The apes are, in fact, members of your own genus (homo). They have been classified otherwise because of their physical appearance, without regard for the countless mental and physical similarities between you. Regarding them as something else merely underscores your own prejudices. You and they evolved from a common ancestor, a fact that has been vigorously denied by your religions, which unanimously insist that human beings are in a special category, elevated above every other form of life on EARTH, or anywhere else. Discounting your biological history clearly illustrates this human bigotry. Treating the great apes as “inferior” is like considering all women, all humans of other races, all those with different sexual orientations, or anyone who exhibits differences of any kind as being of less value than yourselves.
I have left you a few thousand of your relatives, enough to maintain their species if you are willing to set aside territory which is theirs alone, and never violating it. If you were to do this, you would be taking a great step toward joining the civilized beings in the rest of the UNIVERSE as partners. Otherwise, it will not look good on your record, which, even now, is being scrutinized by the bullocks.
Taking some of your cousins with me in no way suggests that beings other than humans or apes are inferior in any way to either of you. I could only take 100,000 of you with me on this trip. Perhaps other K-PAXians will come to bring some of your fellow beings to K-PAX, where we will all live in harmony with one another. If you should learn to co-exist on EARTH, of course, there will be no need. If you cannot, they will not miss you when the badguys come. Either way, their short lives of terror will soon be over, and your WORLD will again be the paradise it was before the sapiens arrived on the scene. And when that happens, those who have emigrated to K-PAX may wish to return to your beautiful PLANET.
A few days after fled and her companions departed, Dartmouth (hobbling on old-fashioned wooden crutches) and Wang paid us a final call. “We have decided to allow her—uh—child to be born,” the latter informed me, “provided that she agrees to certain experimental procedures. We’d appreciate it if you would tell us where we can find her. The boss is very keen to have this matter successfully resolved in the interest of national security.”
“That’s classified,” I told him, and went back into the house, thinking: perhaps we ought to be glad that our governments are so inept. Imagine the damage they could do if they were competent….
* * *
The following Monday Goldfarb called and requested that I come in one last time for lunch and to fill in some paperwork. Karen decided to go, too. I supposed my long-suffering wife was worried that while I was there I’d find some puzzling case to become involved with, though I assured her there was no chance whatever of that.
She rolled her eyes. “All it would take would be an alien visitor or someone equally interesting and you’d be off and running again.”
“I don’t think I could take another alien visitor!”
We went in a few days later. The plywood barricade blocking the grounds from prying eyes had already been removed, but the lawn and lounge were eerily deserted, and there was little to see. As we proceeded to the doctors’ dining room I vaguely wondered how long it would be until the hospital would be filled again with impossible patients of all possible kinds.
“Surprise!” a few dozen voices shouted. It was a long-postponed retirement party for moi.
Well, I won’t go into the gory details on that. Except to say that it had been organized by Will (with the assistance of Hannah Rudqvist). But how did they know I would be hanging up my yellow pad for good as soon as fled had gone? “I knew you would consider anything that happened after she left to be anticlimactic,” Will later told me. Another good indication that it’s time for permanent retirement: when your family and co-workers know you better than you know yourself.
All the remaining patients were also there, including Jerry and the other autists, along with Georgie and his football. Their obvious joy served as a reminder to everyone, especially those of us who had forgotten, that being mentally ill doesn’t always mean sadness and despair.
We all had a wonderful lunch, including a huge chocolate cake (my favorite dessert) with thirty-five candles on it, one for every year I had been at the hospital. There were speeches by Goldfarb, Will, and even Roberts, who openly confided, “To tell you the truth, I never liked you much.”
What else could I say but, “I didn’t like you much either, but now that I’ve gotten to know you better, I like you even less.” His roar of laughter indicated that he accepted the joke in the spirit that had been intended, though it probably covered up a little unconscious prejudice on both our parts. But, of course, we’re both human.
Finally it was my turn. I hadn’t prepared anything, so it was pretty rambling. The easiest part was thanking everyone for so many enjoyable years as their colleague at the Manhattan Psychiatric Institute. All of them, particularly Virginia Goldfarb, had made everything about my difficult job easier and more rewarding. As much as I had sometimes complained about the workload, the frustration, and the stress of treating some very demanding patients, it had been thirty-five years of fascination and wonder. And being able to help a lot of miserable people to live happier lives than they might have otherwise was the icing on the cake. I was almost sorry I had decided to retire.
I confessed that I had been extremely fortunate, of course, in having been in the right place at the right time when prot showed up, followed by fled a few years later. It’s impossible to really explain how much they have enriched my life. Until you’ve been privileged to know beings who represent cultures that have been around far longer than ours, it’s difficult to fully appreciate how very young we are on the cosmological scale, how enormously much we have to learn. In a similar vein, we could also ascertain a great deal from our close cousins, the great apes, who have been around for at least as long as we have, and who have learned to live within the prescribed bounds that a benevolent nature allows, and never try to take more than they need.
After the yawns had died down I pointed out that MPI has a wonderful young staff, doctors and nurses who, I am sure, will give their best until their turn to exit the stage comes along, as it inevitably must. I hoped they would all have lives, both professional and personal, as enjoyable as the one I have had. If I died tomorrow I would die happily, knowing I had done the best I could with what little talent I had.
But, I added, none of it would have been possible without my wonderful wife, who unflaggingly helped me get through the difficult times with her unquestioning love and support. I don’t know how many years we have left together, but I know they will be good ones, happy ones, if not very productive.