by Gene Brewer
I had to admit it might jolt something out of Rob. The other side of the coin, of course, was that it might make matters even worse. But time was running out and, at this point, maybe anything was worth trying.
“The only problem,” she added, “is that he’s rehearsing for Off-Broadway. But I’ll see if he can squeeze it in.”
“Okay, but let’s not rush into anything. I’ve got something else in the fire.” I told her about prot’s inability to remember his early childhood under hypnosis, and my plans to pursue this.
Her only reaction was a stunned, “Is that possible?”
I shrugged. “Where prot is concerned, anything’s possible!”
* * *
ON my way through the Ward Two lounge the next morning I came across Alice and Albert chatting animatedly on the big green sofa. “Alex Trebek” was hanging around, apparently serving as moderator. I marveled, as always, at how far advanced a mental institution is compared to the outside world: a young black woman, an older Chinese—American, and a middle-aged Caucasian deep in conversation with no consideration of age, race, gentler or nationality. Here, everyone is equal. Maybe prot was right—all our differences are based on past mistakes and cruelties, and if we could somehow forget our respective histories and start over, who knows what might come of it.
Of course they clammed up as I approached. But I soon learned that all three had been given certain “tasks” to perform. A familiar uneasiness set in.
“May I ask who gave you these ‘tasks’?”
“Why, prot, of course,” Alice proudly informed me.
“That’s right!” Alex verified.
I had mixed feelings about this revelation, but I had learned not to rush to judgment in matters involving our alien visitor. “And what ‘tasks’ did prot assign to you, Alice?”
She deferred to Albert, who replied, “Theoretically, very simple ones. You see, Alice has a problem with space, and I with time. But prot pointed out that the space-time continuum is a kind of symbiosis, whereby space can be increased at the expense of time, and vice versa. If we can learn to trade one for the other, we would both be cured!”
I resisted the temptation to remind them that their doctors would be the judge of that. They all seemed so pleased that there might be a simple answer right around the corner that I didn’t have the heart to discourage them.
“What about you, Alex? Did prot give you something to do, too?”
“Yes!”
Albert explained that prot had suggested he do his own show right here in the hospital.
“Will you be setting that up, Alex?”
“Correct!”
“He’s going to get to work on it right after lunch,” Alice added.
“How about you, Albert? You and Alice getting right to work, too?”
“Immediately. In fact, we were just discussing it when you came along.” They all stared at me impatiently.
I took the hint. “Well, I’ve got to run. Good luck to all three of you!”
No one offered a farewell. They were already back to whatever they had been considering earlier. Their tasks seemed harmless enough, I thought, and might take their minds off their problems, if only for a little while.
On my way out to find prot, I literally bumped into him. Or would have, had he not stepped aside at the last moment, though he didn’t seem to be looking in my direction. “It was the best I could do on short notice,” he volunteered, when he finally noticed me.
“What—the ‘tasks’ you’ve been giving out?”
“Isn’t that what you wanted to see me about?”
“Well, that was one thing. Actually, I have no problem with any of that as long as the patients’ expectations aren’t raised too high.”
“All I can do is point the way. The rest is up to them.”
“Well, we’ll see how successful your ‘treatment program’ is. But the other reason I was looking for you was to invite you to the house for Thanksgiving tomorrow.”
“What—and watch you cut open a dead bird? No, thanks.”
“Well, how about the day after? What about Friday?”
“Relax, gino. Take a weekend off. Anyway, I won’t be here Friday.”
“What do you mean you ‘won’t be here’?”
“Is that a difficult concept for you?” He repeated each word slowly and distinctly. “I—won’t—be—here.” As if to emphasize his point, he turned to go.
“Where are you going? You’re not leaving the hospital again, are you?” I called after him.
“Not for long!” he shouted back.
Session Thirty-nine
This year Thanksgiving happened to fall on my birthday. Abby and her family came for the occasion, along with Will and his fiancée. They arrived early, Abby bearing the turkey (much to my surprise—she’s a devout vegetarian), and Dawn helped with the preparations. I played a couple of games of chess with the boys (I could still beat them, though not by much), but it only reminded me of Ward Two and the slow-moving matches in the game room, which led to thoughts of prot and his “temporary leave” from the hospital.
I was still preoccupied with that dilemma when my son Fred, who had finished the tour with Les Mis, and daughter Jenny, all the way from California, made an unexpected appearance. It was the first time in years the whole family had been together.
Both of them hugged me, but all I could think to say was, “What are you two doing here?”
“It’s Thanksgiving, Daddy, remember?”
“And Mom’s retirement,” Freddy added.
“And your birthday.”
“It was supposed to be a surprise.” They each handed me a package.
I wasn’t surprised—I was dumbfounded. “I suppose your mother put you up to this.”
“Well, she was in on it, but it was actually prot’s idea,” Fred replied.
“Prot?”
“He came to see us last month.”
“Last month??”
At that point the kitchen contingent burst in, there was another round of hugs and kisses, and we were soon on our way to the dining room, happily accompanied by our other guest, Oxeye Daisy. I won’t go into detail about the dinner, except to say that it was the most beautiful, and also the first, soy turkey I had ever eaten.
None of us has ever been much on public (or private) speaking, but I thought I should say something on the occasion of my sixtieth. So, after we were all completely stuffed, I rambled awhile about the delights and significance of having one’s family around, how this becomes more and more meaningful with the passage of time, and so on. “For this I guess we have prot to thank,” I added. “And I thank all of you wonderful people for being here.”
Perhaps to shut me up, Freddy now raised his glass and said, “To prot!” and we all clinked ours against those within reach.
After the usual chitchat about the year’s events, the strange weather, and the football standings (Abby’s husband Steve toasted the Jets, who were still in the running), Will stood up. Across the table, Karen gave me a huge, knowing smile. We had both been waiting for them to select a wedding date. “Dawn and I are going to be parents!” he announced.
There were cries of joy and more clinking. Far too diplomatic to press them on when they were planning to tie the knot, “Grandma” asked our daughter-out-law when the baby was due.
“In June,” Dawn replied cheerfully.
Jenny raised her glass. “To June!”
“To the new baby!” Abby chimed in.
“Happy birthday, Dad,” Fred added.
“Have a great retirement, Mom,” offered Will.
“To Oxie!” cried Star.
“La chiam!” Rain shouted. Clink. Clink. Clink.
I don’t know why, but sad, happy tears began to roll down my cheeks. I took a sip of wine, hoping no one would notice.
Will disappeared and came back with a huge devil’s food cake (my favorite) ablaze with what seemed like a dangerous number of candles. Having practiced for
this moment, I proceeded to blow them all out, one at a time, around and around, except for the one in the center, which refused to be extinguished. There were groans all around.
“That one’s prot’s,” thirteen-year-old Rain announced confidently. “Mom, can I have some wine?” Abby gave him a sip of hers. Nothing timid about that boy, I thought proudly. Maybe we have another doctor in the family!
Ever the optimist, Karen pointed out that sixty is the beginning of the second half of your life, when you get a chance to do all the things you didn’t get around to in the first half. “Unless you wait until it’s too late,” she added, holding my gaze meaningfully.
Later, after the presents had been opened (I got a “retirement planner” from Karen), I took Will aside and asked him how medical school was going.
“Great!” he told me.
“Still thinking about psychiatry?”
“No doubt about it.”
We gabbed about what he was learning in med school and the rewards (and headaches) of residency and practice. I thought: Nothing can be better than this! I only wished my own father, the small-town doctor, could have been here with us.
“Your mother was wondering when you and Dawn are getting married.”
“I don’t know, Pop. Maybe never.”
“Do you think that’s the best thing?”
“It all seems so irrelevant.”
“Maybe for you, but how about the baby?”
“Dad, you need to have a talk with prot.”
The rest of the family drifted in. Freddy and I sang a few Broadway tunes. Fred is a far better singer than I ever was, but I like to think he got his talent from me. The grandchildren performed a little comedy skit. I don’t know who they got that from.
I usually go in to my office on the Friday after Thanksgiving, but this time, despite the guilt feelings, I stayed home. Abby and her family, along with Will and Dawn, left on Thursday evening, but both Fred and Jenny stayed over. Freddy was going back to his own apartment in the city that afternoon because his beautiful ballerina-girlfriend was returning from a visit with her own family, and Jenny wasn’t flying back to San Francisco until Sunday.
Although his mother resisted the temptation to suggest that Fred follow his younger brother’s example, she nonetheless asked him some pointed questions about his “roommate,” whom we had rarely seen. Poor Fred finally blurted out, “Laura doesn’t want any children!”
After an embarrassing silence the conversation turned to Jenny’s specialty, the treatment of patients suffering from AIDS. She was quite optimistic about the whole thing, reporting that deaths from the disease were on the decline for the first time in its history, and that a vaccine was on the way. When I made the facetious comment that she would soon have nothing to do, she reminded me that thousands of people were still dying from HIV infections every year, and the global incidence of the virus was still on the rise. I remembered an earlier comment by prot that some day human beings would be devastated by diseases “that would make aids look like a runny nose.” I only hoped I wouldn’t be around long enough to see that.
When I had a chance to talk to Freddy alone, I learned that after finishing his national tour he was, once again, “temporarily unemployed.” This gave me an idea. I told him about the situation with Robert, that perhaps the only thing that might shake him out of his present state might be an appearance by his father.
He said, “Sure,” and asked to see pictures of Mr. Porter, and a description of what his voice might have sounded like. I told him I would send him a couple of photos from the file and have Giselle contact Rob’s mother about her husband’s manner of speaking and anything else that might be helpful.
After his reaction to the question about his apartment mate, I deferred inquiring about what he thought about taking over the house if we decided to vacate it. Instead, I asked my son, the former airline pilot, whether he ever missed flying.
“Do you miss getting your teeth drilled?” he replied.
At about lunchtime there was a call from Dr. Chakraborty. I took it in the den, where I still, even at this late date, felt I was imposing on my father’s private sanctuary. “Hello, Chak. What’s up?”
“There is bad news and there is also bad news,” he informed me gravely.
I sighed, “Tell me the bad news first.”
“You are not going to believe this,” he assured me.
“Believe what?”
“It is the DNA work. There is no question about it. Prot and Robert Porter’s DNAs are entirely different. It is confirmed.”
“How different?”
“The odds they are not coming from the same person are seven billion.”
“But—”
“I told you you would not be believing it.”
I gazed at my desk, which was even more cluttered than the one in my office, and promised myself I would wade through it all sometime soon. “Chak, let’s write a paper on this.”
“It can be done. But no one will be believing it.”
“You’re probably right. Okay, what’s the other bad news?”
“Prot has disappeared once more.”
“Did anyone see him leave?”
“No. He was here one minute and gone away the next.”
“Don’t worry. He’ll be back.”
“I am not worrying.”
I wasn’t worried, either. He had done this before, and had always returned. But something else occurred to me on the way to the dining room: Would Paul and Harry’s DNA also be different from Robert’s? Indeed, might this be a simple way to diagnose multiple personality disorder? A Nobel prize, I dreamily reflected, would be as good a way as any to end a career....
By the time of the Monday meeting the entire staff knew that prot had disappeared and there were the usual questions about how he had managed to slip through our fingers again. I reported that I had asked Betty McAllister to make sure someone kept an eye on him at all times, but he had managed to get the nurses to rescue a cat from a closet shelf and when they turned around he was gone. As before, the surveillance cameras in the corridors and at the gates recorded nothing of him at all, and a search of the premises also proved fruitless. Still, no one seemed overly concerned about his disappearance, and I thought: It’s amazing how quickly we get used to even the most bizarre events.
On the other hand, no one was prepared for my summary of the previous session with him, in which the hypnotized prot couldn’t remember anything of his early childhood, nor for the results of the DNA analysis. Both seemed preposterous, and there was no hesitation in telling me so. Before I could mention that I had already thought of it, Goldfarb recommended getting DNA samples from the other alters. Chang suggested I focus in on the precise moment that prot lost his memory and compare this to the exact time Robert called him to Earth. Menninger wondered whether the results of the last session might not mean that his so-called memory of K-PAX was contrived. Thorstein also “smelled a rat.”
The meeting was interrupted by a tap on the door. Betty stepped in to let us know that prot was back and that someone had seen him at the Bronx zoo over the weekend. “My God!” Goldfarb exclaimed. “He’s taking the animals!”
I wasn’t going to provide any fruit for prot, but after he had somehow managed to bring the whole family together for Thanksgiving, I couldn’t refuse him. There was also a mushroom and olive pizza, freshly baked in the hospital kitchens, and some chocolate-covered cherries from Lilac Chocolate in the Village, supplied by Giselle.
While he was scarfing down the various fruits as if there were no tomorrow, I turned on the tape recorder. “First of all, I want to thank you for getting Fred and Jenny to come for the holiday. How did you do that?”
“I just asked them.”
“If I had asked them, they might not have showed up.”
“That’s one of the most interesting things about your species. Most humans will respond to an obviously unselfish request, even when they would refuse a selfish one. A r
emarkable trait, don’t you think?”
“Secondly, you want to tell me where you’ve been the past few days?”
“Oh, out speaking with some of my friends.”
“You mean non-human friends?”
“Mostly.”
“In the zoo, for example?”
“Among other places.”
“Are you taking some of them to K-PAX?”
“One or two, maybe.”
“There’s something I’m curious about.”
“There’s hope for you yet, doctor b.”
“Won’t that—bringing back alien species to K-PAX—screw up the ecology on your planet?”
“Not unless they develop human views on the subject.”
“But—oh, never mind.” I knew I wouldn’t get anywhere with this.
Even though it was still three hours to lunchtime, the aroma coming from the covered tray was beginning to make my mouth water. “You want some pizza?” I asked him.
“Not if that’s cheese I smell in there, and I think it is.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, prot, what’s wrong with cheese? Nobody killed any cows to get that.”
He snorted, a testament to my bottomless ignorance, I suppose. “Maybe you should look into that a little deeper.”
“I’ll do that,” I promised him. “But first I’d like to speak with Robert.”
“Onetwo—” His head fell to his chest so abruptly that I wondered whether Robert might be eagerly waiting to come out.
“Rob?”
He wasn’t.
“Rob, I’ve got some surprises for you. Smell that pizza?” I reached over and lifted out a slice. The cheese strung out more than a foot. “Here. Go ahead.”
He didn’t move a muscle. I took a noisy bite myself—anything for science. “It’s delicious,” I informed him. “Your favorite kind.”
There was no response.
“Well, maybe you’re right. A little early, isn’t it? Okay. How about a chocolate-covered cherry? Just one won’t hurt.”
He wasn’t the slightest bit interested. To encourage him, I tried a couple. They were wonderful.