K-PAX

Session Sixteen

DESPITE facing what should have been a very long and presumably exhausting journey prot seemed his usual relaxed self. He marched right into my examining room, looked around for his basket of fruit. I switched on my backup tape recorder and checked to see that it was working properly. "We'll have the fruit at the end of today's session, if you don't object."

"Oh. Very well. And the top o' the afternoon to ye."

"Sit down, sit down."

"Thankee kindly, sir."

"How's your report coming?"

"I'll have it finished by the time I leave."

"May I see it before you go?"

"When it's finished. But I doubt you'd be interested."

"Believe me, I would like to see it as soon as possible. And the questions for Dr. Flynn?"

"There are only so many hours in a day, gino, even for a K-PAXian."

"Are you still planning to return to your home planet on the seventeenth?"

"I must."

"That's only thirty-eight hours from now."

"You're very quick today, doctor."

"And Robert is going with you?"

"I don't know."

"Why not?"

"He's still not talking to me."

"And if he decides not to accompany you?"

"Then there would be room for someone else. You want to go?"

"I think I'd like that some day. Right now I've got a lot of things to do here."

"I thought you'd say that."

"Tell me-how did you know that Robert might want to go back with you when you arrived on Earth five years ago?"

"Just a hunch. I had a feeling he wished to depart this world."

"What would happen exactly if neither of you went back on that date?"

"Nothing. Except that if we didn't go back then, we never could."

"Would that be so terrible?"

"Would you want to stay here if you could go home to K-PAX?"

"Couldn't you just send a message that you're going to be delayed for a while?"

"It doesn't work that way. Owing to the nature of light ... Well, it's a long story."

"There are plenty of reasons for you to stay."

"You're wasting your time," he said, yawning. I had been told that he hadn't slept for the last three days, preferring instead to work on his report.

The moment had come for my last desperate shot. I wondered whether Freud had ever tried this. "In that case, I wonder if you'd care to join me in a drink?"

"If that's your custom," he said with an enigmatic smile. "Something fruity, I suppose?"

"Are you insinuating that I'm a fruit?"

"Not at all."

"Just kidding, doc. I'll have whatever you're having."

"Stay right there. Don't move." I retreated to my inner office, where Mrs. Trexler was waiting sardonically with a laboratory cart stocked with ice and liquor-Scotch, gin, vodka, rye-plus the usual accompaniments.

"I'll be right here if you need anything," she growled.

I thanked her and wheeled the cart into my examining room. "I think I'll have a little Scotch," I said, trying to appear calm. "I like a martini before dinner, but on special occasions like this one I prefer something else. Not that there are that many special occasions," I added quickly, as if I were applying for the directorship of the hospital. "And what about you?"

"Scotch is fine."

I poured two stiff ones on the rocks, and handed one to prot. "Bon voyage," I said, raising my glass. "To a safe trip home."

"Thank you," he said, lifting his own. "I'm looking forward to it." I had no idea how long it had been since his last drink, or if he had ever taken one at all, but he appeared to enjoy the first sip.

"To tell you the truth," I confessed, "K-PAX does sound like a beautiful place."

"I think you would like it there."

"You know, I've only been out of this country two or three times."

"You should see more of your own WORLD, too. It's an interesting PLANET." He took a deep slug, bared his teeth and swallowed, but his timing wasn't right and he choked and coughed for several seconds. While watching him try to get his breath I remembered the day my father taught me to drink wine. I hated the stuff, but I knew it signified the beginning of adulthood, so I held my nose and gulped it down. My timing wasn't right either, and I spewed some burgundy all over the living room carpet, which retains a ghostly stain to this day. I'm not sure he ever forgave me for that....

"You don't hate your father," prot said. "What?"

"You've always blamed your father for the inadequacies you perceive in yourself. In order to do that you had to hate him. But you never really hated him. You loved your father."

"I don't know who told you all of this, but you don't know what you're talking about."

He shrugged and was silent. After a few more swallows (he wasn't choking anymore) he persisted: "That's how you rationalized ignoring your children so you could have more time for your work. You told yourself you didn't want to make the same mistake as your father."

"I didn't ignore my children!"

"Then why do you not know that your son is a cocaine addict?"

"What? Which son?"

"The younger one. 'Chip,' you call him."

There had been certain signs-a distinct personality change, a constant shortage of funds-signs I chose to disregard until I found time to deal with them. Like most parents I didn't want to know that my son was a drug addict, and I was just putting off finding out the truth. But I certainly didn't want to learn about the problem from one of my patients. "Anything else you want to get off your chest?"

"Yes. Give your wife a break and stop singing in the shower."

"Why?"

"Because you can't carry a tune in a basket."

"I'll think about it. What else?"

"Russell has a malignancy in his colon."

"What? How do you know that?"

"I can smell it on his breath."

"Anything else?"

"That's all. For now."

We had a few more drinks in total silence, if you don't count the thoughts roaring through my head. This was interrupted, finally, by a tap on the door. I yelled, "Come in!" It was Giselle, back from the library.

Prot nodded to her and smiled warmly. She took his hand and kissed him on the cheek before slipping over and whispering in my ear, "It's Robert Porter. That's about all we know so far." Then she plopped down in the corner chair. I brought her a drink, which she gratefully accepted.

We chatted about inconsequential things for a while. Prot was having a fine time. After his fourth Scotch, when he was giggling at everything anyone said, I shouted, "Robert Porter! Can you hear me? We know who you are!"

Prot seemed taken aback, but he finally realized what I was doing. "I tol' you an' tol' you," he snorted unhappily. "He ain' cumin' out!"

"Ask him again!"

"I've tried. I've rilly rilly rilly tried. What else c'n I do?"

"You can stay! Giselle cried.

He turned slowly to face her. "I can't," he said sadly. "It's now or never."

"Why?"

"As I a'-ready 'splained to doctor bew-bew-doctor brewer, I am shed-shed-I am 'xpected. The window is op'n. I c'n only go back on August seventeenth. At 3:31 inna norming."

I let her go on. She couldn't do any worse than I had. "It's not so bad here, is it?" she pleaded.

Prot said nothing for a moment. I recognized the look on his face, that combination of amazement and disgust which meant he was trying to find words she could comprehend. Finally he said, "Yes, it is."

Giselle bowed her head.

I poured him another drink. It was time to play my last trump. "Prot, I want you to stay too."

"Because we need you here."

"Wha' for?"

"You think the Earth is a pretty bad place. You can help us make it better."

"How, f'r cryin' out loud?"

"Well, for example, there are a lot of people right here at the hospital you have helped tremendously. And there are many more beings- you can help if you will stay. We on Earth have a lot of problems. All of us need you."

"You c'n help y'rself if you want to. You just hafta want to, thass all there is to it."

"Robert needs you. Your friend needs you."

"He doesn't need me. He doesn't even pay 'tention to me anymore."

"That's because he's an independent being with a mind of his own. But he would want you to stay, I know he would."

"How d' you know that?"

"Ask him!"

Prot looked puzzled. And tired. He closed his eyes. His glass tipped, allowing some of his drink to spill onto the carpet. After a long minute or two his eyes opened again. He appeared to be completely sober.

"What did he say?"

"He told me I've wasted enough time here. He wants me to go away and leave him alone."

"What will happen to him when you go? Have you thought about that?"

The Cheshire-cat grin: "That's up to you."

Giselle said, "Please, prot. I want you to stay, too." There were tears in her eyes.

"I can always come back."

"When?"

"Not long. About five of your years. It will seem like no time at all."

"Five years?" I blurted out in surprise. "Why so long? I thought you'd be back much sooner than that."

Prot gave me a look of profound sadness. "Owing to the nature of time. .." he began, then: "There is a tradeoff for round trips. I would try to explain it to you, but I'm just too damn tired."

"Take me with you," Giselle pleaded.

He gave her a look of indescribable compassion. "I'm sorry. But next time..." She got up and hugged him. "Prot," I said, emptying the bottle into his and Giselle's glasses. "What if I tell you there's no such place as KPAX?"

"Now who's crazy?" he replied.

AFTER Jensen and Kowalski had taken prot back to his room, where he slept for a record five hours, Giselle told me what she had learned about Robert Porter. It wasn't much, but it explained why we hadn't been able to track him down earlier. After hundreds of hours of searching through old newspaper files, she and her friend at the library had found the obituary for Robert's father, Gerald Porter. From that she learned the name of their hometown, Guelph, Montana. Then she remembered something she had found much earlier about a murder/suicide that had taken place there in August of 1985, and she called the sheriff's office for the county in western Montana where the incident occurred. It turned out that the body of the suicide victim had never been found, but, owing to a clerical error, it had gone into the record as a drowning, rather than a missing person.

The man Robert killed had murdered his wife and daughter. Robert's mother had left town a few weeks after the tragedy to live with his sister in Alaska. The police didn't have the address. Giselle. wanted to fly out to Montana to try to determine where she had gone, as well as to obtain pictures of the wife and daughter, records and documents, etc., in case I could use them to get through to Robert. I quickly approved a travel advance and guaranteed payment of all her expenses.

"I'd like to see him before I go," she said. "He's probably sleeping."

"I just want to watch him for a few minutes."

I understood perfectly. I love to watch Karen sleep, too, her mouth open, her throat making little clicking noises. "Don't let him leave until I find her," she pleaded as she went out.

I don't remember much about the rest of the afternoon and evening, although reports have it that I fell asleep during a committee meeting. I do know that I tossed and turned all night thinking about prot and about Chip and about my father. I felt trapped somewhere in the middle of time, waiting helplessly to repeat the mistakes of the past over and over again.

GisELLE called me from Guelph the next morning. One of Robert's sisters, she reported, was indeed living in Alaska, the other in Hawaii. Sarah's family didn't have either address, but she (Giselle) was working with a friend at Northwest Airlines to try to determine Robert's mother's destination when she left Montana. In addition, she had gathered photographs and other artifacts from his school years and those of his wife-to-be, thanks to Sarah's mother and the high school principal, who had spent most of the previous night going through the files with her. "Find his mother," I told her. "If you can, get her back here. But fax all the pictures and the other stuff now."

"They should already be on, your desk."

I cancelled my interview with the Search Committee. Villers was not pleased-I was the last candidate for the directorship.

There were photos of Robert as a first-grader on up to his graduation picture, with the yearbook caption, "All great men are dead and I'm not feeling well," along with pictures of the wrestling teams and informal snapshots of soda fountains and pizza parlors. There were copies of his birth certificate, his immunization records, his grade transcripts (A's and B's), his citation for top marks in the county Latin contest, his diploma. There were also pictures of his sisters, who had graduated a few years before he had, and some information on them. And one of Sarah, a vivacious looking blonde, leading a cheer at a basketball game. Finally, there was a photograph of the family standing in front of their new house in the country, all smiles. Judging by the age of the daughter, it must have been taken not long before the tragedy occurred. Mrs. Trexler brought me some coffee as I was gazing at it, and I showed it to her. "His wife and daughter," I said. "Somebody killed them." Without warning she burst into tears and ran from the room. I remember thinking that she must be more sympathetic toward the plights of the patients than I had thought. It wasn't until much later, while paging through her personnel file at the time of her retirement, that I learned her own daughter had been raped and murdered nearly forty years earlier.

I had lunch in Ward Two and laid down the law: no cats on the table. I sat across from Mrs. Archer, who was now taking all her meals in the dining room. She was flanked by prot and Chuck. Both were talking animatedly with her. She looked uncertainly from one to the other, then slowly lifted a spoonful of soup to her, mouth. Suddenly, with a sound that could have been heard clear up in Ward Four, she slurped it in. Then she grabbed a handful of crackers and crumbled them vigorously into her bowl. She finished her meal with half the soup smeared all over her leathery face. "God," she said happily, "I've always wanted to do that."

"Next time," said Chuck, "belch!"

I thought I saw Bess smile a little, though it might have been wishful thinking on my part.

After the meal I returned to my office and asked Mrs. Trexler, who had regained her composure, to cancel all my appointments for the rest of the day. She mumbled something unintelligible about doctors, but agreed to do so. Then I went to find prot.

He was in the lounge, surrounded by all the patients and staff from Wards One and Two. Even Russell, who had experienced some sort of revelation after he understood that it was prot who had been responsible for Maria's deciding to become a nun, was there. When I came into the room he exclaimed, "The Teacher saith, My time is at hand." The corners of his mouth were caked with dried spittle.

"Not just yet, Russ," I said. "I need to talk to him first. Will everyone excuse us, please?" I calmed a chorus of protest by assuring them he would be back shortly.

On the way to his room I remarked, "Every one of them would do anything you asked them to. Why do you suppose that is?"

"Because I speak to them as equals. That's something you doctors seem to have a hard time with. I listen to them being to being."

"I listen to them!"

"You listen to them in a different way. You are not as concerned with them or their problems as you are with the papers and books you get out of it. Not to mention your salary, which is far too high."

He was wrong about that, but this wasn't the time to argue the matter. "You have a point," I said, "but my professional manner is necessary in order to help them."

"Let's see-if you believe that, then it must be true. Right?'"That's exactly what I wanted to talk to you about." We came to his room, the first time I had been there since his earlier disappearance. It was virtually bare except for his notebooks lying on the desk. "I've got some pictures and documents to show you," I said, spreading the file out on its surface, gently shoving aside his still-unfinished report. A few of the photographs I held back.

He looked over the pictures of himself, the birth and graduation certificates. "Where did you get these?"

"Giselle sent them to me. She found them in Guelph, Montana. Do you recognize the boy?"

"Yes. It is robert."

"No. It is you."

"Haven't we been over this before?"

"Yes, but at that time I didn't have anything to prove that you and Robert were the same person."

"And we aren't."

"How do you explain the fact that he looks so much like you?"

"Why is a soap bubble round?"

"No, I mean why does he look exactly like you?"

"He doesn't: He is thinner and fairer than I am. My eyes are light-sensitive and his aren't. We are different in a thousand ways, as you are different from your friend bill siegel. "

"No. Robert is you. You are Robert. You are each part of the same being."

"You are wrong. I'm not even human. We are just close friends. Without me he'd be dead by now."

"And so would you. Whatever happens to him also happens to you. Do you understand what I am saying?"

"It is an interesting hypothesis." He wrote something in one of the notebooks.

"Look. Do you remember telling me that the universe was going to expand and contract over and over again, forever?"

"Naturally."

"And you said later that if we were in the contraction phase, time would run backward but we'd never know the difference because all we would have would be our memories of the past and a lack of knowledge of the future. Remember?"

"Of course."

"All right. It's the same here. From your perspective Robert is a separate individual. From my perspective the truth is perfectly logical and obvious. You and Robert are one and the same person."

"You misunderstand the reversal of time. Whether it is moving forward or backward, the perception is the same."

"So?"

"So it makes no difference whether you are correct or not."

"But you admit the possibility that I'm right?"

His smile widened markedly. "I'll admit that, if you'll admit it's possible that I came from K-PAX."

From his point of view there wasn't the slightest doubt about his background. Given several more months or years I might have been able to convince him otherwise. But there was no more time. I pulled the pictures of Sarah and Rebecca from my pocket. "Do you recognize them?"

He seemed shocked, but only for a moment. "It is his wife and daughter."

"And this one?"

"This is his mother and father."

"Giselle is trying to locate your mother and sister in Alaska. She is going to try to bring your mother here. Please, prot, don't leave, until you talk to her."

He threw up his hands. "How many times must I tell you-I have to leave at 3:31 in the morning. Nothing can change that!"

"We are going to get her here as soon as we can." Without looking at a clock he said, "Well, you have exactly twelve hours and eight minutes to do it in."

THAT evening Howie and Ernie threw prot a bon voyage party in the recreation room. There were many gifts for their "alien" friend, souvenirs of his visit to Earth: records, flowers, all kinds of fruits and vegetables. Mrs. Archer hammered out popular tunes on the piano accompanied by Howie on the violin. Cats were everywhere.

Chuck gave him a copy of Gulliver's Travels, which he had lifted from the bookshelves in the quiet room. I recalled prot's telling me that the (Earth) story he liked best was "The Emperor's New Clothes." His favorite movies, incidentally, were The Day the Earth Stood Still, 2001, ET, Starman, and, of course, Bambi.

There was a great deal of hugging and kissing, but I detected a certain amount of tension as well. Everyone seemed nervous, excited. Finally, Chuck demanded to know which of them was going to get to go with him. With those crossed eyes I wasn't sure whether he was looking at me or prot. But prot answered, "It will be the one who goes to sleep first."They all lined up immediately for a last tearful embrace, then dashed to their beds, leaving him alone to finish his report and prepare for his, and hopefully their, journey, each trying desperately to fall asleep with visions of yorts dancing in their heads.

I told him I had some things to do, but would come to say good-bye before he left. Then I retired to my office.

At about eleven o'clock Giselle called. She had found Robert's sister's address in Alaska. Unfortunately, the woman had died the previous September, and his mother had gone on to live with the other sister in Hawaii. Giselle had tried to reach her, but without success. "It's too late to get her to New York in time," she said, "but if we find her, she might be able to call him."

"Make it fast," I told her.

For the next three hours I tried to work to the accompaniment of Manon Lescaut on my cassette player. In Act Three of that opera Manon and Des Grieux depart for the New World, and I understood at last why I love opera so much: Everything that human beings are capable of, all of life's joy and tragedy, all its emotion and experience, can be found there.

My father must have felt this, too. I can still see him lying on the living room sofa on a Saturday afternoon with his eyes closed, listening to the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts. Oh, how I wish he had lived and we had had a chance to talk about music and his grandchildren and all the other things that make life fun and interesting and good! I tried to envision a parallel universe in which he had not died and I had become an opera star, and I imagined singing some of his favorite arias for him while Mother brought out a big Sunday dinner for us to eat.

I suppose I must have dozed off. I dreamed I was in an unfamiliar place where the cloudless purple sky was full of moons and sailing birds, and the land a panoply of trees and tiny green flowers. At my feet stood a pair of huge beetles with humanoid eyes; a small brown snake-or was it a large worm?-slithered along behind them. In the distance I could see fields of red and yellow grains, could make out several small elephants and other roaming animals. A few chimpanzee-like creatures chased one another into and out of a nearby forest. I found myself crying, it was so lovely. But the most beautiful feature of all was the utter silence. There wasn't a hint of wind and it was so quiet I could hear the soft ringing of faraway bells. They seemed for all the world to be tolling, "gene, gene, gene...."

I woke with a start. The clock was chiming 3:00. I hurried down to prot's room, where I found him at his desk writing furiously in his notebook, trying, presumably, to complete his report about Earth and its inhabitants before departing for K-PAX, letting it go until the last minute, it appeared, just as a human being might do. Beside him were his fruits, a stalk or two of broccoli, a jar of peanut butter, the essays and other souvenirs, all neatly packed in a small cardboard box. On the desk, next to his notebooks, were a pocket flashlight, a hand mirror, and the list of questions from Dr. Flynn. All six of the lower-ward cats were lying asleep on the bed.

I asked him whether he minded my looking over the answers he had formulated to those fifty queries. Without interrupting his writing he shook his head and waved me into the other chair.

Some of the questions, e.g., about nuclear energy, he had left unanswered, for reasons he had made clear in several of our sessions together. The last item was a request for a list of all the planets prot had visited around the universe, to which he had replied, "See Appendix," which tallied the complete list of sixty-four. This inventory included a brief description of those bodies and their inhabitants, as well as a series of star charts. It was not everything Professor Flynn and his colleagues, including Steve, had hoped for, but enough to keep them busy for some time, no doubt.

At around 3:10 he threw down his pencil, yawned, and stretched noisily as if he had just finished a routine piece of work.

"May I see it?"

"Why not? But if you want to read it you'd better make a copy right away-it's the only one I've got." I called one of the night nurses to take it upstairs, admonishing him to get some help and to use all the copiers that were operational. He hurried off, clutching the little notebooks as though they were so many eggs. The possibility of stalling the process occurred to me at that point, but it might well have made matters even worse and I quickly rejected the idea.

I had a feeling the report would be a rather uncomplimentary account of prot's "visit" to Earth, and I asked him, "Is there anything about our planet that you liked? Besides our fruits, I mean."

"Sure," he said, with an all-too-familiar- grin. "Everything but the people. With one or two exceptions, of course."

There didn't seem to be much left to say. I thanked my amazing friend for the many interesting discussions and for his success with some of the other patients. In return, he thanked me for "all the wonderful produce," and presented me with the gossamer thread.

I pretended to take it. "I'm sorry to see you go," I said, shaking his brawny hand, though I wanted to hug him. "We will miss you."

"Thank you. I will miss this place, too. It has great potential." At the time I thought he was referring to the hospital, but of course he meant the Earth.

The nurse came running back with the copy a few minutes before it was time for prot to leave. I returned the original notebooks, a little jumbled but intact, to prot.

"Just in the nick of time," he said. "But now you'll have to leave the room. Any being within a few feet will be swept along with me. Better take them with you, too," he said, indicating the cats.

I decided to humor him. Well, why not? There wasn't a damn thing I could do about it anyway. I rousted the cats from his bed. One by one they brushed against his leg and streaked for various other warm places. "Good-bye, Sojourner Porter," I said. "Don't get knocked over by any aps "

"Not good-bye. Just auf wiedersehen. I'll be back before you know it." He pointed toward the sky. "After all, KPAX isn't so far away, really."

I stepped out of the room, but left the door open. I had already notified the infirmary staff to stand by, to be prepared for anything. I could see Dr. Chakraborty down the corridor with an emergency cart containing a respirator and all the rest. There were only a couple of minutes to go.

The last I saw of prot he was sitting at his desk tapping his report into a neater stack, checking his flashlight. He placed his box of fruit and other souvenirs on his lap, picked up the little mirror and gazed into it. Then he transferred the flashlight to his shoulder. At that moment one of the security guards came puffing up to tell me that I had an urgent long-distance call. It was Robert's mother! At exactly the same instant, Chuck came running down the hall with his worn little suitcase, demanding to be "taken aboard." Even with all this commotion I couldn't have taken my eyes off prot for more than a couple of seconds. But when I turned to tell him about the phone call, he was gone!

We all raced into the room. The only trace of him left behind were his dark glasses lying on a scribbled message. "I won't be needing these for a while," the note said. "Please keep them for me."

Acting on my earlier hunch that prot had hidden out in the storage tunnel during the few days he had allegedly gone to Canada, Greenland, and Iceland, we rushed to that area. The door was locked, and the security guard had some difficulty finding the right key. We waited patiently-I was confident we would find prot there-until he finally got the heavy door open and found the light switch. There was enough dusty old equipment to start our own museum, but there was no sign of prot. Nor was he hiding in the surgical theater or the seminar room, or anywhere else we thought he might have tried to conceal himself. It didn't occur to any of us to check the rooms of the other patients.

ONE of the nurses found him a few hours later lying unconscious and in the fetal position on the floor of Bess's room. He was little more than alive. His eyes were barely dilatable, his muscles like steel rods. I recognized the symptoms immediately-there were two two other patients exactly like him in Ward 3B: He was in a deep catatonic state. Prot was gone; Robert had stayed behind. I had rather expected something like this. What I failed to foresee, however, was that later the same morning Bess would also be reported missing.

GISELLE had the report translated by a cryptographer she knew, who used as a basis for this the pax-o version of Hamlet that prot had done for me earlier. Titled "Preliminary Observations on B-TIK (RX 4987165.233)," it was primarily a detailed natural history of the Earth, especially of the recent changes thereon, which he attributed to man's "cancerous" population growth, his "mindless" consumption of its natural resources, and his "catastrophic" elevation of himself to superiority over all the other species who cohabit our planet. All of this is consistent with his use of capitals for the Earth and other planets, and lower case for individual beings.

There were also some suggestions as to how we might "treat" our social "illnesses": the elimination of religion, capital, nationalism, the family as the basic social and educational unit-all the things he imagined were fundamentally wrong with us and, paradoxically, the things most of us hold dear. Without these "adjustments," he wrote, the "prognosis" was not good. Indeed, he gave us only another few decades to make the "necessary" changes. Otherwise, he concluded, "human life on the PLANET EARTH will not survive another century." His last four words were somewhat more encouraging, however. They were: Oho minny blup kelsur-"They are yet children."