by Gene Brewer
“What do you get when you add two and two?”
“I suppose you’re going to tell me the answer is five.”
“It depends on what dimension you’re in.”
“Are you trying to tell me that two and two are five in Rob’s case?”
“Only that you might try looking at the situation from a different angle.”
“What if I don’t know what angle to look at the situation from?”
“Well, I suppose you could re-examine your educational system....”
“You mean my training as a psychiatrist?”
“No, dear boy, I mean your training as a perceptive being. Of course it might take you a few thousand years.”
“Prot, we don’t have a few thousand years.”
“Give or take a few decades.”
“Prot, I’m asking you flat out to tell me anything you know that I don’t know.”
“You have a rutad hanging out of your nose.”
“A what?”
“A bugger.”
“Oh.” He watched with some amusement as I took out my handkerchief and removed the offending particle. “Is that all you have to say?”
“About your proboscis?”
“Or anything else.”
“For the time being.”
“All right. We’re going to change the subject.”
“Back to ‘uncles,’ I suppose.”
“Maybe. There are still a few questions I want to ask you about your childhood on K-PAX.”
“Will they be relevant this time, gino?”
“Let me decide that.”
He shrugged. “Decide away.”
“Thank you. All right. I’m going to ask you something about the time you were a baby on K-PAX. Less than twenty years old. Anything happen to you during that first twenty years that was unpleasant for you in any way?”
He scratched his head, for all the world like an ordinary human being. It’s always fascinated me that trying to recall some obscure fact causes one’s scalp to itch. “Not really. Pretty routine babyhood.”
“All right. Let’s shift to a later time. You’re exactly fifty-five years old. Do you have a pet?”
“We don’t have pets on K-PAX.”
“Well, is there anything that follows you around? Goes where you go? Any animals that are around more than others?”
“There was a folgam that hung around sometimes.”
“What’s a ‘folgam’?”
“Something like a cat, only smaller.”
I was jolted by the recollection that five-year-old Robin’s pedophilic Uncle Dave secured his silence by killing a kitten (and a stray dog), and threatening to do the same to him. “Cat?”
“See ay tee. Cat.”
“But cats are carnivores, aren’t they?”
“Not on K-PAX.”
“A vegetarian cat.”
“I just said that, nicht wahr?”
“You said there ‘was’ a folgam. What happened to it?”
“He wasn’t an ‘it.’ He was a ‘he.’”
“What happened to him?”
Prot frowned and pressed his lips together. “He went off somewhere.”
“He disappeared?”
“No, he wasn’t of the Cheshire variety. He just went away.”
“And you don’t know where.”
“That’s it!”
“You woke up one morning and he was gone.”
“Correct! Except we don’t have ‘morning’ in the sense you mean it. You see, with our two suns—”
“All right, all right. What happened after the folgam went away?”
“Not much. I went to a library and retrieved some information about folgams.”
“Why?”
“I wondered whether they always went away like that.”
“You missed your folgam, didn’t you, prot?”
“He wasn’t ‘my’ folgam. I was just curious.”
“Did you ever have another folgam follow you around?”
He checked his fingernails. “No.”
“Was anyone else around when your folgam ran away?”
He considered this. “Off in the distance I saw someone, but I couldn’t tell who it was.”
“Too far away?”
“Yes.”
“Was he fat or thin?”
“He seemed to be rather heavy for a dremer.”
“You hadn’t seen him before?”
“I told you—I couldn’t tell who he was.”
“Okay. Now let’s return to the time you were sixty-eight. Remember? You woke up with a headache and all the rest?”
He nodded suspiciously.
“Before this happened you were bathing someone, right?”
He nodded again.
“Was he ‘a little heavy for a dremer’?”
“No.”
“So it wasn’t the same being you saw after your—the folgam ran off.”
“Nope.”
“Do you know who he was?”
“Yes, I do.”
“You do?” I could feel my heart beginning to pound. “What was his name?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you know your father’s name?”
“As far as I know, I never met my father.”
“Well, what kind of relationship did you have with the dremer in the hollow log?”
“The usual. We talked about various things, looked at the stars, admired the korms.”
“What did you talk about in particular?”
“A lot of things.”
“Sex?”
“That’s not something that comes up very often on K-PAX. There isn’t that much to say about it.”
“Did he—uh—demonstrate any sexual activity toward you?”
“Of course not! Why should he?”
“But you had seen him before.”
“Many times.”
“Anything unusual happen on those occasions?”
“No.”
“So tell me—why were you bathing him?”
“Haven’t we been over this?”
“Not in any detail.”
“All of a sudden you’re a detail man?”
“That’s right!”
“I was cleaning him because he couldn’t clean himself.”
“Why not?”
“He couldn’t move his arms and legs very well.”
“They were injured?”
“I doubt it. We have ways to repair people who are injured.”
“What was his problem, then?”
“I don’t know.”
“Was he in any pain?”
“Yes.”
“Didn’t you give him something for that? Some balnok bark to chew on, for example?”
“It didn’t do him much good.”
“I see. And had you ever cleaned this man before?”
“No.”
“All right. You say you had seen this dremer many times. How long had you known him?”
“For a while.”
“Why is that? Don’t K-PAXians move around a lot?”
“He couldn’t walk very well. So he didn’t move around much.”
“What about yourself? Didn’t you move around a lot? Leave him behind?”
“Children don’t move around as much as adults. Anyway, we seemed to be going in the same direction most of the time.”
“So you saw him fairly often?”
“More often than most beings, I suppose. So what?”
“But you don’t know his name.”
“I already told you that!” he snapped.
“After you hit your head on something and lost your memory, you never saw him again—right?”
“Never.”
“Why not?”
“Who knows? I suppose he finally moved on.”
“Could he have died?”
This seemed to jolt prot for a second. But he said, simply, “It’s possible, of course.”
“How old was he?”
&n
bsp; “Four hundred or so, I suppose.”
“Pretty young for a K-PAXian.”
“Just approaching middle age.”
“Does anyone ever die at that age on K-PAX?”
“Hardly ever.”
“But it’s possible.”
“Yes, it’s possible! What isn’t?”
“Prot, I want you to think about this next question before you give me an answer. Could the man have been your father?”
“I doubt it,” he replied without hesitation.
“Why not?”
“I told you: I’ve never met my father.”
“You’re lying, aren’t you, prot?”
“Moi? I’ve never told a lie in my life.”
“K-PAXians have a lot of different talents, don’t they? I think one of them is to lie convincingly enough to fool everyone else. Is that possible?”
“Anything’s— I mean, of course it’s possible, but it doesn’t happen to be true.”
“You know who your father is, don’t you? Or at least you suspect who he is.”
“I’ve told you time and again that I don’t!”
“And you lied about it time and again, didn’t you?”
“No! I didn’t!”
“The man in the hollow log is your father, isn’t he?”
“No! I mean... I don’t know who my father is, don’t you understand that? It’s a simp—”
“But it’s possible that the man in the log is your father, isn’t it?”
“YES, IT’S POSSIBLE, GODDAMN IT!”
I swiveled away. “Thank you, prot. That’s all for today.” I busied myself with my notes. A few seconds later I peeked around, but he was already gone. How now, brown prot? Maybe our educational system sucks, but it seems to be getting us somewhere, nicht wahr? In another few years of badgering, I assured myself, I may be able to get to the bottom of all this!
But there were only a few weeks left, not enough time to get even halfway down. With the hourglass rapidly draining, should I focus all my remaining time and attention on Rob himself, press him on what it was he wanted to “get off his chest”? Was it to confess a role in his beloved father’s death, as I was beginning to suspect?
I sought out Giselle and found her in the lounge, sitting in Frankie’s favorite window seat, the very spot where former patient Howie, some seven and a half years earlier, had sought out “the bluebird of happiness.” I asked her what she was contemplating.
“Oh, Dr. B, I was just thinking about all the people we’ll be leaving behind. Look at Alex over there, trying to be someone he’s not. He’s wasting his life, and it’s too precious for that. And all the other patients. Most of them don’t even know what they’re unhappy about. Or who live in fear but aren’t sure what they’re afraid of. We can’t take them all with us. It’s sad, isn’t it?”
I refrained from observing how sad her own dream would be when it ended. Instead, I told her about the brief conversation I had had the previous evening with Rob’s mother. “Robin and his father were very close when he was six, and they spent all their time together the summer he died. His dad called him ‘Robbie’—I’ll mention that to Fred. Another thing I found out was that the man was incontinent. He even wore a diaper, like a baby! And one other thing might be relevant: because of all the hospital bills, the family was going to lose the house. He was pretty distraught about that.”
“The house? Why?”
“Because they couldn’t make the payments. On all of his medical bills, either. They were in pretty bad shape, financially. I think that’s why prot’s so down on the free-enterprise system!”
“But they didn’t lose the house, did they?”
“No. He had some life insurance. Not much, but enough to keep the creditors away for a while.”
Giselle thought about this for a moment. “What did Rob’s mom know about—uh—”
“Not much. The girls were already in their room, asleep. She heard a commotion and went to see what had happened. She found her husband in the bathtub. He was already dead by then. She thought he died of a heart attack. Prot isn’t so sure. Can you get a copy of the death certificate?”
She nodded, emitted a huge sigh, and slouched toward the door.
Before leaving the lounge I stopped alongside Alex, who was sitting in the big overstuffed chair in the corner paging through the huge encyclopedia, taking notes onto a yellow tablet identical to one of my own. A visitor might have thought he was one of the staff, hard at work researching a difficult patient’s problems. “Hello, Alex, how’s it going?”
“Almost ready,” he replied sotto voce, without looking up.
“Keep up the good work,” I murmured, half to myself. It wasn’t until I had left the room that I realized he had responded in a most unAlex-like manner. Of course! I thought. Until he spoke to prot, no one had ever given him a chance to actually be who he wanted to be, a deeply felt desire haunting most people, even those outside these walls. I wondered whether this would work for some of the other patients. What if we catered to their whims? Gave them a chance to actually be who they wanted to be, at least for a little while?
The morning was taken up by a visit from the popular “TV shrink,” who had cancelled a similar appearance two years earlier. He was a roly-poly, apple-cheeked little man, someone who would make the perfect Santa Claus. A farmer by trade, he smelled faintly of manure. I wondered what my former patient Chuck would have thought of him.
He had been scheduled for the whole day, but once again had to cancel the afternoon portion because of certain unspecified but pressing engagements. Though I was secretly glad because I had more than enough work to attend to, his seeming arrogance annoyed me, just as it had in 1995. But perhaps this had more to do with the fact that his books (unlike my own) have made him a wealthy man. Nevertheless, I was looking forward to meeting him because one can always learn something about communicating with one’s patients from a colleague who does it so effectively on a nationwide scale.
The first thing he said, when Thorstein (who picked him up at Penn Station—he doesn’t fly) escorted him into my office, was, “Life is like false teeth.” I had no idea what that meant but I nodded wisely, not wanting to start off our relationship by seeming dense.
I offered the famed guru some coffee. Wagging a pudgy finger, he iterated, “You build a house one card at a time!” Assuming this to be an affirmative response, I buzzed one of the secretaries to bring us some. While we were waiting I asked him where he had studied. “A grain of sand is worth more than all the handwriting on the wall,” he declared with a twinkle. (I found out later he hadn’t gotten past the eighth grade.)
I tried to shift the conversation to something less personal. “How do you like New York?”
“The bigger the goose, the smaller the gander!” he shouted, pounding his fist on my desk. This went on for half an hour, and I was quite relieved when Thorstein arrived to take him away.
A makeshift seminar was set up for eleven o’clock, disrupting the schedules of staff and patients alike. Nevertheless, it was quite well attended. I won’t present a verbatim transcript of that discussion; suffice it to say it was a continuous litany of aphorisms, homilies, nursery rhymes, Biblical quotations, and old wives’ tales, commencing with “What is a lie, but the truth in disguise?” and ending with “You can catch more flies with honey than you can with vinegar, but vinegar is cheaper.” Unfortunately there was no time for questions, but he was rewarded with a generous round of applause as he hurried out the door to his “pressing engagement.”
At lunch afterward, though no one could argue about anything the great philosopher had said, neither could anyone tell me why life is like false teeth.
Lose a few, win a few. The meeting with Linus turned out to be a breakthrough. I merely asked him why he felt it necessary to check over his room exactly thirty-seven times before he could leave it, a question I’m sure I have put to him a dozen times before. In any case the answer, same as always, was, “So th
at I don’t make any more mistakes.”
I suppressed a yawn. “Mistakes like what?”
“Like I did on that paper. You know, the one about the DNA sequence of one of the taste genes.”
“You mean you made the mistake of using the wrong data when you wrote it up for publication?”
“No, I mean I should have selected a gel that wasn’t so obviously a phony.”
Had Linus been talking with prot? I sat up straighter. “You’re admitting you cheated on that? You fudged the data?”
“I fudged all my data.”
“You—but why? Everyone I’ve talked to and the reports I’ve read all say that you have a brilliant mind and could easily plan meaningful experiments and come up with significant and important results.”
“That’s true.”
“So why screw around with the data? Wouldn’t it be easier just to do the experiments?”
“I hate doing experiments.”
“You hate—then why did you go into molecular biology?”
“Dr. Brewer, have you met my parents?”
“Yes, I have. They’re top scientists, both of them. That alone should have given you a leg up on everyone else.”
“But neither of them ever asked me what I wanted to do with my life. They both assumed I would follow in their formidable footsteps. They never even asked for my opinion, and if I tried to give one, they ignored it. One thing led inexorably to another—what could I do?”
I understood his dilemma. In fact, I identified with him. I almost empathized with him. My own father had assumed I wanted to follow in his footsteps. Who knows—if left to my own devices, I may have anyway. The point is I didn’t seem to get a vote in the matter. I even felt obligated to follow his wishes long after he was dead!
I asked Linus what he would do with his life if he could start all over again.
“I’d like to be a cowboy,” he told me with the straightest face I had ever seen. I felt as though I were being watched by a dog and it was suppertime.
“Maybe something can be done about that.”
He actually crawled over to me, wrapped his arms around my ankles, and cried. The truth is, I joined him. I brushed down his hair and wept for him, for myself, for all of us.
Freddy came to dinner on Sunday. (We had invited the ballerina, too, but she couldn’t make it. A good thing, though—he ate enough for two people.) Although he had auditioned for a number of parts he was still without employment, except for a little drama coaching at one of the city’s high schools. He seemed a trifle down, and acted as if there were something he wanted to tell us. The last time it was giving up flying—was he becoming disillusioned with his acting career? It certainly seemed a poorly-paid profession. Or was he worried, like most of us, about being a failure at what he did? Whatever it was, he kept it bottled up inside in typical Fred fashion.