K-Pax Omnibus

by Gene Brewer

  Why would someone so patently brilliant as Linus (his IQ approaches 180) falsify his research and try to make a career out of gibberish when it would have been easier just to do the experiments honestly and report the actual results?

  Obsessive-compulsive disorder is an age-old affliction closely related to certain other anxiety disorders, and often grounded in anal fixation. Monoamine oxidase inhibitors and certain tricyclics have proven beneficial in a limited number of cases, as has cingulotomy, a surgical procedure. Psychoanalysis has not been very effective, however, perhaps because free association merely increases the level of fixation on a particular obsession. The best and most common approach is to expose the patient to whatever triggers the compulsive behavior, prevent his engaging in the usual rituals, and confront the underlying anxiety.

  Sometimes OCD covers up a severe inferiority complex. Linus’s father is a well-known chemist, and his mother a highly regarded mycologist and one of the world’s foremost experts on poisonous mushrooms. Had he tried to live up to their expectations, an elusive goal shared by many highly successful people in all sorts of endeavors? Or had some specific event precipitated his abnormal behavior?

  I welcomed him into my examining room for our bimonthly session. Naturally he declined my offer of prot’s leftover fruit. “Didn’t wash your hands before you came up?”

  Linus, who is not especially handsome in any case, screwed up his face. “No. I just don’t like fruit.”

  “Otherwise it doesn’t bother you to eat it?”

  “Not particularly.”

  “You’re a scientist,” I reminded him. “Let’s do an experiment.”

  He looked horrified. “I—I can’t.”

  “What do you think would happen if you ate it?”

  He squeaked, “I have to go wash my hands!”

  “Try a bite of mango first. I assure you it’s clean. Prot said so.”

  He stopped wringing his hands. “He said that?” I thought for a moment I was going to witness one of prot’s wondrous cures. Obviously struggling to make a decision, Linus stared intensely at the fruit. But suddenly he backed away from it as if it were a gun. “Please!” he begged. “Let me go wash my hands first!” He hurried away to scrub off any contamination he may have encountered by being in the same room with me and an overripe mango. I didn’t try to stop him. In fact, it occurred to me, as it has to every other member of the staff, to turn him over to prot and see what he could do with him.

  Over my wife’s protestations I drove to the hospital early on Saturday morning. She thought we should go looking for a retirement home.

  “I’m not retired yet!” I pointed out.

  “It’s just a matter of time!” she parried.

  “We’ll talk about that after prot leaves. Until then, I don’t want to think about it.”

  She accepted that, I guess. After all, December 31 wasn’t very far off.

  On weekdays I usually take the train and come in the back way, but, since I had driven down, I parked in the garage around the corner and entered through the front gate. To my surprise, and no little annoyance, I found that the half-dozen or so people gathered around it had become a crowd of forty or fifty. I tried to slip through, but someone recognized me and demanded that I “let prot go.”

  “He can go any time he wants,” I calmly reminded him.

  “Then why are there guards at the gate?”

  “We have some dangerous individuals here. I don’t think you’d want to see them on the streets.”

  A few of the patients were milling about the grounds. “They don’t look very dangerous,” someone else observed.

  “Not them. But there are others ...”

  “Is prot dangerous?”

  “Not a bit.”

  “Then why don’t you let him go?”

  “I told you—he can go any time he wants! In fact, he’s leaving on New Year’s Eve!” While the crowd digested this news I sidled past the guard and hurried up the walk to the front door of the hospital wondering why Giselle hadn’t taken care of this nagging problem, and noting as I did so that time had stopped again for the crew working on the new wing. It occurred to me that Albert’s problem might be solved by putting him in charge of the building committee.

  As soon as I got inside I called Giselle’s apartment. Her mother told me she wasn’t home, adding, “I hope you can find Rob soon. We all miss him.”

  I called the nurses’ station on Ward Two and she wasn’t there, either. Still annoyed, I rounded up all the original notes in prot’s file and began to go over them, looking hard for clues and inconsistencies. There had to be something I had overlooked before and was overlooking now. The only things I came up with were some questions about Rob’s dog, Apple, who was run over and killed when Robin was nine, and the recollection that his Uncle Dave and Aunt Catherine died in a fire soon afterward. Were these two events related in some way?

  Frustrated and disappointed, I decided to have lunch in Ward Three, the home of the sexual and social deviates and certain other unfortunates. As always, I was amazed how eating seems to counteract the symptoms of most mental illnesses, if only temporarily. In fact, during that brief period it was difficult to tell the autists from the coprophilics, and I wondered whether some use could be made of this observation: i.e., whether pleasurable sensations of one sort might be useful in the treatment of problems of a different sort. Would stimulating certain areas of the brain, for example, be a way of alleviating the intensity of other, less desirable, sensations? Would marijuana or cocaine overcome the unpleasantness of OCD or bipolar disorder? This reminded me of the early attempts to cure syphilis by infecting patients with malaria. The comparison seemed apt. Psychiatry is at about the same stage now as internal medicine was a century ago.

  I sat across from Jerry and Lenny, two of our autistic patients, remembering the day more than two years earlier when prot had awakened Jerry from his “dream” world long enough for the latter to communicate certain thoughts and feelings he had long bottled up inside. How had prot done that? Unfortunately, this was another conundrum that would probably have to wait for future generations to solve.

  As for the present, I could almost feel a certain amount of tension around the table, which was considerably quieter than usual, hardly any spitting or wailing at all. But it wasn’t until everyone had finished eating (except for those who sculpt their food into birds or squish it into a homogeneous mess before starting) that one of the incurable voyeurs, sitting at the other end of the table, politely asked if prot could come to lunch next time. Total silence descended immediately, like a black curtain. Jerry and Lenny weren’t exactly looking at me, but they weren’t ogling the walls and ceilings, either. What could I say? I told my luncheon companions I would extend the invitation right away. The room broke into spontaneous happy laughter that went on and on. It was quite infectious. Everyone looked at everyone else and laughed even harder. I don’t remember when I’d had such a good time, though I’m still not sure what we were laughing about.

  That afternoon I listened to tapes of some of my early conversations with prot (and, less frequently, with Robert), marveling yet again at his ultraconfidence in the truth of his bizarre confabulation. A world of his own creation that was unbelievably perfect, so carefully thought out as to be seamless and, yes, almost convincing. If we could all focus our attention to such a degree on any worthwhile project, he had often reminded me, who knows what we might accomplish.

  I think I dozed off for a minute and was awakened by the phone. It was Giselle “reporting in.” “You looking for me, Dr. B?”

  “Huh? Oh yes. Those people hanging around the front gate—have you spoken to them yet?”

  “Yes, I have. They won’t leave until they see prot.”

  “Can’t you get rid of them?”

  “Not until he makes an appearance.”

  “This is turning into a circus.”

  “Maybe Milton could put on his clown suit and warm them up with his ju
ggling act.”

  “Get serious, Giselle. If word gets out, the media will have a field day with this.”

  “You worry too much, boss. Let me take care of it for you. That’s why I’m here, remember?”

  “Make it soon.”

  After some shuffling and filing I listened to a few more tapes, and it wasn’t until late afternoon that I grabbed up all the ones I hadn’t yet heard and headed for the parking lot. The crowd was still out front and was, if anything, larger. This problem, like all those connected with prot’s “visit,” just wasn’t going to go away. I turned around and left by the back door.

  Karen and I had tickets to the Met’s lavish presentation of Turandot for that Saturday evening, and I looked forward to a night of relaxation and enjoyment. But this particular opera is about riddles and answers, and my thoughts came right back to prot and the unanswered questions: Why had Robert withdrawn so abruptly, how could we get him back, and what would happen to him when prot made his year-end “departure,” this time for good? With the New Year looming like a guillotine, there was more urgency than ever to get to the bottom of things. But a personal note had also crept into my thinking. If I could solve this puzzle, the case of Robert/prot would be an accomplishment worthy of ending a career. If not, I would be quitting a loser.

  I was encouraged, though, by a tremendous round of cheers and applause, and I took a bow, not quite knowing why. The next thing I knew Karen was elbowing me, whispering that the opera was over. “If you were going to doze through the whole thing,” she added, “we could have stayed home and watched a movie on TV. You could have slept better there.”

  Session Thirty-six

  Monday was one of those days when, for some reason, I felt discombobulated, as if I were on the outside looking in. I wasn’t pleased with what I saw.

  There was something about prot, something all-consuming, that made everything else seem unimportant by comparison. All of my “free” time seemed to go into his (Robert’s) case. When I wasn’t studying my notes or listening to the tapes, I was thinking about them.

  Some of the other staff members were beginning to slide down this slippery slope as well. During the regular Monday meeting most of them were astonished by the revelation that prot seemed able to remember being born, and even lying in the womb. Some, especially Thorstein, saw this as a golden opportunity, suggesting I spend several more sessions pinning down the earliest moment prot could recall.

  Our newest young psychiatrist, Laura Chang, agreed. She herself wanted to “pick his brain,” after hours if necessary, pointing out that perhaps the root of many mental difficulties lay in the very earliest moments of our experience. It is her view, in fact, that certain formative patterns might be initiated in the late-stage embryo, who must be quite mystified indeed by all the harsh sounds he hears, the strange smells and tastes he may be aware of, assuming, of course, that he is conscious (her hypothesis) at times. I could understand their motives, having stated in the past that much could be learned from prot’s apparent depth of knowledge about many esoteric subjects, whatever its nature. I reminded everyone yet again that our responsibility was to Robert, not to prot, and that this should be the basis for any protocol.

  The meeting ended with a discussion of the upcoming outing, for those patients who wanted, and were able, to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and notice of a long-overdue visit by the popular psychologist known to the public as “America’s TV shrink,” who had abruptly cancelled a similar trip two years earlier for personal reasons.

  Afterward, I invited Goldfarb for coffee in the doctors’ dining room, intending to speak with her about the crowd of people hanging around the gate. But she had her own agenda, high on the list of which was an attempt to schedule formal interviews between prot and some of her patients. I peered into those thick glasses, behind which her eyes looked like pinpoints, and tried to change the subject back to the circus going on out front. But she had no interest in dealing with it unless there were some disturbance or other. I pointed out that they were her responsibility. She accepted this and went over to refill her cup. I have never known anyone who could drink hot coffee as fast as Goldfarb.

  The other reason I had wanted to speak with her was to talk her into allowing me temporary leave from some of my duties, particularly those of an optional or peripheral nature, such as the various hospital and university committees I served on and, especially, chairing the one overseeing the completion, if ever, of the new wing. I even tried to foist off a few of my most difficult patients (Frankie and Linus) on her or another colleague, and blatantly inquired about the possibility of someone taking over my lecture course. Hoping this would be the coup d’état, I added, “I’m thinking of retiring next summer.”

  Goldfarb broke into a nasal giggle. She drained her steaming cup, got up and strode out, still chuckling. As she left I heard her whinny, “You’ll never retire!”

  On my way out to give my afternoon lecture at Columbia, I ran into Giselle. “Isn’t it great?” she chirped.

  “Huh? What do you mean?”

  “Like they said, all they wanted was to talk to prot.”

  “Who? Oh, you mean the people—Well, is he going to—”

  “He already did.”

  “What? He talked to them?”

  “Yesterday.”

  “I see. And what did he tell them?”

  “He said he didn’t have room for them all on this trip.”

  “You mean they all want to go with him?”

  “Not all. But some of them did.”

  “What was their reaction to being left behind?”

  “They asked him to come back for them!”

  “And is he going to do that?”

  “Nope.”

  “Why not?”

  “He’s already said he’s never coming back, remember?”

  “What did they think about that?”

  “Not much until he told them someone else might do it.” She waited, her brown eyes twinkling like a cat that had just finished a canary.

  “Well, when is the next K-PAXian due to come for them?”

  “He couldn’t say. In fact, he couldn’t guarantee that anyone from K-PAX would ever visit the Earth again.”

  “Didn’t this make things worse?”

  “Not when he told them we already have K-PAX here. He says the Earth could be just like K-PAX if we wanted it badly enough. Nobody said anything for a while, until a twelve- or thirteen-year-old boy asked him, ‘How do we do that?’” She paused again in her mischievous way.

  Milton slouched by, grumbling, “Hemorrhoids are a pain in the ass....”

  I asked her impatiently, “Okay, I’m curious. What was the answer?”

  “He said, ‘That’s up to you.’”

  “That’s what I figured he’d say.”

  “And then he went back in.”

  “So why are they still here?”

  “They’re not. But it doesn’t make any difference.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because they were soon replaced by another group. They wanted to speak with prot, too.”

  “God, is there no end to this?”

  “These people aren’t crazy, Dr. B. You should go out and talk to them some time. There are plumbers, housewives, accountants, factory workers and—well, you name it. I’d write an article about them if there were time.”

  “Why isn’t there time?”

  “If prot takes Rob with him, I expect to go, too.”

  “To K-PAX.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Don’t you know for sure?”

  She looked as if she’d been shot. “Not exactly. I guess I’d better ask him about that.”

  “What if prot doesn’t find Rob? Then you’ll stay behind with him, correct?”

  “He’ll find him!”

  “One more thing: Don’t let him talk to anybody from the media. We’ve got enough trouble without that.”

  “Easier said than done!”
>
  The afternoon lecture went surprisingly well. When I told the students that a colleague in Germany was prepared to receive prot at 9:15 in the morning, “Oliver Sacks” volunteered to organize a “surveillance committee” to man every entrance to the hospital and monitor prot’s possible comings and goings.

  Another can of worms. Inasmuch as there was nothing to lose, however, I agreed. “But be discreet. I don’t want anyone hanging around before nine or after ten o’clock. And you have to stay outside the wards. Fair enough?”

  This seemed to satisfy everyone concerned, and I went on with the lecture, which, as I suspected, was one of the most muddled I ever presented. Nonetheless, the students gave me their rapt attention and, except for the scratching of pens on paper, were supremely attentive. Or perhaps they were merely mulling over prot’s possible origins, as was I.

  In fact, it was sometime during the presentation that a chilling thought popped into my head: How did prot’s boyhood on K-PAX compare with his alter ego’s tragic life here on Earth?

  * * *

  I came prepared for my next session with prot, having listened by then to all of the tapes of our earlier meetings, re-read his “report,” and watched the video of his television appearance. There was no way I was going to allow him to sidetrack the interview with his superior memory and quibbling about small details. In fact, I decided to emphasize the seriousness of the hour by forgoing the fruit.

  “That’s the main reason I’m here!” he wailed. He sat facing me glumly, his Cheshire-cat grin only a memory. It occurred to me that maybe he was putting me on.

  I started the tape recorder. “Did you find Rob?”

  “Checked every closet and behind every tree. He’s nowhere to be found. Maybe he went back to Guelph.”

  “How would he get out without anyone noticing him?”

  “Maybe he never came in.”

  I nodded pleasantly. “Prot, I have a colleague in Germany who wants to see you for a moment.” I handed him a slip of paper. “Here’s the address.”