K-Pax Omnibus Page 17

  “Scotch is fine.”

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

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

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

  “I think you would like it there.”

  “You know, I’ve only been out of this country two or three times.”

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

  “You don’t hate your father,” prot said.

  “What?”

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

  “I don’t know who told you all of this, but you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

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

  “I didn’t ignore my children!”

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

  “What? Which son?”

  “The younger one. ‘Chip,’ you call him.”

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

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

  “Why?”

  “Because you can’t carry a tune in a basket.”

  “I’ll think about it. What else?”

  “Russell has a malignancy in his colon.”

  “What? How do you know that?”

  “I can smell it on his breath.”

  “Anything else?”

  “That’s all. For now.”

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

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

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

  Prot seemed taken aback, but he finally realized what I was doing. “I tol’ you an’ tol’ you,” he snorted unhappily. “He ain’ comin’ out!”

  “Ask him again!”

  “I’ve tried. I’ve rilly rilly rilly tried. What else c’n I do?”

  “You can stay!” Giselle cried.

  He turned slowly to face her. “I can’t,” he said sadly. “It’s now or never.”

  “Why?”

  “As I a’ready ‘splained to doctor bew—bew—doctor brewer, I am shed—shed—I am ‘xpected. The window is op’n. I c’n only go back on august seventeenth. At 3:31 inna norming.”

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

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

  Giselle bowed her head.

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

  “Why?”

  “Because we need you here.”

  “Wha’ for?”

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

  “How, f’r cryin’ out loud?”

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

  “You c’n help y’rself if you want to. You just hafta want to, thass all there is to it.”

  “Robert needs you. Your friend needs you.”

  “He doesn’t need me. He doesn’t even pay ‘tendon to me anymore.”

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

  “How d’you know that?”

  “Ask him!”

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

  “What did he say?”

  “He told me I’ve wasted enough time here. He wants me to go away and leave him alone.”

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

  The Cheshire-cat grin: “That’s up to you.”

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

  “I can always come back.”

  “When?”

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

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

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

  “Take me with you,” Giselle pleaded.

  He gave her a look of indescribable compassion. “I’m sorry. But next time...” She got up and hugged him.

  “Prot,” I said, emptying the bottle into his and Giselle’s glasses. “What if I tell you there’s no such place as K-PAX?”

  “Now who’s crazy?” he replied.

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

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

  “I’d like to see him before I go,” she said.

  “He’s probably sleeping.”

  “I just want to watch him for a few minutes.”

  I understood perfectly. I love to watch Karen sleep, too, her mouth open, her throat making little clicking noises.

  “Don’t let him leave until I find her,” she pleaded as she went out.

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

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

  “They should already be on your desk.”

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

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

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

  “Next time,” said Chuck, “belch!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “I listen to them!”

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

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

  “Let’s see—if you believe that, then it must be true. Right?”

  “That’s exactly what I wanted to talk to you about.”

  We came to his room, the first time I had been there since his earlier disappearance. It was virtually bare except for his notebooks lying on the desk. “I’ve got some pictures and documents to show you,” I said, spreading the file out on its surface, gently shoving aside his report. A few of the photographs I held back.

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

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

  “Yes. It is robert.”

  “No. It is you.”

  “Haven’t we been over this before?”

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

  “And we aren’t.”

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

  “Why is a soap bubble round?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Naturally.”

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

  “Of course.”

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

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

  “So?”

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

  “But you admit the possibility that I’m right?”

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

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

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

  “And this one?”

  “This is his mother and father.”

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

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

  “We are going to get her here as soon as we can.”

  Without looking at a clock he said, “Well, you have exactly twelve hours and eight minutes to do it in.”

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

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

  There was a great deal of hugging and kissing, but I detected a certain amount of tension as well. Everyone seemed nervous, excited. Finally, Chuck demanded to know which of them was going to get to go with him. With those crossed eyes I wasn’t sure whether he was looking at me or prot. But prot answered, “It will be the one who goes to sleep first.”

  They all lined up immediately for a last tearful embrace, then dashed to their beds, leaving him alone to finish his report and prepare for his, and hopefully their, journey, each trying desperately to fall asleep with visions of yorts dancing in their heads.