I brought Oxeye home with me on Saturday. Karen was delighted to see him and, for that matter, so was everyone else (the Dalmatian, which I had given to Rob in a fruitless attempt to lure him out of his catatonic state, had lived with us from 1991-5). In fact, Abby and her family came up from Princeton for the occasion.
My daughter seemed to have mellowed in the last couple of years, hardly bugging me at all about her hopelessly liberal causes. Maybe she was just glad to be back home for a while. Or perhaps it had something to do with her fortieth birthday looming on the horizon. Oxie, for his part, was also happy to be with us, though he sniffed hard for Shasta and whined for a time when he couldn’t find her (we buried her in her favorite spot at our summer place in the Adirondacks).
Rain and Star ran all over the yard with him that afternoon while the old folks chatted inside. Despite the negative aspects of prot’s return, everyone was overjoyed that he was back as well, and hoped I would bring him home for a cookout, the setting for their earlier encounters with him.
“In the winter?” I protested.
Karen pointed out that Thanksgiving and Christmas were coming up. “Maybe you could bring him home for those.”
I didn’t even want to think about that. It seemed as though we had only put away the decorations a short time before.
I cornered my son-in-law Steve and asked him about his colleague, Charlie Flynn, who had recently returned from Libya (by special dispensation from Colonel Qaddafi in return for a percentage of any profits) with a tiny supply of spider excrement indigenous to that country. According to prot, this was a key component in a cold fusion reaction. Though the results of a single small experiment (in collaboration with the physics department) looked promising, the amount, unfortunately, was insufficient to catalyze a larger-scale production. Undeterred, Flynn was busy gathering feces from various native American arachnid species in hopes of isolating the key element in this material, which could well solve the world’s energy problems, not to mention his own financial ones.
“Ah think he’s in Mexico now, trackin’ down tarantulas,” Steve chuckled.
I asked him whether there had been any developments in the study of planet K-PAX and its double star system.
“Well, another of our faculty has found what looks to be a second planet in that solar system. Ah wonder why prot never mentioned it to you.”
“Maybe he doesn’t know about it.”
“Ah wouldn’t be too sure. Anyway, you might ask him. It’s even bigger than K-PAX. The main difference is that it orbits far outside the double star system, not inside it like K-PAX does.”
“I’ll do that.”
At that point Rain showed up. Now a teenager, his voice had already changed and he sported a feeble mustache, which he’s decided to keep. He seemed to have shot up another several inches since we had last seen him, and was almost as tall as I was. I felt a little like “Albert Einstein,” one of my patients at MPI, who was desperately trying to slow down time and could only watch helplessly as it rolled on and on, carrying him, and the rest of us, along with it like some invisible avalanche. Of course this only reminded me that the time for prot’s departure was lurking, like a giant boulder, at the bottom of the mountain.
After the death of our former director, Klaus Villers, I was voted acting director of the hospital in the fall of 1997. Following interviews with a number of candidates for the permanent directorship, some of whom were crazier than the patients, it was clear that the best person for the job was our own Virginia Goldfarb. Though she has a few figurative warts, as do we all, she is even-handed and fair, and makes decisions only after careful deliberation and weighing of all the options. Moreover, she keeps herself informed of developments in many areas of psychiatry, including her own specialties, bipolar disorder and megalomania. Finally, she practically squeaks of confidence and self-assurance, which doesn’t hurt in the fund-raising department, and I think she was a fine choice to lead the Manhattan Psychiatric Institute into the twenty-first century (though I wasn’t too pleased that she put me in charge of the committee supervising the construction of the new wing, which takes a whopping amount of time).
At the regular Monday morning staff meeting, chaired by Dr. Goldfarb, there was a great deal of interest in prot’s return and what it might tell us not only about Robert Porter’s condition, but about others suffering from the bizarre affliction known as multiple personality disorder (MPD) as well. Although regression to the various individual personalities is not an uncommon occurrence, the patient can usually be reintegrated more easily the second time around. In the case of Robert/prot, however, the problem was complicated by the disappearance of the principal alter.
That led to a discussion of what it means to be an alter ego, i.e., how does a secondary or other personalities differ from the primary one, and from the fully integrated human being? Are they completely different individuals? Or are certain things missing in the thoughts and feelings of the various alters, who are merely “parts” of a whole? Are we all simply a mix of different personalities which dominate our minds at different times? If so, which of these is responsible for our actions? All very interesting, I remarked, but what specific recommendations were there in the case of my relapsed patient, Robert Porter?
Ron Menninger pointed out that MPD differs from all the other syndromes in that aggressive drug treatment of the individual at hand, while perhaps beneficial to him, can be devastating to one or more of the other egos (at this point I wasn’t even certain how many others there were in Robert’s case), and perhaps to the integrated personality as a whole.
A consensus was reached that I should continue psychoanalysis, at least for a while, in hopes that probing into prot’s psyche might provide further information about what had happened to Robert, his primary alter, much as it had seven years earlier. For example, prot’s abhorrence of money in particular, and capitalism in general, seemed to be related to the severe financial obligations incurred by Rob’s family following the fatal injury of his father.
While all this was debatable, unanimous agreement was reached on one thing: no TV appearances for prot this time! Letters and calls from people who wanted to meet him or make use of his talents or follow him to a distant planet were still dribbling in more than two years after he was interviewed on a television talk show. More disturbingly, there were several communications from people in various countries who claimed they had seen him, and even a few who insisted that he had taken them aboard his space ship and examined them. A woman in France claimed she was pregnant with his child! Obviously she hadn’t heard about prot’s tremendous aversion to the procreation process, which was intimately related, of course, to Robert’s sexual abuse as a child.
This was followed by a preliminary discussion of a possible replacement for Carl Thorstein, who was interviewing for a position elsewhere. And we had only just found someone (Laura Chang) to take the place of Klaus Villers, who had died at about the time of prot’s “disappearance” in 1995.
The subject turned, finally, to a couple of the other problem patients. One of these, the aforementioned “Albert Einstein,” is a Chinese-American physicist who believes that time not only flies, but is accelerating! Quite successful in his career until several months ago, he broke down while presenting a paper on the nature of time at an international scientific meeting.
We all harbor the illusion that time moves faster as we grow older. At that conference Albert hypothesized that this is indeed a physical fact having something to do with the expansion of the universe. He tearfully reported to the shocked scientists that time was literally speeding up, that life was rapidly passing him by, along with his audience and all the rest of us. After seeing his own psychiatrist he was taken to “the Big Institute” at Columbia, where he was treated vigorously, though without success, with electroshock and other therapies, and finally ended up with us. He now spends most of his time in his room, along with dozens of pencils and reams of paper, in feverish pursuit of the impossible—of finding a way to slow down time mathematically, or even stop it altogether. Ironically, when he becomes too tired to think, he sits quietly and does nothing at all, in an attempt to make the minutes crawl by as slowly as possible. Like many of our residents, he sleeps very little. Obviously in great anguish, he moans and fidgets during every analytic session and finally jumps up and runs to the door, hoping somehow to make up for lost time.
Another patient under review was a woman suffering from an unusual form of schizophrenia, or perhaps a previously unreported type of bipolar disorder (formerly called manic depression). The patient, a woman we call Alice, sometimes sees herself as no bigger than an insect in a world of giants. At such times she is terrified of being stepped on, drowning in a cup of tea, being eaten by one of the cats, and so on. At others she thinks she has become gigantic, all-powerful, utterly in control of everything around her, including the staff and the other patients. At still other times she seems perfectly normal in every way, continually pestering her doctor (Goldfarb) to “let me out of this madhouse.” We don’t have a clue as to the cause of this curious affliction, nor that of various other phobias, compulsions, and social deviations, whose victims haven’t been helped in the slightest by even the newest and most powerful neuroleptic drugs.
Carl Beamish joined Goldfarb in suggesting that prot might have a talk with some of these problem patients. In fact, I suspect this was the reason for their being included on the meeting’s agenda. There were no objections, except by me. I protested, as I had earlier, that although he had shown an amazing ability to help such unfortunates in the past, our primary responsibility was to Robert and his treatment. Indeed, we seemed to be back where we had started in 1990, with no clear idea of what underlay Robert’s difficulty in dealing with the world around him, or how to get to the bottom of it. However, I did agree to question prot about his prognoses for the other patients, while, at the same time, requesting that everyone present query their charges about their future travel plans.
My main concern, however, was in reintegrating prot’s powerful personality into that of Robert Porter’s so that his family could once again be reunited, Giselle could have her husband back, and baby Gene his missing father.
Prot seemed cheerful and relaxed when he came into my examining room the following morning. “Happy Veterans Day!” he cried as he went for a pear. I watched him eat the whole thing, seeds and all, smacking his lips as usual in what was at once a delightful and disgusting spectacle.
“You know about Veterans Day?”
“Only that it used to be called Armistice Day. But you changed it because it sent the wrong message.”
“What message?”
Munch, munch, munch. “That peace is a good thing. You prefer to honor your warriors. Makes it easier to recruit the next batch, don’tcha know.” A speck of the Bartlett flew across the room.
“You think we’re a violent, warlike species, don’t you?”
He stared at me in some amusement. “Well, if you ain’t, why do you teach your children the ‘glories’ of destroying your ‘enemies’?”
“I didn’t teach my children—”
“You sent them to school, didn’t you? They watched TV, didn’t they? You even took them to Gettysburg! What were they to think about all those heroic battles in all those wars?”
I gazed at him sitting in the dim light, one of his legs drawn up under him disarmingly. “Tell me—did Robert have a set of toy soldiers?”
“I saw some of them on my first visit.”
“That’s the only time?”
“Yep.”
“Later on—did he have any problem with the military?”
His eyebrows came up. “How on EARTH should I know?”
“He never mentioned anything about wanting to go into the military or, maybe, ways to keep out of it?”
“Nope. Never did.”
I made a note to find out whether a friend or relative of Rob’s had died in Vietnam. Or perhaps the killer of his wife and daughter had been wearing part of a military uniform when Robert encountered him.
As prot sank his teeth into another pear I asked him how he felt about being back at MPI. “You’ve added some new patients since I was here—interesting beings in every ward!”
I reminded myself to follow up on this appraisal as soon as time permitted. “Dr. Chakraborty tells me you’re still in excellent shape for a man your age.”
He smiled. “I told you that—remember?”
I didn’t argue the matter. Mainly I had wanted to get a blood sample to compare with an earlier one, which suggested, unless someone had gotten the tubes mixed up (this happens more often than you might imagine), that his DNA was quite different from Robert’s. In any case, we would have the results in a few weeks.
“You remember Steve, my son-in-law?” I asked him.
“Sure Ah do. The astronomer.”
“He tells me there’s another planet orbiting K-MON and K-RIL. Is that right?”
“No. That’s not right.”
“It’s not??”
“That’s what I said. In fact, there are eight others. Most are too small to detect from EARTH with the primitive methods you insist on using.”
“Why didn’t you tell me about these planets before?”
“My dear sir, you never asked.”
“Well, are any of them inhabited?”
“I assume you mean by people?”
“By life of any kind.”
“Nope. Except for the occasional visitor, of course.”
“In other words, your solar system is very similar to ours.”
“Naturally.”
“Don’t you find that interesting?”
He ignored the implication of this astute observation. “Not particularly. For your information, doc, and that of your astronomer relatives, most solar systems around the GALAXY conform to this pattern. But only about one PLANET in five hundred supports the kind of life you’re talking about.”
I smiled at him, perhaps a bit too knowingly. “Just for the record, though, do all of those solar systems have nine planets?”
He ignored the condescending grin, too. “No, and neither does yours. Many STARS have no PLANETARY COMPANIONS at all. Others have a hundred or more. The average is about a dozen. Not counting all the little rocks you call ‘asteroids,’ of course.”
“Did you say the Earth doesn’t have nine planets?”
“There are a few out beyond PLUTO you haven’t found yet.”
There was no way to argue this point, so I let it drop. “Hear anything from Rob?”
“Not a peep.”
“And you still have no idea where he might be?”
“Nary a clue.”
“Could you find him if you wanted to?”
“Maybe. But he obviously doesn’t want to be found, does he?”
“Prot, I’m going to ask you another favor.”
“Here we go again.”
“I’m going to ask you to look hard for him. And when you find him, to give him this message: Tell him I won’t bother him right now; Giselle and I just want to get some information from him. Whether he wants to stay in graduate school, for example. After that he can go back to wherever he’s been keeping himself. Will you do that?”
“Pretty devious trick if you ask me, doc.” He crunched up and swallowed the last of a core. “All right. I’ll see what I can do.”
“Thank you, prot. I appreciate that.”
“No problemo.” With a straight face he added, “Where do you suggest I look?”
I studied him, not knowing whether he was joking or not. Sometime during the middle of a sleepless night, I had gotten a feeble idea. I told him I would like to speak to Paul now.
“Should I think pleasant thoughts or something?”
“Sure, if you like. Think about sailing over K-PAX in a balloon or pitching to Babe Ruth or something.” He closed his eyes and smiled happily, for all the world as if he were in the middle of some high adventure.
I waited for a moment. “Paul? Will you come forward please?” (Paul was the alter ego who first appeared when Robert reached puberty and, because of his earlier abuses, was unable to handle the sexual impulses of normal adolescence, for which prot was of no help whatsoever. He went on to volunteer his services with Rob’s late wife, Sarah.)
Prot shifted slightly in his chair, but Paul made no appearance.
“You might as well come on out, Paul,” I told him. “I can bring you forward with hypnosis any time I want.”
I wasn’t certain of that, but Paul was convinced, apparently. His eyes slowly opened and he stretched lazily. “Oh, hello, doc. How are things?”
I gazed into his eyes. Like prot’s they were playful, mischievous. “You remember the last time we chatted? It was a couple of years ago.”
“Like it was yesterday.”
“What have you been up to since that time?”
“Not much.”
“You haven’t made an appearance since Rob left the hospital?”
“Only a couple of times a week.”
I was somewhat taken aback by this matter-of-fact reply. “Really? What do you do when you come out?”
“Oh, this and that. Try to satisfy Giselle’s needs, for the most part. Don’t let that innocent look fool you—she’s a tiger in bed. Or tigress . . . ?”
I was crestfallen. If Paul was, in fact, assuming Rob’s conjugal duties at this late date, he had probably been doing so in 1995. In that case, was Robert in on the deception? Why would he want to pretend that he was making such terrific progress when he was, in fact, still as miserable as ever? Had he been using his apparent “recovery” to distract us from something even worse than his profound sexual dysfunction?
There was nothing to do but take things as they came. “Are you aware of everything Rob has been up to during the last two years?”
“More or less. He studies a lot. Dull stuff. I usually sleep when he does that. Love to sleep.”
“Bully for you,” I said enviously. “But you’re aware of what’s going on with him most of the time—is that right?”
“Okay. Okay. I have eavesdropped on Rob’s private life. I need to be ready if he fails to live up to his obligations. You understand.”
“Yes, I think I do, finally.” In fact, I felt like a damn fool, and almost said so. “Anything else to report? Anything you’ve seen or heard that his doctor ought to know about?”
He scratched his chin and contemplated the ceiling. “Can’t think of a thing, doc. All of his equipment seems to work okay.”
“What about last Thursday? Were you aware that Rob called on prot to return?”
“Sure—I couldn’t miss something as obvious as that.”
“What was he doing at the time?”
“Giving the kid—my kid—a bath. He’s a slippery little bastard.”
“Anything happen while he was doing that? Did Rob suddenly become ill, or did he cry out, or faint—anything like that?”
“Not a thing. All at once prot was there and Rob wasn’t.”
“Who finished the bath?”
“Prot, I s’pose. What’s the difference?”
“I don’t know. Do you have any thoughts on that?”
He pondered this. “Not really.”
“Well, do you know where Rob went?”
“Nope. When this happens he can stay away for ages, damn him.”
“Why ‘damn him’?”
“Are you kidding? No Rob, no pussy wussy.”
“Paul, when did Rob first call you?”
“He was—I don’t know—twelve or thirteen, I guess. Something like that.”
“And you’ve been around ever since?”
“From time to time.”
“Exactly how often did he call you, and under what circumstances?”
“I told you—he needed someone to take over whenever he got an erection and had to do something about it.”
“With girls?”
“With himself, mostly.”
“And later on, with girls.”
“Nope. Only one girl. What was her name again? Oh, yeah. Sarah. Only he called her Sally. A little dippy, but a good lay.” His smile was not like prot’s—there was an element of sarcasm in it. “Different from Giselle. I imagine all women are different. I’ve only had two.” He sat up straighter, looked directly at me (until then his eyes had shifted from place to place, never focusing on anything for more than a few seconds) and winked. “You’d probably know more about that than I would....”
He was quite wrong about that, but I wasn’t about to go into it. “So you just—what—lie around and wait for the right moment?”
“That’s about it.”
“What about Harry? What has he been up to?”
“That little shit? Haven’t heard from him in a long time.”
“And as I recall, there’s no one else there with you besides Rob, prot, and Harry—is that right?”
“I already told you that a couple of years ago. You hounded Rob like this, too, and look what happened.”
“All right, Paul, that’s all for today. You can go back to sleep now.”
He yawned. “So long, doc. By the way, you got any other patients that need some help? I’m horny as hell.”
“I’ll let you know.”
He shrugged, nodded, and his eyes slowly closed.
I was not unhappy to see this somewhat disgusting young man, who seemed to be interested in little besides sex, withdraw. Perhaps this said more about my own hangups than his promiscuity, but I had no time to dwell on the matter. Before prot could make a reappearance, I asked Harry to come forward. (It was Harry who took over whenever Rob was being abused by his uncle. Indeed, there is reason to believe that it was he, not Robert, who killed the murderer of his wife and daughter, perhaps confusing him for Uncle Dave.) It took a while, but he finally opened his eyes and looked around the room, blinking, presumably trying to figure out where he was.
“Hi, Harry. How are you doing?” The picture of a five-year-old boy with a beard had a somewhat comical effect.
“Okay, I guess.” He frowned. “You’re that doctor, aren’t you?”
“You remember me?”
“What happened to your beard?” Oblivious to his own, he rubbed his nose and wiped his finger on his pants.
“Oh, I’ve got it in a jar at home.”
His eyes widened, but he said nothing.
“What have you been up to the last couple of years?”
“Just waitin’, keepin’ an eye out.”
“For Uncle Dave?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you mind if I ask you some questions?”
He shuffled his feet. “I guess not.”
“Were you around when prot came back this time?”
He felt the vinyl arms of his chair. “Who’s ‘prot’?”
“Never mind. Were you there when Rob left last week?”
“Uh-huh.”
“What happened?”
Another frown. “I dunno.” His nose seemed plugged, as if he had a cold. “He was givin’ somebody a bath.”
“And he left without any warning?”
“I guess so.”
“Any idea where he went?”
He looked around the room. “No,” he said, though it sounded more like “dough.”
“All right. Did I ask you before whether you know about anyone else who lives with you and Rob?”
He shrugged. “I don’t remember.”
“Well, do you?”
“No.”
“What about Paul?”
“Huh?”
“You’ve never met Paul?”
He fidgeted with his shirt buttons. “Uh-uh.”
“Or anyone else besides Robin?” (Robert’s childhood name.)
“Uh-uh.”
“Anything else you want to tell me about Rob while you’re here?”
He wagged his head.
“All right, Harry. You can go.”
He looked around one last time before closing his eyes.
Again I waited for prot to reappear, but he just sat there, apparently asleep.
“Prot?”
His eyes popped open. “Present and accounted for.”
“Did you hear any of my conversations with Paul and Harry?”
“Not a word. Did I miss anything?”
“Apparently you’ve missed quite a lot. Both of us have. All right. Our time’s about up. You might as well go back to Ward Two.”
“So early?” He grabbed the last pear on his way to the door. “See you Friday,” he called out.
“Wait a second. I almost forgot.” I retrieved a weighty bundle, held together by two enormous rubber bands, that the mail room had sent over. “This is all the stuff that came for you while you were gone. We didn’t know where to forward it,” I added pointedly.
Ignoring the comment he took the package. “Thanks, doc.” He riffled through some of the letters. “I hope none of these beings want to go to K-PAX. The passenger list is just about filled up.”
As he left, I marveled at the confidence he exuded, his conviction that he was, in fact, a K-PAXian. There wasn’t a shred of doubt in his mind. But neither is there any (in the patients’ minds) that our current “Christ” is the son of God, that our resident “Croesus” is a rich and powerful woman, or that any of our other delusionals are not who they think they are. For that matter, all of us probably harbor a number of delusions, thinking ourselves more or less attractive, smarter or dumber than we really are. On the other hand, perhaps we are all exactly who we think we are. Prot is right about one thing: truth is whatever we believe it to be.
The idea I had come up with the previous night wasn’t just feeble, it was decrepit. Except for the revelation that Rob had been faking his all-too-rapid recovery in 1995, neither Paul nor Harry were going to be of much help in finding out what happened the week before. Paul appeared to be little interested in Rob, much less prot, unless there was some sexual gratification in it; and Harry, who was only five, was apparently unaware of the existence of the other personalities, except, of course, for Robert. Unless there were someone in there I didn’t yet know about, all I had left was prot.
But even he didn’t seem particularly eager to work with Rob this time around, perhaps because of the latter’s (from prot’s point of view) intransigence. He had already spent several years trying to convince Robert to leave the world he was unable to deal with and return with him to the idyllic planet K-PAX, to no avail.
The questions still remained: What had happened to Robert, and why then? What did it have to do with bathing the baby, if anything? On top of that dilemma, how was I going to tell Giselle that she had been sleeping with two different men, and that Paul, not Rob, was the father of little Gene? The old retirement bug began buzzing around my ears, and I didn’t try very hard to swat it away. I almost felt sorry for Will, now well into his third year of medical school. But I remembered my own student days, and those difficult, exciting years of residency. If I had the chance all over again, I’d probably do exactly the same thing, make the same damn mistakes, take the bad with the good.
After letting prot go a few minutes early I seized the opportunity to take a stroll on the grounds. For one thing I wanted to get a look at progress on the construction of the new wing, the Klaus M. and Emma R. Villers Laboratory for Experimental Therapy and Rehabilitation. More importantly, I have come to realize over the years that a great deal can be learned from informal encounters with the patients. The more contact we have with them the better we are able to spot subtle changes in their behavior, something that might be missed in the more formal setting of the examining room. Besides, it was a sunny November day, and there weren’t going to be many as pleasant for some time.
On this particular occasion I found Ophelia sitting with Alex on a bench not far from the side entrance, and I ambled over to speak with them. Ophelia is a young woman who will do anything anyone tells her to. An orphan who was passed from one foster home to another, she became obsessed early in life with trying to please her various parents so they wouldn’t dump her off on someone else. Like an anorexic, who can never be thin enough, she blamed herself for each perceived failure, and tried harder and harder to please everyone. Ironically, this blatantly sycophantic behavior drove away many prospective parents. At the same time, she suffered abuse from teachers and students, employers and co-workers in whatever situation she found herself. Eventually she learned to trust no one, while helplessly complying with every wish or command. She ended up with us when she was found wandering in Central Park after having been raped by a shoe salesman.
With her was another patient whom we call “Alex Trebek,” after the host of the popular television quiz show, Jeopardy. Perhaps because the real Mr. Trebek makes his job look so easy, our “Alex” firmly believes that he (or perhaps anyone) can do it as well as the original, and, indeed, has offered to substitute for Mr. Trebek, without notice, at any time. As with the route to Carnegie Hall, he thinks he can get there with practice, and he roams the wards and grounds shouting “Yes!” and “That’s right!” and “Correct!” This in itself would not place him with us. The problem with “Alex” is that these are the only words he utters.
As with most mental patients, there is a lighter side to all this. With his mustache and sporty jacket and tie he even looks a little like the real game-show host, and many of our visitors become convinced that Alex Trebek himself is a resident of MPI, no matter what denials we might make.
I paused at their bench and asked if either had spoken with prot as yet. Ophelia inquired immediately (so I wouldn’t think she was being recalcitrant, I suppose) whether I thought that would be a good idea. “Doesn’t make any difference to me,” I assured her. “I was just curious.”
She admitted she had talked with prot for a few minutes over the weekend.
“Correct!” confirmed Alex.
“And did he ask you whether you wanted to go to K-PAX?”
“Would you be unhappy if I told you he did?”
“No.”
“We all want to go,” she confessed matter-of-factly. “But he can only take a hundred of us with him.”
“You are right!”
At this point one of our “exhibitionists” darted from behind a tree and exposed a bare foot to us. When no one responded, he grabbed his shoe and slunk off.
“Well, did he give you any encouragement?”
“Would that be wrong?”
“No.”
“He said the trip is still open to anyone. The passenger list hasn’t been finalized yet.”
“Do you want to be on it?”
“Would it annoy you if I said ‘yes’?”
“Either answer would be fine.”
“I told him that I would be happy to do whatever he wanted me to do.”
“That’s it!” Alex shouted.
Seeing Cassandra leave her favorite spot not far away, I excused myself and hurried to catch up. As always, Ophelia seemed distressed that I was leaving her, feeling, I suppose, that she had displeased me in some way.
But I needed to speak with our resident prophet, whose ability to predict future events could be of help in determining what prot had in mind for the other patients. “Hello, Cassandra!” I called out.
She stopped and tried to focus on the reality of my appearance.
I couldn’t help but notice that she seemed a little down. “Anything wrong, Cassie?”
She stared at me for a few minutes before turning and wandering slowly away. I didn’t like the look of that. It usually meant she had seen signs in the sky suggesting that something bad was going to happen. If so, there was no way I could get her to tell me what it was until she was ready to do so.
At this point Milton appeared. “Man comes home to find his house burned to the ground. ‘Damn!’ he says. ‘I miss everything!’”
When I didn’t laugh, he brought out three huge seeds, taken from one of the dried-out sunflowers lining the back wall, and began to juggle them. I watched Cassandra dissolve in a group of other patients, all huddled around the fountain (which had been turned off for the winter months) like a flock of sheep. Among those present were “Joan of Arc,” who doesn’t understand the meaning of the word “fear,” and “Don Knotts,” who is afraid of everything. It suddenly occurred to me that their illnesses might be related to MPD, that their “incomplete” psyches might be akin to part of a multiple personality, the other alter(s) being absent or repressed. I stood there wishing we could somehow integrate these two patients, and some of the others milling around the “back forty,” to create new, and perhaps whole, individuals out of those whose psyches had become dominated by one emotion or another. But that, along with our understanding of how prot managed to “disappear” on certain occasions, would have to wait until some future time.
Milton was still juggling sunflower seeds when I left, sometimes off his foot and around his back. He was amazingly good, actually.
Giselle was waiting for me when I returned to my office (we had agreed to meet after each Tuesday session to compare notes). I told her about K-PAX’s supposed companion planets, and about the letters I had passed on to prot.
She wasn’t much interested in these revelations. “He told me yesterday that he hasn’t found Rob yet. Did he have any luck today?”
“Unfortunately, no. But he promised me he would make a serious effort to do so.”
She seemed disappointed with our lack of progress, as, of course, was I.
“Giselle, you knew this wasn’t going to be easy. In my opinion something is bothering Robert that may be even more devastating to him than the sexual abuse by his uncle and the murder of his wife and daughter, if you can believe there could be anything worse than that. It may have something to do with bathing your son.”
She thought about this. “My God—you mean he was abused when he was a baby?”
“No, no, no, I didn’t say that. But if something did happen at that early age, it’s not going to be easy to get to. Even if Robert were here and willing to cooperate it would be almost impossible.”
“You mean we may never know what happened to him?”
“I didn’t say that, either. I said it’s going to be very difficult. Besides, it may have nothing to do with his bathing your son.”
“So what can we do?”
“All we can do is keep prot talking, encourage him to get through to Robert, and go from there. But,” I cautioned her, “don’t press him too hard on this. Just talk with him about whatever he wants to chat about and try to steer the conversation toward Robert once in a while.”
“By the way, did anything else happen recently in your life or Rob’s? Any deaths in the family? Is he having difficulties in school? Problems at home? Anything like that?”
“Nothing. As you know, he’s finishing three years of college in two, and was thinking about his senior thesis.”
“Does he have a dissertation topic yet?”
“He’s interested in island biogeography.”
“What’s ‘island biogeography’?”
“It’s about the fragmentation of the Earth, through development and habitat destruction, into little pieces that are too small for indigenous species to survive.”
“Sounds like an interesting topic.”
“It is. I might write an article about it myself some time.”
“What are you working on now?”
“A piece about some of the new drugs coming out of the rainforests.”
“That might fit in well with Rob’s studies.”
“Yeah,” she muttered. “We make a great team.”
I took a deep breath and jumped in. “Any problems of a—um—more personal nature?”
“You mean between Rob and me? No, not really. He seems quite happy most of the time.”
There was no other way to say this. “Has he been a satisfactory sex partner?”
She blushed slightly and looked away, but I detected a mischievous smile on her face. “More than satisfactory,” she assured me. “Why? Did something happen—”
“Just trying to rule out some of the possibilities,” I said.
“Well, that’s not one of them.”
“Giselle ...” I began. The mischievous smile evaporated. “There’s something I have to tell you. Please—sit down.”
She complied immediately and waited for me to go on.
I sat down too, and began to drum my pen on the stack of paper covering my desk, a compulsive habit I resort to whenever I need to break unpleasant news and don’t know quite where to begin. Finally I told her that I’d spoken with Paul.
She shifted slightly in her chair. “Paul?”
“You remember—the personality who took over whenever Rob found himself in a situation involving—”
“I remember.”
“It’s possible he’s lying, of course, but Paul tells me that it was he and not Rob who is Gene’s father.”
Her eyes widened, then slowly narrowed. “I know that,” she murmured.
“You know?”
“At first he had me fooled. I became suspicious when he would start to fall asleep whenever we began to make love, and then he would suddenly be wide awake and very passionate.”
“Giselle, why didn’t you ever tell me about this?”
“I thought about it. But it was sort of a gradual thing. I wasn’t sure until maybe a year ago. And—well, it’s hard to explain. I guess I was afraid of what would happen if I did.”
“What did you think would happen?”
“I was afraid you’d take him away from me.” When I didn’t respond, she added, “I knew that Paul was a part of Rob. So at first I thought: What’s the difference? Maybe we’re all different personalities at different times. You’ve said the same thing yourself. Rob always came back afterward, and was the same Rob as he was before.”
I shook my head a bit and waited.
“Besides, I thought maybe I could help him. Encourage Rob not to be afraid of sex. You know, take it slowly, one step at a time, until he became—well, acclimated to his phobia. Like you do with someone who’s afraid of flying or spiders.”
“Giselle, you know psychiatry isn’t that simple.”
She sighed. “You’re right. I know that. But I didn’t want to lose him....” She was hoping, I suppose, that I would tell her she had done no harm, or at least that I understood.
I did understand. Her motives were partly selfish, partly sympathetic. I felt very sorry for her. But I also felt sorry for Rob, whose problems were infinitely more terrible. “Giselle, is there anything else you want to tell me?”
She pondered this for a moment. “He still misses his father terribly, even thirty-five years after his death. He has a picture of him on the desk in his little study. Once or twice I’ve heard him talking to it.”
“Were you able to hear what he was saying?”
“No, not really. But once I found him crying. It was almost as if he were apologizing to his dad for something.”
I knew how he felt. I have often wished that I could apologize to my father for the near-hatred I felt for him when I was a boy and he exerted such a powerful influence on my life, even seeming to have decided what I was going to do with it. It was only later, long after he died, that I realized that whatever happened to me was mostly my own doing. But I’m sure he felt some negative vibes at the time, just as I could tell when my own children resented something I had said or done wrong, however inadvertently.
“One more thing, Giselle. You understand that Paul is a part of Rob. Why not prot, too?”
“Because he told me he isn’t!”
No arguing with that. “All right, Giselle, we’ll meet again next Tuesday. In the meantime—”
“You’ll be the first to know.”
After she left I got to thinking about Paul again: how many of the discussions I’d had with Rob two years before were actually with someone else?