by Gene Brewer
To put it more plainly, my father was a very sick patient who became someone else when he was writing, someone who had become intimately familiar with the workings of a mental hospital. When he was scribbling on his yellow pads (he never used a computer), he was so absorbed in what he was doing (and thinking) that he could escape for a time the agony of remembering his life with his beloved wife (my mother) and daughter. When he was too tired to work any more, he lay down his pad and slept for a while, or tried to. I doubt that he ever got more than four hours’ sleep a night. (Dr. Schultz has tried for years to get him to take one or another sleeping medication, but he managed to hide and discard almost everything he was given.)
How did he get his novels published? In the usual way, I suppose. As Gene Brewer the writer he was able to do everything other writers do, submitting his manuscripts to agents and publishers in an attempt to get them into print. We at the hospital had no problem with his “moonlighting” in this way — it was far more pleasurable to see him at work than weeping or rigidly staring out the windows for hours at a time, and it was quite gratifying for all of us to find out that his first novel (K-PAX) had been accepted (by St. Martin’s Press, a well-known New York publisher) after forty-eight rejections by others, including various small presses throughout the country.
His success is not entirely unprecedented. The man who contributed so heavily to the Oxford English Dictionary, for example, was a mental patient, and some artists and musicians have also been quite insane (Vincent van Gogh comes to mind). The mental patient retains many capabilities; when they are incarcerated it is for reasons unrelated to their creativity.
But where did he get the idea for the K-PAX series? To back up a step, Dad was a practicing astronomer at Columbia University before Mom and Abby were so brutally murdered. That was his background, and his basis for coming up with a story about an alien visitor he called prot (short for protagonist). In fact, he may have created ‘prot’ thinking that only an alien would understand his dilemma.
The other half of the story has to do with his utter devastation at the hands of a killer (still serving a life sentence in upstate New York) who represented, in his mind, a sort of encapsulation of the human race, which, he felt, was capable of anything. Dr. Schultz has informed me on numerous occasions that Dad spent most of their sessions together railing about our civilization, especially our eagerness to go to war, to kill one another over the slightest provocation, and by extension, to kill anything else that inhabits our planet.
His writing was a kind of outlet for his deep frustration about being able to do nothing to change what happened and to get Mom and Abby back. Although there are many parallels to his own life, he was able to rectify his terrible situation in the sense that he could re-create my mother and sister (and even their beloved and long-deceased dog, Flower) in his books, and live a relatively normal life with them. At the same time, he needed to tell his story (purge it from his memory) in such a way as to indict the human race for its callousness and cruelty.
The genius of his creations, I think, was that somehow he came up with the idea of prot and the planet K-PAX, where none of the terrible things that befell him (and me) could ever happen. No one ever killed anyone else on K-PAX, not even a fly (if there were any there). By comparison with the Earth, K-PAX was a kind of paradise, and as such he could indirectly indict the human race for its inherent viciousness, as evidenced of late by the almost daily shootings in schools and shopping malls, not to mention our never-ending wars (they go together, Dad would frequently declare, and are triggered in part by the desensitization of children to killing by the films they watch and the games they play).
When he was writing, he spent considerable time in our library reading the literature on psychiatry and related subjects, becoming intimately familiar with the ins and outs of the subject as well as the routines inherent in any psychiatric hospital. Some of the patients described in his novel are purely fictional, others (under assumed names, of course) actually reside at MPI, and his descriptions of them are an accurate reflection of their often horrific existence. He followed everyone’s progress (or lack thereof) closely, and often helped them to overcome the little obstacles that their doctors wouldn’t have nearly enough time for. Howie, for instance, and Ernie are real people whom Dad helped treat, if not entirely cure, and who are still productive members of human society. (I was amused when I read that he made a character in one of the novels (K-PAX IV) a patient named Claire, who pretended to be one of the clinical staff.) Many of the others he mentioned are still here, and will probably never leave MPI. The point is that if you read one of Dad’s novels, you can be sure the settings are real. It’s almost like being here. Similarly, some of the characters mentioned in K-PAX V were based, I am sure on these patients. Some of the reporters and committee members mentioned in K-PAX V, for example, are pretty recognizable to those of us who work here.
Where he got the idea for space travel “on a beam of light” is anyone’s guess. As I said above, he was an astronomer, and concerned with all aspects of nuclear physics and cosmology, but whether such a thing is possible is extremely unlikely, according to certain other professionals I have talked to. The same for his theory that the speed of light varies with time, and that the universe recycles over and over again, ideas which have little support within the scientific community. As does his latest one, that the “missing mass” is a form of gravitational energy. As prot would say (if he weren’t fictional), that doesn’t mean much. Many of the greatest scientific discoveries were scoffed at by the discoverer’s peers. The human mind seems to resist anything that smacks of the new and unfamiliar. Once we settle into the familiar picture of how we fit into the world, it becomes uncomfortable, and even unpleasant, to change our way of life, our way of thinking. According to Dad, this is why we haven’t evolved much in the last hundred thousand years. We started out as killers, he said, and we will end up by killing ourselves.
I don’t happen to subscribe to this philosophy, but his books weren’t about me, they were about him. If you’ve read any of them, you have a pretty good idea of what my Dad’s life was like. His father, my grandfather, was, in fact, a small-town physician who died of a heart attack and a relatively early age. He was quite a domineering man, however, who left his son with an inferiority complex and a serious need to be loved and respected by others. He finally won that respect in his final book, becoming literally the most important person on the face of the globe (note how many times he was congratulated or applauded, for example), rubbing shoulders with the leaders of our country and the world. How happy this must have made him!
Mom was quite an interesting person in her own right. As Dad reported in his books, she was a psychiatric nurse as well as a terrific athlete, an all-American lacrosse player in college, among other things. (I think he resented, at least a little, her ability to beat him in certain sports, such as golf and bowling). But it was a deep, lifelong love few have attained, until a hot day in the August of 1989, when he came home and found her and Abby tied up, gagged, and lying dead on their beds. My father, of course, was never the same after that, and he ended up at the Manhattan Psychiatric Institute.
It was another decade before I joined the staff, in part to keep an eye on Dad, who was like Howie in some ways, always working at his desk, trying desperately to forget what he had seen and felt on that fateful day. But at present he lies in a catatonic state in his room in Ward Three, much as he wrote that Robert Porter, prot’s alter ego, also remained, for a time, unresponsive to the world around him. What he is thinking about, if anything, remains a mystery.
As for the current book, he must have finally come to the conclusion that the visits by prot and fled would do nothing to alter our violent natures, and that the only way we humans would be able to change our decidedly unpleasant habit of killing each other was with the intervention of an all-powerful alien who would put the fear of God (so to speak) in our heads.
Thus, he created “Walter,” a sort of ant colony of beings from the planet Bullock (or, in a larger sense, the universe). The desire for retaliation for a perceived injustice is so strongly imbedded in our DNA, Dad believed, that it could only be removed by someone else. We can never do it on our own, we will never evolve.
Dad could never understand how our society, all societies, actually encourages violence in a dozen different ways. We call anyone who puts on a military uniform a “hero,” but what do we call those who refuse to do so? We produce films and games (all virtually identical) filled with blood and gore which can only desensitize those who participate. We murder anything that walks the Earth (except, ironically, our pets, which are often considered part of our families), especially for food, but even for “sport” and a dozen other reasons. People love their guns, and society respects those who produce them. And while capital punishment is perhaps on the wane, some states still eagerly kill criminals for retaliation, and to what purpose? Why do we have so little respect for life, even human life, which only happens once?
Of course, Dad was led to all this by the violent murder of his wife and daughter, without which he might not have thought much about it, nor do most other people. But in fact that is almost all he thought about, and who can blame him? In the end, after saying everything there was to say about the horror of his experiences, he could no longer take it and, for all intents and purposes, disappeared from the Earth by riding a beam of light with Mom and Abby and Flower to the idyllic planet K-PAX. Like his fictional character Robert Porter, he may hear everything anyone tells him, including reports of former and current patients, but there is no way to know this. Though he lies like a stone, he may, in fact, be creating a new novel even now. Or a book of poetry, or painting beautiful canvases or composing songs or even symphonies or operas. It would be nice to know.
Will he ever return to us? Possibly. In the meantime I hope he’s living a truly wonderful life with Mom and all the other beings on K-PAX. If he does return some day, perhaps we’ll hear all about his experiences on that faraway planet. I hope so, for I deeply miss him.
PROT’S NINE SUGGESTIONS
FOR PLANET EARTH
— If you must hate something or someone, it should be your own idea, not one formulated for you by someone else.
— Set aside half of each country, state, province, etc. for the other species you share the earth with.
— If you feel the need for a flag, make it the flag of the united nations. Discard all the rest.
— Read the bible of your choice and decide for yourself who wrote it.
— Create a common language learned and spoken by everyone in your world.
— If your planet’s human population is increasing, don’t add to it.
— Boycott violent films, tv shows, games, and other forms of “entertainment.”
— Before you eat your next sandwich, spend a day in a slaughterhouse.
— Eliminate the word “fight” from your vocabularies.
NOTE ADDED IN PROOF
On May 1, 2014, my father awoke and, without a word, began writing on his yellow pad. This is what he wrote on that day:
EPILOGUE
After five happy years on K-PAX, including reunions with prot and all the others, Karen and I decided to return to Earth (we had mastered the art of light travel and had practiced it extensively) to see whether the human race had been able to comply with the Bullocks’ demands, or if anyone had survived the “purge” of its human inhabitants.
We landed in Russia, and were shocked but not surprised to find no human beings anywhere. We traveled around Europe for a while, and then to America. No matter where we went, however, there was no one to greet us. Stained coffee cups, decayed meals, unfinished puzzles and the like indicated that everything simply came to an end on a certain day. Lawns were unmowed, subway cars unattended on routes no longer used. Churches and theaters and shops — all devoid of people. In a couple of cases bank vaults were left open, and we could have confiscated millions of dollars in worthless money. The overall effect, which was not at all unpleasant, was the absence of traffic and other noises, especially in the big cities.
There were, however, animals of all kinds everywhere, wandering among the buildings, squares, and plazas. Evidently there was plenty to eat, for they looked well-fed and healthy. We had to hide from a bear once; otherwise the entire world was like an open zoo. We visited a few of those, by the way, fearing that the animals there had starved. But someone (Walter?) had opened the gates and let everyone out. The same for laboratories, farms, slaughterhouses — anywhere that anyone had been incarcerated or made use of without their consent. (There were undoubtedly many animals who could not have survived on their own, and we like to think Walter took them back to Bullock, or to other suitable planets.) In any case, the elephants and tigers and whales and so many others were on their way back from the brink of extinction. It was like another Garden of Eden.
From the evidence shown by calendars, whose pages were left unturned on the day everyone vanished, we deduced that the Bullocks had transported everyone off the Earth on the second anniversary of Compliance Day, which meant that Homo sapiens had survived the first and second years before failing the command to stop the killing. This was confirmed by our finding old newspapers, which reported that the human race had managed to end just over 20% of the killing of other people, worldwide, during that first year. Later articles indicated that the next 20% was proving more difficult to attain, and curtailing the killing of even 1/5 of the other fauna living on Earth even more difficult. It appeared that Homo sapiens had failed in both endeavors.
We didn’t stay long — a few days at most (there was plenty to eat: canned goods were available in every market). But the prospect of a longer visit was too heartbreaking. All of our family and friends (not to mention everyone else) were gone. Somehow I never got a chance to tell the Bullocks about many of the things that made the human race worthy of surviving and becoming even better — things like our arts, music, and literature, not to mention brilliant accomplishments in the sciences and humanities. I should have told them also about the countless acts of selflessness and even heroism that are reported daily on the news. People who rush into a lake to save someone who is drowning, or leap down to pull someone under a moving subway train after he or she has fallen onto the tracks. Now, none of these things will ever happen again. There will never be another Mozart, or Gandhi, or Einstein (on Earth, anyway). Or, for that matter, another Taj Mahal, Eiffel Tower, or World Trade Center. Our dark sides may have outweighed our better selves, sometimes, but I truly believe that the balance was shifting. If only there had been more time… .
At first I held myself responsible for failing to convince the world of Walter’s readiness to remove us from our beautiful planet. That was, after all, the charge bestowed upon me by the Bullocks, and I blamed myself for not being up to the task. But prot assured me that no one could have stopped Homo sapiens from killing both our fellow humans and all the other creatures that walk, crawl, or swim the Earth, even with the inducement of complete knowledge of medicine and the sciences and a thousand other things. It’s part of our nature, embedded in our DNA. Nothing short of a mutation can change that. Even so, I still felt the weight of the entire world on my shoulders.
Nevertheless, it was pretty devastating to discover that the Bullocks had carried out their program so successfully. Where everyone has been taken, of course, we hadn’t a clue. Our only consolation was that we were sure that no one had been killed, but were only “sleeping.” If the human race is ever permitted to move forward in time once more, no one will have aged even a second. Maybe the Bullocks will one day allow those who were taken to return, perhaps a few at a time, for another chance, hoping that once they see what the Earth can be without the endless killing, they will begin to evolve into beings the universe can respect. We hope so, and we plan to return every decade or t
wo to find out.
In the meantime, we love our lives on our peaceful planet, where wars and other forms of violence are not seen, and there isn’t even a term for killing. The saddest part of all this is that the Earth could have been another K-PAX if its human inhabitants had only wanted badly enough to make it the garden of Eden it could have been.
After writing these final words, Dad reverted to a catatonic state, where he has remained to this day.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I thank Bob Brewer, Ron Chase, Charles Palmer, Mary Mikalson, and Karen Brewer for valuable suggestions and encouragement. Each of them made this book a little better.
Visit the author at www.genebrewer.com