by Gene Brewer
“Why?”
“He wants to be a biologist.”
“What about his grades?”
“What about them?”
“Does he get good grades?”
“A’s and b’s. He should do better. He sleeps too much.”
“What are his best subjects?”
“He’s pretty good in latin and science. Not so hot in english and math.”
“Is he a good athlete?”
“He’s on the wrestling team.”
“Is he planning to go to college?”
“He was until a few days ago.”
“What happened? Is there a problem?”
“Yes.”
“Is that why he called you?”
“Yes.”
“Does he call you often now?”
“Once in a while.”
“And what is the problem? Money? There are scholarships available, or—”
“It’s more complicated than that.”
“How so?”
“He has a girlfriend.”
“And she doesn’t want him to go?”
“It’s more complicated than that.”
“Can you tell me about it?”
After a brief pause, possibly for consultation with his “friend”: “She’s pregnant.”
“Oh, I see.”
“Happens all the time.”
“And he feels he has to marry her?”
“Unfortunately.” He shrugged.
“‘Unfortunately’ because he won’t be able to go to college?”
“That and the religion problem.”
“What’s the religion problem?”
“She’s a catholic.”
“You don’t like Catholics?”
“It’s not that I dislike catholics, or any other group defined by its superstitious beliefs. It’s that I know what’s going to happen.”
“What’s going to happen?”
“He’s going to settle down in this company town that killed his father and he’s going to have a bunch of kids that nobody will associate with because their mother is a catholic.”
“Where is this town?”
“I told you—he doesn’t want me to tell you that.”
“I thought he might have changed his mind.”
“When he makes up his mind about something, nobody can change it.”
“He sounds pretty strong-willed.”
“About some things.”
“What, for example?”
“About her.”
“Who—his girlfriend?”
“Yep.”
“I may be dense, but I still don’t see why her being a Catholic is such a serious problem.”
“That’s because you don’t live here. Her family lives on the wrong side of the tracks. Literally.”
“Maybe they will be able to overcome the problem.”
“How?”
“She could change her faith. They could move away.”
“Not a chance. She’s too attached to her family.”
“Do you hate her?”
“Me? I don’t hate anyone. I hate the chains people shackle themselves with.”
“Like religion.”
“Religion, family responsibilities, having to make a living, all that stuff. It’s so stifling, don’t you think?”
“Sometimes. But they’re things we have to learn to live with, aren’t they?”
“Not me!”
“Why not?”
“We don’t have all that crap on K-PAX.”
“Will you be going back there soon?”
“Any time now.”
“How long do you usually stay on Earth?”
“Depends. A few days, usually. Just long enough to help him over the rough spots.”
“All right. Now listen carefully. I’m going to ask you to come forward in time several days. Let’s say two weeks. Where are you now?”
“On K-PAX.”
“Good. What do you see?”
“A forest with lots of soft places to lie down on, and fruit trees, and all kinds of other beings wandering around....”
“Much like the kind of forest your friend enjoys hiking in?”
“Something like that, but nobody is bulldozing it down to build a shopping center.”
“Tell me about some of the plants and animals in the woods there on K-PAX.” I was curious to find out whether the young prot had a fully developed concept of his home planet, or whether that came later. While he was describing the flora and fauna I retrieved his file and pulled out the information that prot had divulged to me in sessions five through eight. I quizzed him on the names of grains, fruits and vegetables, the various animal “beings,” even about light travel and the K-PAXian calendar. I won’t repeat the questions and answers here, but they confirmed my suspicion that the creation of his alien world was developed over many years. For example, he could tell me the names of only six grains at this stage.
Our time ran out just as prot decided to make a trip to one of the K-PAXian libraries. He asked me whether I would like to join him. I said I was sorry, I had some appointments.
“It’s your loss,” he said.
After I had awakened him, and before he left my examining room, I asked prot whether he could, in fact, talk to animals, as Giselle and I suspected.
“Of course,” he replied.
“Can you communicate with all our beings?”
“I have a little difficulty with homo sapiens.”
“Can you talk to dolphins and whales?”
“They’re beings, aren’t they?”
“How do you do that?”
He wagged his head in abject frustration. “You humans consider yourselves the smartest of the EARTH beings. Am I right?”
“Yes.”
“Then obviously the other beings speak much simpler languages than yours, right?”
“Well—”
Out came the notebook, pencil poised. “So if you’re so smart, and their languages are so simple, how come you can’t communicate with them?” He waited for an answer. Unfortunately, I didn’t have one.
Just before I left for the day Giselle gave me another discouraging report from the police. Her contact had come up with a list of all disappearances, during the last ten years, of white males born between 1950 and 1965 in the entire United States and Canada. There had been thousands during this period, of course, but not a single one even came close to matching prot’s profile. Some were too tall, some were bald, some were blue-eyed, some were dead, some had been found and were accounted for. Unless prot were a female in disguise, was much older or younger than he seemed, or someone whose disappearance had not been noticed, our patient, for all practical purposes, did not exist.
She was also waiting for the names and locations of all the slaughterhouses operating anywhere in North America between 1974 and 1985.
“You can eliminate the ones in or near large cities,” I told her. “There’s only one movie theater.”
She nodded her acknowledgment. She looked tired. “I’m going to go home and sleep for about two days,” she said, yawning. How I wished I could have done the same!
I was lying awake that night trying to make some sense of the day’s events—why, I wondered hazily, was there no record of Pete’s disappearance? And what good, I tried to reason, was a list of slaughterhouses without further information as to where our abattoir might be located?—when I got a call from Dr. Chakraborty. Ernie was in the clinic. Someone had tried to kill him!
“What? Who?” I barked.
“Howie!” came the chilling reply.
All I could think of as I sped down the expressway was: Jesus Christ! What have I done? Whatever happened to Ernie was my fault, my responsibility, just as I was responsible for everything else that happened at the hospital. It was one of the worst moments of my life. But even at that blackest of hours I was heartened by the glow of the city, her throbbing lights bright against the steel-gray background of the dawning sky
, as full of defiant life as the night, some forty years earlier, that we futilely rushed my father to the hospital. Same glowing sky, same darkening guilt.
Ernie was still in the emergency room when I got to MPI. Dr. Chakraborty met me in the corridor with: “You are not to worry. He is very fine.” And indeed he was sitting up in bed, sans mask, smiling, his hands behind his head.
“How are you feeling, Ernie?”
“Wonderful. Absolutely wonderful.” I had never seen a smile quite like his. It was positively beatific.
“What happened, for God’s sake?”
“My good friend Howie just about strangled me to death.” When he threw his head back to laugh, I could see a red abrasion where something had been wrapped around his neck. “That old son-of-a-bitch. I love him.”
“Love him? He tried to kill you!”
“No he didn’t. He made me think he tried to kill me. Oh, it was fantastic. I was asleep. You know, with my hands tied and everything? He wrapped something around my neck—a handkerchief or something—and tightened it up, and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.”
“Go on.”
“When I stopped breathing and became unconscious he somehow lifted me onto a gurney and ran me up here to the infirmary. They got me going again in a hurry, and when I woke up I realized immediately what he had done.”
“What do you think he did?” I remember saying to myself as I asked him this: I must be a psychiatrist! It was all I could do not to laugh.
“He taught me a lesson I’ll never forget.”
“Which was?”
“That dying is nothing to fear. In fact, it’s quite pleasant.”
“How so?”
“Well, you’ve heard that old adage—when you die your life passes before your eyes? Well, it does! But only the good parts! In my case, I was a child again. It was wonderful! My mother was there, and my dog, and I had all my old toys and games and my catcher’s mitt.... It was just like living my whole childhood over again! But it was no dream. It was really happening! All those memories—I never realized what a wonderful thing childhood is until I got the chance to relive it like that. And then, when I was nine, it started all over again! And again! Over and over again! It was the best thing that ever happened to me!” There he was, his skin pale as a scallop, laughing about the event whose prospect had terrified him all his life. “I can hardly wait for the real thing!”
They had taken Howie to Ward Four. I let him stew there the rest of that day and most of the next before I found time to talk to him. I was angry with him and let him know it, but he just sat there beaming at me, his grin a perfect copy of prot’s know-it-all smirk. As he was heading back to his room on Ward Two he turned and proclaimed, “Prot says one more task and I’ll be cured, too.”
“I’ll decide that, goddamn it!” I shouted after him.
One of the night nurses told me later that the Duchess had begun to take some of her meals in the dining room with the other patients. She was shocked and offended by all the belching and farting (courtesy, primarily, of Chuck), but, to her great credit, she usually stuck it out.
At her first appearance Bess tried to get up and serve her. One glance from prot and she returned to her place. As usual, however, she wouldn’t eat anything until everyone else had finished.
“How did he get her to come to the table?” I asked the nurse.
“She wants to be the one who gets to go with him,” came the obvious reply. She sounded envious.
Session Twelve
While prot was munching peaches and plums I brought up the subject of Howie and his tasks. I explained that the first one he had assigned to him (to find the “bluebird of happiness”) had produced a positive effect not only on Howie, but on the rest of the ward as well. Though it had turned out successfully also, the second (to “cure” Ernie) was more problematical. I asked him if he had anything else in mind for my patient.
“Only one final task.”
“Do you mind telling me what it is?”
“That would spoil the surprise.”
“I think we’ve had enough surprises around here for a while. Can you guarantee this task will cause no harm to anyone?”
“If he does it well, it will be a very happy day for everyone, including yourself.” I was not so certain about that, but my doubts were swallowed up by his self-confidence.
My father once lay down on the living room floor and asked me to make a run at him. He wanted me to push off on his knees, flip over him, and land on my feet above his head. It sounded like suicide. “Trust me,” he said. So I put my life in his hands, made a run at him, and, with his help, miraculously landed on my feet. I never did it again. Prot had the same “trust me” look in his eyes when he told me about Howie’s last task. And on that note we began our twelfth session.
The minute I started to count, prot fell into a deep trance. I asked whether he could hear me.
“Of course.”
“Good. Now I want you to think back to the year 1979; that is, 1979 on Earth. It’s Christmas Day, 1979. Where are you and what do you see?”
“I am on the PLANET TERSIPION in what you would call the CONSTELLATION TAURUS. I see orange and green everywhere. It’s quite remarkable. The flora on this WORLD are not chlorophyll-based as they are on EARTH and K-PAX. Instead, light is gathered by a pigment similar to that of your red algae. The sky is green because of the chlorine in the atmosphere. There are all kinds of interesting beings, most of whom you would characterize as insects. Some are bigger than your dinosaurs. All of them are quite slow-moving, fortunately, but you have to—”
“Excuse me, prot. I would love to hear about this planet, and all the other places you have visited, but right now I would prefer to concentrate on your passages to Earth.”
“Anything you say. But you asked me where I was and what I was doing on christmas of 1979.”
“Yes I did, but only as a point of reference. What I’d like to ask you to do now is to come forward in time to your next visit to Earth. Can you do that?”
“Of course. Um, let’s see. January? No, I was still on TERSIPION. February? No. I was back on K-PAX then, learning to play the patuse, though I’ll never be any good at it. It must have been in march. Yes, it was march, that delightful time in your northern hemisphere when the ice on the streams is melting and the mayapples and crocuses are coming up.”
“This is March 1980?”
“Precisely.”
“And he called you?”
“Well, not for anything in particular. He just wants someone to talk things over with now and then.”
“Tell me about him. What’s he like? Is he married?”
“Yes, he’s married to a girl he knew in—oh, I told you about that already, didn’t I?”
“The Catholic girl who was pregnant when they were seniors in high school?”
“What a memory! She’s still a catholic, but no longer pregnant. That was five and a half years ago.”
“I’ve forgotten her name.”
“I never told you her name.”
“Can you tell me now?”
After a lengthy hesitation, during which he seemed to study my haircut (or the need thereof), he said, quietly, “sarah.”
Barely concealing my elation: “Did they have a son or a daughter?”
“Yes.”
“I mean which?”
“You should do something about that sense of humor, doctor brewer. A daughter.”
“So she’s about five?”
“Her birthday is next week.”
“Any other children?”
“No. Sarah developed endometriosis and they gave her a hysterectomy. Stupid.”
“Because she was so young?”
“No. Because there is a simple treatment for it that your medical people should have figured out long ago.”
“Can you tell me the daughter’s name? Or is that a secret?”
After only a moment’s hesitation: “rebecca.” When this
was divulged so readily I wondered whether Pete had relented and had decided to allow prot to tell me his real name. Perhaps he was beginning to trust me! But prot must have anticipated my question: “Forget it,” he said.
“Forget what?”
“He’s not going to tell you that.”
“Why not? Will he at least tell why not?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“You’ll just use the answer to chip away at him.”
“All right. Then tell me this: Do they live in the same town he was born in?”
“Yes and no.”
“Can you be more specific?”
“They live in a trailer outside of town.”
“How far outside of town is it?”
“Not far. It’s in a trailer park. But they want to get a house farther out in the country.”
A shot in the dark: “Do they have a sprinkler?”
“A what?”
“A lawn sprinkler.”
“In a trailer park?”
“All right. Do they both work?”
His mouth puckered slightly, as if the fruit hadn’t agreed with him. “He has a full-time job, as you would call it. She earns some money making children’s clothing.”
“Where does your friend work?”
“The same place his father and his grandfather did. Just about the only place in town there is to work, unless you’re a grocer or a banker.”
“The slaughterhouse?”
“Yessir, the old butchery.”
“What does he do there?”
“He’s a knocker.”
“What’s a ‘knocker’?”
“The knocker is the guy who knocks the cows in the head so they don’t struggle so much when you cut their throats.”
“Does he like his job?”
“Are you kidding?”
“What else does he do? At home, for example?”
“Not much. He reads the newspaper in the evening, after his daughter has gone to bed. On weekends he tinkers with his car and watches tv like everybody else in town.”
“Does he still hike in the woods?”
“Sarah would like him to do that, but he doesn’t.”
“Why not?”
“It depresses him.”
“Does he still collect butterflies?”
“He threw out his collection a long time ago. There was no room for it in the trailer.”