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  Finally his head lifted and his eyes blinked open. “Now you’ve done it.”

  “Prot? Is that you?”

  “You had to do it, didn’t you? Just when he started to trust you, you went for the jugular.”

  “Prot, I would like to have taken it more slowly, but you are planning to leave us on the seventeenth. Our time is almost up!”

  “I told you—I have no choice in the matter. If we don’t leave then we’ll never be able to get back.”

  “You and Robert?”

  “Yes. Except...”

  “Except what?”

  “Except he’s gone now.”

  “Gone? Gone where?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Look hard, prot. He must be there with you somewhere.”

  “Not anymore. He’s not here anymore. You have driven him away.”

  “Okay, I’m going to count back from five to one now. As the numbers decrease you will begin to wake up. On the count of one you will be fully alert and feeling fine. Ready? Five . . . one.”

  “Hello.”

  “How do you feel?”

  “I think I had too much fruit. Have you got any antacid?”

  “Betty will get some for you later. Right now we need to talk.”

  “What else have we been doing for the past three months?”

  “Where is your friend Robert right now?”

  “No idea, coach.”

  “But you told me earlier he was in ‘a safe place.’”

  “He was then, but he’s gone now.”

  “But you could contact him if you wanted to.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not.”

  “All right. Let’s review a few things. When you came to Earth five years ago, Robert was trying to drown himself. Remember?”

  “How could I forget?”

  “But you don’t know why?”

  “I think it’s because he didn’t want to live anymore.”

  “I mean, you have no idea what caused him to be so upset? So desperate?”

  “Haven’t we been over this?”

  “I think he may have killed someone.”

  “Robert? Nah. He loses his temper sometimes, but—”

  “I don’t think he meant to kill anyone. I think he caught someone in his house. Someone who may have harmed his wife and daughter in some way. He is only human, prot. He reacted without thinking.”

  “I’m not surprised.”

  “Prot, listen to me. You helped Howie to cure Ernie of his phobia. I’m going to ask you to do something for me. I’m going to ask you to cure Robert. Let’s call it a ‘task.’ I’m assigning you the task of curing Robert. Do you accept the assignment?”

  “Sorry, I can’t.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  “Ernie wanted to get well. Robert doesn’t. He just wants to be left alone. He doesn’t even want to talk to me anymore.”

  “You’ve helped a lot of the patients in Ward Two. I have confidence that if you really put your mind to it you could help Robert, too. Will you please try?”

  “Anything you sigh, mite. But don’t hold your breath.”

  “Good. I think that’s enough work for today. We both need a little time to reflect on this. But I’d like to schedule an extra session with you on Sunday. It’s the only day I have. Would you be willing to come back for a Sunday session?”

  “What about your promise to your wife?”

  “What promise?”

  “That you would take Sundays off, no matter what. Except that you cheat and bring work home.”

  “How did you know about that?”

  “Everyone knows about that.”

  “She’s going to the Adirondacks with Chip for a couple of weeks, if it’s any of your business.”

  “In that case, I would be delighted to accept your kind invitation.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Don’t mention it. Is that all?”

  “For now.”

  “Toodle-oo.”

  I switched off the tape recorder and slumped down in my chair, as drained of emotion as Robert must have been. I felt very bad about this particular session. I had rushed things, taken a big chance and failed, perhaps irreversibly. One thing you learn in psychiatry: Treating a psychotic patient is like singing opera—it seems easy enough to the spectator, but it takes a tremendous amount of work and there are no shortcuts.

  On the other hand, perhaps I had not been bold enough. Perhaps I should have forced him to tell me exactly what he saw that August afternoon when he got home from work. I knew now that he had stumbled onto something terrible, and I suspected what it might have been. But this hadn’t helped my patient one iota and, indeed, may have made things worse. Moreover, I had missed a golden opportunity to ask him his last name! The position of director, free of patient responsibility, suddenly seemed a very attractive idea.

  Just before she left for the weekend Betty told me she had given up on the idea of motherhood. I said I was sorry it hadn’t worked out for her. She replied that I needn’t be, and pointed out that there were already more than five billion human beings on Earth, and maybe that was enough. She had obviously been talking with prot.

  As we were walking down the corridor she suggested that I stop in and see Maria. She wouldn’t tell me why. I glanced at my watch. I had about five minutes before I had to leave for a fund-raising dinner at the Plaza. Sensing my impatience, she patted my arm. “It’ll be worth it.”

  I found Maria in the quiet room talking with Ernie and Russell. She seemed uncharacteristically happy, so I thought it was a new alter I had encountered. But it was Maria herself! Although the answer was obvious, I asked her how she was feeling.

  “Oh, Doctor Brewer, I have never felt so good. All the others are with me on this. I know it.”

  “With you on what? What happened?”

  “I’ve decided to become a nun! Isn’t it wonderful?” I found myself smiling broadly. The idea was so simple I wondered why I hadn’t thought of it myself. Perhaps because it was too simple. Perhaps we psychiatrists have a tendency to make things more complicated than they really are. In any case, there she was, nearly beside herself with joy.

  I was beginning to feel better myself. “What made you decide to do that?”

  “Ernie showed me how important it was to forgive my father and my brothers for what they did. After that, everything was different.”

  I congratulated Ernie on his help. “It wasn’t my idea,” he said. “It was prot’s.”

  Russell seemed unsure about what to make of all this. “It is only by Beelzebub, the prince of demons, that this man casteth out demons,” he mumbled uncertainly, and shuffled away.

  Maria watched him leave. “Of course it’s only for a little while.”

  “Why only for a while?” I asked her.

  “When prot comes back he’s going to take me with him!”

  Session Fifteen

  Karen and Shasta left for the Adirondacks late Sunday morning. Shaz was as joyous as Maria had been two days earlier—she knew exactly where she was going. I promised to join them in a week or so.

  Chip, busy with his lifeguard duties, had decided not to spend his time with his fuddy-duddy parents after all, but moved in with a friend whose father and mother were also on vacation. With no one in the house but me, I decided to check into the guest room at the hospital for the duration.

  I made it to my office that afternoon just in time for my session with prot. I was already sweating profusely. It was a very hot day and the air conditioning system wasn’t working. It didn’t seem to bother prot, who had stripped down to his polka-dot boxer shorts. “Just like home,” he chirped. I turned on the little electric fan I keep for such emergencies, and we got on with it.

  Unfortunately, I cannot relate the contents of that interview verbatim because of a malfunction in my tape recorder, which I did not discover until the session was over. What follows is a summary based on the sweaty notes I took at the time.

 
While he devoured a prodigious number of cherries and nectarines, I handed him the list of questions Charlie Flynn had faxed to me for prot’s attention. I had perused the fifty undoubtedly well-chosen queries myself, but they were quite technical and I wasn’t much interested at that point what his responses, if any, would be. (I could have answered the one about light travel—it’s done with mirrors.) Prot merely smiled and stuffed them under the elastic band of his shorts alongside the ever-present notebook.

  At the merest suggestion he found the spot on the wall behind me and immediately fell into his usual deep trance. I wasted no time in dismissing prot and asked to speak with Robert. His countenance dropped at once, he slouched down to the point where it almost seemed he would fall out of his chair, and that’s where he stayed for the remainder of the hour. Nothing I brought up—his father’s death, his relationship with his friends (the bully and his victim), his employment at the slaughterhouse, the whereabouts of his wife and daughter—elicited the slightest hint of a reaction. I carefully introduced the subject of the lawn sprinkler, but even that evoked no response whatsoever. It was as if Robert had prepared himself for this confrontation, and nothing I could say was going to shock him out of his virtually catatonic state. I tried every professional maneuver and amateurish trick I could think of, including lying to him about what prot had told me about his life, and ending up by calling him a shameless coward. All to no avail.

  But something had occurred to me when I brought up the subject of his family and friends. I recalled prot, and was greatly relieved when he finally showed up. I asked him whether there was anyone, if not me, Robert would be willing to speak to. After a minute or two he said, “He might be willing to talk to his mother.”

  I implored him to help me find her. To give me a name or an address. He said, again after a few moments of silence, “Her name is beatrice. That’s all I can tell you.”

  Before I woke him up I tried one more blind shot. “What is the connection between a lawn sprinkler and what happened to Robert on August seventeenth, 1985?” But he seemed genuinely befuddled by this reference (as had the unhypnotized prot), and there was no sign of the panic elicited by my wife’s turning on ours at the Fourth of July picnic in our back yard. Utterly frustrated, I brought him back to reality, called in our trusty orderlies, and reluctantly sent him back to Ward Two.

  The next day Giselle reported that she had spent most of the previous week, along with her friend, at the Research Library tracking down and reading articles from small-town (those with slaughterhouses) newspapers for the summer of 1985, so far without success, though there were still two large trays of microfilm to go. I passed on the meager information I had managed to obtain. She doubted that Robert’s mother’s name would be of much help, but it led her to another idea. “What if we also search the files for 1963, when his father died? If there’s an obituary for a man whose wife’s name was Beatrice and who had a six-year-old son named Robert ... Damn! Why didn’t I think of that before?”

  “At this point,” I agreed, “anything’s worth a try.”

  Chuck had collected all the “Why I Want to Go to K-PAX” essays over the weekend. Most of the patients had submitted one, and a fair number of the support staff as well, including Jensen and Kowalski. As it happened, this was the time for Bess’s semiannual interview. During that encounter I asked her why she hadn’t entered the contest.

  “You know why, Doctor,” she replied.

  “I would rather you tell me.”

  “They wouldn’t want somebody like me.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t deserve to go.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “I eat too much.”

  “Now, Bess, everyone here eats more than you do.”

  “I don’t deserve to eat.”

  “Everyone has to eat.”

  “I don’t like to eat when there are so many that don’t have anything. Every time I try to eat I see a lot of hungry faces pressed up against the window, just watching me eat, waiting for something to fall on the floor, and when it does they can’t get in to pick it up. All they can do is wait for somebody to take out the garbage. I can’t eat when I see all those hungry faces.”

  “There’s nobody at the window, Bess.”

  “Oh, they’re there all right. You just don’t see them.”

  “You can’t help them if you’re starving, too.”

  “I don’t deserve to eat.”

  We had been around this circle many times before. Bess’s battle with reality had not responded well to treatment. Her periods of depression had been barely managed with ECT and Clozaril and, more recently, by the presence of La Belle Chatte. She perked up a little when I told her that Betty was planning to bring in another half dozen cats from the animal shelter. Until further progress was made in the treatment of paranoid schizophrenia and psychotic depression there wasn’t much more we could do for her. I almost wished she had been among those who had submitted an application for passage to K-PAX.

  The kitten, incidentally, was doing fine with Ed. The only problem was that everyone in the psychopathic ward now wanted an animal. One patient demanded we get him a horse!

  On Tuesday, August fourteenth, prot called everyone to the lounge. It was generally assumed he was going to make some kind of farewell speech and announce the results of the essay contest Chuck had organized. When all of Wards One and Two and some of Three and Four, including Whacky and Ed and La Belle, had gathered around, along with most of the professional and support staff, prot disappeared for a minute and came back with—a violin! He handed it to Howie and said, “Play something.”

  Howie froze. “I can’t remember how,” he said. “I’ve forgotten everything.”

  “It will come back,” prot assured him.

  Howie looked at the violin for a long time. Finally he placed it under his chin, ran the bow across the strings, reached for the rosin that prot had thoughtfully provided, and immediately broke into a Fritz Kreisler étude. He stopped a few times, but didn’t start over and try to get it perfect. Grinning like a monkey he went right into a Mozart sonata. He played it pretty badly, but, after the last note had faded into perfect silence, the room broke into thunderous applause. It had been the greatest performance of his career.

  With one or two exceptions the patients were in a fine mood all that day. I suppose everyone was on his best behavior so as not to jeopardize his chances for an all-expense-paid trip to paradise. But prot made no speech, no decision on a space companion. Apparently he was still hoping to talk Robert into going with him.

  Oddly, no one seemed particularly disappointed. Everyone knew it was only a matter of days—hours—until “departure” time, and his selection would have to be made by then.

  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?”