On a Beam of Light (11 page)

My grandsons Rain and Star, ages eleven and nine respectively, had a good time that day, primarily because of the dogs, I suppose, with whom they are great friends. As soon as they arrived the great Frisbee chase began, the boys’ shoulder-length hair flying out behind them like little flags. Shasta Daisy, now thirteen, hard of hearing and somewhat arthritic, became a puppy again in the excitement of the chase.

Betty and her husband Walt and the triplets arrived a little later with Giselle and prot, whom Shasta recognized at once from the similar visit five years earlier. Oxeye approached him as well, though somewhat more cautiously. Perhaps he instinctively realized this was not Robert, the silent companion of his puppyhood (I had brought Oxie to the catatonic ward in a feeble attempt to get Rob to relate to him). In any case, the dogs rarely left his side all afternoon.

Finally came Will, who brought his girlfriend Dawn. Will had just finished his summer stint at MPI, disappointed that he had not been able to decipher Dustin’s secret code. He was sure it had something to do with the “cigar” pantomime, but he couldn’t figure out what. He came to relax on this Labor Day, his final free day before classes began, but he was also hoping to speak with prot about how he might be able to communicate with Dustin.

Nothing extraordinary happened for most of the afternoon, and we all enjoyed a terrific backyard picnic. When that was over, and everyone was sitting around talking, I took prot aside and asked him how Robert was feeling.

“He seems to be doing okay, gino. It must be your chair-side manner. “

“Thank you. Which reminds me—there’s something I need to ask you while you’re here. “

“Ask away. “

“In our last session, Robert called his father his ‘friend and protector. ‘ Do you know what he meant by that?”

“I never met his father. I didn’t know Rob when his father was alive. “

“I know. I just thought he might have mentioned something about him to you. ” I reached into my pocket and pulled out the whistle I had used to bring Robert forward during session twenty. “Remember this?”

“Not the briar patch! Oh, dear! Oh, dear! Anything but the briar patch!” Prot threw up his hands in mock dismay, though I could tell he had been expecting this. Everyone else had been warned, and all the adults present, particularly Giselle, were glancing somewhat nervously in our direction. I winked at her reassuringly. The boys, even little Huey, Louie, and Dewey, were also sitting still, the dogs at their feet. It was suddenly very quiet.

I had no idea whether it would work here, whether Robert was ready to make an appearance outside the relative security of my examining room. As soon as I touched the whistle to my lips, his head dropped for a moment, then raised again. I didn’t even have to blow it.

“Hello, Dr. Brewer, ” he said. His eyes jerked around like a pair of frightened butterflies. “Where am I?” He removed prot’s dark glasses so he could see better.

“You are at my home in Connecticut. Your second safe haven. Come on. I’ll introduce you to everyone. “

But before I could do that, Oxeye came running toward us, his tail flapping. He jumped up and began licking Robert’s face (we were sitting in lawn chairs at the back of the yard). Obviously he recognized his former companion and was very glad to see him. Shasta, on the other hand, was less demonstrative. She had met Robert only once, when he freaked out at the sight of our lawn sprinkler.

For his part, Rob was overjoyed to see Oxie again, and he hugged him for several minutes. “I’ve missed you!” he exclaimed. The dog wagged his tail from ear to ear before running joyfully all over the yard, making several close passes at Rob, as happy dalmatians will do. Later, Rob asked me whether we would keep his dog for him “a little longer. ” I assured him that we would be happy to do so, pleased that his outlook had become so positive.

Out of the confines of the hospital and prot’s influence, Robert showed a side of himself I had not seen before. He was a courteous, kind, soft-spoken man who loved children, and he demonstrated for the boys a number of wrestling holds before joining in on a rip-roaring Frisbee chase with all five, and the dogs as well. If he had not been a mental patient, one would never have suspected there were demons gnawing and scratching just beneath his placid exterior.

Steve tried to engage him in a conversation about the heavens at one point, but gave up when it became apparent that Robert had only a cursory knowledge of the skies— the names of the planets and a few constellations. On the other hand, they both enjoyed comparing notes on their favorite college and professional football teams, though Robert was virtually unaware of developments in that sport since the mid-eighties.

But it was Giselle who occupied most of his time. Though she seemed to resent his presence at first, she was soon chatting quietly with him about her background and his (both came from small towns), and I certainly didn’t discourage this. The more comfortable Rob became with these new and unfamiliar surroundings, the more he was likely to trust us and the better the prognosis. As I watched them I wondered whether it would be Robert or prot who would be returning to the hospital with Betty and her family.

But Rob didn’t last out the afternoon. When he went into the house to use the bathroom it was prot who came out, dark glasses and all. Whether the interior had reminded him of that fateful day in 1985 I wasn’t sure, but I made no attempt to recall his alter ego. I was delighted he had made an appearance at all.

When Will discovered that prot had returned he immediately pressed him about Dustin’s “secret code. “

“You mean you haven’t worked that out yet? About the carrot and all? Ehhhh”—chomp, chomp, chomp—“what’s up, doc?”

“Carrot?” Will stammered. “I thought it was a cigar. ” “Why would he be munching a cigar?” “Well—okay—what does the carrot mean?” “You’re smarter than your father. You figure it out. ” Some of the others wanted to talk to prot as well. Steve pumped him about his own specialty, the formation of stars, and Giselle tried to get him to “speak” with Shasta, to find out whether he could learn anything about her background. Abby wanted to know how to get more people to sympathize with the plight of animals the world over. “Don’t stifle your children’s natural feelings toward them,” he advised her. And even they were grilling him, wanting to know more about what life was like on K-PAX. Star, for example, wondered whether K-PAX was as pretty as the Earth.

Prot’s eyes seemed to glaze over. “You can’t imagine how beautiful it is, ” he murmured. “The sky changes from deep red to bright blue and back again, depending on which sun the illuminated side is facing. Rocks, fields of grains, faces— everything—glow in the radiant energy of the suns. And it’s so quiet you can hear korms flying and other beings breathing far off in the distance…. “

I never did get a chance to ask him any of the host of questions I had been saving for him myself. That, like so many other matters, would have to wait for another time.

Although I had already brought Robert forth after hypnotizing prot, for certain technical reasons I wanted to bypass the latter and deal directly with Rob. I had scheduled Robert’s hypnosis-susceptibility (Stanford) test for early Tuesday morning, but was not surprised that it was prot who showed up. I took the opportunity to ask him, with no little trepidation, about my family and how they were doing (it was prot who put me on to Will’s drug problem five years earlier).

“Your wife makes a great fruit salad, ” he said, stuffing his mouth to the brim with raspberries.

As patiently as I could manage, “Anything else?” He squished the berries around in his mouth; a little stream of blood-red juice ran down his chin. “Abby seems to be one of the few human beings who understand what it will take to save the EARTH from yourselves. Of course she has some rough edges…. ” He grinned wryly and a masticated berry tumbled from his mouth. “I like that. “

“Dammit, prot, what about Will?”

“What about him?”

“Is he taking any drugs?”

“Only sex and caffeine. You humans never cease trying to find something to fulfill your boring lives, do you?”

“It may surprise you to learn, my friend, that there’s no one on Earth more human than yourself. “

“No need for insults, gino. “

I laughed at that, perhaps out of relief. “So you think Will is doing all right, then?”

“He’ll be a great doctor, man ami. “

“Thank you. I’m very happy to hear that. “

“Anytime. “

I could see from the lopsided grin that he still wasn’t going to tell me when he would be leaving or who he planned to take with him. However, something else had occurred to me as I was driving in that morning. “Prot?”

“Yeth thir?” in his Daffy Duck voice. I thought: He’s been hanging around Milton too long.

“Betty told me she saw you in the quiet room reading K-PAX. “

“I was curious. “

“Did you find any inaccuracies in it?”

“Only your absurd speculation that I am merely a figment of robert’s imagination. “

“That brings up an interesting question I’ve been meaning to ask you: How come I’ve never seen you and Robert at the same time?”

He slapped his forehead. “Gene, gene, gene. Have you ever seen me and the world trade center at the same time?”

“No. “

“Then I presume you think the world trade center doesn’t exist?”

“You know, there’s a better way to conclusively prove or disprove that you and Robert are the same person. Will you give us a blood sample?”

“You already sampled it when I was here the first time, remember?”

“Unfortunately, it was accidentally discarded. May we have a little more?”

“There are no accidents, my friend. But why not? I’ve got plenty. “

“I’ll set it up with Dr. Chakraborty for later this week, okay?”

“Hokay, joe. “

“Now—I need to speak to Robert for a while. Will you tell him, please?”

“Tell him what, Dr. Brewer?”

“Oh, hello, Robert. How are you feeling?”

“All right, I guess. “

“Good. I brought you here to see how good a candidate you would be for hypnosis, remember?”

“I remember. “

“All right. Just relax for a moment. ” I explained the procedure to him. He listened carefully, nodded at the appropriate times, and we began.

The procedure took almost an hour. Robert was tested for a number of simple responses to hypnotic suggestion, such as arm immobilization, verbal inhibition,
etc.
Whereas prot had obtained a perfect score of twelve on the same test, I was surprised to find that Robert did very poorly with a four, considerably below average. I wondered whether this represented a genuine lack of aptitude or he was fighting it. Having no good alternative, I decided to go ahead with the next session as planned, though with less confidence than I would have liked.

If Robert was going to get well there would have to be better reasons for him to stay out of his protective shell than to retreat into it. Thus, I wanted and needed Giselle’s help in his treatment, despite her stronger feelings for prot. She was strategically placed to act as a sort of liaison between Rob and the world. I asked her, over lunch, what she thought of him.

“He’s okay. A nice enough guy. In fact, I like him. “

“I’m glad to hear that. Giselle, I have to ask you a favor. Robert is struggling to maintain his identity, even in my examining room. He made a brief appearance yesterday at my home, but that’s about it. As far as I know he’s never shown up in the wards. Have you ever seen him in Two?”

“No, I haven’t. “

“Here’s the thing. Somehow fate has placed you in a unique position to help him. Will you try to do that? As a favor to me as well as him? I’ll give you free access to him— no more time limits. “

“Why not just whistle him out like you did before?”

“That was a special occasion. I don’t want to shock him by bringing him out in the wards before he’s ready. “

“What can I do?”

“What I don’t want you to do is to try to entice Rob to come forward. What I’d like you to do is to make him feel comfortable so he’ll stay out when he does show up. “

Her eyebrows lifted. “How do I do that?”

“Just be nice to him. As nice as possible. Talk to him. Find out what he’s interested in. Play games with him. Read to him. Anything you can think of to keep him around. I want him to like you. I want him to depend on you. I want you to be there for him. ” I almost said, “Try to love him”— but that was asking a bit too much. “Are you up to such a challenge?”

She smiled, I think, though it was hard to tell with her mouth stuffed with food. “It’s the least I can do, ” she mumbled, “for letting me be with prot so much of the time. “

“Good. ” I scraped my plate, wishing as usual that there were more cottage cheese. “Now—what else is happening?”

“Well, there’s an anthropologist and a chemist coming later this week. To talk to prot, I mean. “

“What do they want?”

“I think the anthropologist wants to know about the progenitors of the ‘dremer’ species on K-PAX, maybe get some idea of what our own forefathers might have been like. The chemist wants to ask him about the flora of the Amazonian rain forest, which he’s been studying for twenty years or so. He wants to know where to look for drugs to treat AIDS and various forms of cancer and so on. “

“Let me know what he tells them, if anything. Anybody else lined up?”

“A cetologist is coming next week. He wants prot to talk to a dolphin he knows. “

“He’s bringing a dolphin?”

“He’s got a big tank that he pulls around to fairs and shopping malls. He’s going to bring it and the dolphin to the front of the hospital so that prot can talk to him. “

“Good grief—what next?”

“As prot might say, ‘Anything is possible. ‘ “

That afternoon I met with several of the faculty in Ward Four, where the psychopathic patients are housed. The reason for this gathering was that a new inmate had been brought in, someone who had planned and carried out a series of murders in all five boroughs of the city. Such patients are usually assigned to Ron Menninger, who specializes in psychopathy, with Carl Thorstein taking the overload.