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

CHAPTER TWO

I spent the weekend listening to the tapes of my conversations with prot in 1990, 1995, and 1997. Not to refresh my memory of those sessions—I would never forget them—but to reconsider all the mistakes I had made in dealing with our first K-PAXian visitor. There were plenty, foremost of which was my reluctance to accept anything he had been telling me. Yet, how many psychiatrists would have done otherwise? All of us have encountered patients claiming to be from the reaches of space, from another time, even from the corridors of heaven or the depths of hell.

For those who have not read the previous books, a very brief review: prot had been brought to MPI from Bellevue Hospital, an apparent delusional amnesiac (eventually diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder). With the help of Giselle Griffin, a freelance reporter who had come to the hospital to do a story on mental illness, we were finally able to track down his Earthly origins to a small town in Montana, where his wife and nine-year-old daughter had been brutally assaulted and murdered. That, of course, could drive anybody insane (though technically, it was an alter ego, Robert Porter, who was the severely traumatized patient).

But prot was different from most multiple personality sufferers. Not only did he know certain things about astronomy that even astronomers (like my son-in-law Steve) didn’t know, but was demonstrably able to see light in the ultraviolet range. At first I didn’t believe he could travel at light speed, and even much faster, until he eventually demonstrated that ability on national television, and even then I thought it must be some kind of hallucinatory trick.

With fled, on the other hand, it seemed clear that we wouldn’t have to waste time determining whether she was also from K-PAX and came here on a beam of light. For one thing she knew prot and had brought holograms of him and Robert and Giselle, and, for another, she certainly couldn’t have come from Earth. I wondered whether she liked fruit; she might have looked like an ape, but that wasn’t actually the case. Who knew what her wants and needs might be, or exactly what she planned to do with her time here. I would have to spend at least a couple of visits just getting to know her.

Superimposed on all this was the urgent question of what effect fled might have on the other patients at the hospital. Would she be sympathetic to their plights, as prot had been? Or indifferent, as she was to my cosmological questions? Or perhaps even antagonistic toward them (and vice versa)? Her edges seemed considerably rougher than prot’s; would this propensity for directness (she reminded me of former patient Frankie, now a resident of K-PAX) put off the other inmates, as well as the hospital staff?

I certainly hoped not. Some of the patients had been waiting years for another visitor from K-PAX; many of them, in fact, were depending on her to take them back with her when she returned. These included Cassandra, our long-time resident prognosticator, and the aforementioned Jerry, our autistic engineer, who was working on a large matchstick model of the Institute itself, including the new Villers wing, named for our former hospital director and his wife (and rather unsympathetically dubbed, by Cliff Roberts, “The Screaming Hilton”). Other, newer residents, including some of the “Magnificent Seven,” were also patiently waiting for a voyage to the stars. Most wanted nothing more than to try their luck on another planet.

Two of the latter, incidentally, have been successfully treated and released, and a third, the “female Jesus,” was transferred to our sister hospital, “The Big Institute,” at Columbia. (We sometimes exchange difficult patients, hoping that someone can come up with something the other staff has not; in any case a change of venue is often salutary for everyone involved.) The other four were still with us. Besides Howard and Phyllis these include Rick, who is constitutionally unable to tell the truth, and Darryl, who thinks Meg Ryan is in love with him. Other recent denizens include “Dr. Claire Smith,” who believes that she herself is a psychiatrist, rather than an inmate, and Barney, who has never been able to laugh at anything. It was patients like these whom we all sincerely hoped fled might be able to help—something that none of the staff has been able to do, even with years of dedicated effort.

I hoped that these and our other residents would give fled the benefit of the doubt. In her favor was the notion most of them shared: that she held the key to departing our hostile planet, the direct or indirect source of their problems. Some of the issues responsible for the patients’ troubles would, indeed, be left behind if they could but reach escape velocity—oppressive parents, onerous duties, unwanted obligations, endless guilts and frustration, and all the other baggage that, they believed, would no longer harass them. Even some of the staff would probably go with fled in a New York minute.

But first, before any of that could be sorted out, I needed to determine what she really wanted from us in order to try to head off any problems that she (or anyone else) might encounter during her visit. And beyond all this, I hadn’t forgotten that I would be shouldering an enormous responsibility in talking with another visitor from the planet K-PAX, both to the hospital and to society at large. Who knew what she might come up with that could be of tremendous benefit to everyone, if only I were astute enough to recognize it?

On Saturday night I went out to look for K-PAX in the constellation Lyra, but of course I couldn’t find it—it’s too far away. Nevertheless it was prominent in my imagination, as if it were the full moon. Prot was there, and Robert and Giselle and Gene and Oxie and all the others who had made the journey eight years ago, and all the memories came roaring back….

I couldn’t wait for Monday to come.

* * *

I went up in my rented Cessna on Sunday morning. It always gives me a sense of perspective to go flying on a beautiful spring day. No telephones ringing, no one knocking on the door—only the sky above and the ground below. And I suspected it might be the last chance I’d have for a while to get away from the events that were sure to engulf us at home and in the hospital.

That afternoon the phone started to ring. Daughter Abby and her husband Steve had decided to come up for a visit, and I was pretty sure I knew why: Abby had told my astronomer son-in-law that fled was here, and he wanted to talk to our alien visitor. Though Karen had already explained that she wasn’t interested in astronomical matters, Steve, as always, was undeterred—he wanted to learn whatever he could from her.

Will and Dawn, with daughter Jessica, arrived about the same time. I think Will felt a little guilty about offering to take on fled, only to be rebuffed by hospital director Goldfarb. At the same time, he expressed a sincere interest in discussing her “case,” and in helping in whatever way he could. I reminded him that psychiatry is an overworked profession and that his other charges would appreciate his not diluting his efforts on their behalf. He reluctantly agreed, but I could see that the wheels in his head were still turning. I assured him I would consult with him regularly. He is really quite knowledgeable and thoughtful, and I value his opinions very highly. Whatever his motive for showing up, it was wonderful to see our seven-year-old granddaughter, who had just lost an incisor. “When will it grow back in, Grandpa?”

“When you’re twenty-two,” I told her.

Her eyes became as big as saucers. I laughed so she’d know I was joking.

Even Fred, the actor, called. He couldn’t make it because he was doing a matinee and learning his lines for yet another show; he was just curious about fled. I wished I had more to tell him. He had plenty to tell us, though, primarily about his finally deciding it was time to settle down. “It gets monotonous, Dad, a different girl every other night. Sometimes juggling two or three at once,” he lamented. Karen and I, who have been married for more than forty years, had a good laugh over that.

Jenny was still in California, and presumably didn’t yet know about our most recent visitor. But, even if she had, she undoubtedly wouldn’t have joined in—she was completely immersed in her long-time obsession, a vaccine against HIV. As always, she had high hopes (“We’re getting closer all the time, Dad,” she reported in her last call), if not yet an effective serum.

Abby and Steve brought their son Star with them (Rain was busy with his studies at Princeton), and even he hit me for information: “Is she really a talking chimp, Grandpa?” I explained that she wasn’t a “chimp,” at least as far as I knew, but he wasn’t convinced and wanted to come to the hospital to see for himself. Thinking he might be showing some interest in psychiatry, I asked him why. “Talking to a chimp would be ‘sooooo cool.’” I refrained, as usual, from asking him if he knew any other adjectives. But what he meant, I think, is that he would be able to favorably impress his friends if he could show them a video or the like. Or perhaps a hair from her head. In any case, he didn’t try to push his luck, though he spent a good bit of time videotaping everything that was going on around him—practicing, I suppose, for his directorial debut with fled—and he earned some points by giving Flower a pretty good workout. He is clearly a dog lover, a trait he inherited from his mother.

Abby, who loves all animals, wanted me to encourage fled to visit Africa. She has long been interested in learning what chimpanzees and gorillas really thought about and how they communicated with one another in the wild. In her view, they are far ‘smarter’ than they’re given credit for. “The sign language thing is only the tip of the iceberg,” she informed me. “There’s a lot they know and understand—and feel—that we can’t possibly determine by talking with them in such an unnatural manner.”

I tried to explain to her, too, that fled wasn’t actually a chimpanzee, or an ape of any kind, though I don’t think she heard me.

But it was Steve who was, by far, the most excited. Usually pretty taciturn, my son-in-law, who never fully accepted prot’s alien nature despite the latter’s profound knowledge of cosmology, reasoned that fled’s presence on Earth confirmed our earlier visitor’s K-PAX connection, giving them both an added measure of credibility. He wanted to know everything she could tell him, especially about the elusive graviton.

I tried to tell him that fled didn’t seem to be interested in those things. “Ah find that hard to believe,” he whined, pressing me about when he could speak with her. I told him I didn’t know what her plans were or how much time she had, but would let him know if she would be willing to meet with him.

When everyone was preparing to leave I beseeched them all to be patient. At this point I hadn’t yet talked to her in depth myself, and I promised them that they would all get a chance to present their cases when the time was right. Nobody was entirely satisfied with this arrangement, but for once I was holding all the cards, or so I thought. It wasn’t long before I learned that fled would be making all the decisions about entertaining visitors and giving interviews, not me.

* * *

Almost as soon as my family had left, the doorbell rang. I figured someone had forgotten something. When I answered the bell I found two men standing at the door. One was quite tall, perhaps 6’6” and very thin, the other maybe a foot shorter and much stockier. Both wore crewcuts and ill-fitting blue suits. They identified themselves as Mr. Dartmouth and Mr. Wang. I had met them before, when they had come to MPI to talk with prot about his knowledge of light travel. Nevertheless, seeming not to recognize me, they waved their badges to identify themselves as Central Intelligence agents, and asked very politely, almost humbly, whether they could come in. Unfortunately, Mr. Dartmouth promptly stumbled on the door sill, plunging forward and banging his face on the tiles. At that moment Flower loped into the living room, barking, surprising agent Wang, who sprung into a defensive crouch. When all the commotion had settled, and Dartmouth had wiped the blood from his nose and the entryway with a huge red handkerchief, they proceeded smartly to the sofa as if they’d been here before, Wang keeping an eye on our dog in case of another surprise “attack.”

When they were seated, and had declined my offer of beverages, they got right to the point: what did I know about prot’s return?

“Prot?”

“Please don’t pretend ignorance, doctor. We have our sources.”

I was tempted to stonewall, but thought better of it. “I think you mean fled. She’s another visitor from K-PAX.”

Dartmouth, still dabbing at his nose, pulled out a thick, worn, notepad, with pages sticking out everywhere, and consulted it. He leaned over and whispered something to Wang, who turned to me. “Our sources tell us that prot has returned.”

“Your sources are wrong. Who are they, anyway?”

“That’s classified.”

“Well, he hasn’t. Her name is fled.”

He nodded to Dartmouth, who crossed out something and penciled in something else. Bits of paper flew from the notebook. He patiently retrieved them and carefully shoved them back in while tweaking his nose from time to time, to determine whether it was broken, presumably.

“My apologies, sir. Can you tell us why she’s here?”

At this point it occurred to me that they might have already bugged the house and were merely trying to confirm what I had told Abby, Will, and the others. I repeated that I knew very little about her plans. They wanted to know what little I knew. I told them she had come to study us as alien life forms, and wasn’t interested in light energy or weaponry. I declined to mention that she was planning to take 100,000 people with her when she departed, unsure of what they might think of such an idea. Perhaps their sources would fill them in on that. They asked the exact same questions in various other ways until suddenly, as if able to communicate with each other through telepathy or the like, they leaped simultaneously to their feet. “When will you be seeing her again?” Wang pleasantly inquired.

“Tomorrow.”

“Thank you, doctor. We’ll be in touch.” Despite his courteous demeanor, I felt a sudden chill when I looked into his granite eyes.

Flower, a toy in her mouth, escorted them to the front door, Wang shouting, “Back! Back!” They stumbled out of the house and quickly closed the door behind them.

* * *

I was up early on Monday. It was pouring rain, and ordinarily I would’ve picked a better day to go into the city. But, like the rest of my family (and the federal government, apparently), I couldn’t wait to see fled. After all, I didn’t know how long she would be on Earth. At least a few weeks, presumably, but who knew? Maybe she had earlier departure opportunities she hadn’t mentioned for one reason or another. Emergency escape options, as it were.

I almost couldn’t find the front gate of the hospital. Someone had put up one of those plywood walls used by construction crews to hide what was going behind it. Obviously Goldfarb had already made sure that curious onlookers wouldn’t see too much.

As I entered the old, familiar building and shook off my umbrella as I had done countless times before, I couldn’t believe I was coming in again to work. Well, it wasn’t work, exactly, I was just chatting with a special visitor. Nevertheless, it was a rather nice feeling, a sort of Indian summer in the winter of my professional life. And as prot would have reminded me, it wasn’t really work anyway, not when you’re doing something you love. I had been lucky. What I had done for a living was actually fun, a game, little different in its way from being a professional athlete, perhaps. Except, of course, for the money. But for something you love, that’s relatively unimportant, isn’t it?

A lot of memories flooded my mind as I strode through the first-floor lounge—memories of special breakthrough moments when the veil is lifted and a pure ray of sunlight illuminates the mind of a sick patient. These, unfortunately, are very few, but they’re the ones that keep us going, like a great golf shot brings us back to the links. And I remembered the staff members who have since departed but were here when I first arrived at MPI, including my one-time secretary, Joyce Trexler. Even Betty McAllister, our exceptional head nurse, had taken leave to raise her family (triplets are a lot to handle), and Jasmine Chakraborty, our chief clinician for many years, had returned to India. Of course I, too, was no longer on the faculty, and I wondered whether Will and the others ever thought of me as they passed through this venerable corridor….

My first stop was Goldfarb’s office to pick up the key to her examination room. I also wanted to ask her how fled had spent the weekend, how she was getting along with the patients, what she thought of them and of humans in general, what her immediate plans were. Virginia’s ebullient young secretary, Margie Garafoli, escorted me right into the inner sanctum. “She’s been waiting for you,” she reported cheerfully. I nodded and watched her go. It’s hard to take your eyes off Margie—she’s not only pretty, but quite shapely as well. Margie always makes me feel younger somehow.

Goldfarb wasn’t much help. Fled had disappeared early Saturday morning and hadn’t returned until a few hours ago. There wasn’t much point in asking her how our alien visitor had managed to leave the hospital—we both knew the answer to that—but I was somewhat miffed that fled hadn’t told me she was planning an early escapade.

“Why?” she demanded. “What would you have done about it?”

I had to confess that I wouldn’t have done anything, but added that, if I were to be her “host,” I needed to know what she was up to in order to co-ordinate—

“You’ll find out soon enough. She doesn’t seem to be reticent about telling anyone what’s on her mind.”

And neither, I thought with an inward smile, are you.

Goldfarb showed me a chart describing fled’s physical parameters. Basically, she seemed to be just about what she looked like: her facial features, tooth structure, and blood type were amazingly like those of our earth-bound cousins, the chimpanzees. But her eyes, like prot’s, were capable of seeing UV light. Her sensitivity to visible light, however, was considerably less than his, and she apparently had no need for sunglasses, which would have given her an even more comical appearance, like that of a circus performer. The results of the DNA and detailed blood analyses, of course, would have to wait for the lab reports.

I handed back the chart and mumbled something like, “Well, here we go again,” as I got up to leave.

“Not quite,” she said, with dead seriousness. “She’s a different animal, so to speak, from prot. If I were you, I’d watch my back.”

* * *

I found fled in the Ward Two (the floor that houses patients with serious neuroses and nonviolent psychoses) game room playing darts with Howard (not to be confused with Howie, a well-known chamber violinist and former inmate). She was wearing a loose-fitting yellow shift, but had nothing on her feet. Perhaps the hospital hadn’t been able to find anything big enough to fit them. To my surprise she wasn’t surrounded by a cadre of denizens eager to go off with her to K-PAX, as I had expected. The room, in fact, normally filled with a couple of dozen patients engaged in various activities, especially when it was raining outside, was empty except for fled and Howard. “Where is everyone?” I asked him.

The “toad man” candidly informed me that the other inmates, as well as most of the staff, were staying away from fled.

“Why is that?”

“They’re repulsed by her.”

“Repulsed?” Fled was standing nearby, but for once was keeping her big mouth shut.

“She acts like a talking ape.”

“So?”

“They don’t want to talk to an ape who can talk back. Especially one who is smarter than they are.”

“Why not?”

His bulging eyes took careful aim at the board. “Because she reminds them that they are part ape, too. Nobody seems to be able to deal with that image.”

I had imagined many difficulties accruing from fled’s visit, but nothing like that one. “What about you, Howard? How are you able to deal with it?”

The dart fluttered toward its target. When it thunked into the wall a foot from the board, he turned back to me. “Dr. Brewer, I’m the ugliest man alive. I have no image to protect.”

Even Howard’s parents and siblings were repulsed and disgusted by him. He had not been a cute baby—his eyes and mouth, as well as his head itself, were way too big, while his nose and ears were almost nonexistent. “But fled isn’t an ape,” I reminded him. “She’s not even an Earth being.”

“No,” he agreed, “she’s a beautiful orf. But to most people she would be considered ugly. Humans hate ugliness. ‘There but for the grace of God…’ and all that shit.” I was afraid he was going to break into tears. His extreme sensitivity to that truth was, in fact, the reason he was with us.

But I didn’t want to get into that just then. Instead, I turned to fled. “Do you want to talk here, or would you rather go up to Dr. Goldfarb’s examining room?”

“I can’t go anywhere. My heart is broken….”

“Listen: you shouldn’t take anything the patients—”

“Just joking, doc. Let’s go and let the patients have their playroom back.” Without looking at the target, she flung a dart sidelong into the bullseye. “Will you excuse us, Howard?”

He nodded dismally and clumped toward the board.

On the way to the elevator (I headed that way; fled turned toward the stairs and I hurried to catch up with her) I asked her what she thought about his observation. “Beauty is truth, yet it’s a mystery. It’s inseparable from sex, though it’s only skin deep in the mind of the beholder. Of its own beauty is the mind diseased, but beauty and virtue rarely go together. It provokes—”

“All right! I get it!”

“Are you sure?”

“Let’s talk about something else, shall we?”

“Like what, may I be so bold as to ask?”

“Like where you went over the weekend.”

“I visited the place you call Congo.”

“Congo?” I panted. “Why Congo?”

“Prot said it was a beautiful spot to visit. Did you know it was called Zaire when he first came here?”

“Was he right?” I wheezed.

“Yes, the government changed its name following—”

I gasped, “I meant was he right about its being beautiful?”

We finally made it to Five. “You know the answer to that, doctor b. Anyway, it’s the most beautiful country I’ve visited so far.”

“How many have you visited?”

“Two.”

“What’s the other one?”

“The United States.”

“Oh.” Still breathing heavily, barely able to focus my eyes, I unlocked Room 520. As if she wanted to prove she could do it, fled turned the knob with a flair and pushed open the door with her foot. She sprang into the room and promptly nosed around the few papers on the back of the desk, as if she were trying to find something. When she was finished she sat down, not on the patients’ chair but on the back of it, her huge bare feet resting on the seat. After contemplating her hairy toes for a moment, I took the one behind Goldfarb’s desk.

Fled grinned at me, apparently amused by my awkward situation. “Where’s the produce? Prot promised there would be produce!”

“Sorry. I’ll try to have some here next time. Bananas will work for you, I presume?”

“I prefer vegetables.”

“But I thought—your being a—”

“I’ll say it one last time: I’m not a chimpanzee, you numbskull! Get it?”

“I know that.”

She glared at me. “It’s because I don’t look human, like prot, isn’t it? You’re not a speciesist like most sapiens, are you, doctor b?”

I ignored that absurd comment. “Before we go any further with this, I want to ask you something. Why do you keep calling me disparaging names impugning my intelligence? We consider that to be pretty impolite on our planet.”

“Oh, yeah, prot told me about your aversion to the truth.”

“But he never called me a numbskull!”

“Yes, the dremers are more tolerant of fools than the rest of us, I’m afraid.” She slipped down to the seat of the chair and thrust a huge bare foot on the desk. “All right, I won’t call you ‘stupid,’ unless you say something stupid. Fair enough?”

“For your information, even stupid people don’t like to be reminded of their shortcomings.”

“Why not?”

“Just take my word for it, all right? Now let’s get on with it.”

Readers of the K-PAX trilogy may remember that I used a tape recorder when interviewing prot. The Manhattan Psychiatric Institute is a research hospital, and I wanted to have our sessions accessible for later study, both for myself and for my colleagues. And the tapes turned out to be invaluable in writing the books that came out of our sessions. Nevertheless, I chose not to be encumbered by such a device during these informal discussions with fled. She wasn’t, after all, a patient, and I wasn’t actually a practicing psychiatrist any longer. Moreover, at the time these conversations began, I wasn’t really contemplating writing a book about her, despite her smart-ass assumption.

I cleared my throat and began the short speech I had prepared on the way in. “I thought we would just establish some ground rules today. So we don’t get bogged down in extraneous details or go off on wrong tangents.”

“You don’t want to waste any of your precious time on ‘tangents,’ is that it?”

“Well… no, I don’t. Or yours, either.”

“Time is very important to you, isn’t it?”

“Yes, I suppose it is. Particularly at my age, when one doesn’t know how much of it he has left.”

“A very human thing to say.”

“And you never think about that?”

“No species but yours thinks about that, gino. Ironic, isn’t it, that you waste so much of it worrying about how much you have, rather than living your lives as fully as the other animals on your planet, who never think about it?”

As was often the case with prot, I had already lost control of the situation, which was exactly what I didn’t want to do. “Okay, that’s one of those tangents—can we just stick to the ground rules?”

“Sounds boring. What are they?”

“There are several. First, can I depend on you to be here when I come in?”

“Depends on when you come in.”

“Let’s say Mondays and Fridays at about this time.”

“Let’s say I’ll let you know if I won’t be here those days.”

I had learned enough about aliens to know it was a waste of time to argue with them. “Fine. But can you minimize your absences?”

“When I’m here, I’m absent from somewhere else.”

I sighed. “Second thing: I’ll ask the questions and you answer them. Fair enough?”

“Depends on the questions. And what if I have questions for you?”

“What if you wait until I’ve asked you all my questions before you ask yours?”

“What if we take turns?”

“Damn it, fled, you promised to cooperate!”

With that she leapt from the chair onto the desk. I admit that this startled me, and I jumped. But it didn’t take me long to notice that her shift was pulled up, her legs were spread wide apart, and underneath her garment she wasn’t wearing anything.

I turned my head away, but I wasn’t sure whether it was from modesty or disgust. “Okay,” I stammered, staring at the door, “here’s another rule: I sit on this chair, you sit on that one.”

She leapt back to her chair, crossed her hairy legs, and placed her chin in her hand, obviously faking a demure seriousness. And with that, our series of discussions began, though most of the time I wasn’t sure who was interviewing whom.

“All right. The first thing I want to know is: what were you doing in Congo? Besides sightseeing, of course.”

Picking her nose, she replied, “I was looking for the nonhuman apes.”

“Nonhuman?”

“Humans are a part of the ape family. Didn’t you know that, doc?”

“I’m not an ape.”

“Spoken like a true speciesist.” She rolled the contents of a nostril between her fingers and popped it into her mouth.

Though unable to fully conceal my disgust, I nevertheless forged ahead. “And did you find—?”

“Not many. Most have been exterminated.”

“Most of what?”

“Chimpanzees, gorillas, baboons, monkeys—you name it.”

“Who exterminated them?”

She snorted. “You’re playing dumb again, aren’t you, gene? That might work for your human patients, but not for the rest of us.”

“No, I mean, isn’t it illegal to—uh—exterminate an ape?”

“You ever hear of the bushmeat trade, doctor? Not to mention murdering the parents so you can kidnap their babies to sell for pets? Or anything else that’s profitable?”

“Bushmeat??”

“Why don’t you just get a hearing aid and save the rest of us a lot of grief?”

This particular K-PAXian seemed to annoy me more and more by the minute. “All right, goddamn it—I’ll try not to repeat myself! By ‘bushmeat,’ you mean—”

“That’s it exactly. Ape brains for supper.”

“Would you please stop reading my mind? It’s quite disconcerting to a human being, you know.”

She saluted. “Sure, boss. Just trying to save you some precious time.”

“Thank you!”

“That’s how aids got started, you know. Humans eating monkey brains.”

“Yes, I’ve heard that.”

“And now you’ve got mad cow and bird flu. Not to mention heart disease, cancer, and on and on. Leave the animals alone, doc—you’ll live longer.”

“Thanks again. As I was about to say, there are still millions of apes and—uh—other things in Africa, aren’t there, even with this ‘bushmeat’ trade?”

“Try ‘thousands.’ Maybe a few hundred thousands if you include all the great apes on EARTH, but their numbers are decreasing by the minute. It’s only the sapiens who are forever on the increase.”

“Well, did you run across a few apes? And if you did, what did you find out about them? You did come to study them, didn’t you?”

“No, you cretin. I came to learn from them. Something most of you humans haven’t opted to do yet.”

“All right—what did you learn from them?”

“Plenty. They’re sick and tired of trying to hide from the ‘naked beasts,’ as they refer to you. Especially since they haven’t done anything to justify your endless persecution.”

Suddenly she grinned and a leg shot up to the desk. Are you sure you don’t want to—”

“No, I don’t.”

“You must have read my mind.”

“Never mind that! If you don’t stop coming on to me I’m going to throw you out of here and you can find someone else to ‘put you up.’”

“It’s because I’m an ‘ape,’ isn’t it?”

“No! I mean—well, yes, that’s part of it. We don’t have sex with animals on this planet.”

“I’m no more or less an animal than you are! What you mean is that you’re a speciesist. Aren’t you? Aren’t you?” She began to play with herself.

I turned away again. “No, damn it! I just don’t want to have intimate relations with a— With a goddamn ape!”

“Speciesist! Speciesist!”

I stood up. “That’s all the time we have for today. I’ll see you on Friday.” I started toward the door before adding, “But only if you promise to behave yourself!”

“I am behaving myself, doc,” she shouted back. “On K-PAX it would be impolite for an orf not to make the offer. If you don’t like great sex, that’s your problem.”

I sighed. “Good-bye, fled. Until Friday.” I shuffled out and down the stairs, leaving her to amuse herself in whatever way she found polite.

* * *

Hoping that fled wasn’t following me I ducked into the quiet room to collect my thoughts and plan my next discussion with her. Instead, I ran into “Dr.” Claire Smith, who believes she’s a staff psychiatrist. She was reading a journal. The problem with a patient like this is that she, in fact, knows a lot about psychiatry—in some areas, more than most of the staff, perhaps. Certainly more than I, retired and beginning to fall out of touch with the literature and the latest developments. Claire loves to offer advice to her “colleagues,” and yes, we often humor her in this to avoid triggering a severe depression.

I sat down beside her at the reading table and brought up the subject of fled. She gave me a knowing smile and pointed to a recent article she was reading, “The Non-Human Psychiatric Patient.” At first I imagined a doctor with a pig or a cow lying on his examining couch. But it was about patients who believe they are not human, and I must confess that I hadn’t yet read it. Nor would I have been likely to had “Dr. Smith” not brought it to my attention. “So you’ve met her,” I deduced.

“Yes, I have,” she admitted. “What do you think of her?”

Claire had a way of turning the tables like that. “Well, I really don’t know what to make of her. But some of the patients don’t seem to like her much. Do you have any thoughts about that?”

“She’s new here. Everyone is suspicious of a new patient. You never know what’s going on in their heads.”

“It doesn’t bother you that she seems to be some kind of ape?”

“Well, she smells a little funny, but you know the olfaction theory. We all smell a little different from everyone else. It’s genetic, of course.”

“Of course.” I pointed to the journal lying in front of her. “What’s the gist of the article?”

“I wasn’t aware that certain mental patients are convinced they’re animals of some sort, were you? For the most part, it’s an extreme type of inferiority complex. When you’re treated like a dog, you eventually begin to act like one, and finally you become one. Fascinating, don’t you agree?”

“So you think that’s what’s happened to fled? That she’s become an ape because she was treated like one?”

She pondered this for a moment. “Not exactly. I would say that she’s got some sort of condition—maybe an overabundance of one or another steroid—where she grows hair all over her body. When that happened, she became more and more apelike. It’s a defense mechanism, you see. So people wouldn’t laugh at her for being so hairy.”

This made perfect sense, and I had to admit she could be right, except for one thing. “What about the fact that she’s from another planet?”

“She’s no more from another planet than you are, Gene.”

I was stunned by this assessment. Although I had been convinced of her extraterrestrial origin by fled’s apparent acquaintanceship with prot, it suddenly occurred to me that she had done nothing to demonstrate this fact. True, she had left the hospital for a couple of days, and she had shown me a device something like a 3-D movie projector, but— Shit! I thought. Will it ever be possible to know whether these endless visitors are really telling the truth? Even with all the evidence that had accumulated for prot’s otherworldly nature, I still wasn’t 100% convinced that even he had come from K-PAX. Ninety-nine, maybe, but can we ever be totally sure of anything?

* * *

My confidence took another jolt when I stopped in to see Will. I found him sitting at his desk staring at the wall, contemplating the solution to some problem or other, presumably. I didn’t realize it was the same one as mine.

Normally when I stop in we chat about the family, as well as some of his patients. This time he wanted to talk about fled. I told him about Claire’s suggestion that she might be one of the rare “animal” patients. But what he came back with was even more startling than that. “I’ve been thinking, Dad. Prot was an alien, or so it seems, but he also fit the pattern for a dissociative identity disorder, right?”

“No question about that, at least.”

“So here we have fled claiming to be from the planet K-PAX, and I think she is. But at the same time, could she have some other personalities as well, like prot did? Could there be someone on Earth who may or may not look much like her, but who nevertheless has had similar life experiences?”

I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of such an obvious possibility myself. “Son, you may be right! But if you are, how would we go about finding her? Or him? In prot’s case, we had an idea of where his roots on Earth were planted, and eventually what kind of person Robert Porter was. In fled’s case, we haven’t a clue.”

Will’s eyebrows curled into a deep frown, as they do when he is thinking. He jokingly suggested we put her image on milk cartons to see if anyone recognized her. More seriously he wondered, “Do you suppose all K-PAXians have an alter ego somewhere on Earth? Or to look at it the other way, do all of us have an alter ego living a similar life to our own on some faraway planet? It’s pretty mind-boggling, don’t you think?”

“So how would you suggest we go about finding the right person among the six billion or so candidates?” I asked him.

His eyebrows relaxed. “Same as with prot,” he said. “Dig into her mind, find out exactly who’s lurking there.”

“You mean hypnosis?”

“It’s the only way. Unless you want to drug her.”

It didn’t take long for me to realize that Will was absolutely right about that as well. The answers to all our questions about her were hiding somewhere in fled’s brain. I wasn’t sure I was the right person to go digging for them, but I sure as hell wanted to try. The old excitement was coming back. Maybe I wasn’t as far over the hill as I thought. Wishful thinking, perhaps, but so what? As far as I’ve been able to tell, life itself is, in large part, wishful thinking.

While driving up the Henry Hudson toward the GW Bridge, however, I experienced a revelation of my own. Based on fled’s promiscuous behavior, it seemed quite likely to me that her alter ego(s), if any, could well be a prostitute. That, I assumed, narrowed down the field somewhat. But if milk cartons were out of the question for such a search, what should I do: put a notice on the Internet advertising for ugly whores to send in their résumés?

* * *

When I got home at about lunchtime, Karen told me Goldfarb had called. The first thing that occurred to me was that our alien visitor had come on to another staff member or patient, and she wanted me to speak to me about fled’s wantonness. I was as concerned about that as she was, and returned the call immediately. But it wasn’t fled’s sexual impropriety she was worried about, at least not at the moment. A couple of requests for interviews had already come in, one for network television and another for a British magazine.

“How the hell did they—”

“I don’t know, Gene. But that’s irrelevant now, wouldn’t you say? The question is, what are we going to do about this?”

“Hey, I’m retired, remember? The question is, what are you going to do about it? If you want her to talk to someone else instead of me, you have my total consent.” I already regretted saying this, but, like prot and fled, Goldfarb sometimes seemed to push the wrong buttons.

“Hold on, Dr. B. You always were too excitable.” I detected a little snort. “I suppose that’s why your patients all liked you. Made you seem more human.”

“Thank you. I think.”

“Here’s the deal. The network is offering us $200,000 for a live production. The magazine 10,000 pounds sterling, which is around $20,000, I believe. We can’t afford to turn down manna like that. All I’m asking is that you coordinate the thing so the hospital isn’t totally disrupted by these extracurricular activities.”

“Retired. Retired.”

“Will you think about it?”

I caught my wife out of the corner of my eye. She was frowning in the manner that I recognized as: listenanddon’tsayanythingstupiduntilyou’vethoughtaboutit. “Okay,” I told Goldfarb, “I’ll think about it. But I should remind you that prot wouldn’t let us take any money for his TV appearance, and fled probably won’t, either.”

“I won’t tell her about the money if you don’t. So when will I see you again?”

“I was planning to come in on Mondays and Fridays.”

“Can you make Wednesday an administrative day? To take care of this sort of thing?”

“I’ll think about it.”

“Would a regular paycheck help you decide?”

We needed some remodeling done. “Might.”

I could see that knowing smile beaming all the way up from the city. “See you Wednesday,” she said, and hung up.

During lunch I filled Karen in on what had just transpired, followed by a report on my conversation with Will. She was almost as fascinated as I was by his suggestion that perhaps our visitor had an alter ego somewhere on Earth. “You’re hooked again, aren’t you?”

I had to admit I was, and that I was eagerly anticipating getting to the bottom of the “fled story,” wherever it might lead. “But there are a lot of negatives creeping into it, too,” I pointed out. “It’s not only the demands on my time that bother me about going back to the hospital a few days a week, it’s talking with fled herself. She wants to have sex with me!”

After a momentary frown, my wife burst out laughing.

“What—you don’t think I can do it?”

We both laughed at this absurd notion. When we slowed down a little, I added, “Given her promiscuity, it occurred to me that her alter ego might be a prostitute. What do you think?”

“Don’t jump to any conclusions, Dr. B,” she advised.

* * *

That evening Dartmouth and Wang called on us again. “May we come in, Dr. Brewer?” they begged simultaneously, brandishing their badges and promising, “We won’t take much of your time,” as if they had been in on my conversation with fled.

I stepped back. Dartmouth eyed the entryway suspiciously, as if it were mined. Wang, for his part, quickly covered his crotch when Flower appeared, wagging her tail hopefully. We proceeded to the living room sofa as before. The government gazed around, apparently searching for anything out of the ordinary. I thought I heard one or two clicking sounds, like the opening of a camera shutter hidden in a button or tie, but perhaps it was only a wisp of wind being passed.

Wang got right to the point. “Sir, we can’t let your—uh—visitor take 100,000 people with her when she goes back to K-PAX.” If I still had any doubt about fled’s origins, they certainly did not.

For some reason, I became annoyed by their assumption that I had any control over fled. “What’s that got to do with me?”

“Everything. You are her host. Whatever she does is your responsibility.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

Wang stared at me icily while Dartmouth fiddled with a button on his jacket.

“Look: the woman travels on a beam of light. What do you expect me to do, seal her up in an unlighted room?”

They glanced at each other briefly, as if seriously considering this offhand remark. But before I could explain that this wouldn’t work, Wang added, “How you do it is up to you, doctor. But we would have to make certain that no Americans are going with her.”

I didn’t ask them how they planned to make certain of it. “You mean anyone outside the U.S. could go?”

“We have no authority in other sovereignties,” Wang reluctantly confessed. “If she wants to take 100,000 Middle Easterners, that’s their concern.” Suddenly Dartmouth looked up at the ceiling and began to follow something with his eyes, as if there were a tiny insect flitting around up there.

“Here’s what I can do. I’ll pass on your apprehension to fled. What she does with it is up to her.”

“Thank you, sir. We’d appreciate that. And one more thing: we’d like for you to keep tabs on how her travel plans for the return trip are progressing. You know, the when, the where, that sort of thing. We’ll take care of the rest.”

I mumbled a noncommittal response. Apparently they hadn’t yet heard about the proposed magazine and television ventures. Or perhaps they had no problem with those. In any case, they jumped simultaneously to their feet. Dartmouth started to fall back onto the sofa, but whirled around rapidly instead, somehow ending up facing me again. “We’ll let you get on with your dinner, sir,” he volunteered (I wasn’t aware it was being prepared). At this point Flower ran at Wang with her squeaky fish. He immediately crouched into his defensive position, hands in chopping mode. I called her away before she could sustain some kind of freak accident.

“We’ll be in touch,” they cried in unison as they backed toward the door. I heard Dartmouth trip again in the entryway, but apparently Wang caught him before he crashed to the tiles.