by Gene Brewer
I gave him all the information we had about Robert’s father, and I could see him mulling it over, forming some sort of characterization in his mind. In the end we scheduled a “dress rehearsal” for the following Saturday. He would come to the house in some old baggy clothes and we would go over the setup and what to expect when he came to the hospital, a visit we planned for the following week. I realized, with no little regret, that he had never been to my office.
We watched a ballet on TV that afternoon. Was Fred so attentive because he was trying to please me? Or was it simply that he had learned a lot about the art from his roommate? Perhaps he was studying the dancers in order to increase his chances of landing a role on Broadway. Who would know? Who can get inside another person’s head, even that of someone close to us? Only his mother seemed completely happy, humming away in the kitchen. She disliked ballet, and wasn’t going to pretend otherwise. Karen has always been exactly who she is, nothing more, nothing less. And, in her case at least, that’s quite enough.
Session Forty-two
The Monday morning staff meeting was a halcyon affair, with Linus’s transfer to Ward One in process and Milton, who had been in other institutions for more than three decades before coming to MPI, about to be discharged altogether. Carried away by the general good feeling, I contemplated the perfect copy of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, painted by a former patient, and nibbled on a cinnamon donut, knowing I would regret it later on when I stepped on the scales. I rationalized this by professing that I would be quite willing to have a cinnamon donut every time a patient is discharged.
“You’d better start stocking up, then,” Beamish roared, “because I’ve got someone else who’s ready for Ward One, in my opinion.”
I stared at the tiny glasses, which weren’t much bigger than his eyes. “Who?—Ophelia?”
“That’s right! How did you know?”
“I’ve noticed some changes.”
Menninger agreed. “She’s like a different person.”
“Maybe she is a different person,” I suggested, not knowing what the hell I was talking about.
“Whoever she is, she’s no longer psychotic,” Beamish assured us. “I can’t even get a good neurosis out of her anymore.”
Goldfarb looked around the room. “Any dissenters?”
There were none.
“Let’s get rid of her!” she exclaimed, flinging her pen onto the big mahogany table. A crude expression, perhaps, but it’s one of Goldfarb’s favorites, something of a talisman, I suppose. “Anyone else ready for Ward One?”
“I think Don and Joan are ready, as long as they go together,” Chang replied. “It’s wonderful—between the two of them they seem to make a whole human being.”
“Same with Alice and Albert,” Goldfarb chipped in, “though they’re probably not ready to move down yet. But we should give prot the credit for putting them together.”
That was true in the latter case, but it was I who had first thought of pairing “Don Knotts” and “Joan of Arc,” though at this point who would have believed me? I did manage to point out that there were some patients who didn’t seem to be affected much by prot’s visit—Frankie, Cassandra, the autists, the deviates, the psychopaths.
“Give him time,” said Menninger. “Give him time. Cassie, at least, has broken out of her depression. Maybe prot had something to do with that.” I replied rather sheepishly that I would speak to her about it.
In view of all the upcoming vacancies in Ward Two there was room for a group of new patients waiting to make the move from “the big institute” (at Columbia) to MPI. “Let’s bring them over early,” Chang proposed. “Let prot have a crack at them before he goes.” Mine was the only dissenting vote.
The meeting wound up with a discussion of the annual outing to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was set for Monday, the fifteenth, when the venerable institution is normally closed. We would have the place all to ourselves (I suspect this gesture on the part of the museum staff was more for the benefit of their paying patrons than for our patients, but it was nonetheless appreciated).
“What’s going on with the new wing?” Thorstein demanded. “I was on the lawn this morning and there doesn’t seem to be much happening.” Everyone looked at me accusingly.
“I spoke to the foreman last week. It’s got something to do with the holidays and with a union vote and something else I didn’t quite get. He doesn’t speak much English.”
“No problem,” Goldfarb said with a smirk. “At this rate, we’re not going to need the damn thing anymore.” Goldfarb had made a joke! She lifted her pen. “Anything else?”
I mentioned the crowd at the front gate, which seemed to be getting bigger every day.
“What’s the big deal?” Thorstein wanted to know. “They seem to be an orderly bunch. All they want is a word from prot. Anyway, the fault lies with you.”
I found myself hoping he would be successful in finding a position elsewhere. “Moi?”
“If you hadn’t written those books, no one would know he was here.”
“What are they going to do when he leaves?” mused Beamish.
“The question is, what are we going to do when he leaves?” Goldfarb muttered, deadly serious again.
I found Betty waiting for me in my office. She seemed nervous, even agitated. I asked her where the disturbance was.
“Right here,” she wailed.
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve got an appointment in an hour to have a root canal done.”
“So?”
“I’m afraid of the drill.”
Betty’s teeth have never been very good. Now I knew why. “What is it about the drill that bothers you?”
“I’m afraid it’s going to get loose and shoot through my skull.”
“Betty! The odds against that are astronomical!”
Her hands were picking away at each other. “I know. But it doesn’t help.”
I could see she was terrified. “Well, do you want me to recommend someone to help you get through this?”
“I— Maybe. I thought you could just say something real quick that would do it.”
“Nothing is that easy in this business, Betty—you know that. How did you get through the previous visits to the dentist?”
“My husband always took me. But he can’t go today.”
I thought immediately of sending prot with her, but quickly rejected the idea. “I don’t think this is something we can solve in an hour. Do you want to change the appointment until we can look into it a little more?”
“I can’t. If I wait any longer she’ll have to pull it, and that’s worse.”
At that moment my wife walked in. “Hi! I was in town today, and for some reason I found myself heading this way. I thought we might have lunch together. Hi, Betty—want to come with us?”
“I can’t,” she replied dismally.
“What’s the matter?”
Betty repeated the whole story.
“I understand perfectly,” Karen assured her. “I have the same problem. What time’s your appointment? I’ll go with you. Then we’ll have a nice lunch somewhere.”
As if a valve had opened, all the tension drained immediately from Betty’s face. On their way out, Karen gave me a wave over her shoulder and a little smile that seemed to say, “See? It’s easy if you empathize with your patients.”
I didn’t even know she had a problem with dentists.
I went to see for myself how Cassandra was doing. While I was looking for her on the lawn (she liked to be outside where she could contemplate the heavens, regardless of how cold it was) it occurred to me that perhaps she was a kind of autistic savant, someone who devotes so much of her mental capabilities to one single activity that she actually can see a pattern in events that the rest of us can’t, and merely reaches some perfectly logical conclusion about the long-term results.
I found her sitting on her favorite bench in her old worn coat, her arms wrapped around her as
if she were confined to a straightjacket. I waited for a few minutes while she tuned in to me.
“Hi, Cassie. How are you feeling?”
“Just fine.” She even smiled a little.
“Good. I’m glad you’re feeling better.”
“Prot told me not to give up hope.”
“About what?”
“About a trip to K-PAX. He says someone else might come back for me later on.”
“Can we talk about that for a minute?”
“He’s leaving on the thirty-first.”
“Yes, I know. What I was wondering was, have you figured out who he’s taking with him this time?”
“Not for sure. Only how many of us will get to go.”
“Really? How many will there be?”
“Two.”
“Only two?” I sniggered. “I thought he was supposed to take a hundred of us to K-PAX.”
She glared at me through the hair falling over her eyes. “That’s right. But only two of us.”
“You mean the people who live here at the hospital.”
“Yes.”
“But you have no idea who they will be.”
“Not yet,” she sighed, turning back to the sky.
“Do you have any idea when you might know who he’ll be taking with him?”
But she was already gone, lost in the stars.
On my way back to the big front door I reflected yet again on how little we know about the human mind. As if to prove my point, I ran into Alice and Albert coming out, accompanied by a couple of cats. The A’s now seemed inseparable. “How are you two doing?” I inquired.
“Great!” Albert exclaimed, whipping out a tape measure. “Alice’s last ‘big’ phase was a full two centimeters short of the time before, which was two short of the one before that!”
Alice, brandishing a stopwatch, added, “And Albert was two minutes closer to estimating the duration of an hour than he was last week! Isn’t it great?”
“Wonderful!” I said, and meaning it. “Keep it up!”
“In another month or two, we’ll be cured!”
I wasn’t so sure about that, but I doubted they would be among the lucky winners of an all-expenses-paid trip to K-PAX.
A dense crowd was still milling quietly about the front gate. Some of them glanced in occasionally to see who was on the lawn, but it wasn’t prot, and they had no interest in the rest of the patients. Not surprising, actually, since most people feel the same way toward the mentally ill and, by and large, hope they’ll just disappear. Unfortunately, so do the HMO’s.
As I was leaving the hospital to give my “Principles of Psychiatry” lecture, Giselle stopped me in the corridor with an envelope addressed to “dr. eugene n. brewer, EARTH.” Of course it was from prot, and it contained the list of things he did and did not understand about our patients (as well as the rest of us), which I had asked him to compile for the benefit of my students. I perused the “list,” which was neatly typed on a 3x5 card:
what I know about homo sapiens
you’ve been brainwashed from the beginning—by
your parents, your relatives, your neighbors, your
schools, your religions, your employers, your
governments, no wonder you’re such a mess.
what I don’t understand about homo sapiens
how anyone can shoot a deer.
I stuck it back in the envelope. “Tell prot I’ll pass this on. By the way, did you get a copy of Rob’s father’s death certificate?”
“Nope. They’re still looking for it. I’ll try to have it for you in time for tomorrow’s session.”
With that I headed for Columbia to face the wrath of my students. To my surprise, however, they took prot’s microtreatise with great equanimity. In fact, as I proceeded to unload as much information as I could cram into the tiny hour, I didn’t hear another word about him. It was as quiet as a funeral in there, but what they were all thinking about was anybody’s guess.
Three more weeks! As I waited for prot to show up for our forty-second session together, I reflected on the death certificate, which had arrived only that morning. Rob’s father had, in fact, died from “natural causes.” There was no autopsy. The cause must have seemed obvious to the local doctor: a heart attack or massive stroke brought on by the unremitting stress of living inside a terribly battered body. Nothing very surprising there.
Without saying a word, prot sauntered in and grabbed up a handful of kiwis, which he noisily devoured.
“Prot, please relax now and feel free to put yourself—”
“I wish you’d make up your mind, doctor. Onetwo—”
“Thank you.”
“What for?” he mumbled.
“Never mind. How do you feel?”
“Like I’m traveling on a beam of light.”
“Good. Now just relax.” Uncertain about whether he was under or just pretending, I checked his pulse: thirty-eight, about normal for the hypnotized prot. “Okay, prot, I’d like to speak to Robert for a minute.”
Prot/Robert drooped into the usual slouch, but of course there was no sign of comprehension or movement. “Rob, it’s me. Dr. Brewer. Gene. How are you feeling today?”
No response.
“Prot tells me you’d like to get something off your chest. Is that true?”
Not a sign of cognition.
“Well, I’m here. What is it you wanted to tell me?”
I waited for several minutes in case he was on the verge of responding. But there was no indication of any such attempt. “Rob, please listen to me. You don’t have to say anything, but I want you to hear what I’ve got to tell you. If you can hear me, please nod.”
There wasn’t the slightest hint of movement.
“I know you can hear me, Rob. So just listen. I’ve got a theory about what happened when you were a boy and I’d like to run it by you, all right? If it’s right, don’t say anything [a sneaky trick, but sometimes one has to resort to them]. But if it’s wrong, please let me know. Otherwise we’ll be off on the wrong foot, heading in the wrong direction. Understand?”
No response.
“Think back for a moment to the summer of 1963 when you were six and your father began telling you about the stars. Think of all the wonderful nights you spent gazing into the heavens with him out in the back yard. Remember he told you about the sun and the planets and comets and asteroids and meteors and so on, and how exciting that was? And then he told you about all the billions of stars in the sky, and how a lot of them could have solar systems like our own, and that there were probably intelligent beings on some of the planets out there? How they might be different from us but maybe not so different? And how we might be able to communicate with them and that it might even be possible some day to visit them or that we might have visitors from one of those faraway worlds? Remember how nice it was out in the yard on those warm summer nights with his arm around your shoulder? How you helped your father back into the house when it was time to go to bed? Then your mother tucked you in and kissed you and said goodnight? Wouldn’t it be wonderful to be able to go back there and live that time over again? Even for a little while?”
Rob sat like a stone.
“But one night he soiled himself while you were outside and he needed to be cleaned up. Your mother was busy or wasn’t feeling well, and she asked if you would help him with his bath just this once. You said you would, and supported him while he made his painful way to the bathroom. You helped him get undressed and into the tub—remember? You kicked his dirty clothes toward the hamper and began to wash him.
“But you were dirty too, so you got out of your pants and T-shirt. Then, while you were leaning over him, his hands began to grope for you. You didn’t like what was happening. You remembered the time you were living with your aunt and uncle and everything you’d been trying to forget came back.”
Rob seemed to fidget a little, and I think I heard a little choke.
“Not only did your father seem to
be behaving like Uncle Dave, but at that moment you knew you could no longer depend on your ‘friend and protector’ to keep you from harm. There was no one in the whole world you could trust! You threw down the washcloth and ran out of the bathroom and into the back yard. Your dad fell back into the tub. You were so distressed that you kept running on into the woods behind the house. It was dark and you stumbled and fell and hit your head against a rock or a tree. You passed out, and when you finally woke up and decided you had better go back inside, you heard your mother screaming. Despite your splitting headache you ran in and found that your father had died after you left him in the tub. He was lying under the water. You were terribly confused. You thought it was your fault because he had fallen and, if you hadn’t run away, he would still be alive. Isn’t that right, Rob? Isn’t that what happened when you were six?”
I watched him carefully but, except for the sound of heavy breathing, he didn’t twitch a muscle.
“You never forgave yourself, did you, Rob? You were never able to shake the guilt and sorrow, were you? Rob, please tell me if I’m wrong about any of this.”
I waited for quite a while but his breathing quieted and there was no further response.
“Then I can assume my theory is correct and that everything happened more or less as I described it. If not, please indicate this by blinking your eyes once.”
His eyelids didn’t flicker. But a tear rolled down his cheek!
“All right, Rob. In a moment I’m going to let you go back to where you were a little while ago. But I want you to think about something in the time between now and your next visit. I want you to know something you didn’t know before. Your father’s death was brought on by the extreme stress on his body resulting from the injury he had suffered months earlier at the slaughterhouse. It was sudden, but it could have happened at any time. He wasn’t reaching for you, he was reaching out, already feeling the effects of whatever it was that killed him. Isn’t that possible, Rob? You couldn’t have done anything about it even if you had stayed with him. Do you understand? It wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t anyone’s fault. On Earth people die sometimes, despite anything we might do. You didn’t kill your father, Rob. If anything, you made his last few weeks some of the happiest of his life. You gave him something that he needed and wanted. You gave him your love.”