K-PAX

Session Nine

IT was a beautiful Fourth of July: partly cloudy skies (I wonder why it's always in the plural-how many "skies" are there?), not too hot or humid, the air redolent of charcoal grills and freshly cut grass.

A holiday seems to generate a feeling of timelessness, bringing, as it does, blended memories of all those that came before. Even my father took the Fourth off and we always spent the day around the brick barbecue pit and the evening at the river watching the fireworks. I still live in my father's house, the house I grew up in, but we don't have to go anywhere now; we can see the nearby country club display right from our screened-in terrace. Even so, when the first Roman candle lights up the sky I invariably smell the river and the gunpowder and my father's Independence Day cigar.

I love that house. It's a big white frame with a patio as well as the second-story terrace, and the backyard is loaded with oaks and maples. The roots are deep. Right next door is the house my wife grew up in, and my old basketball coach still lives on the other side. I wondered, as I gathered up the sticks and leaves lying around the yard, whether any of my own children would be living here after we've gone, picking up loose twigs on the Fourth of July, thinking of me as I thought of my father. And I wondered whether similar thoughts might not have been buzzing around Shasta Daisy's head as she sniffed around her predecessor's little wooden marker barely visible in the back corner behind the grill-Daisy the Dog: 1967-1982.

By two o'clock the coals were heating up and the rest of my family began to arrive. First came Abby with Steve and the two boys, then Jennifer, who had brought her roommate, a dental student, from Palo Alto. Not a man, as we had thought, but a tall African-American woman wearing copper earrings the size of salad plates that hung down to and rested on her bare shoulders. And I do mean tall.

As soon as I saw Steve I told him about the variance between Charlie Flynn's description of the figure-eight orbit of K-PAX around its twin suns, and prot's version, which, if I understood it correctly, was more of a retrograde pattern, like that of a pendulum. Later I showed him the calendar and the second star chart prot had concocted-the one describing the sky as seen from K-PAX looking away from Earth. Steve shook his head in wonder and drawled that Professor Flynn had just left for a vacation in Canada, but said he would mention all this to him when he got back. I asked him whether he knew of any physicists or astronomers who had disappeared in the last five years, particularly on August 17, 1985. To his knowledge there had been no such disappearances, though he joked that there were a few colleagues who he wished might quietly do so.

Freddy arrived from Atlanta, still wearing his airline uniform, alone as usual. Now everyone was here for the first time since Christmas. Chip, however, had better things to do and soon went off somewhere with his friends.

Just after that Betty showed up with her husband, an English professor at NYU, who happens to have a black belt in aikido. They had brought prot and one of our trainees, whom I had invited primarily because he had been an outstanding amateur wrestler and he, too, would be helpful in case prot showed any indication of turbulence. Shasta Daisy, extra nervous when so many people are present, barked at everyone who arrived from the safety of the underside of the back porch, her usual refuge.

Prot came bearing gifts: three more star maps representing the heavens as seen from various places he had "visited," as well as a copy of Hamlet, translated into pax-o. He hadn't been out of the car for five seconds, however, before an extraordinary thing happened. Shasta suddenly ran at him from the porch. I yelled, afraid she was going to attack him. But she stopped short, wagged her tail from ear to ear as only a Dalmatian can,' and flattened herself against his leg. Prot, for his part, -was down on the ground immediately, rolling and feigning with the dog, barking, even, and then they were up running all over the yard, my grandsons chasing along behind, Shakespeare and the charts blowing in the wind. Fortunately, we managed to recover all but the last page of the play.

After a while prot sat down on the grass and Shasta lay down beside him, bathing herself, utterly calm and content. Later, she played with Rain and Star for the very first time. Not once did she retreat to the porch the rest of that afternoon and evening, not even when the nearby country club celebration started off with a tremendous bang. She became a different dog that Fourth of July.

As, so to speak, did we all.

That night, after the fireworks were over and our guests had gone, Fred came into the family room downstairs, where I was shooting some pool and listening to The Flying Dutchman on our old hi-fi set.

For years I'd had the feeling that Fred wanted to tell me something. There had been times during pauses in conversations when I was sure he was trying to get something off his chest but couldn't quite bring himself to do it. I never tried to push him, figuring that when he was ready he would tell me or his mother what was bothering him.

That's not entirely true. I didn't press him because I was afraid he was going to tell us he was gay. It is something a father doesn't ordinarily want to hear-most fathers are heterosexual-and I'm sure his mother, who will not be satisfied with less than eight grandchildren, felt the same way.

Apparently motivated by a conversation with prot, Fred decided to come out with it. But it wasn't to tell me about his sexual orientation. The thing he had tried to bring up all those years, and couldn't, was his deep-seated fear of flying!

I have known dentists who quake at the sight of a drill and surgeons who are terrified to go under the knife. Sometimes that's why people get into those fields-it's a form of whistling in the dark. But I had never encountered an airline pilot who was afraid to fly. I asked him why on Earth he had decided on that profession, and he told me this: I had mentioned at dinner years before that phobias could be treated by a gradual acclimation to the conditions that triggered them, and had given some examples, such as fear of snakes, of closets and, yes, of flying. I had taken him with me to a conference near Disneyland when he was a boy, having no idea he was apprehensive about the flight.

That was why he went to the airport the day after he graduated from high school and began to take flying lessons-to work out the problem on his own. It didn't help, but he continued the training until he had soloed and flown crosscountry and passed his flight test. Even after all that he was still afraid to fly. So he figured the only thing to do was to enroll in an aeronautical school and become a professional pilot. He obtained his commercial license, became an instructor, hauled canceled checks all over the Eastern seaboard, usually in the middle of the night and often in bad weather, and after a couple of years of that he was as horrified as ever at the prospect of leaving terra firma. Then he got his air transport "ticket," as he called it, and went to work for United Airlines. Now, five years later, after a brief conversation with prot, he had finally come to me for help.

We were a long time down in the family room, playing Ping-Pong and throwing darts and shooting pool as we talked. Nine years a pilot and he still had nightmares about plunging to Earth from awesome heights, taking forever to fall through empty space, falling and falling and never reaching the ground.

I have had many patients, over a quarter century of practice, who were afraid of flying. For that matter, it is quite common among the general population, and for a very simple reason: Our ancestors were tree-dwellers. As such, a fear of falling was of considerable evolutionary valuethose who did not fall survived to reproduce. Most people are able to overcome this fear, at least functionally. On the other hand there are some who never go anywhere they can't get to by car or train or bus, no matter how inconvenient.

I explained all this to Fred and suggested that he very likely fell into a similar category.

He wanted to know what he should do.

I suggested he try some other line of work.

"That's exactly what prot said!" he cried, and for the first time in two decades, he hugged me. "But he thought I should talk to you about it first." I had never seen him so happy.

My sigh of relief turned out to be premature. Right after Freddy had gone, Jennifer came in, pink from a shower. She grabbed his cue stick, took a shot, missed. We talked a while about medical school, shooting all the while, until I noticed that she hadn't pocketed a single ball, which was unusual for her.

I said, "Is there something you wanted to talk to me about?"

"Yes, Daddy, there is." I knew it was something I didn't want to hear. She hadn't called me "Daddy" in years. And she had also been talking to prot.

But it sometimes takes Jenny a while to get to the point. "I saw you hugging Freddy," she said. "That was nice. I never saw you do that before."

"I wanted to lots of times."

"Why didn't you?"

"I don't know."

"Abby thinks you weren't much interested in our problems. She figured it was because you listened to other people's troubles all day long and didn't want to hear any more at home."

"I know. She told me tonight before she left. But it's not true. I care about all of you. I just didn't want you to think I was trying to interfere with your lives."

"Why not? Every other parent I know does."

"It's a long story."

She missed another easy shot. "Try me."

"Well, it's because of my father, mostly. Your grandfather."

"What did he do to you?"

"He wanted me to become a doctor."

"What's wrong with that?"

"I didn't want to be a doctor."

"Dad, how could he have made you go to med school? He died when you were eleven or twelve, didn't he?" Her voice cracked charmingly on "eleven" and "twelve."

"Yes, but he planted the seed and it kept growing. I couldn't seem to stop it. I felt guilty. I guess I wanted to finish the rest of his life for him. And I did it for my mother-your grandmother-too. "

"I don't think you can live someone else's life for them, Dad. But if it's any consolation, I think you're a very good doctor."

"Thank you." I missed my next shot. "By the way, you didn't go to medical school because of me, did you?"

"Partly. But not because you wanted me to. If anything, I thought you didn't. You never took me to see your office or the rest of the hospital. Maybe that's why I became interested-it seemed so mysterious."

"I just didn't want to do to you what my father did to me. If I haven't told you before, I'm very happy you decided to become a doctor."

"Thank you, Dad." She studied the table for a long minute, then missed the next ball entirely, sinking the cue ball instead. "What else would you have done? If you hadn't gone into medicine, I mean?"

"I always wanted to be an opera singer."

At that she smiled the warm smile she inherited from her mother-the one that says: "How sweet."

That annoyed me a trifle. "What's the matter?" I said. "Don't you think I could have been a singer?"

"I think anyone should be anything he or she wants to be," she replied, not smiling anymore. "That's what I wanted to talk to you about." With that she missed the twelveball by a mile.

"Shoot," I said.

"It's your turn."

"I mean, what's the problem?"

She threw herself into my arms and sobbed, "Oh, Daddy, I'm a lesbian!"

That was about midnight. I remember because Chip came in right afterward. He was acting strangely, too, and I braced myself for another revelation. Chip, however, had not spoken with prot.

Even my grandsons behaved differently after that momentous Fourth of July. They stopped fighting and throwing things and began to bathe and to comb their hair without arguing about it-an almost miraculous change.

But back to the cookout. Prot wouldn't eat any of the chicken, but he consumed a huge Waldorf salad and a couple of gallons of various fruit juices, shouting something about "going for the gusto." He seemed quite relaxed, and played Frisbee and badminton with Rain and Star and Shasta all afternoon.

Then something happened. When Karen turned on the sprinkler so that the kids could cool off, prot, who appeared to be enjoying himself, suddenly became extremely agitated. He didn't turn violent, thank God, just stared for a moment in utter horror as Jennifer and the two boys splashed into and out of the spray. Suddenly he started screaming and running around the yard. I was thinking, "What the hell have I done?" when he stopped, dropped to his knees, and buried his face in his hands. Shasta was by his side in a second. Betty's husband and our trainee looked at me for instructions, but the only one I had was, "Turn off the goddamn sprinkler!"

I approached him cautiously, but before I could put a hand on his shoulder he raised his head, became as cheerful as ever, and started to frolic with Shasta again.

There were no further incidents that afternoon.

Karen and I had a lot to talk about that night and it was nearly dawn when we finally got to sleep. She wanted to know what Freddy would do after he left the airline, and she cried a little about Jenny-not because of her choice, but because she knew it was going to be difficult for her. Her last words before drifting off, however, were: "I hate opera."

GisELLE was waiting for me the next morning, jumping up and down, nearly beside herself. "He's from the Northwest!" she exclaimed. "Probably western Montana, northern Idaho, or eastern Washington!"

"That what your man said?"

"She's not a man, but that's what she said!"

"Wouldn't the police know if someone, especially a scientist, had disappeared from that part of the country five years ago?"

"They should. I know someone down at the Sixth Precinct. Want me to check for you?"

For the first time in several days I had to laugh. It appeared she knew someone in any line of work one could name. I threw up my arms. "Sure, why not, go ahead." She was out the door like a shot.

That same morning, Betty, wearing an enormous pair of copper earrings in. another desperate attempt to get pregnant, I presumed, brought in a stray kitten. She had found it in the subway station, and I assumed she was going to take it home with her that evening. But instead she suggested that we let the patients take care of it.

The presence of small animals in nursing and retirement homes has proven to be of great benefit to the residents, providing badly needed affection and companionship and generally bolstering their spirits to such a degree that life spans are actually increased significantly. The same may be true for the population at large. To my knowledge, however, such a program had not been introduced in mental institutions.

After due consideration-we are an experimental hospital, after all-I asked Betty to instruct the kitchen staff to see that the kitten was fed properly, and decided to let it roam Wards One and Two to see what would happen.

It headed straight for prot.

A short time later, after he had nuzzled it for a while and "spoken" to it, it went out to meet the other inhabitants of its new world.

One or two of the patients, notably Ernie and several of Maria's alters, stayed away from it, for reasons of their own. But most of the others were delighted with it. I was especially surprised and gratified to see that Chuck the curmudgeon took to it immediately. "Doesn't stink a bit," he averred. He spent hours tempting it with bits of string and a small rubber ball someone had found on the grounds. Many of the other patients joined in. One of these, to my amazement, was Mrs. Archer, who, I discovered, had owned numerous cats before coming to MPI.

But the most remarkable effect of the kitten was on Bess. Unable to sustain a relationship with another human being, she became totally devoted to "La Belle Chatte." She assumed the responsibility for feeding her and emptying her litter box and taking her for romps on the grounds. If anyone else wanted to play with the kitten, Bess immediately gave her up, of course, with a wise, sad nod, as if to say, "You're right-I don't deserve to have her anyway." But when night came, La Belle invariably sought out Bess, and the staff would find them in the mornings sharing the same pillow.

After a few days of this I began to wonder whether another kitten or two might not have an even greater salutary effect on the patients. I decided to get a tomcat later on and let nature take its course.