On a Beam of Light (24 page)

“I’d like that very much. “

“I might be able to get the assignment committee’s approval by tomorrow morning. Are you sure you can handle it?”

“The sooner the better. “

“I’m glad you feel that way. Tell me—what do you plan to do with your life once you escape our clutches?”

He pondered the question, but not like prot would have contemplated it, his eyes focused on the ceiling or rolled up into his head. Rob simply frowned. “Well, I thought I would start by taking a trip to Guelph. See some old friends, visit Sally’s and Becky’s graves, the school I went to, the house I lived in. After that, I’d like to try to get into a college. It’s probably too late for this year. Maybe next. Giselle is all in favor of that. “

“Do you want to talk a little about your relationship with Giselle?”

“I like Giselle very much. She’s not as pretty as Sally was, but she’s smarter, I think. She’s the most interesting person I’ve ever met, except for prot. That’s one of the reasons I want to go back home. To say goodbye to Sally and kind of get her permission to be with Giselle. I think she would have understood. “

“I’m sure she would have. Bear in mind, though, that it might be a while before you can make the trip. I may want to keep you in Ward One for a few weeks. Just to make sure there aren’t any problems we’ve missed. “

“If I’m good, do I get time off for good behavior?”

“Maybe. “

“Then I’ll be very good. “

“You really want to get out of here, don’t you?”

“Wouldn’t you?”

“Yes, of course. I just wanted to hear you say it. “

“I’ve been here more than five years. That’s enough, don’t you think?”

“Plenty. ” I glanced at my pad. “Rob, there’s one more thing that has bothered me all this time, but I didn’t want to ask you until you were well enough. “

“What is it?”

“Prot claimed he left for a few days in 1990 to visit Iceland, Greenland, Newfoundland, and Labrador. You remember that from the tapes?”

“Yes. “

“Did you go with him?”

“No, I didn’t. “

“Nobody saw you during that time. Where were you?”

“I hid in the storage tunnel. “

“Why?”

“I wasn’t ready to face anyone alone. “

“Prot told you to go there?”

“No, he just gave me the key. He said, ‘The rest is up to you. ’”

“All right, Rob. Anything else you want to tell me before you go back to the wards?”

He thought some more. “Just one thing. “

“What’s that?”

“I want to thank you for all you’ve done for me. “

“Psychiatric treatment is like a marriage, Rob—it takes a tremendous effort from both parties. You should give yourself most of the credit. “

“All the same, thank you. “

This time I offered him my hand. When he took it he looked me straight in the eye. He seemed as sane as any human being could ever be.

The following morning Lou and her daughter were discharged. I’ve never seen a happier mother or a more beautiful child. When she left she promised to stop by again soon. “But first, ” she said, “I’m going to have a sex-change operation. “

“I think that would be a very good idea. ” She waved as she carried Protista out the gate. Although technically she was Beamish’s patient, I somehow felt the loss of another daughter separating the ties.

On Thursday, September 28, three of Klaus’s patients and I spread the Villerses’ combined ashes around Emma’s beautiful flower garden at their Long Island home. At last the tears came, for all of us.

That afternoon, exactly six weeks after prot’s “return” from K-PAX, Robert Porter was transferred to Ward One.

Robert did fine in One. He got along well with the staff and his fellow patients, expressed normal feelings and desires, was optimistic about his future. In the six weeks he remained there he developed his skills in chess (he even beat Dustin once or twice), studied college catalogs, pursued his interest in biology. His romance with Giselle continued to blossom to the extent that, after three weeks in what he called “Purgatory, ” I allowed him a weekend furlough in her custody. That worked out quite nicely, and as soon as he was released he moved in with her permanently (along with Oxeye Daisy, their dalmatian).

While Rob was waiting to be discharged, Giselle flew out to Hawaii at her own expense and brought Rob’s mother back for a short visit. It was a tearful reunion—his mother hadn’t talked with him in more than a decade (she had seen him only in a comatose state). While she was here I spoke with her about Rob’s childhood, her husband’s fatal accident, etc., as I had five years earlier. Now I learned that Rob’s Uncle Dave and Aunt Catherine had died in a fire in 1966, three years after his father’s death. Mrs. Porter, of course, had no knowledge of Rob’s molestation by them.

She remained in New York only a few days and, buoyed by her happiness at seeing her son nearly ready for discharge, flew back to Honolulu on her own. “It’s a shame his father couldn’t be here for this, ” she told me at the airport. “He loved his son very much. ” I assured her that Robin loved his father, too, though perhaps for more complex reasons than she might have realized.

I think it is safe to say, at last, that all the missing pieces of the puzzle are firmly in place. The root cause of Robert’s difficulties lay not, as I had thought, with the terrible tragedy that befell his wife and daughter, but came much earlier, at the hands of a pedophilic uncle. It was this severe trauma that precipitated Rob’s abhorrence of sex, and the appearance of an alter (Harry) to help five-year-old Robert deal with the torment.

But why did prot appear on the scene when Robert was six? I believe that Robin felt safe only in the presence of his father, who unwittingly shielded him from the abuse he had experienced at the hands of his Uncle Dave. How devastating it must have been when his “friend and protector” died, leaving him once more at the mercy of that sick creature! Rob called into being a new guardian, one who came from an ideal place where such people as his mother’s brother and sister could never exist. Fortunately, Robin wasn’t compelled to stay with his aunt and uncle after all, and prot was no longer needed. In fact, it was only after his dog Apple (progenitor of the “aps, ” the small elephant-like creatures that roam the fields of K-PAX?) was killed that prot made his second appearance on Earth to help Robert, now nine, deal with this new tragedy.

As a result of his traumatic childhood experiences Rob struggled with sex for the rest of his youth and young adulthood, and on into his married life. In sexual matters, prot was virtually useless, and a new identity arose to deal with this problem. Thanks to Paul, Sally was never the wiser, apparently, and they enjoyed a relatively happy life together for several years.

It’s not difficult to imagine what Robert must have felt when he came home one fine summer afternoon and found his wife and daughter lying dead on the kitchen floor at the hands of a deranged killer, whose terrible acts brought back his own repressed suffering. Is it any wonder that Harry came to the rescue, that all the pent-up rage he felt for his Uncle Dave exploded like a volcano and he seized the opportunity to prevent this man from performing further atrocities? Or that prot came back to try to help Robert cope with these events, something that perhaps no human being could have done? Indeed, Robert appears to have made an almost miraculous recovery, given the grim circumstances of his tragic background.

Following a trip to Montana (Oxie stayed with us, much to Shasta’s delight), Rob enrolled at NYU with a major in field biology. He called me a few weeks later to tell me he was having the time of his life. That’s the last I heard of him until the summer of ‘96, when he and Giselle visited the hospital to renew their acquaintanceship with me and the rest of the staff and patients.

Because so many people had seen prot on television and recognized him wherever Rob went, he had grown a beard. “You’d be surprised, ” he told me, “how well a beard disguises who you really are. ” Except for that I found him just as he was when he left, smiling and confident, quite in control. There’s a lot of prot in him, I think. But perhaps there’s a little of prot in everyone. In any case, he appears to be a fully integrated human being, part of him capable of great things, another part capable of murder.

Giselle’s book about prot, An Alien Among Us?, came out in December 1996. She reports that it is still selling “spectacularly, ” and she has been on the talk-show circuit all winter. But the big news, as I write this, is that she is now pregnant, and the baby is due in July. If it is a boy, they tell me they will call him “Gene. “

The hospital seems strangely empty without Robert/prot. The patients keep asking when he is coming back, hoping for a ride to the stars. I don’t dare tell them that prot gave his life for Robert, and that he is gone for good, because that might make matters worse. And so they wait, and hope, but perhaps this isn’t such a bad thing.

Most of our former inmates, however, no longer need prot, and would probably decline a trip to K-PAX even if one was offered. Soon after Bert was discharged he met and married a lovely widow and they legally adopted Jackie, who remained, of course, with us. They visit her regularly, and her new mother is as charming a person as you’d ever want to meet. As a consequence of all this, apparently, Jackie has begun to grow up! It is as if her life was put on hold with the death of her parents, and now that she has a new set, the clock has started ticking again. No one here has ever seen anything quite like it. She even cut off her pigtails!

Lou paid us a visit after her operation. She, too, has found a partner, one who loves her as a woman, and Protista is growing fast. Her first word was (no, not “prot”) “cat. “

Michael and Manuel and Rudolph are also doing well, all gainfully employed and enjoying their new lives. We hear from them occasionally; they never fail to ask whether prot has returned yet.

Dustin, too, has made spectacular improvement. As a result of my laying down the law to his parents, who now visit him only once a month, he has gradually grown away from coded speeches and game-playing, and has taken an interest in other things. His communications skills have improved accordingly, and I am thinking seriously of moving him to Ward One to see how he gets along there. Incidentally, the purpose of their meeting with me in September was a feeble attempt to learn whether I was on to them, as Will and most of the patients seemed to be.

Others have not done so well. Jerry and his fellow autists remain in their own private worlds, earnestly engineering famous structures and the like. In February, Charlotte, despite being under heavy sedation as an experiment in therapy, nearly castrated and strangled Ron Menninger to death. He is now taking a more cautious approach and there have been no further incidents along that line.

Milton is still trying to cheer us (himself) up with his endless jokes, and Cassandra still sits on the lawn gazing at the stars. She predicted the results of the congressional elections months before voting day, though no one believed her at the time. (I asked her why she hadn’t foretold Russell’s death and Klaus Villers’s suicide. “No one asked me, ” she replied. ) And Frankie, unfortunately, is still Frankie— nasty, foulmouthed, unloved.

The Villerses left their entire estate, valued at several million dollars, to MPI (how they obtained all their wealth remains to be determined). The new wing will be called the Klaus M. and Emma R. Villers Laboratory for Experimental Therapy and Rehabilitation, though the funds won’t be released for quite some time, the lawyers tell me. In the meantime, construction costs will be met from other donations and the contributions that came in following prot’s television appearance.

Klaus’s death left an immense void, of course, which I have tried unsuccessfully to fill. I have had to cut back on the time spent with my patients and take on a lot of onerous duties I could live without. We are currently accepting applications for permanent director, and I, for one, can’t wait until the position is filled (Goldfarb and Thorstein are among the candidates).

On a more personal note, my wife will be retiring soon (thanks to the sale of the film rights to K-PAX), as will our old friends Bill and Eileen Siegel, who have bought a place in upstate New York and are waiting for Karen and me to join them in an Adirondack retreat of our own. Our son Will graduates from Columbia this spring. He visits the hospital once in a while to keep tabs on the patients and to advise me not to work so hard. I always say, “Tell me that when you’re in my shoes!” He is still engaged to Dawn Siegel; they plan to be married “sometime” after they graduate.

Will is as puzzled as I and the rest of the staff by the results of the DNA analyses that came back shortly after Robert was discharged. The laboratory, an extremely reliable one whose clients include some of the country’s finest criminologists, reported that Rob’s and prot’s blood DNA came from two entirely different individuals. Most of us think this must be due to human error, but of course there is no way to prove it.

And then there’s the sticky question of how he was able to move, if not at superlight speed, at least fast enough to outrun a TV camera. One physicist estimated that in order to do that he would have to have traveled at least twenty-five miles a second, and perhaps much faster.

If that isn’t enough, Giselle tells me that prot’s trip to the Bronx Zoo provided certain information that no one but zoo officials (and the animals themselves) knew, such things as what their former habitats were like, some foods they missed, and so on. Based on this information, their keepers have tried to replace some of the losses, but I imagine that if prot were still here he would say this misses the point. Happily, the cetologist who visited us has transferred his dolphin, Moby, to a marine biology facility for rehabilitation pending a return to the ocean depths. The young man himself is now selling life insurance.

Regardless of what talents prot may have possessed, however, I still believe that he was nothing more (nor less) than a secondary personality of Robert Porter, and is now an integral part of him. Though many people seem to think he came from K-PAX (including Charlie Flynn, the spider coprophiliac, now mining for gold in the sands of Libya), it seems patently ridiculous to me to imagine that anyone can zip through space on a beam of light without air or heat or protection from various forms of radiation, no matter how fast he travels.