K-Pax Omnibus Page 18

  I told him I had some things to do, but would come to say good-bye before he left. Then I retired to my office.

  At about eleven o’clock Giselle called. She had found Robert’s sister’s address in Alaska. Unfortunately, the woman had died the previous September, and his mother had gone on to live with the other sister in Hawaii. Giselle had tried to reach her, but without success. “It’s too late to get her to New York in time,” she said, “but if we find her, she might be able to call him.”

  “Make it fast,” I told her.

  For the next three hours I tried to work to the accompaniment of Manon Lescaut on my cassette player. In Act Three of that opera Manon and Des Grieux depart for the New World, and I understood at last why I love opera so much: Everything that human beings are capable of, all of life’s joy and tragedy, all its emotion and experience, can be found there.

  My father must have felt this, too. I can still see him lying on the living room sofa on a Saturday afternoon with his eyes closed, listening to the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts. Oh, how I wish he had lived and we had had a chance to talk about music and his grandchildren and all the other things that make life fun and interesting and good! I tried to envision a parallel universe in which he had not died and I had become an opera star, and I imagined singing some of his favorite arias for him while Mother brought out a big Sunday dinner for us to eat.

  I suppose I must have dozed off. I dreamed I was in an unfamiliar place where the cloudless purple sky was full of moons and sailing birds, and the land a panoply of trees and tiny green flowers. At my feet stood a pair of huge beetles with humanoid eyes; a small brown snake—or was it a large worm?—slithered along behind them. In the distance I could see fields of red and yellow grains, could make out several small elephants and other roaming animals. A few chimpanzee-like creatures chased one another into and out of a nearby forest. I found myself crying, it was so lovely. But the most beautiful feature of all was the utter silence. There wasn’t a hint of wind and it was so quiet I could hear the soft ringing of faraway bells. They seemed for all the world to be tolling, “gene, gene, gene....”

  I woke with a start. The clock was chiming 3:00.1 hurried down to prot’s room, where I found him at his desk writing furiously in his notebook, trying, presumably, to complete his report about Earth and its inhabitants before departing for K-PAX, letting it go until the last minute, it appeared, just as a human being might do. Beside him were his fruits, a stalk or two of broccoli, a jar of peanut butter, the essays and other souvenirs, all neatly packed in a small cardboard box. On the desk, next to his notebooks, were a pocket flashlight, a hand mirror, and the list of questions from Dr. Flynn. All six of the lower-ward cats were lying asleep on the bed.

  I asked him whether he minded my looking over the answers he had formulated to those fifty queries. Without interrupting his writing he shook his head and waved me into the other chair.

  Some of the questions, e.g., the one about nuclear energy, he had left unanswered, for reasons he had made clear in several of our sessions together. The last item was a request for a list of all the planets prot had visited around the universe, to which he had replied, “See Appendix,” which tallied the complete list of sixty-four. This inventory included a brief description of those bodies and their inhabitants, as well as a series of star charts. It was not everything Professor Flynn and his colleagues, including Steve, had hoped for, but enough to keep them busy for some time, no doubt.

  At around 3:10 he threw down his pencil, yawned, and stretched noisily as if he had just finished a routine piece of work.

  “May I see it?”

  “Why not? But if you want to read it you’d better make a copy right away—it’s the only one I’ve got.” I called one of the night nurses to take it upstairs, admonishing him to get some help and to use all the copiers that were operational. He hurried off, clutching the little notebooks as though they were so many eggs. The possibility of stalling the process occurred to me at that point, but it might well have made matters even worse and I quickly rejected the idea.

  I had a feeling the report would be a rather uncomplimentary account of prot’s “visit” to Earth, and I asked him, “Is there anything about our planet that you liked? Besides our fruits, I mean.”

  “Sure,” he said, with an all-too-familiar grin. “Everything but the people. With one or two exceptions, of course.”

  There didn’t seem to be much left to say. I thanked my amazing friend for the many interesting discussions and for his success with some of the other patients. In return, he thanked me for “all the wonderful produce,” and presented me with the gossamer thread.

  I pretended to take it. “I’m sorry to see you go,” I said, shaking his brawny hand, though I wanted to hug him. “I owe you a lot, too.”

  “Thank you. I will miss this place. It has great potential.” At the time I thought he was referring to the hospital, but of course he meant the Earth.

  The nurse came running back with the copy a few minutes before it was time for prot to leave. I returned the original notebooks, a little jumbled but intact, to prot.

  “Just in the nick of time,” he said. “But now you’ll have to leave the room. Any being within a few feet will be swept along with me. Better take them with you, too,” he said, indicating the cats.

  I decided to humor him. Well, why not? There wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it anyway. I rousted the cats from his bed. One by one they brushed against his leg and streaked for various other warm places. “Good-bye, Sojourner Porter,” I said. “Don’t get knocked over by any aps.”

  “Not good-bye. Just auf wiedersehen. I’ll be back before you know it.” He pointed toward the sky. “After all, K-PAX isn’t so far away, really.”

  I stepped out of the room, but left the door open. I had already notified the infirmary staff to stand by, to be prepared for anything. I could see Dr. Chakraborty down the corridor with an emergency cart containing a respirator and all the rest. There were only a couple of minutes to go.

  The last I saw of prot he was sitting at his desk tapping his report into a neater stack, checking his flashlight. He placed his box of fruit and other souvenirs on his lap, picked up the little mirror and gazed into it. Then he transferred the flashlight to his shoulder. At that moment one of the security guards came puffing up to tell me that I had an urgent longdistance call. It was Robert’s mother! At exactly the same instant, Chuck came running down the hall with his worn little suitcase, demanding to be “taken aboard.” Even with all this commotion I couldn’t have taken my eyes off prot for more than a couple of seconds. But when I turned to tell him about the phone call, he was already gone!

  We all raced into the room. The only trace of him left behind were his dark glasses lying on a scribbled message. “I won’t be needing these for a while,” the note said. “Please keep them for me.”

  Acting on my earlier hunch that prot had hidden out in the storage tunnel during the few days he had allegedly gone to Canada, Greenland, and Iceland, we rushed to that area. The door was locked, and the security guard had some difficulty finding the right key. We waited patiently—I was confident we would find prot there—until he finally got the heavy door open and found the light switch. There was enough dusty old equipment to start our own museum, but there was no sign of prot. Nor was he hiding in the surgical theater or the seminar room, or anywhere else we thought he might have tried to conceal himself. It didn’t occur to any of us to check the rooms of the other patients.

  One of the nurses found him a few hours later, lying unconscious and in the fetal position on the floor of Bess’s room. He was little more than alive. His eyes were barely dilatable, his muscles like steel rods. I recognized the symptoms immediately—there were two other patients exactly like him in Ward 3B: he was in a deep catatonic state. Prot was gone; Robert had stayed behind. I had rather expected something like this. What I failed to foresee, however, was that later the same morning Bess would also be reported
missing.

  Giselle had the report translated by a cryptographer she knew, who used as a basis for this the pax-o version of Hamlet that prot had done for me earlier. Tided “Preliminary observations on B-TIK (RX 4987165.233),” it was primarily a detailed natural history of the Earth, especially of the recent changes thereon, which he attributed to man’s “cancerous” population growth, his “mindless” consumption of its natural resources, and his “catastrophic” elevation of himself to superiority over all the other species who cohabit our planet. All of this is consistent with his use of capitals for the Earth and other planets, and lower case for individual beings.

  There were also some suggestions as to how we might “treat” our social “illnesses”: the elimination of religion, capital, nationalism, the family as the basic social and educational unit—all the things he imagined were fundamentally wrong with us and, paradoxically, the things most of us hold dear. Without these “adjustments,” he wrote, the “prognosis” was not good. Indeed, he gave us only another decade to make the “necessary” changes. Otherwise, he concluded, “human life on the PLANET EARTH will not survive another century.” His last four words were somewhat more encouraging, however. They were: Oho minny blup kelsur—“They are yet children.”

  Epilogue

  Robert’s mother arrived with Giselle the day after prot’s departure and stayed through the weekend, but there was no indication whatever of cognizance on Robert’s part. She was a lovely woman, a bit confused, of course, about what had happened to her son—from the beginning she had been completely unaware of prot’s existence—as were we all. I told her there was no need for her to stay longer, and promised to let her know of any change in his condition. I dropped her at Newark Airport before heading for the Adirondacks with Chip, who tearfully admitted his cocaine problem when I confronted him with it, to join Karen and Bill and his wife and daughter.

  That was nearly five years ago. How I wish I could tell you that Robert sat up one fine day during that time and said, “I’m hungry—got any fruit?” But, despite our best efforts and constant attention, he remains to this day in a deep catatonic state. Like most catatonics he probably hears every word we say, but refuses, or is unable, to respond. Perhaps with patience and kindness on our part he will recover, in time, from this tragic condition. Stranger things have happened. I have known patients who have returned to us after twenty years of “sleep.” In the meantime, we can do little more than wait.

  Giselle visits him almost every week, and we usually have lunch and talk about our lives. She is currently researching a book about the deplorable infant mortality rate in America. Her article on mental illness featuring prot and some of the other patients appeared in a special health-oriented issue of Conundrum. As a result of that piece we have received thousands of letters from people asking for more information about K-PAX, many of them wanting to know how they can get there. And a Hollywood producer has requested authorization to do the story of Robert’s life. I don’t know whether anything will come of that, but, thanks to Giselle’s tireless efforts, the information we received from Robert’s mother, the hours of conversations I had with prot, and the cooperation of the authorities in Montana, we now have a reasonably clear picture of what happened on that terrible afternoon of August sixteenth through the early morning hours of August seventeenth, 1985. First, some biographical details.

  Robert Porter was born in Guelph, Montana in 1957, the son of a slaughterhouse worker. Shortly after Robert’s birth his father became disabled when a convulsing steer became unshackled and fell on top of him. In terrible pain for the rest of his life, unable even to tolerate bright light, he spent many of his waking hours with his young son, an energetic, happy boy who liked books and puzzles and animals. He never recovered from his injuries and succumbed when Robert was six years old.

  His father had often speculated about the possibility of remarkable life forms living among the stars in the sky and Robert called into being a new friend from a faraway planet where people didn’t die so readily. For the next several years Robert suffered brief bouts of depression, at which times he usually called on “prot” for comfort and support, but he was never hospitalized or otherwise treated for it.

  His mother took a job in the school cafeteria, which paid poorly, and the family, which also included two daughters, was barely able to make ends meet. Luxuries, like fresh fruit, were rare. Recreation took the form of hikes in the nearby woods and along the riverbank, and from these Robert gained a love and appreciation of the flora and fauna in forest and field and, indeed, of the forests and fields themselves.

  He was a good student, always willing to pitch in and help others. In the fall of 1974, when he was a high school senior, Robert was presented a community service medal by the Guelph Rotary Club and, later that year, was elected captain of the varsity wrestling team. In the spring of 1975 he was awarded a scholarship to the state university to study field biology. But his girlfriend, Sarah Barnstable, became pregnant and Robert felt obligated to marry her and find work to support his new family. Ironically, the only job he could find was the one that had killed his father some twelve years earlier.

  To add to their difficulties his wife was Catholic, and the resulting mixed marriage stigmatized the pair in the eyes of the residents of their small town, and they had few, if any, friends. This may have been a factor in their eventual decision to move to an isolated valley some miles outside of town.

  One August afternoon in 1985, while Robert was stunning steers at the slaughterhouse, an intruder appeared at the Porter home. Mother and daughter were in the backyard cooling themselves under the lawn sprinkler. The man, a stranger who had been arrested and released numerous times for a variety of crimes, including burglary, automobile theft, and child molestation, entered the house through the unlocked front door and watched Sarah and little Rebecca from the kitchen window until the girl came inside, probably to use the bathroom. It was then that the intruder accosted her. Hearing her daughter’s screams the mother ran into the house, where both she and Rebecca were raped and murdered, though not before Sarah had severely scratched the intruder’s face and nearly bitten off one of his ears.

  Robert arrived home just as the man was coming out of the house. On seeing the husband and father of his victims the murderer ran back inside and out the rear door. Robert, undoubtedly realizing that something was terribly wrong, pursued him into the house, past the bloody bodies of his wife and daughter lying on the kitchen floor, and into the yard, where he caught up with their killer and, with the strength of a knocker and the skills of a trained wrestler, broke the man’s neck. The sprinkler was still on, and remained so until the police shut it off the next day.

  He then returned to the house, carried his wife and daughter to their bedrooms, covered them with blankets, washed and dried their swimsuits and put them away, mopped the bloody floor, and, after saying his final farewells, made his way to the nearby river, where he took off his clothes and jumped in, an apparent suicide attempt. Although his body was never found, the police concluded that he had died by drowning, the case was officially closed, and that is how the report went into the files.

  He must have come ashore somewhere downstream, and from that point on he was no longer Robert, but “prot” (derived, presumably, from “Porter”), who wandered around the country for four and a half years before being picked up at the bus terminal in New York City. How he lived during that period is a complete mystery, but I suspect he spent a lot of time in public libraries studying the geography and languages of the countries of the world, in lieu of actually visiting them. He probably slept there as well, though how he found food and clothing is anybody’s guess.

  But who was prot? And where did his bizarre idea of a world without government, without money, sex, or love come from? I submit that somehow this secondary personality was able to utilize areas or functions of the brain that the rest of us, except, perhaps, those afflicted with savant syndrome and certain other diso
rders, cannot. Given that ability, he must have spent much of his time developing his concept of an idyllic world where all the events that had accumulated to ruin his “friend” Robert’s life on Earth could not happen. His vision of this Utopian existence was so intense and so complete that, over the years, he imagined it down to the most minute detail, and in a language of his own creation. He even divined, somehow, the nature of its parent suns and the pattern of stars in the immediate vicinity, as well as those of several other planets he claimed to have visited (all the data he provided to Dr. Flynn and his associates have proven to be completely accurate).

  His ideal world had to be one in which fathers don’t die while their children are growing up. Prot solved this problem in two ways: A K-PAXian child rarely, if ever, sees his parents, or even knows who they are; at the same time, he is comforted by the knowledge that they will probably live to be a thousand.

  It had to be a world without sex, or even love, those very human needs which can destroy promising young lives and rewarding careers. More importantly: Without love there can be no loss; without sex, no sex crimes. A world without even water, which might be used for sprinkling lawns!

  There would be no currency of any kind in this idealized place, the need for which kept Robert out of college and forced him to spend his life destroying the creatures he loved, the same kind of work that had killed his father. As a corollary, no animals would be slaughtered or otherwise exploited on his idyllic planet.

  His world would be one without God or any form of religion. Such beliefs had prevented Sarah from using birth-control devices, and then had stigmatized the “mixed marriage” in the eyes of the community. Without religion such difficulties could never arise. He may also have reasoned that what happened to Robert’s wife and child, and his father as well, argued against the existence of God.

  Finally, it had to be a world without schools, without countries, without governments or laws, all of which prot saw as doing little, if anything, to solve Robert’s personal and social problems. None of the beings on his idealized planet were driven by the forces of ignorance and greed that, in his eyes, motivate human beings here on Earth.