by Gene Brewer
I had lunch in Ward Two and laid down the law: no cats on the table. I sat across from Mrs. Archer, who was now taking all her meals in the dining room. She was flanked by prot and Chuck. Both were talking animatedly with her. She looked uncertainly from one to the other, then slowly lifted a spoonful of soup to her, mouth. Suddenly, with a sound that could have been heard clear up in Ward Four, she slurped it in. Then she grabbed a handful of crackers and crumbled them vigorously into her bowl. She finished her meal with half the soup smeared all over her leathery face. "God," she said happily, "I've always wanted to do that."
"Next time," said Chuck, "belch!"
I thought I saw Bess smile a little, though it might have been wishful thinking on my part.
After the meal I returned to my office and asked Mrs. Trexler, who had regained her composure, to cancel all my appointments for the rest of the day. She mumbled something unintelligible about doctors, but agreed to do so. Then I went to find prot.
He was in the lounge, surrounded by all the patients and staff from Wards One and Two. Even Russell, who had experienced some sort of revelation after he understood that it was prot who had been responsible for Maria's deciding to become a nun, was there. When I came into the room he exclaimed, "The Teacher saith, My time is at hand." The corners of his mouth were caked with dried spittle.
"Not just yet, Russ," I said. "I need to talk to him first. Will everyone excuse us, please?" I calmed a chorus of protest by assuring them he would be back shortly.
On the way to his room I remarked, "Every one of them would do anything you asked them to. Why do you suppose that is?"
"Because I speak to them as equals. That's something you doctors seem to have a hard time with. I listen to them being to being."
"I listen to them!"
"You listen to them in a different way. You are not as concerned with them or their problems as you are with the papers and books you get out of it. Not to mention your salary, which is far too high."
He was wrong about that, but this wasn't the time to argue the matter. "You have a point," I said, "but my professional manner is necessary in order to help them."
"Let's see-if you believe that, then it must be true. Right?'"That's exactly what I wanted to talk to you about." We came to his room, the first time I had been there since his earlier disappearance. It was virtually bare except for his notebooks lying on the desk. "I've got some pictures and documents to show you," I said, spreading the file out on its surface, gently shoving aside his still-unfinished report. A few of the photographs I held back.
He looked over the pictures of himself, the birth and graduation certificates. "Where did you get these?"
"Giselle sent them to me. She found them in Guelph, Montana. Do you recognize the boy?"
"Yes. It is robert."
"No. It is you."
"Haven't we been over this before?"
"Yes, but at that time I didn't have anything to prove that you and Robert were the same person."
"And we aren't."
"How do you explain the fact that he looks so much like you?"
"Why is a soap bubble round?"
"No, I mean why does he look exactly like you?"
"He doesn't: He is thinner and fairer than I am. My eyes are light-sensitive and his aren't. We are different in a thousand ways, as you are different from your friend bill siegel. "
"No. Robert is you. You are Robert. You are each part of the same being."
"You are wrong. I'm not even human. We are just close friends. Without me he'd be dead by now."
"And so would you. Whatever happens to him also happens to you. Do you understand what I am saying?"
"It is an interesting hypothesis." He wrote something in one of the notebooks.
"Look. Do you remember telling me that the universe was going to expand and contract over and over again, forever?"
"Naturally."
"And you said later that if we were in the contraction phase, time would run backward but we'd never know the difference because all we would have would be our memories of the past and a lack of knowledge of the future. Remember?"
"Of course."
"All right. It's the same here. From your perspective Robert is a separate individual. From my perspective the truth is perfectly logical and obvious. You and Robert are one and the same person."
"You misunderstand the reversal of time. Whether it is moving forward or backward, the perception is the same."
"So?"
"So it makes no difference whether you are correct or not."
"But you admit the possibility that I'm right?"
His smile widened markedly. "I'll admit that, if you'll admit it's possible that I came from K-PAX."
From his point of view there wasn't the slightest doubt about his background. Given several more months or years I might have been able to convince him otherwise. But there was no more time. I pulled the pictures of Sarah and Rebecca from my pocket. "Do you recognize them?"
He seemed shocked, but only for a moment. "It is his wife and daughter."
"And this one?"
"This is his mother and father."
"Giselle is trying to locate your mother and sister in Alaska. She is going to try to bring your mother here. Please, prot, don't leave, until you talk to her."
He threw up his hands. "How many times must I tell you-I have to leave at 3:31 in the morning. Nothing can change that!"
"We are going to get her here as soon as we can." Without looking at a clock he said, "Well, you have exactly twelve hours and eight minutes to do it in."
THAT evening Howie and Ernie threw prot a bon voyage party in the recreation room. There were many gifts for their "alien" friend, souvenirs of his visit to Earth: records, flowers, all kinds of fruits and vegetables. Mrs. Archer hammered out popular tunes on the piano accompanied by Howie on the violin. Cats were everywhere.
Chuck gave him a copy of Gulliver's Travels, which he had lifted from the bookshelves in the quiet room. I recalled prot's telling me that the (Earth) story he liked best was "The Emperor's New Clothes." His favorite movies, incidentally, were The Day the Earth Stood Still, 2001, ET, Starman, and, of course, Bambi.
There was a great deal of hugging and kissing, but I detected a certain amount of tension as well. Everyone seemed nervous, excited. Finally, Chuck demanded to know which of them was going to get to go with him. With those crossed eyes I wasn't sure whether he was looking at me or prot. But prot answered, "It will be the one who goes to sleep first."They all lined up immediately for a last tearful embrace, then dashed to their beds, leaving him alone to finish his report and prepare for his, and hopefully their, journey, each trying desperately to fall asleep with visions of yorts dancing in their heads.
I told him I had some things to do, but would come to say good-bye before he left. Then I retired to my office.
At about eleven o'clock Giselle called. She had found Robert's sister's address in Alaska. Unfortunately, the woman had died the previous September, and his mother had gone on to live with the other sister in Hawaii. Giselle had tried to reach her, but without success. "It's too late to get her to New York in time," she said, "but if we find her, she might be able to call him."
"Make it fast," I told her.
For the next three hours I tried to work to the accompaniment of Manon Lescaut on my cassette player. In Act Three of that opera Manon and Des Grieux depart for the New World, and I understood at last why I love opera so much: Everything that human beings are capable of, all of life's joy and tragedy, all its emotion and experience, can be found there.
My father must have felt this, too. I can still see him lying on the living room sofa on a Saturday afternoon with his eyes closed, listening to the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts. Oh, how I wish he had lived and we had had a chance to talk about music and his grandchildren and all the other things that make life fun and interesting and good! I tried to envision a parallel universe in which he had not died and I had become an opera
star, and I imagined singing some of his favorite arias for him while Mother brought out a big Sunday dinner for us to eat.
I suppose I must have dozed off. I dreamed I was in an unfamiliar place where the cloudless purple sky was full of moons and sailing birds, and the land a panoply of trees and tiny green flowers. At my feet stood a pair of huge beetles with humanoid eyes; a small brown snake-or was it a large worm?-slithered along behind them. In the distance I could see fields of red and yellow grains, could make out several small elephants and other roaming animals. A few chimpanzee-like creatures chased one another into and out of a nearby forest. I found myself crying, it was so lovely. But the most beautiful feature of all was the utter silence. There wasn't a hint of wind and it was so quiet I could hear the soft ringing of faraway bells. They seemed for all the world to be tolling, "gene, gene, gene...."
I woke with a start. The clock was chiming 3:00. I hurried down to prot's room, where I found him at his desk writing furiously in his notebook, trying, presumably, to complete his report about Earth and its inhabitants before departing for K-PAX, letting it go until the last minute, it appeared, just as a human being might do. Beside him were his fruits, a stalk or two of broccoli, a jar of peanut butter, the essays and other souvenirs, all neatly packed in a small cardboard box. On the desk, next to his notebooks, were a pocket flashlight, a hand mirror, and the list of questions from Dr. Flynn. All six of the lower-ward cats were lying asleep on the bed.
I asked him whether he minded my looking over the answers he had formulated to those fifty queries. Without interrupting his writing he shook his head and waved me into the other chair.
Some of the questions, e.g., about nuclear energy, he had left unanswered, for reasons he had made clear in several of our sessions together. The last item was a request for a list of all the planets prot had visited around the universe, to which he had replied, "See Appendix," which tallied the complete list of sixty-four. This inventory included a brief description of those bodies and their inhabitants, as well as a series of star charts. It was not everything Professor Flynn and his colleagues, including Steve, had hoped for, but enough to keep them busy for some time, no doubt.
At around 3:10 he threw down his pencil, yawned, and stretched noisily as if he had just finished a routine piece of work.
"May I see it?"
"Why not? But if you want to read it you'd better make a copy right away-it's the only one I've got." I called one of the night nurses to take it upstairs, admonishing him to get some help and to use all the copiers that were operational. He hurried off, clutching the little notebooks as though they were so many eggs. The possibility of stalling the process occurred to me at that point, but it might well have made matters even worse and I quickly rejected the idea.
I had a feeling the report would be a rather uncomplimentary account of prot's "visit" to Earth, and I asked him, "Is there anything about our planet that you liked? Besides our fruits, I mean."
"Sure," he said, with an all-too-familiar- grin. "Everything but the people. With one or two exceptions, of course."
There didn't seem to be much left to say. I thanked my amazing friend for the many interesting discussions and for his success with some of the other patients. In return, he thanked me for "all the wonderful produce," and presented me with the gossamer thread.
I pretended to take it. "I'm sorry to see you go," I said, shaking his brawny hand, though I wanted to hug him. "We will miss you."
"Thank you. I will miss this place, too. It has great potential." At the time I thought he was referring to the hospital, but of course he meant the Earth.
The nurse came running back with the copy a few minutes before it was time for prot to leave. I returned the original notebooks, a little jumbled but intact, to prot.
"Just in the nick of time," he said. "But now you'll have to leave the room. Any being within a few feet will be swept along with me. Better take them with you, too," he said, indicating the cats.
I decided to humor him. Well, why not? There wasn't a damn thing I could do about it anyway. I rousted the cats from his bed. One by one they brushed against his leg and streaked for various other warm places. "Good-bye, Sojourner Porter," I said. "Don't get knocked over by any aps "
"Not good-bye. Just auf wiedersehen. I'll be back before you know it." He pointed toward the sky. "After all, KPAX isn't so far away, really."
I stepped out of the room, but left the door open. I had already notified the infirmary staff to stand by, to be prepared for anything. I could see Dr. Chakraborty down the corridor with an emergency cart containing a respirator and all the rest. There were only a couple of minutes to go.
The last I saw of prot he was sitting at his desk tapping his report into a neater stack, checking his flashlight. He placed his box of fruit and other souvenirs on his lap, picked up the little mirror and gazed into it. Then he transferred the flashlight to his shoulder. At that moment one of the security guards came puffing up to tell me that I had an urgent long-distance call. It was Robert's mother! At exactly the same instant, Chuck came running down the hall with his worn little suitcase, demanding to be "taken aboard." Even with all this commotion I couldn't have taken my eyes off prot for more than a couple of seconds. But when I turned to tell him about the phone call, he was gone!
We all raced into the room. The only trace of him left behind were his dark glasses lying on a scribbled message. "I won't be needing these for a while," the note said. "Please keep them for me."
Acting on my earlier hunch that prot had hidden out in the storage tunnel during the few days he had allegedly gone to Canada, Greenland, and Iceland, we rushed to that area. The door was locked, and the security guard had some difficulty finding the right key. We waited patiently-I was confident we would find prot there-until he finally got the heavy door open and found the light switch. There was enough dusty old equipment to start our own museum, but there was no sign of prot. Nor was he hiding in the surgical theater or the seminar room, or anywhere else we thought he might have tried to conceal himself. It didn't occur to any of us to check the rooms of the other patients.
ONE of the nurses found him a few hours later lying unconscious and in the fetal position on the floor of Bess's room. He was little more than alive. His eyes were barely dilatable, his muscles like steel rods. I recognized the symptoms immediately-there were two two other patients exactly like him in Ward 3B: He was in a deep catatonic state. Prot was gone; Robert had stayed behind. I had rather expected something like this. What I failed to foresee, however, was that later the same morning Bess would also be reported missing.
GISELLE had the report translated by a cryptographer she knew, who used as a basis for this the pax-o version of Hamlet that prot had done for me earlier. Titled "Preliminary Observations on B-TIK (RX 4987165.233)," it was primarily a detailed natural history of the Earth, especially of the recent changes thereon, which he attributed to man's "cancerous" population growth, his "mindless" consumption of its natural resources, and his "catastrophic" elevation of himself to superiority over all the other species who cohabit our planet. All of this is consistent with his use of capitals for the Earth and other planets, and lower case for individual beings.
There were also some suggestions as to how we might "treat" our social "illnesses": the elimination of religion, capital, nationalism, the family as the basic social and educational unit-all the things he imagined were fundamentally wrong with us and, paradoxically, the things most of us hold dear. Without these "adjustments," he wrote, the "prognosis" was not good. Indeed, he gave us only another few decades to make the "necessary" changes. Otherwise, he concluded, "human life on the PLANET EARTH will not survive another century." His last four words were somewhat more encouraging, however. They were: Oho minny blup kelsur-"They are yet children."
Epilogue
ROBERT'S mother arrived with Giselle the day after prot's. departure and stayed through the weekend, but there was no indication whatever of cognizance on Ro
bert's part. She was a lovely woman, a bit confused, of course, about what had happened to her son-from the beginning she had been completely unaware of prot's existence-as was everyone else. I told her there was no need for her to stay longer, and promised to let her know of any change in his condition. I dropped her at Newark Airport before heading for the Adirondacks with Chip, who tearfully admitted his cocaine problem when I confronted him with it, to join Karen and Bill and his wife and daughter.
THAT was nearly five years ago. How I wish I could tell you that Robert sat up one fine day during that time and said, "I'm hungry-got any fruit?" But, despite our best efforts and constant attention, he remains to this day in a deep catatonic state. Like most catatonics he probably hears every word we say, but refuses, or is unable, to respond.
Perhaps with patience and kindness on our part he will recover, in time, from this tragic condition. Stranger things have happened. I have known patients who have returned to us after twenty years of "sleep." In the meantime, we can do little more than wait.
Giselle visits him almost every week, and we usually have lunch and talk about our lives. She is currently researching a book about the deplorable infant mortality rate in America. Her article on mental illness featuring prot and some of the other patients appeared in a special health oriented issue of Conundrum. As a result of that piece we have received thousands of letters from people asking for more information about K-PAX, many of them wanting to know how they can get there. And a film version of Robert's life is in the works. I don't know how that will turn out, but, thanks to Giselle's tireless efforts, the information we received from Robert's mother, the hours of conversations I had with prot, and the cooperation of the authorities in Montana, we now have a reasonably clear picture of what happened on that terrible afternoon of August sixteenth through the early morning hours of August seventeenth, 1985. First, some biographical details.