K-Pax Omnibus Page 12

  But who was Pete, the primary personality? Apparently he was in there somewhere, living the life of a recluse in his own body, refusing to divulge his name or much of his background, except that he was born in 1957, apparently, to a slaughterhouse worker who died in 1963, perhaps somewhere in the northwestern part of the United States, and he had a mother and two older sisters. Not much to go on, but it might help the police trace his origin. Strictly speaking, it was Pete’s identity, rather than prot’s, that we needed to ascertain. Any information we could get about him, any knowledge of things familiar to him, might facilitate my persuading him to come out.

  All this put prot’s “departure date” into an entirely new light. It is one thing for a patient to announce an end to a delusion, but quite another for a dominant alter to disappear, leaving behind a hysteric, or maybe worse. If prot were to leave before I could get to Pete, it might well preclude my ever being able to help him at all.

  I wondered whether the unhypnotized prot knew anything about Pete. If not, the plan would remain as before: to bring prot/Pete slowly and carefully, under hypnosis, up to the time of the traumatic event(s) which precipitated Pete’s dramatic withdrawal from conscious existence. Even if he did know about Pete, however, hypnosis might still be necessary, both to facilitate prot’s recollection and to make possible direct contact with the host personality.

  But there was a dilemma associated with this approach. On the one hand, I needed to talk to Pete as soon as possible. On the other, forcing him to relive that terrible moment prematurely could be devastating, and cause him to withdraw even further into his protective shell.

  * * *

  Giselle seemed a little less cheerful than usual the following Monday morning. “My friend down at the Sixth Precinct couldn’t find any report of a missing person who disappeared from the upper West in August of 1985,” she said, consulting a little red notebook much like the one prot was fond of. “Somebody killed a man and then himself in a little town in Montana on the sixteenth of that month, and in Boise on the eighteenth another guy ran off with his secretary and one hundred fifty thousand dollars of his company’s funds. But your guy isn’t dead, and the one who ran off with his secretary is still in the Idaho State Penitentiary. My friend is expanding the search to cover January through July of 1985, and then all of the United States and Canada. It will be a while before he gets the results.

  “I also know someone in the Research Library at New York Public; during her breaks she’s doing some searches for me for the week of August seventeenth. You know—newspaper reports of anything unusual that might have happened during that period in Montana, Idaho, Washington, and Oregon. Nothing there so far, either.” She closed the little book. “Of course,” she added, “he might have been raised in the Northwest and then moved somewhere else....”

  I told her about prot’s (Pete’s) father and the slaughterhouse. “Ha!” she replied. “I wonder how many of those things there are in the United States?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’ll find out,” she said with a wave.

  “Wait a minute,” I called after her. “He was born in 1957.”

  “How did you find this stuff out?” she demanded to know.

  “Ve haff arrrr vays, mein Mädchen.”

  She ran back and kissed me on the mouth (almost) before dashing out. I felt about thirteen years old again.

  Karen and I were inseparable after my father’s funeral. If we could’ve lived together, we would have. I especially loved her fat, pink cheeks, which became red and shiny, like little apples, in the wintertime. But it took me another year to get up the nerve to kiss her.

  I studied the way they did it in the movies, practiced for months on the back of my hand. The problem was, I wasn’t sure she wanted me to. Not that she turned away whenever our faces were close together, but she never indicated in any clear way that she was interested. Finally I decided to do it. With all those movies it seemed abnormal not to.

  We were sitting on the sofa at her house reading Donald Duck comics, and I had been thinking about it all morning. I knew you were supposed to kiss sort of sideways so your noses wouldn’t bang together, and when she turned toward me to show me Donald’s nephews carrying picket signs reading: “Unca Donald is stewped,” I made my move. I missed, of course, as first kisses often do, as Giselle’s did before she ran out.

  That afternoon I found Giselle in the exercise room talking animatedly with prot. La Belle was asleep in his lap. Both were jotting things down in their respective notebooks, and prot seemed quite comfortable with her. I didn’t have time to join them, but she told me later some of the things they had discussed. For instance, they had been comparing the Earth with K-PAX, and one of the questions she had asked him, in a brash attempt to track down my patient’s origins, was where he would like to live if he could live anywhere on Earth. She was hoping he would say “Olympia, Washington,” or some such town in the upper West. Instead, he answered, “Sweden.”

  “Why Sweden?” she wanted to know.

  “Because it’s the country most like K-PAX.”

  The subject then turned to those human beings who seemed most like K-PAXians to him. Here is what he said: Henry Thoreau, Mohandas Gandhi, Albert Schweitzer, John Lennon, and Jane Goodall.

  “Can you imagine a world full of Schweitzers?” she hooted.

  I said, “John Lennon?”

  “Have you ever heard ‘Imagine’?”

  I told her I would look it up.

  Then she said something I had been wondering myself: “You know what else? I think he can talk to animals!”

  I said I wasn’t surprised.

  I had no time for them that afternoon because I was on my way to Ward Four, where Russell was trying to get in. Apparently distraught with the loss of his followers to prot’s counsel and advice, and his failure to wake up the catatonic patients, he had decided to convert some of the psychopaths. When I arrived I found the nurses attempting to get him to go back to his own ward. He was up on his toes shouting through the little barred window high in the steel door, “Take heed that no man deceiveth you! For many shall cometh in my name, saying, I am the Christ; and shall deceiveth many!” Apparently his words were not falling on deaf ears, as I could hear laughter coming from inside. But he kept on yelling, even after I pleaded with him to go back to Ward Two. I ordered a shot of Thorazine and had him taken back to his room.

  That same day two other things happened that I should have paid more attention to. First, I got a report that Howie had asked one of the residents how to perform a tracheotomy. Dr. Chakraborty finally told him, thinking Howie was going to show Ernie how easily he could be saved even if he were to get choked on something, despite the unfortunate example of his mother’s demise.

  The other event concerned Maria. One of her alters, a sultry female called Chiquita, somehow got into Ward Three and, before anyone discovered her presence there, offered herself to Whacky. But the results were the same as with the prostitute prescribed earlier. Facing this unexpected rejection, Chiquita quickly exited and Maria appeared. Though finding herself with a naked man engaged in self-manipulation she didn’t become hysterical, as you might expect. Rather, she immediately began to pray for Whacky, whose despair she seemed to understand completely!

  On the lighter side, Chuck presented prot with a drawing summarizing his assessment of the human race, one of many attempts, I discovered, to impress prot so that he would take Chuck to K-PAX with him. It is reproduced here:

  Purely by coincidence this diagram described almost perfectly our second applicant for the position of permanent director. He obviously had not bathed in weeks or even months. A blizzard of dandruff snowed from his head and drifted onto his shoulders. His teeth seemed to be covered with lichen. And, like the previous candidate, Dr. Choate, who checked his fly every few minutes, the man came with excellent references.

  Session Eleven

  I had been gazing out my office window at a croquet match
on the lawn below just before prot came in for his next interview. I nodded toward the fruit basket and asked him what sorts of games he had played as a boy. “We don’t have games on K-PAX,” he replied. “We don’t need them. Nor what you call ‘jokes,’” he added, scrutinizing a dried fig. “I’ve noticed that human beings laugh a lot, even at things that aren’t funny. I was puzzled by this at first until I understood how sad your lives really are.”

  I was sorry I had asked.

  “By the way, this fig has a pesticide residue on it.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I can see it.”

  “See it? Oh.” I had forgotten about his ultraviolet vision. With time at a premium, I nonetheless could not resist the opportunity to ask him what our world looked like from his perspective. In response, he spent nearly fifteen minutes trying to describe an incredibly beautiful visage of vibrantly colored flowers, birds, and even ordinary rocks, which lit up like gems for him. The sky itself took on a shimmering, bright, violet aura through his eyes. It appeared that prot’s vista was tantamount to being permanently high on one or another psychedelic drug. I wondered whether van Gogh had not enjoyed a similar experience.

  He had put down the offensive fig while he expounded on his exceptional faculty, and found one more to his liking. While he masticated I carefully proceeded. “Last time, under hypnosis, you told me about a friend of yours, an Earth being, and his father’s death, and his butterfly collection, and some other things. Do you remember any of that now?”

  “No.”

  “Well, did you have such a friend?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is he still a friend of yours?”

  “Of course.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me about him before?”

  “You never asked.”

  “I see. Where is he now, do you know?”

  “He is waiting. I am going to take him back to K-PAX with me. That is, if he still wants to go. He vacillates a lot.”

  “And where is your friend waiting?”

  “He is in a safe place.”

  “Do you know where that is?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Can you tell me?”

  “Nay, nay.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because he asked me not to tell anyone.”

  “Can you at least tell me his name?”

  “Sorry.”

  Given the circumstances, I decided to take a chance. “Prot, I’m going to tell you something you may find hard to believe.”

  “Nothing you humans come up with surprises me anymore.”

  “You and your friend are the same person. That is, you and he are separate and distinct identities of the same person.”

  He seemed genuinely shocked. “That is patently absurd.”

  “It’s true.”

  Annoyed now, but under control: “Is that another of those ‘beliefs’ that passes for truth with your species?”

  It had been a long shot, and it had missed. There was no way to prove the contention and no point in wasting any more time. When he had finished his snack I asked if he was ready to be hypnotized again. He nodded suspiciously, but by the time I had counted to three he was already “gone.”

  I began: “Last time you told me about your Earth friend, beginning with his father’s death. Do you remember?”

  “Yes.” Prot was trance anamnestic—he could remember previous hypnotic sessions, but only while in the hypnotic state.

  “Good. Now I want you to think back once again, but not so far back as last time. You and your friend are high school seniors. Twelfth-graders. What do you see?”

  At this point prot slouched down in his chair, fiddled with his nails, and began to chew on an imaginary piece of gum. “I was never a high school senior,” he said. “I never went to school.”

  “Why not?”

  “We don’t have schools on K-PAX.”

  “What about your friend? Does he go to school?”

  “Yes, he does, the dope. I couldn’t talk him out of it.”

  “Why would you want to talk him out of it?”

  “Are you kidding? Schools are a total waste of time. They try to teach you a bunch of crap.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like how great america is, better than any other country, how you have to have wars to protect your ‘freedoms,’ all kinds of junk like that.”

  “Does your friend feel the same way you do about that?”

  “Nah. He believes all that garbage. They all do.”

  “Is your friend there with you now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can he hear us?”

  “Of course. He’s right here.”

  “May I speak with him?”

  Again the momentary hesitation. “He doesn’t want to.”

  “If he changes his mind, will you let me know?”

  “I guess.”

  “Will he tell me his name, at least?”

  “No way.”

  “Well, we have to call him something. How about Pete?”

  “That’s not his name, but okay.”

  “All right. Is he a senior now?”

  “Yep.”

  “What year is it?”

  “Nineteen seventy-four.”

  “How old are you?”

  “A hunnert and seventy-seven.”

  “And how old is Pete?”

  “Seventeen.”

  “Does he know you come from K-PAX?”

  “Yes.”

  “How does he know that?”

  “I told him.”

  “What was his reaction to that?”

  “He thinks it’s cool.”

  “Incidentally, how did you learn to speak English so well? Did he teach you?”

  “Nah. It’s not very difficult. You should try speaking w:xljqzs/k..mns pt.”

  “Where did you land when you came to Earth?”

  “You mean this trip?”

  “Yes.”

  “China.”

  “Not Zaire?”

  “Why should I land in zaire when china was pointing toward K-PAX?”

  “Do you have any other Earth friends? Is there anyone else there with you?”

  “Nobody here but us chickens.”

  “How many chickens are you?”

  “Just me and him.”

  “Tell me more about Pete. What’s he like?”

  “What’s he like? He’s all right. Kinda quiet. Keeps to himself. He’s not as smart as I am, but that doesn’t matter on EARTH.”

  “No? And what does matter?”

  “All that matters is that you’re a ‘nice guy,’ and not too bad looking.”

  “And is he?”

  “I suppose.”

  “Can you describe him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Please do.”

  “He’s beginning to wear his hair long. He has brown eyes, medium complexion, and twenty-eight pimples, which he puts clearasil on all the time.”

  “Are his eyes sensitive to bright light?”

  “Not particularly. Why should they be?”

  “What makes him a nice guy?”

  “He smiles a lot, he helps the dumber kids with their assignments, he volunteers to set up the bleachers for the home games, stuff like that. He’s vice-president of the class. Everybody likes him.”

  “You sound as though you’re not so sure they should.”

  “I know him better than anybody else.”

  “And you think he’s not as nice as everybody thinks.”

  “He’s not as nice as he makes out.”

  “In what way?”

  “He has a temper. It gets out of hand sometimes.”

  “What happens when it gets out of hand?”

  “He gets mad. Throws things around, kicks inanimate objects.”

  “What makes him mad?”

  “Things that seem unfair, that he can’t do anything about. You know.”

  I was pretty sure I did know. It had so
mething to do with the helplessness and anger he felt at the time of his father’s death. “Can you give me an example?”

  “One time he found a kid beating up on a smaller kid. The older guy was a big redheaded bully and everybody hated him. He had broken the other kid’s glasses, and his nose, too, I think. My friend beat the shit out of him. I tried to stop him but he wouldn’t listen.”

  “What happened then? Was the bully badly hurt? Did he try to get even later on?”

  “He lost a couple teeth is all. He was mostly afraid my friend would tell everybody what happened. When he didn’t, and asked the little kid not to either, they became the best of buddies. All three of them.”

  “What do these other guys think about you?”

  “They don’t know about me.”

  “Does anyone besides your friend know about you?”

  “Nary a soul.”

  “All right. Back to your friend. Does this anger of his show itself often?”

  “Not very. Hardly ever at school.”

  “Does he ever get mad at his mother and sisters?”

  “Never. He doesn’t see his sisters much. They’re already married and gone. One of them moved away.”

  “Tell me about his mother.”

  “She’s nice. She works at the school. At the cafeteria. She doesn’t make much money, but she does a lot of gardening and canning. They have enough to eat, but not much else. She’s still trying to pay back all of his dad’s doctor bills.”

  “Where do they live? I mean is it a house? What kind of neighborhood is it in?”

  “It’s a small three-bedroom house. It looks like all the others on the street.”

  “What sorts of things does your friend do for entertainment? Movies? Books? Television?”

  “There’s only one movie theater in town. They have an old tv set that doesn’t work half the time. My friend reads a lot, and he also likes to walk around in the woods.”