by Gene Brewer
“Will you do it as a personal favor to me?” He eyed me suspiciously. “Why do you hesitate—are you afraid to be hypnotized?”
It was a cheap trick, but it worked. “Of course not!”
“Next Wednesday all right?”
“Next Wednesday is the fourth of July. Do you work on your american holidays?”
“God, is it July already? All right. We’ll test your susceptibility to the procedure next Tuesday, and begin the week after that. Does that suit you?”
Suddenly calm: “Perfectly, my dear sir.”
“You’re not planning on leaving again, are you?”
“I’ll say it one more time: not until 3:31 A.M. on the seventeenth of august.”
And he returned to Ward Two, where he was welcomed back like the prodigal son.
The next morning Giselle was waiting at my office door when I arrived at the hospital. She was wearing the same outfit as before, or perhaps one of its clones. She was all tiny-tooth smiles. “Why didn’t you tell me about prot?” she demanded.
I had stayed up until two o’clock to finish some editorial work, had come in early to prepare a speech for a Rotary Club luncheon, and was still distraught over prot’s temporary disappearance. My office clock began to chime, further jangling my nerves and telling me what I didn’t want to know. “What about him?” I snapped.
“I decided to make him the focus of the piece. With your permission, of course.”
I dropped my bulging briefcase onto my desk. “Why prot?”
She literally fell into the brown leather chair and curled into the already familiar ball. I wondered whether this was premeditated or whether she was unaware of the charming effect it had on middle-aged men, especially those suffering from Brown’s syndrome. I began to understand why she was such a successful reporter. “Because he fascinates me,” she said.
“Did you know that he is my patient?”
“Betty told me. That’s why I’m here. To see if you would let me look at his records.” Her eyelids were fluttering like the wings of some exotic butterfly.
I busied myself with transferring the contents of my case to some logical place on the already overcrowded desk. “Prot is a special patient,” I told her. “He requires very delicate treatment.”
“I’ll be careful. I wouldn’t do anything that would jeopardize my own story. Or divulge any confidences,” she added in a playful whisper. Then: “I know you’re planning to write a book about him.”
“Who told you that?” I practically shouted.
“Why, he—prot—told me.”
“Prot? Who told him?”
“I don’t know. But I want to assure you that my piece won’t affect your book in any way. If anything, it should drum up some business for it. And I’ll show it to you before I submit it for publication—how’s that?” I stared at her for a moment, trying to think of some way out of this unwanted complication. She must have sensed my doubt. “I’ll tell you what,” she said. “If I can identify him for you, I get my story. Fair enough?” She had me and she knew it. “Plus any expenses I might incur,” she added immediately.
Over the weekend I reviewed the transcripts of all eight sessions with prot. Everything pointed to at least one violent episode in his past that precipitated his hysterical “escape” from the real world, which he deeply hated, to a nonexistent, idyllic place where there are no human interactions to cause all the problems, large and small, that the rest of us have to live with every day. Nor the joys that make it all worthwhile...
I decided to ask prot to spend the Fourth of July at my home in order to see if a more or less normal family environment would bring anything out of him I hadn’t seen before. I had done this with a few other patients, sometimes with beneficial results. My wife was in favor of the idea, even though I mentioned to her that prot may have been involved in some sort of violent affair, and there was a possibility that—
“Don’t be silly,” she interrupted. “Bring him along.”
How these things happen I haven’t a clue, but by Monday morning everyone in Wards One and Two knew that prot was coming to the house for a barbecue. Almost every patient I ran into that day, including three of Maria’s alters, who kept fastening buttons unfastened by other personalities, and vice versa, complained, good-naturedly, “You never invited me to your house, Dr. Brewer!” To every one of them I said, “You get well and get out of here, and I’ll do exactly that.” To which most of them replied, “I won’t be here, Dr. Brewer. Prot is taking me with him!”
All but Russell, who had no intention of going to K-PAX: His place was on Earth. Indeed, with everyone in Wards One and Two enjoying a picnic on the hospital lawn, except for Bess, who stayed inside out of an imaginary rainstorm, Russ spent all of the Fourth in the catatonic ward, preaching the gospels. Unfortunately, none of those pathetic creatures jumped up and followed him out.
That same Monday morning Giselle was waiting for me again in her usual outfit, same piney bouquet. I asked her as politely as possible to please call Mrs. Trexler for an appointment whenever she wanted to see me. I started to tell her that I had patients to see, a lot of administrative work, papers to referee, letters to dictate and so on, but I had barely begun when she said, “I think I know how to track down your guy.”
I said, “Come in.”
Her idea was this: She wanted to have a linguist she knew listen to one of the interview tapes. This was one of those people who can pinpoint the area of the country where one was born and/or grew up, sometimes with uncanny accuracy. It is not based on dialect so much as phrasing—whether you say “water fountain” or “bubbler,” for example. It was a good suggestion, but impossible, of course, owing to patient/client privilege. She was ready for this. “Then can I tape a conversation with him myself?” I saw no compelling reason she should not, and told her I would ask Betty to arrange a time convenient for her and prot. “Never mind.” She grinned slyly. “I’ve already done it.” And she literally skipped away like a schoolgirl to get in touch with her expert. Her piney aura, however, stayed with me for the rest of the day.
Session Nine
It was a beautiful Fourth of July: partly cloudy skies (I wonder why it’s always in the plural—how many “skies” are there?), not too hot or humid, the air redolent of charcoal grills and freshly cut grass.
A holiday seems to generate a feeling of timelessness, bringing, as it does, blended memories of all those that came before. Even my father took the Fourth off and we always spent the day around the brick barbecue pit and the evening at the river watching the fireworks. I still live in my father’s house, the one I grew up in, but we don’t have to go anywhere now; we can see the nearby country club display right from our screened-in terrace. Even so, when the first Roman candle lights up the sky I invariably smell the river and the gunpowder and my father’s Independence Day cigar.
I love that house. It’s a big white frame with a patio as well as the second-story terrace, and the backyard is loaded with oaks and maples. The roots are deep. Right next door is the house my wife grew up in, and my old basketball coach still lives on the other side. I wondered, as I gathered up the sticks and leaves lying around the yard, whether any of my own children would be living here after we’ve gone, picking up loose twigs on the Fourth of July, thinking of me as I thought of my father. And I wondered whether similar thoughts might not have been buzzing around Shasta Daisy’s head as she sniffed around her predecessor’s little wooden marker barely visible in the back corner behind the grill— Daisy the Dog: 1967-1982.
By 2:00 the coals were heating up and the rest of my family began to arrive. First came Abby with Steve and the two boys, then Jennifer, who had brought her roommate, a dental student, from Palo Alto. Not a man, as we had thought, but a tall African-American woman wearing copper earrings the size of salad plates that hung down to and rested on her bare shoulders. And I do mean tall.
As soon as I saw Steve I told him about the variance between Charlie Flynn’s de
scription of the figure-eight orbit of K-PAX around its twin suns, and prot’s version, which, if I understood it correctly, was more of a retrograde pattern, like that of a pendulum. Later I showed him the calendar and the second star chart prot had concocted—the one describing the sky as seen from K-PAX looking away from Earth. Steve shook his head in disbelief and drawled that Professor Flynn had just left for a vacation in Canada, but said he would mention all this to him when he got back. I asked him whether he knew of any physicists or astronomers who had disappeared in the last five years, particularly on August 17, 1985. To his knowledge there had been no such disappearances, though he joked that there were a few colleagues who he wished might quietly do so.
Freddy arrived from Atlanta, still wearing his airline uniform, alone as usual. Now everyone was here for the first time since Christmas. Chip, however, had better things to do and soon went off somewhere with his friends.
Just after that Betty showed up with her husband, an English professor at NYU, who happens to have a black belt in aikido. They had brought prot and one of our trainees, whom I had invited primarily because he had been an outstanding amateur wrestler and he, too, would be helpful in case prot showed any indication of turbulence. Shasta Daisy, extra nervous when so many people are present, barked at everyone who arrived from the safety of the underside of the back porch, her usual refuge.
Prot came bearing gifts: three more star maps representing the heavens as seen from various places he had “visited,” as well as a copy of Hamlet, translated into pax-o. He hadn’t been out of the car for five seconds, however, before an extraordinary thing happened. Shasta suddenly ran at him from the porch. I yelled, afraid she was going to attack him. But she stopped short, wagged her tail from ear to ear as only a Dalmatian can, and flattened herself against his leg. Prot, for his part, was down on the ground immediately, rolling and feigning with the dog, barking, even, and then they were up running all over the yard, my grandsons chasing along behind, Shakespeare and the charts blowing in the wind. Fortunately, we managed to recover all but the last page of the play.
After a while prot sat down on the grass and Shasta lay down beside him, bathing herself, utterly calm and content. Later, she played with Rain and Star for the very first time. Not once did she retreat to the porch the rest of that afternoon and evening, not even when the nearby country club celebration started off with a tremendous bang. She became a different dog that Fourth of July.
As, so to speak, did we all.
That night, after the fireworks were over and our guests had gone, Fred came into the family room downstairs, where I was shooting some pool and listening to The Flying Dutchman on our old hi-fi set.
For years I’d had the feeling that Fred wanted to tell me something. There had been times during pauses in conversations when I was sure he was trying to get something off his chest but couldn’t quite bring himself to do it. I never tried to push him, figuring that when he was ready he would tell me or his mother what was bothering him.
That’s not entirely true. I didn’t press him because I was afraid he was going to tell us he was gay. It is something a father doesn’t ordinarily want to hear—most fathers are heterosexual—and I’m sure his mother, who will not be satisfied with less than eight grandchildren, felt the same way.
Apparently motivated by a conversation with prot, Fred decided to come out with it. But it wasn’t to tell me about his sexual orientation. The thing he had tried to bring up all those years, and couldn’t, was his deep-seated fear of flying!
I have known dentists who quake at the sight of a drill and surgeons who are terrified to go under the knife. Sometimes that’s why people get into those fields—it’s a form of whistling in the dark. But I had never encountered an airline pilot who was afraid to fly. I asked him why on earth he had decided on that profession, and he told me this: I had mentioned at dinner years before that phobias could be treated by a gradual acclimation to the conditions that triggered them, and had given some examples, such as fear of snakes, of closets, and, yes, of flying. I had taken him with me to a conference near Disneyland when he was a boy, having no idea he was apprehensive about the flight. That was why he went to the airport the day after he graduated from high school and began to take flying lessons—to work out the problem on his own. It didn’t help, but he continued the training until he had soloed and flown cross-country and passed his flight test. Even after all that he was still afraid to fly. So he figured the only thing to do was to enroll in an aeronautical school and become a professional pilot. He obtained his commercial license, became an instructor, hauled canceled checks all over the Eastern seaboard, usually in the middle of the night and often in bad weather, and after a couple of years of that he was as horrified as ever at the prospect of leaving terra firma. Then he got his air transport “ticket,” as he called it, and went to work for United Airlines. Now, five years later, after a brief conversation with prot, he had finally come to me for help.
We were a long time down in the family room, playing Ping-Pong and throwing darts and shooting pool as we talked. Nine years a pilot and he still had nightmares about plunging to Earth from awesome heights, taking forever to fall through empty space, falling and falling and never reaching the ground.
I have had many patients, over a quarter century of practice, who were afraid of flying. For that matter, it is quite common among the general population, and for a very simple reason: Our ancestors were tree dwellers. As such, a fear of falling was of considerable evolutionary value—those who did not fall survived to reproduce. Most people are able to overcome this fear, at least functionally. On the other hand there are some who never go anywhere they can’t get to by car or train or bus, no matter how inconvenient.
I explained all this to Fred and suggested that he very likely fell into the latter category.
He wanted to know what he should do.
I suggested he try some other line of work.
“That’s exactly what prot said!” he cried, and for the first time in two decades, he hugged me. “But he thought I should talk to you about it first.” I had never seen him so happy.
My sigh of relief turned out to be premature. Right after Freddy had gone, Jennifer came in, pink from a shower. She grabbed his cue stick, took a shot, missed. We talked a while about medical school, shooting all the while, until I noticed that she hadn’t pocketed a single ball, which was unusual for her.
I said, “Is there something you wanted to talk to me about?”
“Yes, Daddy, there is.” I knew it was something I didn’t want to hear. She hadn’t called me “Daddy” in years. And she had also been talking to prot.
But it sometimes takes Jenny a while to get to the point. “I saw you hugging Freddy,” she said. “That was nice. I never saw you do that before.”
“I wanted to lots of times.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Abby thinks you weren’t much interested in our problems. She figured it was because you listened to other people’s troubles all day long and didn’t want to hear any more at home.”.
“I know. She told me tonight before she left. But it’s not true. I care about all of you. I just didn’t want you to think I was trying to interfere with your lives.”
“Why not? Every other parent I know does.”
“It’s a long story.”
She missed another easy shot. “Try me.”
“Well, it’s because of my father, mostly. Your grandfather.”
“What did he do to you?”
“He wanted me to become a doctor.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“I didn’t want to be a doctor.”
“Dad, how could he have made you go to med school? He died when you were eleven or twelve, didn’t he?” Her voice cracked charmingly on “eleven” and “twelve.”
“Yes, but he planted the seed and it kept growing. I couldn’t seem to stop it. I felt guilty. I guess I wante
d to finish the rest of his life for him. And I did it for my mother—your grandmother—too.”
“I don’t think you can live someone else’s life for them, Dad. But if it’s any consolation, I think you’re a very good doctor.”
“Thank you.” I missed my next shot. “By the way, you didn’t go to medical school because of me, did you?”
“Partly. But not because you wanted me to. If anything, I thought you didn’t. You never took me to see your office or the rest of the hospital. Maybe that’s why I became interested—it seemed so mysterious.”
“I just didn’t want to do to you what my father did to me. If I haven’t told you before, I’m very happy you decided to become a doctor.”
“Thank you, Dad.” She studied the table for a long minute, then missed the next ball entirely, sinking the cue ball instead. “What else would you have done? If you hadn’t gone into medicine, I mean?”
“I always wanted to be an opera singer.”
At that she smiled the warm smile she inherited from her mother—the one that says: “How sweet.”
That annoyed me a trifle. “What’s the matter?” I said. “Don’t you think I could have been a singer?”
“I think anyone should be anything he or she wants to be,” she replied, not smiling anymore. “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.” With that she missed the twelveball by a mile.
“Shoot,” I said.
“It’s your turn.”
“I mean, what’s the problem?”
She threw herself into my arms and sobbed, “Oh, Daddy, I’m a lesbian!”
That was about midnight. I remember because Chip came in right afterward. He was acting strangely, too, and I braced myself for another revelation. Chip, however, had not talked to prot.
Even my grandsons behaved differently after that momentous Fourth of July. They stopped fighting and throwing things and began to bathe and to comb their hair without arguing about it—an almost miraculous change.
But back to the cookout. Prot wouldn’t eat any of the chicken, but he consumed a huge Waldorf salad and a couple of gallons of various fruit juices, shouting something about “going for the gusto.” He seemed quite relaxed, and played Frisbee and badminton with Rain and Star and Shasta all afternoon.