With fled, on the other hand, it seemed clear that we wouldn’t have to waste time determining whether she was also from K-PAX and came here on a beam of light. For one thing she knew prot and had brought holograms of him and Robert and Giselle, and, for another, she certainly couldn’t have come from Earth. I wondered whether she liked fruit; she might have looked like an ape, but that wasn’t actually the case. Who knew what her wants and needs might be, or exactly what she planned to do with her time here. I would have to spend at least a couple of visits just getting to know her.
Superimposed on all this was the urgent question of what effect fled might have on the other patients at the hospital. Would she be sympathetic to their plights, as prot had been? Or indifferent, as she was to my cosmological questions? Or perhaps even antagonistic toward them (and vice versa)? Her edges seemed considerably rougher than prot’s; would this propensity for directness (she reminded me of former patient Frankie, now a resident of K-PAX) put off the other inmates, as well as the hospital staff?
I certainly hoped not. Some of the patients had been waiting years for another visitor from K-PAX; many of them, in fact, were depending on her to take them back with her when she returned. These included Cassandra, our long-time resident prognosticator, and the aforementioned Jerry, our autistic engineer, who was working on a large matchstick model of the Institute itself, including the new Villers wing, named for our former hospital director and his wife (and rather unsympathetically dubbed, by Cliff Roberts, “The Screaming Hilton”). Other, newer residents, including some of the “Magnificent Seven,” were also patiently waiting for a voyage to the stars. Most wanted nothing more than to try their luck on another planet.
Two of the latter, incidentally, have been successfully treated and released, and a third, the “female Jesus,” was transferred to our sister hospital, “The Big Institute,” at Columbia. (We sometimes exchange difficult patients, hoping that someone can come up with something the other staff has not; in any case a change of venue is often salutary for everyone involved.) The other four were still with us. Besides Howard and Phyllis these include Rick, who is constitutionally unable to tell the truth, and Darryl, who thinks Meg Ryan is in love with him. Other recent denizens include “Dr. Claire Smith,” who believes that she herself is a psychiatrist, rather than an inmate, and Barney, who has never been able to laugh at anything. It was patients like these whom we all sincerely hoped fled might be able to help—something that none of the staff has been able to do, even with years of dedicated effort.
I hoped that these and our other residents would give fled the benefit of the doubt. In her favor was the notion most of them shared: that she held the key to departing our hostile planet, the direct or indirect source of their problems. Some of the issues responsible for the patients’ troubles would, indeed, be left behind if they could but reach escape velocity—oppressive parents, onerous duties, unwanted obligations, endless guilts and frustration, and all the other baggage that, they believed, would no longer harass them. Even some of the staff would probably go with fled in a New York minute.
But first, before any of that could be sorted out, I needed to determine what she really wanted from us in order to try to head off any problems that she (or anyone else) might encounter during her visit. And beyond all this, I hadn’t forgotten that I would be shouldering an enormous responsibility in talking with another visitor from the planet K-PAX, both to the hospital and to society at large. Who knew what she might come up with that could be of tremendous benefit to everyone, if only I were astute enough to recognize it?
On Saturday night I went out to look for K-PAX in the constellation Lyra, but of course I couldn’t find it—it’s too far away. Nevertheless it was prominent in my imagination, as if it were the full moon. Prot was there, and Robert and Giselle and Gene and Oxie and all the others who had made the journey eight years ago, and all the memories came roaring back….
I couldn’t wait for Monday to come.
* * *
I went up in my rented Cessna on Sunday morning. It always gives me a sense of perspective to go flying on a beautiful spring day. No telephones ringing, no one knocking on the door—only the sky above and the ground below. And I suspected it might be the last chance I’d have for a while to get away from the events that were sure to engulf us at home and in the hospital.
That afternoon the phone started to ring. Daughter Abby and her husband Steve had decided to come up for a visit, and I was pretty sure I knew why: Abby had told my astronomer son-in-law that fled was here, and he wanted to talk to our alien visitor. Though Karen had already explained that she wasn’t interested in astronomical matters, Steve, as always, was undeterred—he wanted to learn whatever he could from her.
Will and Dawn, with daughter Jessica, arrived about the same time. I think Will felt a little guilty about offering to take on fled, only to be rebuffed by hospital director Goldfarb. At the same time, he expressed a sincere interest in discussing her “case,” and in helping in whatever way he could. I reminded him that psychiatry is an overworked profession and that his other charges would appreciate his not diluting his efforts on their behalf. He reluctantly agreed, but I could see that the wheels in his head were still turning. I assured him I would consult with him regularly. He is really quite knowledgeable and thoughtful, and I value his opinions very highly. Whatever his motive for showing up, it was wonderful to see our seven-year-old granddaughter, who had just lost an incisor. “When will it grow back in, Grandpa?”
“When you’re twenty-two,” I told her.
Her eyes became as big as saucers. I laughed so she’d know I was joking.
Even Fred, the actor, called. He couldn’t make it because he was doing a matinee and learning his lines for yet another show; he was just curious about fled. I wished I had more to tell him. He had plenty to tell us, though, primarily about his finally deciding it was time to settle down. “It gets monotonous, Dad, a different girl every other night. Sometimes juggling two or three at once,” he lamented. Karen and I, who have been married for more than forty years, had a good laugh over that.
Jenny was still in California, and presumably didn’t yet know about our most recent visitor. But, even if she had, she undoubtedly wouldn’t have joined in—she was completely immersed in her long-time obsession, a vaccine against HIV. As always, she had high hopes (“We’re getting closer all the time, Dad,” she reported in her last call), if not yet an effective serum.
Abby and Steve brought their son Star with them (Rain was busy with his studies at Princeton), and even he hit me for information: “Is she really a talking chimp, Grandpa?” I explained that she wasn’t a “chimp,” at least as far as I knew, but he wasn’t convinced and wanted to come to the hospital to see for himself. Thinking he might be showing some interest in psychiatry, I asked him why. “Talking to a chimp would be ‘sooooo cool.’” I refrained, as usual, from asking him if he knew any other adjectives. But what he meant, I think, is that he would be able to favorably impress his friends if he could show them a video or the like. Or perhaps a hair from her head. In any case, he didn’t try to push his luck, though he spent a good bit of time videotaping everything that was going on around him—practicing, I suppose, for his directorial debut with fled—and he earned some points by giving Flower a pretty good workout. He is clearly a dog lover, a trait he inherited from his mother.
Abby, who loves all animals, wanted me to encourage fled to visit Africa. She has long been interested in learning what chimpanzees and gorillas really thought about and how they communicated with one another in the wild. In her view, they are far ‘smarter’ than they’re given credit for. “The sign language thing is only the tip of the iceberg,” she informed me. “There’s a lot they know and understand—and feel—that we can’t possibly determine by talking with them in such an unnatural manner.”