by Gene Brewer
On a more personal note, my wife will be retiring soon (thanks to the sale of the film rights to K-PAX), as will our old friends Bill and Eileen Siegel, who have bought a place in upstate New York and are waiting for Karen and me to join them in an Adirondack retreat of our own. Our son Will graduates from Columbia this spring. He visits the hospital once in a while to keep tabs on the patients and to advise me not to work so hard. I always say, “Tell me that when you’re in my shoes!” He is still engaged to Dawn Siegel; they plan to be married “sometime” after they graduate.
Will is as puzzled as I and the rest of the staff by the results of the DNA analyses that came back shortly after Robert was discharged. The laboratory, an extremely reliable one whose clients include some of the country’s finest criminologists, reported that Rob’s and prot’s blood DNA came from two entirely different individuals. Most of us think this must be due to human error, but of course there is no way to prove it.
And then there’s the sticky question of how he was able to move, if not at superlight speed, at least fast enough to outrun a TV camera. One physicist estimated that in order to do that he would have to have traveled at least twenty-five miles a second, and perhaps much faster.
If that isn’t enough, Giselle tells me that prot’s trip to the Bronx Zoo provided certain information that no one but zoo officials (and the animals themselves) knew, such things as what their former habitats were like, some foods they missed, and so on. Based on this information, their keepers have tried to replace some of the losses, but I imagine that if prot were still here he would say this misses the point. Happily, the cetologist who visited us has transferred his dolphin, Moby, to a marine biology facility for rehabilitation pending a return to the ocean depths. The young man himself is now selling life insurance.
Regardless of what talents prot may have possessed, however, I still believe that he was nothing more (nor less) than a secondary personality of Robert Porter, and is now an integral part of him. Though many people seem to think he came from K-PAX (including Charlie Flynn, the spider coprophiliac, now mining for gold in the sands of Libya), it seems patently ridiculous to me to imagine that anyone can zip through space on a beam of light without air or heat or protection from various forms of radiation, no matter how fast he travels.
I felt betrayed at first that he “left” us without any warning whatever, especially since he had promised to give me some notice before he departed. But I keep remembering his last words to me in the television studio: “See you later, doc.” And that when Robert and Giselle left the hospital to take up their lives elsewhere, Rob gave me a very uncharacteristic wink and Cheshire-cat grin. Moreover, none of the hundred “beings” he planned to take with him has yet disappeared, as far as we know. Is he hiding in Robert’s brain somewhere, waiting to come forth again when the time is right?
Or is it possible that he is traveling the Earth at this very moment, searching for unhappy beings to take back to K-PAX with him? For that matter, is there any limit to what is possible? What little we know about life and the universe itself is merely a drop in the ocean of space and time. I still go out at night sometimes and look up at the sky, toward the constellation Lyra. And I still wonder....
The Wisdom (or Craziness) of prot
(from his television appearance of Sept. 20, 1995)
Don’t blame the politicians for your problems. They are merely a reflection of yourselves.
Many humans feel sorry for the dolphins who are trapped in tuna nets. Who weeps for the tuna?
Your recorded “history” and your “literature” and “art” are merely those of your own species; they ignore all the other beings who share your planet. For a long time we thought that Homo sapiens was the only species living on EARTH.
Religions are difficult for a K-PAXian to understand. Either all of them are right or none of them is.
Human society will always have a drug problem unless life without drugs becomes a more attractive prospect for those concerned.
Hunting is no sport, it is cold-blooded murder. If you can outwrestle a bear or chase down a rabbit, then you can consider yourself a true sportsman.
Killing someone because he killed someone else is an oxymoron.
The root of all evil isn’t the lust for money, but money itself. Try to think of a problem that doesn’t involve money in some way.
Schools are not for teaching anything. They exist solely to pass on society’s beliefs and values to its children.
The purpose of governments is to make your WORLD safe for commerce.
Humans love to fool themselves with euphemisms in order to pretend they aren’t eating other animals—“beef for cow, “pork” for pig, etc. This never fails to elicit gales of laughter from our beings.
All wars are holy wars.
Some humans are concerned with the destruction of their environment and the concomitant extinction of other species. If these well-meaning people were more concerned with the individual beings involved, there would be no need to worry about loss of species.
There will come a time when the human beings of EARTH will be devastated by diseases that will make aids look like a runny nose.
This above all: To thine own WORLD be true.
K-Pax III
the worlds of prot
For Karen
It often happens that the universal belief of one age—a belief from which no one was free or could be free without an extraordinary effort of genius or courage—becomes to a subsequent age so palpable an absurdity that the only difficulty is to imagine how such an idea could ever have appeared credible.
—JOHN STUART MILL
Prologue
In April, 1990, I began the psychoanalysis of a 33-year-old mental patient who called himself “prot” (rhymes with “goat”) and claimed to be from the planet “K-PAX.”
I met with this young man on a regular basis for several months, during which time I was unable to shake his bizarre story and convince him of his earthly origins (he insisted he came here on a beam of light). The only useful information that emerged from these sessions was that he suffered from a severe sexual dysfunction, hated one or both of his parents, and took a dim view of human society in general.
However, after several weeks of analysis, it became clear that the patient was, in fact, suffering from a rare form of multiple personality disorder in which “prot” was a dominant secondary ego. The primary personality belonged to a man named Robert Porter, who had killed the murderer of his wife and nine-year-old daughter, and whose frustration, guilt, and grief had driven him to withdraw from the real world into an impenetrable shell guarded by his “alien” friend.
But prot, whatever his origin and nature, was a remarkable individual filled with arcane astronomical knowledge, a kind of genius savant. Indeed, he provided astronomers with valuable information on the planet K-PAX and others he claimed to have visited, as well as the double stars between which his world swung in a retrograde motion much like that of a pendulum.
Paradoxically, he seemed to possess a profound understanding of human suffering. Indeed, he was able, during his brief tenure at the Manhattan Psychiatric Institute, to hasten the recovery of a number of his fellow patients, some of whom had been with us for years. He even helped solve certain problems plaguing my own family!
Finally I managed, mainly through hypnosis, to break through Robert’s carapace and make direct contact with his primary personality. For the first time, it seemed possible that I might be able to help him learn to deal with the death of his wife and daughter, and bring prot down to Earth.
The treatment, unfortunately, was interrupted by prot’s announcement of his intention to return to his home planet on August 17, 1990, at precisely 3:31 a.m., a “journey” I was unable to persuade him to postpone. Faced with an impossible deadline, I tried to achieve an early resolution of Robert’s crisis, which succeeded only in driving him deeper inside his protective shell. Moreover, the hospital was thrown into turmoil as many of the patients
competed for a chance to go with him. Even some of the staff were lining up for the trip!
Robert declined to join him, however, and, when prot “departed” at the scheduled time, was left behind in a state of intransigent catatonia. One of the other patients, a woman suffering from severe psychotic depression, did “disappear” along with prot, but what became of her and how she managed to leave the hospital is still a matter of conjecture.
The only bright spot in the episode was prot’s promise to return to Earth in “approximately five of your years.” And, true to his word, he returned precisely on August 17, 1995, to take over Robert’s injured psyche once again and protect it from further harm.
This time prot refused to divulge the date of his next and, according to him, final departure and I had no idea how long I would have to work with Robert. But this may have been something of a blessing in disguise: I could only assume there would be enough time to complete the protocol and, hopefully, to help Rob accept, at long last, what had happened to him and his family, and get on with his life.
Ironically, thanks in part to prot’s cajoling, Robert now appeared ready and even willing to cooperate in his treatment program. As a result, it soon became evident that he had experienced a number of devastating incidents early in his life, including his sexual abuse at age five by a maternal uncle, and the death of his father when he was six. The loss of his only “friend and protector” (his father) was the last straw. It was then that he brought forth a new guardian (prot), who came from a faraway planet, one that was free from violence, cruelty, and loss, where all the events that had traumatized Robert’s young life could never have happened.
Once these knots had been unraveled, and the existence of two additional alter egos revealed, it became possible, at last, for him to deal with his terrible past, including the death of his wife and daughter. Indeed, he made such rapid progress that he was discharged from MPI at the end of September, 1995, and moved in with his friend Giselle Griffin, a reporter who had been instrumental in discovering his true identity five years earlier (and subsequently became a kind of liaison between Robert and the outside world). It appeared that prot and the other two personalities, Harry and Paul, had become fully integrated into the psyche of Robert Porter, who seemed to have resumed a relatively normal life, i.e., there was no sign of a multiple personality disorder or any of the secondary symptoms (headaches, mental lapses, etc.) usually associated with this condition. For all practical purposes, Rob had been released from his psychological prison after more than thirty years of incarceration.
All of these events, including excerpts of my thirty-two sessions with Robert/prot, are described more fully in K-PAX and K-PAX II, which ended with the birth of his and Giselle’s son Gene in the summer of 1997. At that time it appeared the family (including their Dalmatian, Oxeye Daisy) might, at last, live happily ever after.
Unfortunately, this turned out not to be the case.
Session Thirty-three
The call came on Thursday, November 6, during my regular afternoon “Principles of Psychiatry” lecture at Columbia University, with which the Manhattan Psychiatric Institute is affiliated. Betty McAllister, our head nurse, contacted the chair of the psychiatry department there and insisted he interrupt my lecture to give me the bad news. Giselle had reported to Betty that prot had returned suddenly and without warning as Robert was bathing his son in their Greenwich Village apartment. Though somewhat dismayed, I wasn’t entirely surprised by this unwelcome development. For one thing, multiple personality regression is not an uncommon occurrence and, for another, there were certain elements of Rob’s rapid recovery in 1995 that had seemed almost too easy from the beginning—his seemingly well-rehearsed responses to certain questions put to him, for example.
It wasn’t an emergency, however, and I decided to finish the lecture before returning to MPI. That was a mistake, and not the first of the long ordeal I was already dreading revisiting. I was so preoccupied with Robert’s relapse that I became confused about some trivial point, much to the delight and even snickers of some of the medical students. Annoyed, I announced an immediate pop quiz; the derision turned to groans, and I left them with a question about Hessler’s paradox, knowing full well there was no correct answer, requesting that a serious and (I assumed) trustworthy student collect the papers and forward them to me.
Prot and Giselle and their (Robert’s) son were already waiting, with Betty, for me in my office when I returned to MPI. We greeted one another warmly. In the seven years I had known them, Giselle had become almost like a daughter to me, and prot, strange as it may seem, something of a trusted friend and advisor. He (like Rob, of course) was graying at the temples and sported a salt-and-pepper beard. I, on the other hand, had shaved mine off since our last meeting, retaining a trim mustache so as not to feel totally exposed.
He had lost none of his confidence and good cheer. Peering at me from behind his familiar dark glasses, he spouted, “Hiya, doc. Still beating your wife?” (This referred to an early session in which we were struggling to find a way to communicate with each other.)
Though I couldn’t wait to interrogate prot, to find out where he had been while Robert lived his apparently normal life as a graduate student in biology at New York University, as well as devoted partner and father, I asked Betty to escort him to Ward Two while I spoke with Giselle. The prospect seemed to delight him, and he was off at once for the stairway to his former home, Betty hurrying along behind.
MPI is an experimental hospital which accepts only those cases who have failed to make significant progress elsewhere. The different wards correspond to the floors on which they are located. Ward Two, for example, houses patients with various psychoses and severe neuroses. Those who make significant progress are eventually transferred down to Ward One, where they remain until they are ready to be discharged. The third floor is occupied by various sexual deviates, coprophiles, and others, as well as the autists and catatonics, and Ward Four by a number of psychopaths, those individuals who are a danger to both the staff and their fellow patients. The faculty and staff maintain offices and examining rooms on the fifth floor.
When prot and Betty had gone I closed the door, invited Giselle to sit down, and tweaked my namesake’s little nose. He gurgled happily with an expression somewhere between prot’s lopsided grin and Robert’s shy smile. “Now,” I said. “Tell me what happened.”
Giselle looked worried, or perhaps merely frustrated, as people often are when they thought they had escaped from some skillet or other, only to find themselves dancing around an enormous frying pan. She gazed at me with her moist, doe-like eyes, which triggered in my mind vivid memories of our first encounter all those years ago when, curled up in that very chair, she had come to request permission to “roam the corridors” of MPI to research an article on mental illness for a national magazine.
“I don’t know,” she sighed. “One minute he was Robert, and the next he was prot.” She snapped her fingers. “Just like that.” The baby reached for her hand, apparently trying to understand where the “snap” had come from.
“What were you doing when it happened?”
“I had a headache and was trying to take a nap. When it was time for the baby’s bath, I asked Rob if he would do it just this once. Rob is wonderful with Gene, gets up at night, feeds him and plays with him and all the rest, but he hates to bathe or change him. I told him about the headache, though, and he agreed to do it. But when he came back it wasn’t Rob. It was prot.”
“How could you tell?”
“You already know the answer to that, Doctor B. Prot is different from Rob in a thousand ways.”
“What did he say?”
“He said, ‘Hiya, Giselle. So you’re a mommy now.’”
“And you said—”
“I was too distressed to say much.”
“So who gave the little guy his bath?”
“I think Rob probably started it, but never finished.”
“An
d that’s when prot appeared.”
“I guess so. He never did get the diaper on right.”
“I’m not surprised. He doesn’t have much experience with babies, human or otherwise. What else can you tell me?”
“Nothing. Absolutely nothing. There he was, just as if he had never left.”
“Did you ask him where Robert had gone?”
“Of course!” she wailed. Then, wistfully, “He didn’t have a clue.”
“He doesn’t know where Robert is?”
That’s when the tears came. I suppose Giselle hadn’t thought about the full implication of this until that moment. It meant that Robert had retreated so deeply that not even his “guardian” (prot) knew where he was hiding. The baby started crying, too. She held him to her breast while I tried to reassure her. “We’ll get to the bottom of it,” I promised, without a lot of conviction. I thought we had already scraped out that barrel.
She nodded and found a handkerchief. I took little Gene, who smelled wonderfully piney, like his mother. He tweaked my nose. I feigned a roar of pain, which got him crying again, and only made things worse. “C’mon,” I said to Giselle, after she had calmed herself and the boy. “Let’s show Ward Two your new baby.”
We found prot talking with the patients, some of whom obviously remembered him fondly. Frankie was there, fatter than ever and almost smiling, a rare occurrence for her. And Milton, whose entire family was wiped out in the holocaust, was quietly listening to whatever was being discussed, not joking or clowning around at all. Some of the others had never met prot, except by reputation, but were eagerly telling him their stories in a blatant, if pathetic, attempt to win a free trip to K-PAX, or at least to gain some sympathy for their plights. Half a dozen cats swarmed around him, too, purring and rubbing against his legs.