I ended with the hope that many of the staff would visit us once in a while in the Andirondacks, knowing that most would not. That’s okay, too. They will have plenty of other things to do.
As would I. I looked forward to getting back to travel planning, my telescope, my rented Cessna, and to reading the vast number of books accumulating dust in my study—MobyDick and all the rest.
And I had one last book of my own to write.
EPILOGUE
A short time after fled’s departure I got another call from Wang. “We have reason to believe,” he confided, “that she is leaving soon—perhaps from a football stadium somewhere in the Western United States. But never fear: we have every one of them staked out, and—”
I patiently explained that she had already gone.
“Gone where? The boss wants to see her. There has been an invitation from the United Nations for her to speak to the General Assembly.”
“You’re too late,” I reluctantly informed him. “Maybe on her next visit. She was planning to tell us—”
“Hang on,” he mumbled. Apparently he was trying to set up a recording device. Or perhaps looking for a pencil. “Okay, shoot.”
“She had a message from prot. He wanted to give us nine suggestions for avoiding a visit from the Badguys. Unfortunately, we will probably never know what they were.”
‘Nine? That’s too complicated. The boss isn’t going to like that. Can’t you make it one or two?
“There aren’t going to be any,” I repeated slowly. Fled is already back on K-PAX by now.”
“But we had a meeting scheduled for midnight tonight….”
“She won’t be able to make it.”
Another pause. “What did she say about Mr. Dartmouth?”
“He ought to see a mental health professional as soon as possible. And, incidentally, she suggested that you do the same.”
“I’ll have to get back to you on that.” That was the last I heard from Messrs. Dartmouth and Wang.
* * *
As of this writing, everything is back to normal at home and at the Manhattan Psychiatric Institute. I get all the hospital news from Will, who tells me about the many new patients, all difficult, all interesting. Although I’m glad he enjoys discussing them, I only half-listen sometimes.
Steve and the boys show up now and then, but not very often—all are busier than ever. Our son-in-law did show us some pictures of the late-night picnic, which turned out surprisingly well despite the darkness—Star may have a future in photography as well as acting. But it was chilling to see them and remember that fled had actually been with us not so long before. She looked amazingly human in her candlelit poses with the family: smiling, with her arms draped around one or another of the boys. As a result of all this, and the hair of fled’s head encased in plastic, Star was elected to the student council. Unfortunately, he couldn’t stand the boredom and quickly resigned from that post.
Fred is starring in a new Broadway show and is hoping to reprise the role in Hollywood (we’ll see about that—the starring role he told us about earlier had already fallen through, the film having been relegated to “development hell”). And Jenny and Anne did make the trip to New York, and we to California. Karen is planning several more trips for us, including a month-long tour of the entire Southwest with a stop at the Grand Canyon, where fortunes are being made by vendors selling all kinds of ape paraphernalia, and to the Siegels’ favorite country, Poland.
I rarely visit the hospital anymore, but I did stop in to see Jerry not long after my final retirement. He no longer interacts with anyone, so he’ll probably be at MPI the rest of his life. Despite this grim outlook, I believe he is the happiest patient there. I don’t know whether he remembers how he was for a while, but, if so, he must be doubly happy. He finally finished the miniature MPI, and rebuilt the Eiffel Tower. His current project is a matchstick version of the great pyramid at Giza, which almost fills his room (he sleeps inside it).
I left him with the usual hug, and a “’Bye, Jer.”
“’Bye, Jer, ’bye Jer, ’bye, Jer,” he replied, without hugging me back. To me it sounded like music.
One other note from the hospitaclass="underline" last Christmas, Hannah Rudqvist married Cliff Roberts and has become an American citizen and a permanent member of the MPI staff. It wasn’t embarrassment that caused her blushing problem, but a physiological response to the detergent she was using coupled with heat and perspiration. She wasn’t even aware of it. Who knows—perhaps that was one of the reasons Cliff was attracted to her (besides her good looks). Or maybe it was something else. The mysteries of love should remain just that, and I wish them both well. Incidentally, her new husband wasn’t really a womanizer. He started that rumor himself because of his innate shyness. People!
Freddie was also married, in the fall of 2005, though not to the ballerina but to the actress who played Meg Ryan so convincingly that Darryl dumped her. Perhaps they should have waited awhile—they’re already having problems they never had for the few months they were living together before the wedding. Life is so weird!
I mentioned to Will that, while he and Hannah were meeting to plan my retirement party, I had suspected they were having an affair. “I knew you would never do a thing like that,” I fatuously told him.
“No more than you would, Dad,” came the obvious reply.
According to news reports, a sizable number of the people who became vegans or vegetarians in an attempt to secure a ticket to K-PAX have not gone back to eating their fellow beings. As a result, the air is a little cleaner, water shortages have eased a bit, and global warming has slowed down significantly. Encouragingly, perhaps, there is even some evidence that the general population has become fractionally more aware that our planet is but a speck in the cosmos, only one of countless trillions throughout the universe. In this sense alone, perhaps, fled’s visit has had an impact of potentially monumental consequence.
It’s possible that some of this apparent awakening is due in part to the telecast of the pilot program for the reality show filmed at MPI, which, in fact, included fled’s warning that the Badguys could show up in 2020. I don’t know whether the producers did this just to make the show more exciting to the viewers, but the end result was that some people must have heard the message. Perhaps it’s a start. In any case, I did get two voiceovers on the show, including my defense of fled’s mating habits and putative offspring. Freddy said I was “brilliant.” I wasn’t, of course, but it’s nice to have a son who thinks so.
Not long after the telecast of the pilot episode, the series itself was canceled. Not just the mental hospital part—all of it. Apparently, like most popular TV programs, the reality show blueprint had already begun to run its course, beaten to death by spinoff and repetition. (The only formulas that seem to be unaffected by overexposure are the endless identical cop shows and sitcoms, which most people can’t seem to get enough of.)
In other news, son-in-law Steve has been awarded the 2007 Copernicus prize in astronomy, primarily because of his work on the speed of light. Since its value is directly related to the expansion of the universe, he discovered that it is possible, in fact, to show that the rate of expansion is slowing down, rather than accelerating, as other evidence had suggested. He did this by making exquisitely sensitive measurements of the speed of light over a period of one year, and when this calculation is carried out to eighteen decimal places, the value of c is clearly slowing at an infinitesimal, though measurable, rate. Furthermore, he found that the light coming from at least two distant galaxies “winked out” as a result of the slowdown in light speed during this same time period. The awards committee favorably compared his studies to the special relativity theory formulated by Albert Einstein a century earlier. Fled’s help in initiating Steve’s findings was not mentioned in the citation, however.