The young chimpanzee raised her head and looked directly at me for the first time. She made a whimpering noise, which Filbert translated as “Yes.”
Through Tewksbury I asked Filbert to instruct Naraba to rest for a while and not talk while I tried to speak to the others. When he had done so, she closed her eyes and her head fell to her chest. I requested that he try to speak to Naraba/fled as though she were someone else. Change his tone, for example. Though it might have been worth the try, it failed. After several minutes I discontinued the fishing expedition and recalled fled. It might have been my last best chance to determine how many alters were involved, but I knew there were many. And we had established that another species besides human beings could somehow call up an alter from a faraway planet to help them out in time of need. Did this apply to all the animals? Were all K-PAXians alter egos for someone living on the Earth, human or otherwise? Were there other planets harboring such personalities as well? Worm after worm was slithering out of the can.
Just then the door opened. It was Goldfarb. Not knowing we were there, she had apparently come to get something from her examining room. “God’s teeth!” she muttered when she saw us all huddled around her desk. Nevertheless, she came on in to retrieve whatever it was she was looking for. Was it Naraba or someone else who was freaked by the hospital director in her white coat? Whoever it was began to scream, and scurried off into a corner. “I’ll come back,” Goldfarb wisely decided, and exited as quickly as she had come in. The chimpanzee, however, continued to cry and refused to come out of her “hiding” place, even with Filbert’s gentle cajoling. I reluctantly decided to end the session, and recalled fled. Upon seeing where she was, the latter stood up and returned, quite calmly, to her chair. I brought her out of her trance. She remembered nothing of what had transpired, of course, but nevertheless seemed more subdued than usual, as if she felt, in some unconscious way, the suffering hidden deep in her alien mind. As a former psychiatrist, I wanted to get at that pain, but for that I no longer needed Filbert or Tewks.
Before we said our good-byes, I passed around the vegetables again, even taking a stalk of celery for myself, as did Tewksbury.
“I wish we could stay longer,” she confided with a crunch. “I’d like to talk to fled about K-PAX and what it’s like.” Then she signed a question to Filbert. He immediately became very excited and conveyed his enthusiasm to fled, who quickly signed something back. The chimpanzee immediately became calm, almost reverential, I thought, and the two of them sat down beside the desk and groomed each other for a while.
Tewks and I chatted a little more about chimpanzees in the wild, in research labs, in zoos. I was shocked and saddened to learn that the last of these held more of them than did the forests. There are a few environmental and animal rights groups working to reverse this obnoxious trend, but the handwriting already seems to be on the walclass="underline" with the growth of human populations and the poaching for bushmeat of the few remaining wild apes, it won’t be long before there won’t be a single chimpanzee left in his/her natural habitat. It sounded like the initial dire warnings about global warming, which very few paid attention to, and many still don’t, to the detriment of all of us.
“And that’s only the beginning,” she added. “Soon there won’t be any rhinos, hippos, giraffes, tigers—you name it—in the wild. Unless there’s a radical change in mindset among the human populations of the world, there will be more and more of us, and fewer and fewer of them, until someday there won’t be anything left on Earth except Homo sapiens and a few token animals—their cats and dogs and horses—all in captivity. Would you like to live in a world filled with people, and no tigers or polar bears?” she asked rhetorically, and then answered her own question: “I wouldn’t. If you ever write a book about this, Gene, I hope you’ll stress this point to your readers.”
“If I do that,” I patiently explained to her, “there might not be any readers. But tell me something: isn’t Filbert living in captivity, too?”
She looked at me sadly. “He was a pet. Some rich bastard in Montana brought him back from Congo when he was a baby. Same guy has a bunch of cheetahs living on his ranch. They’d never seen snow before they got there. Anyway, when this jerk got tired of Filbert’s shenanigans, he advertised him for sale. Then he tried to give him away. But no one wants an adult chimpanzee who hasn’t learned human manners. They’re strong, and they can be dangerous. But they’re too tame to go back to what little forest is left. They can’t survive there after living a couple of years in captivity.”
I asked her what fled had told Filbert to calm him down a little while earlier.
“I suggested he ask her if he could go with her to her forest in the sky. Her answer was that she had already reserved a place for him. “When I get home,” she said, “I’m going to check fled’s website to see if there might be a place for me as well!” She laughed. “Maybe Fil will put in a good word for me!”
At this point it occurred to me that fled had come to Earth to take the apes with her to K-PAX before it was too late. But then I remembered she had said it would be 100,000 people who would be making the trip. When I finally looked around to see what fled and Filbert were up to, I couldn’t find them. Had they sneaked out when Tewks and I were engaged in conversation? We finally found them under the desk, asleep. God knows what they had been doing before that.
When they woke up I asked fled whether she was going to stick around for a while.
“For a while,” she echoed dreamily.
I escorted Tewks and Filbert down the stairs and out of the hospital to the front gate, Fil waving to everyone as he exited. They all wistfully returned it.
I profusely thanked Dr. Tewksbury, of course, and assured her that her expenses would be promptly reimbursed. After our final hugs, Filbert kissed me firmly and very wetly on the lips, and I could swear that he winked at me as he skipped down the sidewalk toward the waiting van.
* * *
Though it seemed rather anticlimactic, I followed my usual habit and took a turn around the lawn, where I found Barney surrounded by several other patients, all unsuccessfully making silly faces at him. Darryl’s shirttail sticking out of his fly had no better success. From the back forty I heard Rocky shouting epithets at Rick, and I hurried over to try to calm them down.
As with most mental patients, the truth is quite simply what each of them believes it to be, and absolutely nothing will convince them otherwise. Same for Darryl, of course, who is certain that Meg Ryan will eventually come to her senses, and that they will live happily ever after, just like in the movies. And for “Dr.” Claire Smith, who is perfectly willing to share with you anything you might want to know about her experiences treating the residents of MPI, which are as real to her as so many brick walls.
Yet, how different, really, are any of them from you and me? We all believe certain things to be true or false regardless of ample evidence to the contrary. That other people like or dislike us, for instance, or find us more or less attractive than we think we are, that our religious beliefs are the only true ones. Perhaps this is part of being human. Since we can never know the absolute truth about anything (quantum mechanics emphasizes this uncertainty), we all need to fill in the gaps in order to interact with other people, get through our days with a minimum of confusion and doubt. The only thing different about the patients here is the degree of self-deception, which precludes their functioning in the “normal” world.
Consider Rick, for example, who not only holds on tightly to his bald-faced lies, but tries to foist them on everyone else. He works very hard at this because, without his private beliefs, his world would collapse and he would find it impossible to cope with his surroundings at all.