by Gene Brewer
“I called my mom last night. She’s staying with us until we figure out what’s going on.”
“What about Rob’s mother?”
“I called her, too. She’s remarried, and living in Arizona now. She wanted to come, but I talked her out of it. There wouldn’t be much point in her visiting him if we don’t know where he is.”
I gazed at her eager, still-youthful face. “You probably know as much about Rob’s problem as I do, Giselle. What do you think went wrong?”
“I suppose giving Gene his bath somehow brought everything back. But why he left so abruptly and prot came back at exactly the same time ...” She shrugged.
I had forgotten that she considered them to be two separate individuals. “Any idea where he might have gone?”
“None at all. Unless he went back to Guelph.”
“His home town?”
“Yes.”
“Why Guelph?”
“I don’t know. When I’m overwhelmed with something, it helps to go back to the place I grew up in. It’s like returning to a simpler time, I suppose.”
I nodded understandingly though I, myself, still lived in the house I grew up in, and had nowhere else to go. But neither my own childhood nor Giselle’s were fraught with the misery that had befallen Robert’s.
“Can I go see him now?”
“All right, Giselle. Go see what you can find out from prot that I can’t.”
“Thanks, Doctor B.” She jumped up and pecked me on the cheek before skipping out. In another second she skipped back in. “By the way,” she added. “Would you be willing to take care of Oxie until Rob comes back?”
As it happened, our own Dalmatian, Shasta Daisy, had died in August. Though she was nearly fifteen and had had a wonderfully happy life, we still missed her sleeping with us, watching everything from the back seat of the car, playing with the grandkids. Giselle had me again and she knew it.
“All right. Bring him in tomorrow and I’ll take him home with me.”
“Just one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“He’s a vegetarian now.”
“The dog? Is that possible?”
“Sure. It’s just a matter of feeding him the right nutrients in the right proportions. I’ll give you a list.”
“Thanks,” I mumbled.
She smiled brightly. “I knew I could count on you.” I only wished I could share her confidence.
After Giselle had gone I found myself trying vainly to reorganize the piles of paper strewn all over my desk, a ritual I go through every time some unexpected and unwanted new burden is tossed onto it. There were unrefereed manuscripts, unattended meeting invitations, an unfinished paper of my own, books, reprints, catalogs, notebooks, yellow pads, Post-its and memos of all kinds. At the back of it all stood a picture of my entire family.
I gazed lovingly at the photo, remembering the event at which it was taken, a backyard picnic more than seven years ago, the time I first invited prot to the house to determine the effect of a normal home environment on his condition (I didn’t know about Rob at the time). My wife Karen and I are seated in the foreground, Shasta at our feet, backed by our sons Fred on the left and Will on the right, with daughters Abby and Jennifer standing between them. It’s Will’s fingers that form the antenna sticking up from the back of my head.
How much things change in seven years! Will, who was in high school at the time and suffering through a nearly catastrophic cocaine addiction, is now in his third year of medical school and doing exceedingly well. He is still planning a career in psychiatry, and he and his fiancée Dawn Siegel plan to be married as soon as he graduates (they’ve already been living together for two years).
Jennifer, a medical student herself at the time the picture was taken, is now specializing in the treatment and prevention of HIV infections in the San Francisco area. In fact, she has become something of a celebrity in Northern California, the subject of several newspaper and magazine articles, and is as happy in her dismal work as was Mother Teresa in hers. Though her responsibilities preclude her visiting us more than once or twice a year, we are, of course, extremely proud of her great success and dedication.
That was a year of transition for Fred, who continues to amaze us with his career as a singer and actor. He has appeared in a couple of films and soap operas, but spends most of his time on stage, and, in fact, made his first Broadway appearance last year in the smash hit Rent and is now in the road company of Les Misérables (we didn’t even know he could sing until we saw him perform at a dinner theater in Newark not long after the picture was taken). Freddy lives in the East Village with a beautiful ballerina, but refuses to discuss the possibility of marriage, at least not with us. His mother continues to hope, however.
I turned my gaze on Abby, the eldest of the four, and the most outspoken. Now approaching forty, she remains active in a number of causes, particularly that of animal rights, which she claims is the coming thing. “People are beginning to realize that animals have their own feelings and sensitivities, sometimes not very different from our own,” she insists. She is prot’s favorite, I suspect.
Our astronomer son-in-law Steve (who took the picture) and his colleague Charles Flynn were, of course, instrumental in uncovering prot’s vast knowledge of astronomical matters, including his identifying several planets associated with solar systems elsewhere in the galaxy. Indeed, Dr. Flynn has long been convinced that prot is, in fact, from the planet K-PAX.
But back to the family: Steve and Abby’s children Rain and Star, now thirteen and eleven and glued to their computer monitors several hours a day, have turned into surprisingly normal adolescents, bright yet thoughtful and considerate. Rain, in fact, is planning on becoming an Eagle Scout, and has already earned several merit badges along the way. Though we see Abby’s family more often than the others, we still don’t see them often enough. We don’t see any of them often enough.
Perhaps that will change with the new year. Karen, thanks primarily to the option payments on the film version of K-PAX, decided to retire at the end of the year. She already has our travel plans worked out for the next three decades and persistently reminds me that the longer I work the less time we will have left. “What about my patients?” I ask her.
“You can’t stay at the hospital forever,” she always tells me. “You’ve got to leave them to someone else sooner or later.”
It’s not that easy, of course, though I see her point. Sometimes I almost think it would be nice to have a multiple personality, to be able to lead two lives (or more) at the same time. Most of us, however, are stuck with just the one. I could only hope mine could be of some benefit to Robert Porter, to help him get to the bottom of his difficulty and start him again on the long road to a permanent recovery.
Session Thirty-four
I brought Oxeye home with me on Saturday. Karen was delighted to see him and, for that matter, so was everyone else (the Dalmatian, which I had given to Rob in a fruitless attempt to lure him out of his catatonic state, had lived with us from 1991-5). In fact, Abby and her family came up from Princeton for the occasion.
My daughter seemed to have mellowed in the last couple of years, hardly bugging me at all about her hopelessly liberal causes. Maybe she was just glad to be back home for a while. Or perhaps it had something to do with her fortieth birthday looming on the horizon. Oxie, for his part, was also happy to be with us, though he sniffed hard for Shasta and whined for a time when he couldn’t find her (we buried her in her favorite spot at our summer place in the Adirondacks).
Rain and Star ran all over the yard with him that afternoon while the old folks chatted inside. Despite the negative aspects of prot’s return, everyone was overjoyed that he was back as well, and hoped I would bring him home for a cookout, the setting for their earlier encounters with him.
“In the winter?” I protested.
Karen pointed out that Thanksgiving and Christmas were coming up. “Maybe you could bring him home for t
hose.”
I didn’t even want to think about that. It seemed as though we had only put away the decorations a short time before.
I cornered my son-in-law Steve and asked him about his colleague, Charlie Flynn, who had recently returned from Libya (by special dispensation from Colonel Qaddafi in return for a percentage of any profits) with a tiny supply of spider excrement indigenous to that country. According to prot, this was a key component in a cold fusion reaction. Though the results of a single small experiment (in collaboration with the physics department) looked promising, the amount, unfortunately, was insufficient to catalyze a larger-scale production. Undeterred, Flynn was busy gathering feces from various native American arachnid species in hopes of isolating the key element in this material, which could well solve the world’s energy problems, not to mention his own financial ones.
“Ah think he’s in Mexico now, trackin’ down tarantulas,” Steve chuckled.
I asked him whether there had been any developments in the study of planet K-PAX and its double star system.
“Well, another of our faculty has found what looks to be a second planet in that solar system. Ah wonder why prot never mentioned it to you.”
“Maybe he doesn’t know about it.”
“Ah wouldn’t be too sure. Anyway, you might ask him. It’s even bigger than K-PAX. The main difference is that it orbits far outside the double star system, not inside it like K-PAX does.”
“I’ll do that.”
At that point Rain showed up. Now a teenager, his voice had already changed and he sported a feeble mustache, which he’s decided to keep. He seemed to have shot up another several inches since we had last seen him, and was almost as tall as I was. I felt a little like “Albert Einstein,” one of my patients at MPI, who was desperately trying to slow down time and could only watch helplessly as it rolled on and on, carrying him, and the rest of us, along with it like some invisible avalanche. Of course this only reminded me that the time for prot’s departure was lurking, like a giant boulder, at the bottom of the mountain.
After the death of our former director, Klaus Villers, I was voted acting director of the hospital in the fall of 1997. Following interviews with a number of candidates for the permanent directorship, some of whom were crazier than the patients, it was clear that the best person for the job was our own Virginia Goldfarb. Though she has a few figurative warts, as do we all, she is even-handed and fair, and makes decisions only after careful deliberation and weighing of all the options. Moreover, she keeps herself informed of developments in many areas of psychiatry, including her own specialties, bipolar disorder and megalomania. Finally, she practically squeaks of confidence and self-assurance, which doesn’t hurt in the fund-raising department, and I think she was a fine choice to lead the Manhattan Psychiatric Institute into the twenty-first century (though I wasn’t too pleased that she put me in charge of the committee supervising the construction of the new wing, which takes a whopping amount of time).
At the regular Monday morning staff meeting, chaired by Dr. Goldfarb, there was a great deal of interest in prot’s return and what it might tell us not only about Robert Porter’s condition, but about others suffering from the bizarre affliction known as multiple personality disorder (MPD) as well. Although regression to the various individual personalities is not an uncommon occurrence, the patient can usually be reintegrated more easily the second time around. In the case of Robert/prot, however, the problem was complicated by the disappearance of the principal alter.
That led to a discussion of what it means to be an alter ego, i.e., how does a secondary or other personalities differ from the primary one, and from the fully integrated human being? Are they completely different individuals? Or are certain things missing in the thoughts and feelings of the various alters, who are merely “parts” of a whole? Are we all simply a mix of different personalities which dominate our minds at different times? If so, which of these is responsible for our actions? All very interesting, I remarked, but what specific recommendations were there in the case of my relapsed patient, Robert Porter?
Ron Menninger pointed out that MPD differs from all the other syndromes in that aggressive drug treatment of the individual at hand, while perhaps beneficial to him, can be devastating to one or more of the other egos (at this point I wasn’t even certain how many others there were in Robert’s case), and perhaps to the integrated personality as a whole.
A consensus was reached that I should continue psychoanalysis, at least for a while, in hopes that probing into prot’s psyche might provide further information about what had happened to Robert, his primary alter, much as it had seven years earlier. For example, prot’s abhorrence of money in particular, and capitalism in general, seemed to be related to the severe financial obligations incurred by Rob’s family following the fatal injury of his father.
While all this was debatable, unanimous agreement was reached on one thing: no TV appearances for prot this time! Letters and calls from people who wanted to meet him or make use of his talents or follow him to a distant planet were still dribbling in more than two years after he was interviewed on a television talk show. More disturbingly, there were several communications from people in various countries who claimed they had seen him, and even a few who insisted that he had taken them aboard his space ship and examined them. A woman in France claimed she was pregnant with his child! Obviously she hadn’t heard about prot’s tremendous aversion to the procreation process, which was intimately related, of course, to Robert’s sexual abuse as a child.
This was followed by a preliminary discussion of a possible replacement for Carl Thorstein, who was interviewing for a position elsewhere. And we had only just found someone (Laura Chang) to take the place of Klaus Villers, who had died at about the time of prot’s “disappearance” in 1995.
The subject turned, finally, to a couple of the other problem patients. One of these, the aforementioned “Albert Einstein,” is a Chinese-American physicist who believes that time not only flies, but is accelerating! Quite successful in his career until several months ago, he broke down while presenting a paper on the nature of time at an international scientific meeting.
We all harbor the illusion that time moves faster as we grow older. At that conference Albert hypothesized that this is indeed a physical fact having something to do with the expansion of the universe. He tearfully reported to the shocked scientists that time was literally speeding up, that life was rapidly passing him by, along with his audience and all the rest of us. After seeing his own psychiatrist he was taken to “the Big Institute” at Columbia, where he was treated vigorously, though without success, with electroshock and other therapies, and finally ended up with us. He now spends most of his time in his room, along with dozens of pencils and reams of paper, in feverish pursuit of the impossible—of finding a way to slow down time mathematically, or even stop it altogether. Ironically, when he becomes too tired to think, he sits quietly and does nothing at all, in an attempt to make the minutes crawl by as slowly as possible. Like many of our residents, he sleeps very little. Obviously in great anguish, he moans and fidgets during every analytic session and finally jumps up and runs to the door, hoping somehow to make up for lost time.
Another patient under review was a woman suffering from an unusual form of schizophrenia, or perhaps a previously unreported type of bipolar disorder (formerly called manic depression). The patient, a woman we call Alice, sometimes sees herself as no bigger than an insect in a world of giants. At such times she is terrified of being stepped on, drowning in a cup of tea, being eaten by one of the cats, and so on. At others she thinks she has become gigantic, all-powerful, utterly in control of everything around her, including the staff and the other patients. At still other times she seems perfectly normal in every way, continually pestering her doctor (Goldfarb) to “let me out of this madhouse.” We don’t have a clue as to the cause of this curious affliction, nor that of various other phobias, compulsions, and social deviati
ons, whose victims haven’t been helped in the slightest by even the newest and most powerful neuroleptic drugs.
Carl Beamish joined Goldfarb in suggesting that prot might have a talk with some of these problem patients. In fact, I suspect this was the reason for their being included on the meeting’s agenda. There were no objections, except by me. I protested, as I had earlier, that although he had shown an amazing ability to help such unfortunates in the past, our primary responsibility was to Robert and his treatment. Indeed, we seemed to be back where we had started in 1990, with no clear idea of what underlay Robert’s difficulty in dealing with the world around him, or how to get to the bottom of it. However, I did agree to question prot about his prognoses for the other patients, while, at the same time, requesting that everyone present query their charges about their future travel plans.
My main concern, however, was in reintegrating prot’s powerful personality into that of Robert Porter’s so that his family could once again be reunited, Giselle could have her husband back, and baby Gene his missing father.
Prot seemed cheerful and relaxed when he came into my examining room the following morning. “Happy Veterans Day!” he cried as he went for a pear. I watched him eat the whole thing, seeds and all, smacking his lips as usual in what was at once a delightful and disgusting spectacle.
“You know about Veterans Day?”
“Only that it used to be called Armistice Day. But you changed it because it sent the wrong message.”
“What message?”
Munch, munch, munch. “That peace is a good thing. You prefer to honor your warriors. Makes it easier to recruit the next batch, don’tcha know.” A speck of the Bartlett flew across the room.
“You think we’re a violent, warlike species, don’t you?”