I remember my first encounter with prot as if it were yesterday (he would probably say it was yesterday). His demeanor annoyed me considerably until I connected his lopsided grin with that of my late father, for whom I held a deep-seated resentment. Perhaps I was also a bit frustrated by the case itself. Prot was an apparent delusional with no obvious background. Identifying him was like trying to crack open a billiard ball with a feather, and came at a time when I, as interim director of the Manhattan Psychiatric Institute, was covered up with numerous other duties.
But it soon became apparent that prot, regardless of his background and origin, was remarkably empathetic and could sense in an instant whatever was troubling anyone he ever met, including both inmates and staff. Perhaps this is what drew all of us to him, a feeling that he understood, and what’s more, could help. Dozens of patients who otherwise might still be residents of MPI were soon discharged when prot got to the heart of their problems and helped solve them. It was quite remarkable to witness the recovery of intractable psychotics who had been with us for years, and perhaps even more so was the recidivism rate: 0 (with the notable exception of his own alter ego, Robert Porter). I can’t help but wish that every mental institution harbored a visitor or two from K-PAX, or some other wonderful place completely different from Earth, whose inhabitants, even the sanest among us, seem to be blinded in many important respects by our own mental baggage.
But prot left an even wider and deeper legacy than that. During the five years he traveled the Earth with Robert, he made incisive observations on the behavior of its inhabitants, with particular emphasis on Homo sapiens, whom he designated “a freak of nature.” It was our human activities that seemed to fascinate him most, though not always in a positive way. Calling us “a cancer on the EARTH,” he offered a simple (to him) solution to all our social and environmental problems: start over with a different set of assumptions. Practically everything we had ever done, all the choices we had ever made in the long history of our species, was ill-considered, inappropriate, or just plain stupid, according to prot. Among our “disastrous” notions were the institutions of government, capitalism, religions, schools, even motherhood—in short, virtually the entirety of our human belief systems and values. All this he recorded in a little red notebook he carried with him at all times.
This is not the place to rewrite the K-PAX trilogy, but for those who haven’t read it, a brief summary may be in order. Prot was brought to the Institute in May, 1990. With patience, luck, and a little hard work, we eventually learned that there was a very sick man (Robert Porter) he was “fronting” for, a man who had suffered several terrible traumas in his life beginning when he was only five years old. After seven years of therapy, interrupted by a return visit to K-PAX and a two-year hiatus during which prot roamed the Earth looking for a hundred traveling companions for his final journey to the stars, I was forced to conclude that he was both Robert’s alter ego and, at the same time, a visitor from space. Whether or not this is the correct interpretation, both of them left us at the end of 1997 and haven’t been seen since.
There are some who would disagree with this admittedly empirical conclusion, but no one denies that prot possessed a remarkably disinterested and logical mind, one with a great deal to say about life on Earth as viewed by a true outsider. While we might dislike, or even resent, many of his observations, there is an underlying ring of truth in them that cannot easily be dismissed.
It was his custom to write a “report to K-PAX” on all the planets he had visited during his frequent travels. In August of 1990, when he was about to return to his home planet “for a little r & r,” prot allowed us to make a copy of his copious notes about the Earth, written in a language he called pax-o. Fortunately, we had a Rosetta Stone to help us decipher his writings, a translation he had made of Hamlet into his native language. With the help of a professional linguist (Dr Carol Boettcher, Columbia University Department of Linguistics, to whom I am deeply grateful) I was able to convert most of his notes into modern English. Where there was no equivalent word or phrase in Shakespeare’s great play, but the meaning seemed clear, she has filled in what she believes were prot’s intentions. When the meaning was not clear, she or I made a stab at it, based on my familiarity with him and his way of thinking. These are enclosed in brackets. Words and phrases in parentheses, on the other hand, are prot’s own clarification of meaning to his K-PAXian readers. Otherwise, the entire text is included here without modification except for certain grammatical corrections, such as the use of capital letters to begin sentences.
Prot wrote his notes in bits and pieces, whenever he had time to jot down a paragraph or two (he was surrounded by patients most of the time), interspersing the history and present condition of the Earth with his observations at the hospital and elsewhere. Consequently, his report is somewhat disjointed, though that may simply be the way K-PAXians do these things. When possible, I have connected the various sections into a continuous whole. For the sake of clarity (and to make printing easier), his occasional notes, scribbled in the margins, have not been included. However, I have retained prot’s convention of capitalizing stars, planets, and other heavenly bodies, and using lower case for everything else, including the names of individuals.
Over the years there have been numerous requests for copies of prot’s report, including those from the assistant secretary-general of the United Nations, and the heads of the FBI, CIA, and other governmental agencies, as well as scientists, sociologists and religious leaders, and these have been honored. But there have also come thousands of requests from the general public, which were impossible to fulfill in unpublished form. I sincerely hope this volume will satisfy that demand, and that readers everywhere will find some interest, if not comfort, in the workings of prot’s remarkable mind.