Readers of the K-PAX trilogy may remember that I used a tape recorder when interviewing prot. The Manhattan Psychiatric Institute is a research hospital, and I wanted to have our sessions accessible for later study, both for myself and for my colleagues. And the tapes turned out to be invaluable in writing the books that came out of our sessions. Nevertheless, I chose not to be encumbered by such a device during these informal discussions with fled. She wasn’t, after all, a patient, and I wasn’t actually a practicing psychiatrist any longer. Moreover, at the time these conversations began, I wasn’t really contemplating writing a book about her, despite her smart-ass assumption.
I cleared my throat and began the short speech I had prepared on the way in. “I thought we would just establish some ground rules today. So we don’t get bogged down in extraneous details or go off on wrong tangents.”
“You don’t want to waste any of your precious time on ‘tangents,’ is that it?”
“Well… no, I don’t. Or yours, either.”
“Time is very important to you, isn’t it?”
“Yes, I suppose it is. Particularly at my age, when one doesn’t know how much of it he has left.”
“A very human thing to say.”
“And you never think about that?”
“No species but yours thinks about that, gino. Ironic, isn’t it, that you waste so much of it worrying about how much you have, rather than living your lives as fully as the other animals on your planet, who never think about it?”
As was often the case with prot, I had already lost control of the situation, which was exactly what I didn’t want to do. “Okay, that’s one of those tangents—can we just stick to the ground rules?”
“Sounds boring. What are they?”
“There are several. First, can I depend on you to be here when I come in?”
“Depends on when you come in.”
“Let’s say Mondays and Fridays at about this time.”
“Let’s say I’ll let you know if I won’t be here those days.”
I had learned enough about aliens to know it was a waste of time to argue with them. “Fine. But can you minimize your absences?”
“When I’m here, I’m absent from somewhere else.”
I sighed. “Second thing: I’ll ask the questions and you answer them. Fair enough?”
“Depends on the questions. And what if I have questions for you?”
“What if you wait until I’ve asked you all my questions before you ask yours?”
“What if we take turns?”
“Damn it, fled, you promised to cooperate!”
With that she leapt from the chair onto the desk. I admit that this startled me, and I jumped. But it didn’t take me long to notice that her shift was pulled up, her legs were spread wide apart, and underneath her garment she wasn’t wearing anything.
I turned my head away, but I wasn’t sure whether it was from modesty or disgust. “Okay,” I stammered, staring at the door, “here’s another rule: I sit on this chair, you sit on that one.”
She leapt back to her chair, crossed her hairy legs, and placed her chin in her hand, obviously faking a demure seriousness. And with that, our series of discussions began, though most of the time I wasn’t sure who was interviewing whom.
“All right. The first thing I want to know is: what were you doing in Congo? Besides sightseeing, of course.”
Picking her nose, she replied, “I was looking for the nonhuman apes.”
“Nonhuman?”
“Humans are a part of the ape family. Didn’t you know that, doc?”
“I’m not an ape.”
“Spoken like a true speciesist.” She rolled the contents of a nostril between her fingers and popped it into her mouth.
Though unable to fully conceal my disgust, I nevertheless forged ahead. “And did you find—?”
“Not many. Most have been exterminated.”
“Most of what?”
“Chimpanzees, gorillas, baboons, monkeys—you name it.”
“Who exterminated them?”
She snorted. “You’re playing dumb again, aren’t you, gene? That might work for your human patients, but not for the rest of us.”
“No, I mean, isn’t it illegal to—uh—exterminate an ape?”
“You ever hear of the bushmeat trade, doctor? Not to mention murdering the parents so you can kidnap their babies to sell for pets? Or anything else that’s profitable?”
“Bushmeat??”
“Why don’t you just get a hearing aid and save the rest of us a lot of grief?”
This particular K-PAXian seemed to annoy me more and more by the minute. “All right, goddamn it—I’ll try not to repeat myself! By ‘bushmeat,’ you mean—”
“That’s it exactly. Ape brains for supper.”
“Would you please stop reading my mind? It’s quite disconcerting to a human being, you know.”
She saluted. “Sure, boss. Just trying to save you some precious time.”
“Thank you!”
“That’s how aids got started, you know. Humans eating monkey brains.”
“Yes, I’ve heard that.”
“And now you’ve got mad cow and bird flu. Not to mention heart disease, cancer, and on and on. Leave the animals alone, doc—you’ll live longer.”
“Thanks again. As I was about to say, there are still millions of apes and—uh—other things in Africa, aren’t there, even with this ‘bushmeat’ trade?”
“Try ‘thousands.’ Maybe a few hundred thousands if you include all the great apes on EARTH, but their numbers are decreasing by the minute. It’s only the sapiens who are forever on the increase.”
“Well, did you run across a few apes? And if you did, what did you find out about them? You did come to study them, didn’t you?”
“No, you cretin. I came to learn from them. Something most of you humans haven’t opted to do yet.”
“All right—what did you learn from them?”
“Plenty. They’re sick and tired of trying to hide from the ‘naked beasts,’ as they refer to you. Especially since they haven’t done anything to justify your endless persecution.”
Suddenly she grinned and a leg shot up to the desk. Are you sure you don’t want to—”
“No, I don’t.”
“You must have read my mind.”
“Never mind that! If you don’t stop coming on to me I’m going to throw you out of here and you can find someone else to ‘put you up.’”
“It’s because I’m an ‘ape,’ isn’t it?”
“No! I mean—well, yes, that’s part of it. We don’t have sex with animals on this planet.”
“I’m no more or less an animal than you are! What you mean is that you’re a speciesist. Aren’t you? Aren’t you?” She began to play with herself.
I turned away again. “No, damn it! I just don’t want to have intimate relations with a— With a goddamn ape!”
“Speciesist! Speciesist!”
I stood up. “That’s all the time we have for today. I’ll see you on Friday.” I started toward the door before adding, “But only if you promise to behave yourself!”
“I am behaving myself, doc,” she shouted back. “On K-PAX it would be impolite for an orf not to make the offer. If you don’t like great sex, that’s your problem.”
I sighed. “Good-bye, fled. Until Friday.” I shuffled out and down the stairs, leaving her to amuse herself in whatever way she found polite.
* * *
Hoping that fled wasn’t following me I ducked into the quiet room to collect my thoughts and plan my next discussion with her. Instead, I ran into “Dr.” Claire Smith, who believes she’s a staff psychiatrist. She was reading a journal. The problem with a patient like this is that she, in fact, knows a lot about psychiatry—in some areas, more than most of the staff, perhaps. Certainly more than I, retired and beginning to fall out of touch with the literature and the latest developments. Claire loves to offer advice to her “colleagues,” and yes, we often humor her in this to avoid triggering a severe depression.