by Gene Brewer
“I spoke with prot. He had the answer to all my problems.”
“What is that?”
“Forget our history.”
“Forget the holocaust??”
“Forget everything! We don’t have to live in the past, regretting everything we’ve done or that anyone else has done. We don’t have to look for retribution, to continue the cycle over and over. We don’t even have to forgive anyone. We can start all over, as if the events of the past never happened. This can be day one! It is for me!”
“Does this make sense to you, Milton?”
“Perfect sense, Dr. Brewer.”
“And you think your memories won’t come back?”
“Of course they won’t. There is no past! This is the beginning of time!”
“I’d like to talk to you about this some more, but I want to speak with prot first. That okay with you?”
“Whatever you say. Should I plan to move down to Ward One?”
“That’s up to Dr. Goldfarb and the assignment committee, but I think there’s a good chance of that if you continue to improve.”
“I guarantee it. You’d be surprised what a burden the past can be!”
“That I won’t argue with!”
When I got back to my office our esteemed director was there, pacing back and forth, smoking a cigarette. Goldfarb stopped smoking ten years ago.
“What’s wrong?” I asked her.
“You remember the visit we had from the CIA after prot’s TV appearance two years ago?”
“How could I forget? They reminded me of Laurel and Hardy.”
“Well, they’re back.”
“What did they want?”
“They wanted to know why we hadn’t told them prot had returned. They wanted to talk to him.”
“What did you tell them?”
“I asked them if they had a search warrant.” Like my daughter Abby, Goldfarb is among the last of the liberals.
“Did they have one?”
“No. But they did have a request signed by the President.”
“You mean the President?”
“The.”
“How did they know prot was here?”
“Everyone seems to know that.”
“So did you give them the go-ahead?”
“No. I said I had to speak to his doctor first.”
“What do they want to talk to him about?”
“They want to know how he’s able to travel at light speed. For security reasons, they tell me.”
“I’m tempted to deny their request.”
“Are you prepared to deny one from the President of the United States?”
“Maybe.”
“Good! To tell you the truth, I didn’t think you had it in you.”
“But I think the decision should be up to prot.”
She tamped out the cigarette on her watch crystal (an old habit) and dropped the butt into a jacket pocket. “That’s only the beginning.”
“What do you mean?”
“They want to be here when he leaves.”
“What for?”
“Same thing. They want to set up cameras and all sorts of other equipment to record the event.”
“How they going to get all that into his little room?”
“They’ve already thought of that. They want him to use the lounge.”
“Of course you said no to that.”
She examined her shoetops, which were suede and matched her green wool skirt. “Not exactly.”
“What do you mean?”
“I offered them a compromise. I said only if we let the press in to cover it, too.”
“What? You want to——”
“There’s a difference between meddling in a patient’s affairs and simply observing him. If they keep out of the way and don’t try to interfere with whatever happens ...”
“That’s a pretty fine distinction.”
“Look. The new wing is running a million and a half over estimates. We’re going to need all the publicity we can get to generate the funds necessary to complete the goddamn thing.”
I started to laugh.
“Something’s funny?”
“I was just thinking: prot’s going to love ending his visit with another fundraising appearance.”
After she left I realized I had forgotten to tell her about Milton.
Session Thirty-seven
When I entered prot’s room on Wednesday morning, escorted by a couple of felines, he exclaimed: “Look what the cats drug in!” Several other inmates were in attendance.
I wasn’t amused. “Prot, I need to talk to you.”
“Anything you say, doc.” A tiny nod and all the other patients trailed out, but not without a little muttering and nasty stares, even from the cats.
I sat down in his chair. “What did you tell Milton?”
“You mean about treating his life as a bad joke?”
“Yes.”
“I told him to forget your history. It’s nothing but a bloody mess, a catalog of false starts and wrong turns, doomed from the beginning.”
“He should forget all of our history?”
“Every human being should forget it.”
I wondered whether he was joking again. “Look, prot. I appreciate your attempts to help the patients. We all do. But I don’t think you should try to treat them without discussing it with their doctors first.”
“Why?”
“Because mental illness is a very complex matter—”
“Not really.”
“Prot, I know you’ve helped others in the past. But a wild suggestion like that could backfire if——”
“It worked, didn’t it?”
“And in the second place, how can we forget our history? Someone has said that if we forget history, we are doomed to repeat it.”
“You repeat it anyway! You have a war, then another war, then another and another. You never learn a thing from them, except how to kill more beings more efficiently. Your history serves mainly to remind you who to hate. But your petty wars and other peccadilloes are a small matter compared to your determination to destroy your own WORLD. Basically you got off on the wrong feet in the beginning. Everything you’ve tried—feudalism, communism, capitalism, nationalism, sexism, racism, speciesism— has failed. The only way to get out of a vortex like that is to start all over again.”
I reminded myself never to argue with a crazy person. “Thanks. I’ll pass that on. The other thing I wanted to talk to you about involves a couple of visitors we had -yesterday.”
“You mean the g-men.”
“You know about them?”
“Everybody knows about them.”
“So you know they want to speak to you.”
“They want me to go to germany, too?”
“No, I think the TV demonstration convinced them you can travel on a beam of light. But they want to know exactly how you do it.”
“It’s done with—”
“Mirrors. Yes, I know. Would it be all right with you if Giselle schedules a meeting between you and them?”
“If she wants.”
I stood up. “When will she be coming in?”
“Any time now.”
“She tells me she’s going to K-PAX with you. Is that true?”
“If rob goes, she wants to go, too.”
“And if he doesn’t want to go? Or you can’t find him?”
“I imagine she’ll want to stay here with him. Odd, isn’t it?”
“What’s odd about it?”
“Your beings would rather live on a doomed PLANET than go to paradise and leave someone you love behind. It’s a most interesting phenomenon.”
“In any case, do you think you should get her hopes up like that?”
“I merely answered her questions. The hope is her own idea.”
“But you might include her on your list.”
“Many of the sapiens I’ve talked to would go if they had the chance. And almost all the other being
s. You’ve made life on EARTH miserable for them, you know. It’s turning out to be more difficult than I thought to narrow the list down to a hundred.”
“Before you make a final decision, the residents of Ward Three want to speak with you as well. Will you come for lunch today?”
“Will there be fruit?”
“I guess that can be arranged.”
“I’ll be there!”
I needed coffee. In the doctors’ dining room I found Laura Chang reading a journal and sipping a cup of tea. She had been with us only a couple of months and, as yet, I didn’t know her very well, except that she came with a fine academic record and excellent recommendations. About all I knew for sure was that she had been a championship ice skater in her youth but had sustained an unfortunate injury that shortened her career and precluded a trip to the 1988 winter Olympics. As a result of this and the subsequent depression she became interested in medicine and then psychiatry.
I asked her how she was getting along with her patients, whether she had any unanswered questions about the hospital, or any problems with the staff or facilities.
“That pounding and drilling in the new wing is driving me crazy!” she replied without looking up from her article (on the relationship between autism and oxygen deprivation in the fetus).
“Well, it’ll all be finished in another twenty or thirty years.”
Chang was not amused. “It’s like going to the dentist every day!”
I went for a cup of “rainforest blend.” On the other side of the room I could hear Thorstein and Menninger discussing Cassandra. Or Thorstein, anyway. He has the kind of voice that would carry across Grand Central Station. It appeared that Cassie had withdrawn even more into her thoughts and dreams than ever. This was not unusual—all the patients have their ups and downs. What was puzzling, however, was that she seemed to be the one resident on whom prot was having a negative effect. Even prot can’t win them all, I mused.
When I got back to Chang’s table she was still buried in the journal. I gazed at her shiny black hair, the bright, youthful face, and for a moment I caught a glimpse of the future. Despite the astronomical expense of medical and psychiatric training, the cost-cutting outlook of the healthcare providers, and all the other difficulties associated with the practice, I realized with no small degree of pleasure that the current crop of clinicians was among the best ever to come out of the various residencies. Maybe because the greater challenges aren’t for the faint-hearted.
“Any other complaints?” I asked her. “Anything you want to talk about?” What I really wanted to know, of course, was whether she was having trouble with any of her patients.
She looked up from her article. “I would like to know more about prot.”
“You mean about Robert. Prot is really only a secondary personality.”
“But if I understood you correctly at the last staff meeting, you’re having a problem getting through to Robert. What have you tried?”
Good God, I thought. She wants to help me. I didn’t know whether to be flattered or insulted. But what the hell—maybe she could spot something I’d missed. I gave her a short summary of prot’s first and second “visits,” and a brief review of what had been accomplished, if anything, during our four sessions since his reappearance two weeks earlier.
“The whistle didn’t bring him out this time?”
“Not as far as I could tell. He’s withdrawn even deeper into his shell than he was when I first saw him seven years ago.”
“But it worked before?”
“Yes.”
“With hypnosis or without?”
“Without. It was a post-hypnotic suggestion.”
“Ever try it when the patient was under hypnosis?”
My chin dropped. Then I burned the roof of my mouth. What a fool I was! It had been so easy to bring Rob forward in 1995 that I assumed hypnosis wouldn’t be necessary this time around.
Without another word she returned to her journal. But her eyes were even brighter than before, and I’m almost sure there was a hint of a smile on her face.
The Thursday lecture was another disaster. When I reported that prot wouldn’t cooperate in the light-travel experiment, there was a collective roar. A discussion broke out (as if I weren’t even there) about whether this proved prot was only human after all. When I finally gained control and began to talk about eating disorders, there was a constant shifting in seats, shuffling of papers, coughing and hacking, and the inevitable, “Are we going to be responsible for this on the final exam?”
I was tired and went through the material as fast as possible. And, as before, I was preoccupied by thoughts of prot and all the unwanted complications his presence at the hospital always brought, though I had been informed that his joining the residents of Three for lunch the day before had had a considerable salutary effect. And there was definitely a change in Milton. Not only was he no longer telling endless jokes and juggling vegetables and riding around the lounge on his unicycle, he couldn’t seem to do those things anymore, couldn’t even remember any jokes. In the not inexpert opinion of Betty McAllister and some of the other nurses, he was as sane as they were, and should be transferred to Ward One, if not discharged immediately.
But what about Cassandra? Why had she become more withdrawn than she was on her arrival, and what did this have to do with prot? Of course my thoughts were focused primarily on Robert. I had to find him again, perhaps while his “alien” friend was under hypnosis. Failing that, I planned to go at him with what might have happened to him as a baby, jolt him into consciousness one way or another. I only hoped the shock wouldn’t be just another short circuit.
Once again I withheld the bowl of fruit. I wanted prot to feel edgy, uncertain. He came into my examining room, glanced around, shrugged, and took his seat. “How are you today?” I asked him perfunctorily.
“Peachy keen,” he replied, rather pointedly I thought.
“Have you seen the CIA yet?”
“S?˄/, sen˄˙or, I see the cia by the seaside.”
“What did you tell them?”
“I told them it was done with mirrors.”
“What else?”
“They wanted to know if I’d explained the procedure to any foreign powers.”
“Well?”
“I said, ‘What you mean, “foreign,” white man’?”
I concealed a weak grin. “And?”
“They wanted me to sign something promising I wouldn’t do that.”
“Did you?”
“No.”
“What’d they say?”
“They offered me some stocks and bonds.”
I couldn’t hold back a snort. “Anything else?”.
“They asked me not to try to leave this place.”
“Did you agree to that?”
“I said I would stay until December the thirty-first. Except for a few brief excursions, perhaps.”
“What did they think of your making ‘excursions’?”
“They said they would be watching me.”
“Since you brought that up, I wonder if you would tell me something I’ve been wondering about: How do you get out of the hospital without anyone seeing you?”
“Can you see a photon?” he asked with an all-too-familiar grin.
“But that’s what light is composed of, isn’t it?”
“More or less.”
“Well, can you go through doors?”
“Now, gene, you know light doesn’t go through doors.”
“Does that mean if we put you in a room without windows you wouldn’t be able to get out?”
“Of course not. I’d just open the door and leave.”
“What if the door were locked?”
He wagged his head. To him I must have appeared to be the stupidest person on Earth. “Gino, there isn’t a lock on EARTH I couldn’t open. But if you want to play another of your little games ...”
“What if there were no door?”
“If there�
�s no door, how would you get me in there?”
“Well, we could build the room around you.”
“And what would keep me from leaving while the walls are going up?”
“Well, we could—” But time was passing rapidly, and there wasn’t anymore to waste. “Ah, skip it. See that little dot on the wall behind me?”
He warbled, “That ooooooold black magic has me [pause] innnnnn its spellllll. . . . Onetwothreefour—” and dropped into his customarily deep hypnotic state.
I waited a moment before saying gendy, though confidently, “Rob, would you please step forward for a moment? I have something very important to discuss with you.”
There was no indication he had heard me.
“Rob, I think I might know what’s bothering you. What’s causing you so much anguish. May I tell you about it?”
I waited for another long minute. It was like speaking to the dead. Well, I thought, what can we lose? I pulled out the whistle and blew it as loudly as I could.
There wasn’t a twitch, not a flutter. But of course he might have been faking a response in 1995. As a former mentor was fond of saying, “When all else fails, try a sledgehammer.”
“Rob, I think you may have been abused in some way very early in your life, maybe when you were a baby. Something that you yourself may not even be aware of, and it ties in with your later encounters with Uncle Dave and Aunt Catherine. It was something terrible and it irreversibly changed your life, but whatever happened wasn’t your fault, and we can repair the damage if you’ll let us. Do you understand?”
No response.
“Rob? Can we talk about this for a minute?” I waited. “All right. If you’ll just indicate in some way that you hear me, you can go for now. I won’t bring this up again until you’re ready to talk about it—okay?”
Not a nod, not a whisper.
“All right, Rob. Please think it over until we meet again in a few days. I’ll see you then.”
I waited for another little while. “Prot? Are you there?”
His eyes popped open. “Hiya, doc, how you been?”