* As always, the names of the patients have been changed to protect the anonymity of their families.
“What about—?”
“Your son has more than he can handle. So does Chang and Menninger and Rothstein and Rudqvist and Roberts. We have more patients than we’ve ever had, and none of them seems to want to leave. They’re all waiting for someone from K-PAX to come and get them. And who knows more about alien visitors than you do?”
My last feeble defense: “I don’t have an examining room.”
“You can use mine. It has a separate entrance and I don’t have that many patients anymore.”
She had me and she knew it. And the truth is, I rather missed the direct interaction with the residents of MPI, though, technically, fled wasn’t a patient. “I’ll have to clear it with Karen.” But I knew my long-suffering wife would have no objection to getting me out of the house a couple of days a week.
When I turned to see how fled was taking all this, I found that she had fallen asleep again, her feet curled around the legs of her chair.
I whispered to Virginia, “We’re going to have to do something about the front gate. If people see a large chimpanzee loping around the lawn they’re going to think this is a zoo.”
“I’ll take care of it,” she promised.
* * *
As usual when visiting the hospital I decided to have lunch in the faculty dining room. Several of the staff psychiatrists were there and they greeted me warmly when I came in. I thought that rather odd, as I had been showing up fairly regularly almost since my retirement. It turned out that they were all relieved and happy that I had taken fled off their hands and they didn’t have to deal with her.
I sat down with our two most recent arrivals, Cliff Roberts and Hannah Rudqvist. The latter had arrived only three weeks before, on a sabbatical leave from the Karolinska Institute to work with Ron Menninger. (As part of an international exchange, Arthur Beamish was on leave in Stockholm for the year. Carl Thorstein, incidentally, left the Institute for good four years ago.) I didn’t yet know Hannah very well, but I wasn’t especially fond of Cliff, the hospital’s only African-American staff psychiatrist, who seemed to personify the unappealing self-centeredness of the younger generation of whatever race or ethnic origin. He was rumored to be a womanizer as well. On the other hand, he was a bright young doctor who had taken on some of the institute’s most difficult patients, including Howard, “the toad man of Milwaukee,” and Rocky, who cannot forget a slight, regardless of how miniscule, until an apology is made or revenge taken.
As do most psychiatrists, Hannah has her own little neuroses, and for reasons of her own, blushed when I sat down. In an attempt to put her at her ease, I asked her about invisible Phyllis, who is one of her responsibilities. Phyllis’s affliction, though rare, does occur occasionally, and it’s a difficult one for both patients and staff. If someone comes up and stares right into her eyes, for example, or punches her on a shoulder, she is convinced that the offender is merely looking at himself in a mirror, or shadow-boxing, or whatever. As with most delusionals, nothing can persuade her of the unreality of her situation. I mentioned that Phyllis seemed to wave at fled when we came in.
“Maybe you could get your monkey friend to help us out with her,” Cliff interjected brightly. Obviously he already knew something about our alien visitor.
“I’ll check with her, but I think it’s a little early to know whether she has the same chairside manner as prot. In fact, she seems to have different interests entirely.”
“That’s too bad,” he said. “I was hoping she could do something about our ridiculous workload.”
Another reason I didn’t like Cliff: he seemed more interested in his own personal well-being than in helping the patients. I noticed that his teeth could use some work, too. Perhaps I would ask fled if she had any interest in dentistry….
But a light seemed to click on in Hannah’s head. “Perhaps she knows fled can see her!” she exclaimed. (Though her English was flawless, she spoke with a lilting Swedish accent.) “Maybe Dr. Roberts is right: maybe we can get Phyllis to tell your new patient what troubles her!”
I pointed out that fled was a visitor from a faraway planet, and not a new patient. But Hannah was undeterred, and her enthusiasm was infectious. I was starting to get that feeling I had whenever I talked with prot. What could fled do for us, for the patients—for the world—that we couldn’t yet imagine?
At this point Ron Menninger and Laura Chang pulled up chairs. Both tried to speak at the same time. Ron finally gave way to his more persistent colleague. “Will you ask her to speak with Claire?” she pleaded. “Sometimes I think I’ve gotten somewhere with her, and the next thing I know we’re right back to square one.”
“Yes,” Menninger piped up,” and Charlotte has suddenly gone into a deep depression for no discernible reason.” Anticipating my next question, he added, “No, it’s not a side effect of her medication, which she’s been taking for some time. But all of a sudden she doesn’t seem to care about anything. I think she’s just lonely.”
“And Jerry,” Chang interjected. “Prot got through to him. Maybe fled can, too.”
“Hey, take a number!” Roberts shouted out. “Let her take a look at Rocky first!”
“Whoa!” I said. “Slow down! Give me a chance to talk to her. She may not want to practice Earth-bound psychiatry. She’s only here to study turtles and trees, as far as I can tell.”
They all backed off for the moment, but I knew they would be waiting impatiently for a verdict, and considerable help, from fled. And who can blame them? The Manhattan Psychiatric Institute takes only the most difficult patients, often those that other mental hospitals have given up on. Many have been here for years. I, too, hoped with all my heart that fled could relieve them of their suffering, help bring a measure of peace and happiness to their endlessly tormented lives. But that depended entirely on her willingness to cooperate with us and take an interest in their problems.
CHAPTER TWO
I spent the weekend listening to the tapes of my conversations with prot in 1990, 1995, and 1997. Not to refresh my memory of those sessions—I would never forget them—but to reconsider all the mistakes I had made in dealing with our first K-PAXian visitor. There were plenty, foremost of which was my reluctance to accept anything he had been telling me. Yet, how many psychiatrists would have done otherwise? All of us have encountered patients claiming to be from the reaches of space, from another time, even from the corridors of heaven or the depths of hell.
For those who have not read the previous books, a very brief review: prot had been brought to MPI from Bellevue Hospital, an apparent delusional amnesiac (eventually diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder). With the help of Giselle Griffin, a freelance reporter who had come to the hospital to do a story on mental illness, we were finally able to track down his Earthly origins to a small town in Montana, where his wife and nine-year-old daughter had been brutally assaulted and murdered. That, of course, could drive anybody insane (though technically, it was an alter ego, Robert Porter, who was the severely traumatized patient).
But prot was different from most multiple personality sufferers. Not only did he know certain things about astronomy that even astronomers (like my son-in-law Steve) didn’t know, but was demonstrably able to see light in the ultraviolet range. At first I didn’t believe he could travel at light speed, and even much faster, until he eventually demonstrated that ability on national television, and even then I thought it must be some kind of hallucinatory trick.