K-PAX

by Gene Brewer

  "Probably in their late six hundreds."

  "Obviously they no longer work."

  "Neither of them has ever worked." Apparently the patient considered his parents to be ne'er-do-wells, and the way he phrased his answer led me to believe that he harbored a deep-seated resentment or even hatred not only of his father (not uncommon) but of his mother (relatively rare for a man) as well. He continued: "No one `works' on KPAX. That is a human concept."

  "No one does anything?"

  "Of course not. But when you do something you want to do, it's not work, is it?" His grin widened.

  "You don't consider what you do to be work, do you?"

  I ignored this smug comment. "We'll talk more about your parents later, all right?"

  "If you like."

  "Fine. There are a couple of other things I'd like to clear up before we go on."

  "Anything you say."

  "Good. First, how do you account for the fact that, as a visitor from space, you look so much like an Earth person?"

  "Why is a soap bubble round?"

  "I don't know-why?"

  "For an educated person, you don't know much, do you, gene? A soap bubble is round because that is the most energy-efficient configuration. Similarly, many beings around the UNIVERSE look pretty much like we do."

  "I see. Okay-you mentioned earlier that-mm EARTH is a particularly lively place as seen and heard from space."

  "What did you mean by that?"

  "Your television and radio waves go out from EARTH in all directions. The whole GALAXY is watching and listening to everything you say and do."

  "But these waves travel only at the speed of light, don't they? They couldn't possibly have reached K-PAX as yet."

  He sighed again, more loudly this time. "But some of the energy goes into higher overtones, don'tcha know? It's this principle, in fact, that makes light travel possible. Have you studied physics?"

  I suddenly remembered my long-suffering high school physics teacher, who had tried to drum this kind of information into my head. I also felt a need for a cigarette, though I hadn't smoked one in years. "I'll take your word for that, Mist-uh-prot. One more thing: Why do you travel around the universe all by yourself?"

  "Wouldn't you, if you could?"

  "Maybe. I don't know. But what I meant was: Why do you do it alone?"

  "Is that why you think I'm crazy?"

  "Not at all. But doesn't it get kind of lonely, all those years-four years and eight months, wasn't it?-in space?"

  "No. And I wasn't in space that long. I've been here for four years and nine months."

  "How long were you in spacer"

  "I aged about seven of your months, if that's what you mean."

  "You didn't feel a need to have someone to talk to for all that time?"

  "No." I jotted down: Patient dislikes everyone?

  "What did you do to keep yourself occupied?"

  He wagged his head. "You don't understand, gene. Although I became seven EARTH months older during the trip, it really seemed like an instant to me. You see, time is warped at super light speeds. In other words-"

  Unforgivably, I was too annoyed to let him go on. "And speaking of time, ours is up for today. Shall we continue the discussion next week?"

  "As you wish."

  "Good. I'll call Mr. Kowalski and Mr. Jensen to escort you back to your ward."

  "I know the way."

  "Well, if you don't mind, I'd rather call them. Just routine hospital procedure. I'm sure you understand."

  "Perfectly."

  "Good." The orderlies arrived in a moment and the patient left with them, nodding complacently to me as he went out. I was surprised to find that I was dripping with perspiration, and I remember getting up to check the thermostat after switching off the recorder.

  While the tape was rewinding I copied my scribbled observations for his permanent file, making mention of my distaste for what seemed to me his arrogant manner, after which I filed the rough notes into a separate cabinet, already stuffed with similar records. Then I listened to part of the tape, adding a comment about the patient's lack of any trace of dialect or accent. Surprisingly, hearing his soft voice, which was rather pleasant, was not at all annoying to me. It had been his demeanor.... Suddenly I realized: That cocky, lopsided, derisive grin reminded me of my father.

  DAD was an overworked small-town doctor. The only time he ever relaxed-except for Saturday afternoons, when he lay on the sofa with his eyes closed listening to the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts-was at dinnertime, when he would have exactly one glass of wine and relate to my mother and me, in his offhand way, more than we wanted to know about the ringworms and infarctions of his day. Afterwards he would head back to the hospital or make a few house calls. Unless I could think up a good excuse he would take me with him, assuming, erroneously, that I enjoyed the noxious sounds and smells, the bleeding and vomiting as much as he did. It was that insensitivity and arrogance, which I hated in my father, that had annoyed me so much during my first encounter with this man who called himself "prot."

  I resolved, as always when something like this happens, to keep my personal life out of the examining room.

  ON the train home that evening I got to thinking, as I often do after beginning a difficult or unusual case, about the human mind and reality. My new patient, for example, and Russell, our resident Christ, and thousands -like them live in worlds of their own, realms just as real to them as yours and mine are to us. That seems difficult to understand, but is it really? Surely the reader of this account has become, at one time or another, thoroughly involved in a film or absorbed in a novel, utterly "lost" in the experience. Dreams, even daydreams, often seem very real at the time, as do events recalled during hypnosis. On such occasions, who is to say what reality is?

  It is quite remarkable what some of those with severe mental disorders are able to do within the boundaries of their illusory worlds. The "idiot" savants are a case in point. Unable to function in our society, they withdraw into recesses of the mind which most of us can never enter. They are capable of feats-with numbers, for example, or music-that others cannot begin to duplicate. We are still in the Dark Ages as far as understanding the human mind is concerned-how it learns, how it remembers, how it thinks. If Einstein's brain were transplanted into Wagner's skull, would this individual still be Einstein? Better: Switch half of Einstein's brain with half of Wagner's-which person would be Einstein and which Wagner? Or would each be someone in between? Similarly, in the case of multiple personality syndrome, which of the distinct "identities" is really the person in question, or is he/she a different person at different times? Are we all different people at different times? Could this explain our changing "moods"? When we see someone talking to himself-to whom is he speaking? Have you ever heard someone say, "I haven't been myself lately."? Or "You're not the man I married!"? And how do we account for the fundamentalist preacher and his clandestine sex life? Are we all Drs. Jekyll and Messrs. Hyde?

  I made a note to dwell for a while on prot's imaginary life on his imaginary planet, hoping of course that this would reveal something about his background on Earth-his geographical origin, perhaps, -his occupation, his name!-so that we might be able to track down his family and friends and thus, in addition to allaying their fears about his health and whereabouts, get to the underlying cause for his bizarre confabulation. I was beginning to feel the little tingle I always get at the beginning of a challenging case, when all the possibilities are still open. Who was this man? What sorts of alien thoughts filled his head? Would we be able to bring him down to Earth?

  Session Two

  I have always tried to give my examining room as pleasant an atmosphere as possible, with cheerful pastel walls, a few sylvan watercolors, and soft, indirect lighting. There is no couch: My patient and I sit facing each other in comfortable chairs. There is a clock placed discreetly on the back wall where the patient cannot see it.

  Before my second interview with prot I wen
t over Joyce Trexler's transcript of the first week's session with him. Mrs. Trexler has been here almost forever and it is common knowledge that it is she who really runs the place. "Crazy as a loon" was her uninvited comment as she dropped the typed copy onto my desk.

  I had looked up "tachyons" and found that they were, as he had indicated, entities traveling faster than light. They are purely theoretical, however, and there is no evidence suggesting their actual existence. I had also tried to check out the "Zairese," but couldn't find anyone who spoke any of its more than two hundred dialects. However, although his story seemed perfectly consistent, it was no less problematic.In psychoanalysis, one tries to become the patient's peer. Gain his confidence. Build on what grasp he still has of reality, his residue of normal thoughts. But this man had no grasp of reality. His alleged travels around the world offered some sort of earthbound experience to pursue, but even that was suspect-he could have spent time in the library, or watched travelogues, for example. I was still pondering how to gain some kind of toehold on prot's psyche when he was escorted into my examining room.

  He was wearing the same blue corduroys, dark glasses, and familiar smile. But this time the latter did not annoy me so much-it had been my problem, not his. He requested a few bananas before we began, and offered one to me. I declined, and waited until he had devoured them, skins and all. "Your produce alone," he said, "has made the trip worthwhile."

  We chatted for a few minutes about fruit. He reminded me, for example, that their characteristic odors and flavors are due to the presence of specific chemical compounds known as esters. Then we reviewed briefly our previous interview. He maintained that he had arrived on Earth some four years and nine months ago, traveled on a beam of light, etc. Now I learned that "K-PAX" was circled by seven purple moons. "Your planet must be a very romantic place," I prodded. At this point he did a surprising thing, something that no other patient of mine has ever done in the nearly thirty years I have been practicing psychoanalysis: He pulled a pencil and a little red notebook from his shirt pocket and began taking notes of his own! Rather amused by this, I asked him what he was jotting down. He replied that he had thought of something to include in his report. I inquired as to the nature of this "report." He said it was his custom to compile a description of the various places he visited and beings he encountered throughout the galaxy. It appeared that the patient was examining the doctor! It was my turn to smile.Not wanting to inhibit his activities in any way, I did not press him to show me what he had written, though I was more than a little curious. Instead, I asked him to tell me something about his boyhood on "K-PAX" (i.e., Earth).

  He said, "The region I was born in-incidentally, we are born on K-PAX, just like you, and the process is much the same, only-well, we'll get into that later, I suppose...."

  "Why don't we go into it now?"

  He paused briefly, as if taken aback, but quickly recovered. The little grin, however, was gone. "If you wish. Our anatomy is much like yours, as you know from the physical examination. The physiology is also similar, but, unlike on EARTH, the reproduction process is quite unpleasant."

  "What makes it unpleasant?"

  "It is a very painful procedure."

  Ah, I thought, a breakthrough: Mr. "prot" very possibly suffers some sort of sexual terror or dysfunction. I quickly pursued this lead. "Is this pain associated with intercourse itself, with ejaculation, or merely with obtaining an erection?"

  "It is associated with the entire process. Where the seactivities result in pleasurable sensations for beings such as yourself, for us the effect is quite the opposite. This applies both to the males and females of our species and, incidentally, to most other beings around the GALAXY as well."

  "Can you compare the sensation to anything else I might be able to understand or identify with? Is it, like a toothache, or-"

  "It's more like having your gonads caught in a vise, except that we feel it all over. You see, on K-PAX pain is more general, and to make matters worse it is associated with something like your nausea, accompanied by a very bad smell. The moment of climax is like being kicked in the stomach and falling into a pool of mot shit."

  "Did you say mot shit? What is a `mot'?"

  "An animal something like your skunk, only far more potent."

  "I see." Unforgivably I began to laugh. This image coupled with the dark glasses and suddenly serious demeanorwell, as they say, you had to be there. He grinned broadly then, apparently understanding how it must have sounded to me. I managed to regain my composure and carry on., "And you say it is the same for a woman?"

  "Exactly the same. As you can imagine, women on KPAX do not strive very hard to reach orgasm."

  "If the experience is so terrible, how do you reproduce?"

  "Like your porcupines: as carefully as possible. Needless to say, overpopulation is not a problem for us."

  "What about something like surgical implantation?"

  "You are distorting the importance of the phenomenon. You have to bear in mind that since the life span for our species is a thousand of your years, there is little need to produce children."

  "I see.. All right. I'd like to get back to your own childhood. Can you tell me a little about your upbringing? What were your parents like?"

  "That's a little difficult to explain. Life on K-PAX is quite different from that on EARTH. In order for you to understand my background, I will have to tell you something about our evolution." He paused at that point, as if wondering whether I would be interested in hearing what he had to say. I encouraged him to proceed. "Well, I suppose the best place to start is at the beginning. Life on KPAX is much older than life ' on EARTH, which began about two-point-five billion years ago. Homo sapiens has existed on your PLANET for only a few tens of thousands of years, give or take a millennium or two. On K-PAX, life began nearly nine billion of your years ago, when your WORLD was still a diffuse ball of gas. Our own species has been around for five billion of those years, considerably longer than your bacteria. Furthermore, evolution took a quite different course. You see, we have very little water on our PLANET, compared to EARTH-no oceans at all, no rivers, no lakes-so life began on land or, more precisely, underground. Your species evolved from the fishes; our forefathers were something like your worms."

  "And yet you evolved into something very much like us."

  "I thought I explained that in our previous discussion. You could check your notes"

  "This is all very interesting-uh-prot, but what does paleontology have to do with your upbringing?"

  "Everything just as it does on EARTH."

  "Why don't we proceed with your childhood, and we can come back to this relationship later if I have any questions about it. Would that be all right?"

  He bent over the notebook again. "Certainly."

  "Very well. First, let's talk about some of the fundamental items, shall we? For example, how often do you see your parents? Are your grandparents still alive? Do you have any brothers or sisters?"

  "Gene, gene, gene. You haven't been listening. Things are not the same on K-PAX as they are on EARTH. We don't have `families' as you know the term. The whole idea of a `family' would be a non sequitur on our PLANET, and on most others. Children are not raised by their biological parents, but by everyone. They circulate among us, learning from one, then another."

  "Would it be fair to say, then, that as a child you had no home to go to?"

  "Exactly. Now you've got it."

  "In other words you never knew your parents."

  "I had thousands of parents."

  I made a note that prot's denying his father and mother confirmed my earlier suspicion of a deep-seated hatred of one or both, possibly due to abuse, or perhaps he had been orphaned, or neglected, or even abandoned by them.

  "Would you say you had a happy childhood?"

  "Very."

  "Can you think of any unpleasant experiences you had as a child?"

  Prot's eyes closed tightly, as they often did when he tried to
concentrate or to recollect something. "Not really. Nothing unusual. I was knocked down by an ap a couple of times, and squirted by a mot once or twice. And I had something like your measles and mumps. Little things like that."

  "An 'ap'?"

  "Like a small elephant."

  "Where was this?"

  "On K-PAX."

  "Yes, but where on K-PAX? Your own country?"

  "We don't have countries on K-PAX."

  "Well, do elephants run around loose there?"

  "Everything runs around loose there. We don't have zoos."

  "Are any of the animals dangerous?"

  "Only if you get in their way."

  "Do you have a wife waiting for you back on K-PAX?" This was another toss from left field, again to determine the effect of a key word on the patient's state of mind. Except for a barely perceptible shift in his chair, he remained calm.

  "We don't have marriage on K-PAX-no husbands, no wives, no families-get it? Or, to put it more correctly, the entire population is one big family."

  "Do you have any biological children of your own?"

  "No."

  There are many reasons why a person decides not to have children. One of these has to do with abuse by or hatred of his parents. "Let's get back to your mother and father. Do you see them very often?"

  He sighed in apparent frustration.

  "No."

  "Do you like them?"

  "Are you still beating your wife?"

  "I don't understand."

  "Your questions are phrased from the point of view of an EARTH person. On K-PAX they would be nonsense."

  "Mr prot"

  "Just prot."

  "Let's establish some sort of ground rules for these sessions, shall we? I'm sure you will forgive me if I phrase my questions from the point of view of an Earth person since, in fact, that is what I am. I could not phrase them in K-PAXian terms even if I wanted to because I am not familiar with your way of life. I am going to ask you to humor me, to bear with me in this. Please try to answer the questions in the best way you can, using Earth expressions, which you seem to be quite familiar with, whenever possible. Would that be a fair request under the circumstances?"