K-Pax Omnibus

by Gene Brewer

  As with most mental patients, there is a lighter side to all this. With his mustache and sporty jacket and tie he even looks a little like the real game-show host, and many of our visitors become convinced that Alex Trebek himself is a resident of MPI, no matter what denials we might make.

  I paused at their bench and asked if either had spoken with prot as yet. Ophelia inquired immediately (so I wouldn’t think she was being recalcitrant, I suppose) whether I thought that would be a good idea. “Doesn’t make any difference to me,” I assured her. “I was just curious.”

  She admitted she had talked with prot for a few minutes over the weekend.

  “Correct!” confirmed Alex.

  “And did he ask you whether you wanted to go to K-PAX?”

  “Would you be unhappy if I told you he did?”

  “No.”

  “We all want to go,” she confessed matter-of-factly. “But he can only take a hundred of us with him.”

  “You are right!”

  At this point one of our “exhibitionists” darted from behind a tree and exposed a bare foot to us. When no one responded, he grabbed his shoe and slunk off.

  “Well, did he give you any encouragement?”

  “Would that be wrong?”

  “No.”

  “He said the trip is still open to anyone. The passenger list hasn’t been finalized yet.”

  “Do you want to be on it?”

  “Would it annoy you if I said ‘yes’?”

  “Either answer would be fine.”

  “I told him that I would be happy to do whatever he wanted me to do.”

  “That’s it!” Alex shouted.

  Seeing Cassandra leave her favorite spot not far away, I excused myself and hurried to catch up. As always, Ophelia seemed distressed that I was leaving her, feeling, I suppose, that she had displeased me in some way.

  But I needed to speak with our resident prophet, whose ability to predict future events could be of help in determining what prot had in mind for the other patients. “Hello, Cassandra!” I called out.

  She stopped and tried to focus on the reality of my appearance.

  I couldn’t help but notice that she seemed a little down. “Anything wrong, Cassie?”

  She stared at me for a few minutes before turning and wandering slowly away. I didn’t like the look of that. It usually meant she had seen signs in the sky suggesting that something bad was going to happen. If so, there was no way I could get her to tell me what it was until she was ready to do so.

  At this point Milton appeared. “Man comes home to find his house burned to the ground. ‘Damn!’ he says. ‘I miss everything!’”

  When I didn’t laugh, he brought out three huge seeds, taken from one of the dried-out sunflowers lining the back wall, and began to juggle them. I watched Cassandra dissolve in a group of other patients, all huddled around the fountain (which had been turned off for the winter months) like a flock of sheep. Among those present were “Joan of Arc,” who doesn’t understand the meaning of the word “fear,” and “Don Knotts,” who is afraid of everything. It suddenly occurred to me that their illnesses might be related to MPD, that their “incomplete” psyches might be akin to part of a multiple personality, the other alter(s) being absent or repressed. I stood there wishing we could somehow integrate these two patients, and some of the others milling around the “back forty,” to create new, and perhaps whole, individuals out of those whose psyches had become dominated by one emotion or another. But that, along with our understanding of how prot managed to “disappear” on certain occasions, would have to wait until some future time.

  Milton was still juggling sunflower seeds when I left, sometimes off his foot and around his back. He was amazingly good, actually.

  Giselle was waiting for me when I returned to my office (we had agreed to meet after each Tuesday session to compare notes). I told her about K-PAX’s supposed companion planets, and about the letters I had passed on to prot.

  She wasn’t much interested in these revelations. “He told me yesterday that he hasn’t found Rob yet. Did he have any luck today?”

  “Unfortunately, no. But he promised me he would make a serious effort to do so.”

  She seemed disappointed with our lack of progress, as, of course, was I.

  “Giselle, you knew this wasn’t going to be easy. In my opinion something is bothering Robert that may be even more devastating to him than the sexual abuse by his uncle and the murder of his wife and daughter, if you can believe there could be anything worse than that. It may have something to do with bathing your son.”

  She thought about this. “My God—you mean he was abused when he was a baby?”

  “No, no, no, I didn’t say that. But if something did happen at that early age, it’s not going to be easy to get to. Even if Robert were here and willing to cooperate it would be almost impossible.”

  “You mean we may never know what happened to him?”

  “I didn’t say that, either. I said it’s going to be very difficult. Besides, it may have nothing to do with his bathing your son.”

  “So what can we do?”

  “All we can do is keep prot talking, encourage him to get through to Robert, and go from there. But,” I cautioned her, “don’t press him too hard on this. Just talk with him about whatever he wants to chat about and try to steer the conversation toward Robert once in a while.”

  She nodded dismally.

  “By the way, did anything else happen recently in your life or Rob’s? Any deaths in the family? Is he having difficulties in school? Problems at home? Anything like that?”

  “Nothing. As you know, he’s finishing three years of college in two, and was thinking about his senior thesis.”

  “Does he have a dissertation topic yet?”

  “He’s interested in island biogeography.”

  “What’s ‘island biogeography’?”

  “It’s about the fragmentation of the Earth, through development and habitat destruction, into little pieces that are too small for indigenous species to survive.”

  “Sounds like an interesting topic.”

  “It is. I might write an article about it myself some time.”

  “What are you working on now?”

  “A piece about some of the new drugs coming out of the rainforests.”

  “That might fit in well with Rob’s studies.”

  “Yeah,” she muttered. “We make a great team.”

  I took a deep breath and jumped in. “Any problems of a—um—more personal nature?”

  “You mean between Rob and me? No, not really. He seems quite happy most of the time.”

  There was no other way to say this. “Has he been a satisfactory sex partner?”

  She blushed slightly and looked away, but I detected a mischievous smile on her face. “More than satisfactory,” she assured me. “Why? Did something happen—”

  “Just trying to rule out some of the possibilities,” I said.

  “Well, that’s not one of them.”

  “Giselle ...” I began. The mischievous smile evaporated. “There’s something I have to tell you. Please—sit down.”

  She complied immediately and waited for me to go on.

  I sat down too, and began to drum my pen on the stack of paper covering my desk, a compulsive habit I resort to whenever I need to break unpleasant news and don’t know quite where to begin. Finally I told her that I’d spoken with Paul.

  She shifted slightly in her chair. “Paul?”

  “You remember—the personality who took over whenever Rob found himself in a situation involving—”

  “I remember.”

  “It’s possible he’s lying, of course, but Paul tells me that it was he and not Rob who is Gene’s father.”

  Her eyes widened, then slowly narrowed. “I know that,” she murmured.

  “You know?”

  “At first he had me fooled. I became suspicious when he would start to fall asleep whenever we began to
make love, and then he would suddenly be wide awake and very passionate.”

  “Giselle, why didn’t you ever tell me about this?”

  “I thought about it. But it was sort of a gradual thing. I wasn’t sure until maybe a year ago. And—well, it’s hard to explain. I guess I was afraid of what would happen if I did.”

  “What did you think would happen?”

  “I was afraid you’d take him away from me.” When I didn’t respond, she added, “I knew that Paul was a part of Rob. So at first I thought: What’s the difference? Maybe we’re all different personalities at different times. You’ve said the same thing yourself. Rob always came back afterward, and was the same Rob as he was before.”

  I shook my head a bit and waited.

  “Besides, I thought maybe I could help him. Encourage Rob not to be afraid of sex. You know, take it slowly, one step at a time, until he became—well, acclimated to his phobia. Like you do with someone who’s afraid of flying or spiders.”

  “Giselle, you know psychiatry isn’t that simple.”

  She sighed. “You’re right. I know that. But I didn’t want to lose him....” She was hoping, I suppose, that I would tell her she had done no harm, or at least that I understood.

  I did understand. Her motives were partly selfish, partly sympathetic. I felt very sorry for her. But I also felt sorry for Rob, whose problems were infinitely more terrible. “Giselle, is there anything else you want to tell me?”

  She pondered this for a moment. “He still misses his father terribly, even thirty-five years after his death. He has a picture of him on the desk in his little study. Once or twice I’ve heard him talking to it.”

  “Were you able to hear what he was saying?”

  “No, not really. But once I found him crying. It was almost as if he were apologizing to his dad for something.”

  I knew how he felt. I have often wished that I could apologize to my father for the near-hatred I felt for him when I was a boy and he exerted such a powerful influence on my life, even seeming to have decided what I was going to do with it. It was only later, long after he died, that I realized that whatever happened to me was mostly my own doing. But I’m sure he felt some negative vibes at the time, just as I could tell when my own children resented something I had said or done wrong, however inadvertently.

  “One more thing, Giselle. You understand that Paul is a part of Rob. Why not prot, too?”

  “Because he told me he isn’t!”

  No arguing with that. “All right, Giselle, we’ll meet again next Tuesday. In the meantime—”

  “You’ll be the first to know.”

  After she left I got to thinking about Paul again: how many of the discussions I’d had with Rob two years before were actually with someone else?

  Session Thirty-five

  I usually spend an hour or two on Thursday morning preparing for my afternoon lecture at Columbia. On this one, however, I found myself thinking about prot’s first visit to MPI and how I struggled for weeks trying to determine the underlying basis for his delusion. One of the ideas I wrestled with was that of finding some way to convince him of his earthbound origins. With his impeccable logic, I surmised, this revelation might jolt him to his senses, much as a computer might “crash” after being dealt an impossible problem to solve. At that time, of course, I didn’t know about Robert. Once I found him hiding behind prot it became quite a different matter, and I abandoned that strategy in favor of a more direct approach. Now, I realized, the situation had reverted to its original state. If I could prove to prot that he was, in fact, only human, and a mere part of one at that, his whole support structure might collapse and allow me to find Robert’s hiding place once more. The danger here was that Rob could be left in the same condition as when prot “departed” in 1990, i.e., an intractable catatonia. On the other hand, if I weren’t able to get to Robert before December 31, he would be left exposed and vulnerable anyway. As things stood, there was nothing to lose by taking some calculated risks.

  I was encouraged in this endeavor by a paper I had run across a few weeks earlier. In England, in 1950, a man had come to London from an outlying village which, he claimed, was characterized by a matriarchal society. In fact, he had fled his hometown to get away from the “oppressive bitches” who “ruled” there. His therapist discovered that he lived at home with a domineering mother who dictated his every move. When he was confronted by the facts, and established in his own apartment far away from her influence, the delusion quickly dissipated and the man went on to find a wife and, presumably, live happily ever after. It was this sort of logical approach I hoped to use with prot. The only problem was to convince him that the basis for his delusion lay not with a domineering mother, but with the terrible hand fate had dealt his alter ego long before he arrived on the scene.

  The lecture did not go well. In fact, it never happened. One of the students had discovered why I had been interrupted by the department chairman the week before and, as soon as I came into the classroom, began to question me about prot. I protested client-patient relationship, but he persisted and was joined by others who wanted to know, in general terms at least, what the current situation was, pointing out that I had written two books about him and that he had appeared on a national television program, so his case was hardly “privileged.” I’m a firm believer that teaching is a two-way process, that a professor is usually wise to follow the interests of his students. Thus, the rest of the hour was taken up by my summarizing what had transpired so far, the dilemmas I faced, and what my plans were for dealing with prot/Robert. I had never seen them so animated, so eager to participate. They even forgave me for the pop quiz I had sprung on them earlier.

  The aforementioned student, a young man with an enormous black beard (his hero was Oliver Sacks), came up with a quick answer to the whole complex problem: get prot to perform a controlled light-travel demonstration during his next session. “If we can verify this ability,” he submitted, “he must be who he says he is.”

  We? I thought. “He’s already done that with a television camera,” I retorted. “But you have to remember that he has found a way to use parts of his mind that only autists and savants are able to access. If he ‘disappears,’ it may mean only that he can trick us into believing it, by a kind of hypnosis or some other means we haven’t been able to figure out yet.”

  “No, no, no,” he retorted back. “I mean, get him to go to some specific place—in another part of the country, say—where you’ve got a colleague waiting to take his photograph. All you have to do is wait for your partner to fax prot’s picture to you. You could even have him wear a funny hat or something so there wouldn’t be any chance for a mistaken identity.”

  My expression probably said, Why is there always someone like this in every class? But I responded with, “What if he won’t go?”

  “Then he can’t do it,” the student shouted, “and you’ve got him!” There was a chorus of “Yes!” and “That’s right!”

  “Might be worth a try,” I admitted, wishing I had thought of the idea myself. In a transparent face-saving attempt I added, “But don’t bet on it.”

  When I was finally able to take my leave, “Oliver” and two of his friends followed me out. They all wanted to sit in on my next session with prot. While I was impressed with their obvious interest in the case, I explained the impossibility of complying with their request. The hirsute young man snapped, “All right, keep him to yourself, but we expect a full report next time!”

  Great, I thought. Now I could look forward to being grilled before every lecture about prot’s progress. As the adage goes, give a medical student enough rope and he’ll hang you with it. I was definitely getting too old for this. My wife’s unflagging determination that I retire by the summer of ‘98 was sounding more and more attractive all the time.

  When I got back to MPI there was a group of five or six noisy people waiting at the front gate. The security guard had his hands full convincing them that
they couldn’t go in, that this was a mental hospital, that only the families or friends of the patients could enter, and even then only during visiting hours. When he saw me trying to sneak by his little shed, the guard shouted, “Dr. Brewer, will you talk to these people?”

  I swallowed my annoyance; this had not been a good day. “What seems to be the problem?”

  One of the group, a woman with fiery red hair and wonderful teeth, responded, “We want to see prot. We know you’ve got him in there. You have no right to keep him locked up.”

  I didn’t waste any time denying that he was back. “Prot is a patient here. At the moment he’s not allowed to have visitors.”

  A middle-aged man wearing a fatigue jacket and crew cut jumped in front of me. “Why are you keeping him here? He hasn’t done anything wrong.”

  I backed up a step. “We’re not ‘keeping’ him. He volunteered to be here.”

  He stepped forward. “We don’t believe you. That’s exactly what you’d say if you were holding him against his will.”

  I held my ground. “Look, I don’t make the rules. What if you had a brother in a hospital and a bunch of people demanded to see him?”

  “I’d ask him about it!”

  “It’s not his decision to make.”

  “Whose decision is it?” another man demanded, his stubbled chin jutting out towards mine.

  I backed up again. “Okay, I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll ask prot if he wants to come out and talk to you. If he doesn’t, that’s the end of it. Fair enough?”

  “How do we know you’ll ask him?”

  “I guess you’ll have to trust me on that.”

  They looked at each other. One or two of them shrugged. “Okay, doc, but we’re not leaving until he comes out.”

  “I probably won’t see him until tomorrow.”

  “What time?”

  “Nine o’clock.”

  “We’ll be here at nine.”

  “This is from California, isn’t it?” prot opined. “Not as good as the Caribbean mangoes.”

  “Sorry. Best I could do.”

  “I’ll take it,” he slurped. “Clean as a whistle, too,” he reported. “Not a trace of any of your so-called pesticides.”