K-PAX IV: A New Visitor From The Constellation Lyra

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The phone woke us up at 5:30 Monday morning. I thought it might be Smythe again with the early results of the baby-naming contest, and decided to let the machine answer it. My wife, however, who always thinks it might be an urgent call from one of our kids (we still call them “kids” even though the youngest one is nearly thirty), picked up the phone. In a few seconds she handed it to me and went back to sleep. It was our son-in-law. I had never heard him so excited (though he’s always excited about something).

“What’s up, Steve?” I asked him without much enthusiasm.

“Fled just left! She came last night for a picnic!”

“That’s great, Steve, but couldn’t it wait until—”

“Ah thought you’d want to be among the first to know that the speed of light is equal to the expansion rate of the universe! In other words, light doesn’t travel at 186,000 miles per second through the universe at all. The universe is expanding at that rate in all directions, and photons just go along for the ride! This explains everything! Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light because if it did, it would escape the bounds of the universe, which is impossible! Einstein was right, but for the wrong reason!”

I knew what he was saying, more or less, but was a bit annoyed to get the information second-hand. “I thought fled wasn’t interested in stuff like that.”

“She isn’t. Ah guess she just wanted to get me off her back.”

I had no trouble believing that. “When did you say she came for this picnic?”

“Last night! Or this morning, actually! About two a.m.!”

“She came for a picnic at two in the morning?”

“Yep. We were in bed, o’ course, but we all wanted to talk to her about different things, and we got up right away. She was hungry, so we all went out to the back yard and had some fruit and veggies.”

“In the dark?”

“Not exactly. We lit some candles. It was pretty nice, actually. You ought to try it sometime.”

“I’ll think about it. Do you know where she’d been?”

“South America. Her last field trip, she said. Anyway, Ah asked her a bunch of questions Ah’d been saving for her. She told me enough stuff for a dozen papers. Of course everything she said needs to be confirmed experimentally. But shit—”

“Did she tell you anything else? Like where she’s leaving from?”

“Well, no. Nobody asked her that. Rain happened to be home, and Star kept taking pictures of her with the rest of us, and we took some more of him and Rain with fled. I’ll send you a few. She gave him a hair from her head, too. And then Abby talked to her about what might happen to the Earth and what the options were….”

“Options? What options?”

‘There ain’t any. She said the only way we’re going to survive is to evolve.”

“How long will that take?”

“We’re way overdue.”

“Did fled tell you where she was going when she left you?”

“Back to the hospital, Ah think.”

“Then I’d better get going!”

Steve doesn’t always take a hint. “The other reason Ah called was to thank you for getting her to come over. It was amazin’! Think about it, Gene! Light isn’t movin’ at all! It’s just going along with the expansion of the universe. That’s why it zooms off in all directions at the speed it does. Anything else travels at a slower speed depending on its mass. Neutrinos travel a little slower than light because they have a little dab of mass. It’s a little more complicated than that, o’ course, but basically, the heavier a particle, the slower it goes.”

“O’ course.”

“And get this: black holes don’t just keep light from escaping. They actually stop the expansion of the universe in their immediate vicinity! Which is why no light can come from them!”

I had to admit it sounded pretty amazin’. “What did she say about superstring theory?”

“According to fled, the whole thing is a piece of shit. There are dozens of string theories. She said they’re either all right or they’re all wrong.”

“Makes sense, I guess.”

“Ah want to go to K-PAX!”

“Now?”

“Well, no. First Ah need to write a buncha papers….”

* * *

I left the house early to beat the traffic, and was still in a fog when I got to the hospital. But I had been invited to the Monday morning staff meeting for the first time since my “retirement,” and I wasn’t about to pass up the opportunity. For one thing, I wanted to discuss an idea I had had about fled and the patients.

I wasn’t the first to arrive. Goldfarb, as always, was already there, going through some notes, editing her agenda. She nodded when I came in, but went back to her business as if I weren’t there.

The perfect copy of van Gogh’s “Sunflowers,” painted by a former patient, was still hanging on the side wall, a clear reminder that when I finally stop coming to MPI the place would go on perfectly well without me. At times like this one wonders what impact, if any, his life on Earth really has. In another hundred years who would know I had even been here?

The rest of the staff dribbled in: Hannah Rudqvist, who blushed darkly when she saw me, followed by Ron Menninger, Laura Chang, Cliff Roberts, and finally Will (Rothstein was absent—for personal reasons, Goldfarb said). I couldn’t help wonder whether Laura and Will had separated their entrances for appearance’s sake.

There were several topics on the table. Ron reported that Ed, a murderous psychopath who had become a lamb after a brief talk with prot, had paid us a return visit over the weekend and ran into Charlotte, another of his ilk. It was love at first sight, Ron disclosed incredulously, a storybook romance of the movie variety. Whether it was their common violent background or simply the kind of unpredictable chemistry that results in a passionate love affair between more ordinary individuals Menninger didn’t know (who would?), but they were inseparable for the entire two days. Now Charlotte has announced that she is “ready” to leave the hospital. If MPI and the courts won’t allow that, Ed wants to move back in!

The consensus was that Ron should prepare an assessment of Charlotte’s progress over the last few years and, in the meantime, we should allow Ed full visitation rights and see what developed. The vote was 5-1 in favor (Menninger, the lone dissenter, had, himself, once been a victim of Charlotte’s sadistic nature), and one abstention (mine).

Next up was Jerry. Laura reported that he had sunk into a severe depression, and had even talked about possibility of ending it all. “He’s bored out of his mind,” she lamented. Although she didn’t think suicide was likely, it was nonetheless a serious concern: one doesn’t take such threats by a mental patient lightly. She compared him to Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver, who, after returning home from his visits to various other lands and their inhabitants, found human beings so repugnant that he wanted nothing more to do with them. In Jerry’s case, everything about the “real” world seemed stupid and faintly repugnant.

“How can we convince him that his new—i.e., normal—existence isn’t so terrible?” she asked us. Unfortunately, no one could provide a good answer to that.

“Different things make different people happy,” Will offered. “It depends on the individual. The usual factors are love, religion, an interesting career, money—things like that.”

Cliff, as usual, came up with a smart-ass remark. “We could hook him up with a rich, beautiful lady preacher who’s always wanted to live in a house of matchsticks.”

I reminded him that Jerry couldn’t remember how to build matchstick houses anymore. He demanded to know if I had a better idea. I didn’t, but Goldfarb contended that fled was smart enough to have foreseen what might happen to Jerry when she “re-wired” him. Maybe, she suggested, our alien visitor had something else in mind….

The rest of the hour was taken up by brief case reviews of a number of the other patients, including Darryl. I mentioned that my son Fred was planning to bring in an actress who resembled Meg Ryan, to see if an unpleasant encounter with her might snap him out of his impossible dream. There were no objections to giving it a try—what was there to lose? Most of the other issues were routine administrative matters, which droned on and on, but I just enjoyed being there, probably for the last time, gazing at the pictures, taking in the sounds of concerned people trying to come to terms with difficult mental patients, trying not to remember how short life really is. But, being human, I also glanced at Hannah and Will, sitting together in apparent innocence, pretending all was well at home. I hoped my scowl didn’t show. But I realized that Karen, as always, was right. They were consenting adults who knew what they were getting into, and I had no right to interfere, regardless of who might be hurt.

I was awakened from my reverie by Goldfarb, who brought up fled. “Do we know yet when she’s leaving?”

“It’s still not firm, but I think it might be in a couple of days. She was in Princeton early this morning, but I don’t know where she went after that. If she shows up here today, I was hoping we could set up a group meeting between her and the patients. She promised to talk to everyone at some point, and has already spoken with some of them” (I didn’t mention the ‘cone-shaped thing,’ not knowing what it meant myself—was she making holograms for their relatives?), “but I don’t think there’s enough time for her to interact with everyone else individually.”

“Any objections?” Goldfarb inquired. There were none. “See what you can do,” she said.

Finally, our hard-working director mentioned that she had received a call from the producer of the TV program. (Actually, it turned out to be a committee of producers). They were very enthusiastic about the show, suggesting that it was on the “fast track” and the telecast would be moved up to September. But it wasn’t fled’s announcement—that the Bullocks were coming if we didn’t change our collective habits—or even her pregnancy, which had already been scooped by the British magazine article, but the daily lives and concerns of the patients at the Manhattan Psychiatric Institute that had triggered their enthusiasm. “This is the last untapped source of human emotion that hasn’t yet been explored by television,” he informed her. “Until now, we’ve been afraid to approach it. But we were wrong. Everyone can empathize with the problems of the mentally ill,” he enthused. “Certainly everyone here at the network.”

Yes! I thought. If nothing else came of fled’s visit, a better understanding of this serious medical (and social) problem would have made her trip worthwhile.

* * *

Fled wasn’t in Room 520 so, as usual, I went looking for her. I didn’t find her on the lawn or in the lounge, but I did run across Darryl speaking with—Meg Ryan. They seemed to be deeply engaged in a heated conversation, so I left them alone.

After searching everywhere else, I returned to our regular meeting place; by then fled had returned from wherever she had been. She was chewing on a potato, and there was a pile of peelings on the desk next to the basket. She took another one and began to strip it slowly with her teeth. I took the opportunity to mention something that had been bothering me all along. “Prot never peeled his vegetables. Or his fruit.”

“Yes, I know. Dremers are very primitive in some ways.”

“They can’t even read minds!” I joked. She stared at me and continued to munch. “Before we get started,” I began, “I want to thank you for visiting Abby and Steve and the boys.”

“Wasn’t as bad as Ah thought.” Crunch, crunch, munch. “And in answer to your first question (I hadn’t asked it yet), it won’t be long now.”

“What won’t be long?”

She grinned at that; perhaps she had finally given me credit for a touch of humor.

I smiled back. “So you’ve got a football stadium lined up?”

“Not exactly. Something much better than that.”

“Well? What is it? Where is it?”

“One moment, please.” She got up and reached for the light, pulling out some sort of tiny electronic device. “‘Bye, boys!” she yelled into it. I didn’t want to think about how Dartmouth and Wang’s ears must be feeling.

“They aren’t feeling anything, my human friend. I deactivated this thing as soon as he put it there.”

“He?”

“Sauer.”

“While you were here?”

“I pretended to be asleep.”

“You mean after you—and he—”

“Exactly.”

“So they haven’t heard anything all along?”

“No, they heard something. A fake broadcast I recorded for them. They think we talked about my baby blanket the whole time I was here.” She flipped the device into the wastebasket. “Can you keep a secret, coach?”

“Nothing that I hear in this room will ever get out of it. It’s been that way for thirty-five years, and I don’t intend to change anything now.”

“I knew that, but I also know how much you love saying it. We’ll be leaving from the grand canyon.”

“The Grand— I suspect that will hold 100,000 people.”

“I only wish I could take more.”

“Maybe someone else will come for the rest of us.”

“The bullocks are coming! The bullocks are coming!”

“Uh—I’ve been meaning to ask you about that.”

She plopped an entire potato into her mouth. “Have you, indeed?”

“Tell me: was that some kind of joke? A ruse to scare us into coming together as a world and learning to behave ourselves?”

Chomping loudly, she managed to spit out, “Why would I do that? If I were a bullock, I would’ve been here long ago. It was prot who asked them to give you more time. He likes your species, for some reason. Of course there’s no accounting for taste.” A spray of potato bits few in my face.

I ignored them. “And they’re really coming in another fifteen years?”

“Give or take a day or two.”

“So you’re just like prot—you don’t really care if we humans survive or not, do you?”

“About as much as you care if your elephants do.”

It was no use pretending I was on the front line of the save-the-elephant movement, and I didn’t try.

“Anything else, coach?”

“We’re having a bit of a problem with Jerry….”

“Already done.”

“Already—”

“Simple matter. I re-did his wiring. He’s just like he was before.”

“Thank you. I think. And what about the other patients? Can you see them all sometime before you go? A group session, everyone included?”

She pulled out the hologram device she had showed me when she first arrived at the house. “This will tell you more than you want to know about your patients.”

I stared at the thing.

“Just set it down on its flat end, remember? And turn it to whichever patient you want to review. It will do the rest.”

“You mean—”

“I’m leaving it with you. A word of advice, though, my sapien friend: when you’ve finished interacting with the projections, I’d suggest you don’t let it get into the wrong hands.”

“When did you do this?”

“Whenever I was around them. Of course they didn’t know how deeply I was peering into their minds.”

I stuffed the thing in my jacket pocket. “How do I keep it out of the wrong hands?”

“Do I have to do all your thinking, my dimwitted friend? When you’re finished with it, just bury the thing. Like a time capsule. You could write on it, ‘To be opened in a million years,’” she hooted. “C’mon. I’ll take you home.”

“Home?”

“You know, doc. Your dwelling.”

“Uh…” Oh, what the hell. You only live once.

The next thing I knew I was standing on our back porch. She took my hand. “Let’s go in.”

Amazingly, I wasn’t dizzy or, for that matter, felt anything at all. It seemed something like a movie cut. Karen and Flower were in the living room. While the latter went for a toy, fled began removing bugs from the lights, the phones, the electrical outlets—a dozen in all. “Souvenirs, anyone?” she shrieked, dropping all the paraphernalia on an end table and chasing our indefatigable canine through the house. After fifteen or twenty minutes Flower had finally had her fill, probably for the first time in her life. As she lay panting, I asked fled, “The boys got fake messages from these, too?”

“The government thinks you lead the most exciting lives on EARTH! Parties, orgies—”

“Can you give us a clue about how you did—”

“I’m going to tell you something, doctor b. You listening? You wouldn’t even begin to understand it even if I tried to explain it to you. It’s time you stopped asking questions and just paid attention to what you know already. Now I’m going to say it again. Slowly. You ready? Here is all you need to know: the bullocks are coming in fifteen years. Do you read me loud and clear?”

“That’s affirmative.”

“Good.” Suddenly she clapped her hands together and screeched, “Let’s go for a ride!” The light and mirror re-appeared, and the next thing we knew we were all standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon staring down into the biggest natural gorge in the world. Karen and I had never been there. “Cool” doesn’t come close to describing it. It was still early morning in the West, and the brilliant sun cast long shadows on the floor of the cavern below. Wisps of fog floated above the river valley. A small herd of burros or donkeys dotted the verdant floor below. The scope could not possibly be accurately reproduced by the greatest of landscape painters, or even a wall-size photograph. I vowed to spend as much time as possible from that moment on seeing all the sights around the globe that we had never found time to take in earlier.

Another flash and suddenly we were at the bottom, standing beside a gushing river, the creator of it all. The air smelled fresh, and full of life. The burros looked up from their breakfast and sized us up before bending down again, ignoring us completely. Spring blossoms of all colors and kinds demanded our attention. The rushing water provided a paradisical background to the beautiful scene. The four of us took it all in without a word. Even Flower was awestruck, or perhaps she was just too tired to chase the burros.

“Let’s come back here some day,” my wife whispered to me. Fled’s grin was a foot wide. In another moment we were back in our living room, and Fled was nowhere to be seen. But I knew where she was. She only had two days to gather up 100,000 people and stash them in a canyon.

* * *

That afternoon, after Karen had gone bowling with her women’s league, I went to fled’s website, where I found the following notice:

SORRY, THE PASSENGER LIST IS FULL

APPLICATIONS ARE CLOSED

I scrolled down to see if there were any other changes or additions. The only one appeared at the end.

COMING SOON: THE BADGUYS

Suddenly I remembered the hologram device in my jacket pocket. I retrieved it from the closet and hurried back to my study, where I carefully placed it on the floor, as fled had done earlier. To my surprise I found a three-dimensional representation of a four- or five-year-old girl at a dinner table with, I presumed, her parents. She was sitting on her hands, and appeared to be terrified. Tears had run down her dirty face.

“It’s all right, Phyllis,” her mother cajoled her. “Eat your chicken.”

The child didn’t move.

“Eat that goddamn chicken, you little slut,” her father snarled.

“I don’t want it. I’m afraid to.”

“Daddy won’t hurt you,” her mother promised. “Go ahead.”

Little Phyllis timidly picked up a piece of fried chicken. Before she got it to her plate the father whacked her hand with his fork. The chicken fell onto the floor, and the girl began crying again.

“GET DOWN THERE AND EAT THAT FOOD!” her father screamed.

Phyllis, her arms thrust upward to ward off blows, screamed, too. But she quickly got down on the floor and tried to pick up the wing.

“NOT WITH YOUR HANDS, YOU LITTLE BITCH—WITH YOUR MOUTH! YOU THROW YOUR FOOD ON THE FLOOR, YOU EAT IT THERE. YOU DON’T DESERVE TO EAT LIKE A HUMAN BEING!”

Phyllis did as she was told.

“And for being such a clumsy girl, you’re going to get the bathtub treatment tonight,” her mother added sweetly.

Phyllis cried even louder. “Please, Mommy, please no! I won’t throw any more chicken on the floor! Please don’t put me in the bathtub! Oh, please, not tonight!”

“And after that, you little shit, I’ve got a cigarette for you!” her father promised.

The girl wailed again before leaning over and throwing up on the floor.

“You lick that up, you little bitch! LICK IT UP!”

“Be more careful with that cigarette this time,” the woman admonished her husband. “We don’t want it to show.”

Phyllis suddenly dissolved and reappeared in another scene. She was sitting in a corner of a bare room, perhaps her bedroom, rocking back and forth, back and forth. She looked to be a little older, and was no longer crying. Her face was blank, her eyes staring, as if she were a porcelain doll. Instinctively I reached out to pick her up, to give her a hug. She didn’t recoil, as I had expected her to, nor did she react in any way. It was as if she were dead….

I didn’t want to know what else they had done to Phyllis, and quickly turned the device a few degrees. The room turned dark, and I found myself in a dirt-floor basement. I could smell the mold, feel the cold dampness. There was an emaciated boy of six or seven in dirty rags crawling on his hands and knees—perhaps there wasn’t enough room to stand up—next to a grimy window. He reached for a spider, pushed it into his mouth, and then went for a dead fly attached to a piece of the web. A mouse ran by and little Rick quickly grabbed it. Just as he was about to bite off its head it squirmed out of his grasp and disappeared through a crack in the wall. He began to cry.

I turned the damn thing again.

This time it was a boy playing Monopoly with, I suspect, an older brother. The boy landed on Park Place. Without warning, the brother slapped him hard in the face with his bare hand. Rocky didn’t seem surprised. He didn’t even cry. He just went on blankly playing the game….

I kept turning the device, but no matter how I set it down I found only misery and anguish. I caught a glimpse of someone who resembled Claire being laughed at, presumably by her parents and other relatives, when she said she wanted to be a doctor. And there were others. Probably all our patients were represented, but I made no effort to distinguish one from the other. There were also two staff members, whose horrible childhood explained a lot about their adult behavior, but whom I can’t identify in these pages.

One last turn, hoping to find an iota of happiness, or at least a little less abuse than befell the others. A chimpanzee was holding her baby in a peaceful jungle setting. There was hardly a sound, except for leaves rustling in the trees, and perhaps the tinkling of a nearby stream. The sun came through the foliage, dappling the soft ground and the young ape. For a second I allowed myself a smile. Without warning, however, the pair were surrounded by three large mongrel dogs. Cradling her child, the mother jumped up, ran for a tree, and almost made it before their canine pursuers caught up with them. It was over in a few seconds, the adult chimpanzee’s throat torn out, the little one screaming, the men with their rifles yelling at the dogs to leave the baby alone….

The scene shifted without interference from me. In a brightly-lit laboratory another ape (perhaps the grownup baby) was sitting in a tiny cage, his head clamped into a vise-like tool. Electrodes connected to heavy black cables protruded from his head. A couple of women in white coats turned a dial and watched for the ape’s reaction, one of the scientists or technicians jotting down the results in a thick black notebook. But the chimpanzee was long past reacting. His vacant eyes stared sightlessly ahead. I saw that he had, sometime in the past, chewed off half his fingers….

I spun the thing and ended up on an icy outcropping near the ocean. Several men with grappling hooks were beating baby seals to death or kicking them senseless with their heavy boots, hundreds and hundreds of them. The bodies, already stripped of their fur (many were still alive, writhing on the ice), dotted the landscape, red with warm blood….

Another turn and a huge bull was being murdered in a ring. Thousands and thousands of de-beaked chickens were crammed into tiny cages, their eggs collected on a conveyer belt, the air saturated with fecal ammonia fumes. A live pig whose throat had just been cut was thrashing and screaming on a red-stained cement floor. I suddenly realized that there was little difference between child and animal abuse….

That was all I could take. Leaving Flower inside so she wouldn’t dig it up later, I grabbed the terrible device and headed for the tool shed, where I picked up a shovel and, forgetting, or maybe not caring, about government agents everywhere, hiked deep into the woods behind the house to bury the fucking thing. For the first time in years I found myself weeping. “Let the goddamn Bullocks come!” I shouted to the rabbits and squirrels. “Let them take us out of existence and put a stop to this endless goddamn cruelty!”

Later, when Karen came home, I explained what had happened. Without a word she put her arms around me until, finally, after what seemed like hours, I began to feel better.