How sweet.” I could tell I had been snoring. The movie was over.
“Decided on a retirement place?”
“No, but it’s something I’d definitely like to think about.”
* * *
I drove in to work the next day, Saturday, but couldn’t seem to get much done. I felt listless, out of sorts, not myself. On my desk I uncovered the paper I hadn’t yet reviewed, and a couple of tickets I had forgotten about. They were for Carnegie Hall that afternoon. Howie, a fine musician and former patient, had sent them to me. I called Karen, but she had a bowling tournament she wasn’t about to miss.
For some reason I thought of prot. He wasn’t in the building, so I tried the lawn. I found him examining the sunflowers, which must have looked like a row of burning stars to him. “Love to hear Howie play!” he exclaimed.
“Hurry up and get ready. We have to leave right away.”
“I’m ready,” he replied, heading for the gate.
Prot immediately struck up a conversation with the taxi driver, who had seen a picture of him on television. “Glad you’re back,” he told my alien companion. “I was hopin’ you could do somethin’ wid dis friggin’ heat.”
“Sorry, pal,” prot replied. “That’s up to you.” The cabbie didn’t say another word.
Later on, we passed a couple of kids banging away at each other with toy rifles. “I see you’re still teaching your children to kill,” he observed. I thought: I can’t take him anywhere!
The multitude in the streets seemed to put him into a foul mood. When I asked him what CD he would take with him if he were marooned on a desert island, he snapped, “Where would I get a cd player on a desert island?”
The concert, however, was a great success. Prot seemed to be able to pick out Howie’s playing from the other violinists in the chamber group. “Nice vibrato,” he reported. “But he’s a hair flat, just like always.”
As the musicians started on their final work, the Mendelssohn “Octet,” someone in the balcony screamed, “Shut up the goddamn coughing!” The hacking stopped immediately, as did the music. All the players and half the audience gave the man a standing ovation. Prot laughed out loud. Then it became absolutely still. I had never heard the piece played so beautifully.
We visited with Howie after the concert. Looking much younger than he did half a decade earlier, he was very happy to see prot, and wondered how long he’d be around. Prot dodged the question. Howie inquired as to Bess’s health, and asked about the patients still with us. “I miss them,” he lamented. “In fact, I miss the whole hospital.”
“You want to come back?” I joked.
“I’m thinking about it,” he replied in all seriousness. “Unless there’s room for me on the bus to K-PAX.”
Prot didn’t say yes, but he didn’t say no, either.