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.”