problems.
One of the latter,- dubbed 'Whacky' by a comedic student some time ago, is a young man who diddles with himself almost constantly. Virtually anything sets him off: arms, legs, beds, bathrooms-you name it.
Whacky, is the son of a prominent New York attorney and his ex-wife, a well-known television soap opera actress. As far as we know he enjoyed a fairly normal childhood, i.e., he wasn't sexually repressed or abused in any way, he owned a Lionel train and Lincoln logs, played baseball and basketball, liked to read, he had friends. In high school he was shy around girls, but in college he became engaged to a beautiful coed. Although convivial and outgoing, she was nevertheless extremely coquettish, leading him on and on but never quite going 'all the way.' Crazed with desire, Whacky remained as virginal as Russell for two agonizing years-he was saving himself for the woman he loved.
But on their wedding day she ran off with an old boyfriend, recently released from the state prison, leaving Whacky literally standing at the altar (and bursting at the seams). When he received the news that his fiancee had jilted him, he took down his pants and began to masturbate right there in the church, and he has been at it ever since.
Prostitution therapy was completely ineffective in Whacky's case. However, drug treatments have proven marginally successful, and he can usually come to the table and get back to his room without causing a disturbance.
When he is not caught up in his compulsion, Whacky is a very pleasant guy. Now in his mid-forties, he is still youthfully handsome, with closely cropped brown hair, a strong cleft chin, and a terrible melancholy that shows in his sad blue eyes. He enjoys watching televised sporting events and talks about the baseball or football standings whenever I see him. On this particular occasion, however, he did not discuss the Mets, his favorite team. Instead, he brought up the subject of prot.
Whacky had never seen my new patient as far as I knew, since inhabitants of Ward Three are not permitted to visit the other floors. But somehow he had heard about a visitor in Ward Two who had come from a faraway place where life was very different from ours, and he wanted to meet him. I tried to discourage the idea by downplaying prot's imaginary travels, but his pathetic baby-blue eyes were so insistent that I told him I would give the matter some thought. 'But why do you want to meet him?' I inquired.
'Why, to see if he will take me back with him, of course!'
The sudden silence was eerie-the place is usually one of noisy confusion and flying food. I glanced around. No one was wailing or giggling or spitting. Everyone was watching us and listening. I mumbled something about 'seeing what I could do.' By the time I got up to leave, the whole of Ward Three had made it clear that they wanted a chance to take their cases to my 'alien' patient, and it took me nearly half an hour to calm everyone down and make my exit.
TALKING with Whacky always reminds me of the awesome power that sex has over all of us, as Freud perceived in a moment of tremendous inspiration a century ago. Indeed, most of us have sexual problems at some time in, if not throughout, our lives.
It wasn't until my wife and I had been married for several years that it suddenly occurred to me what my father had been doing on the night he died. The realization was so intense that I leaped out of bed and stared at myself in the closet-door mirror. What I saw was my father looking back at me: same tired eyes, same graying temples, same knobby knees. It was then that I understood with crystal clarity that I was a mortal human being.
My wife was wonderfully understanding throughout the ensuing ordeal-she is a psychiatric nurse herself- though she finally insisted I seek professional help for my frustrating impotence. The only thing that came from this was the 'revelation' that I harbored tremendous guilt feelings about my father's death. But it wasn't until I finally passed the age he was when he died that the (midlife) crisis mercifully ended and I was able to resume my conjugal duties.
During that miserable six-month period I think I hated my father more than ever. Not only had he chosen my career for me and precipitated a lifelong guilt complex, but, thirty years after his death, he had nearly managed to ruin my sex life as well!
STEVE did even better than he promised. He faxed the astronomical data, including a computerized printout of a star chart of the night sky as seen from the hypothetical planet K-PAX, directly to my office. Mrs. Trexler was quite amused by the latter, referring to it as my 'connect-thedots.'
Armed with this information, which prot could not possibly have had in his possession, I met with him again at the usual time on Wednesday. Of course I knew he could not be a space traveler any more than our resident Jesus Christ could have stepped-out of the New Testament. But I was nonetheless curious as to just what this man could pull from the recesses of his unpredictable, though certainly human, mind.
He came into my examining room preceded by his standard Cheshire-cat grin. I was ready for him with a whole basket of fruit, which he dug into with relish. As he devoured three bananas, two oranges, and an apple he asked me a few questions about Ernie and Howie. Most patients express some curiosity about their fellow inmates and, without divulging anything confidential, I did not hesitate to answer them. When I thought he was relaxed and ready I turned on the recorder and we began.
To summarize, he knew everything about the newly discovered star system. There was some discrepancy in his description of the way K-PAX revolved around the two stars it was associated with-
he claimed it was not a figure eight but something simpler-and the corresponding length of the putative planet's year was not what Steve or, rather, Dr. Flynn had calculated. But the rest of it fit quite well: the size and brightness of Agape and Satori (his K-MON and K-RIL), the periodicity of their rotation about each other, the next closest star, etc. Of course it could have been a series of lucky guesses, or perhaps he was reading my mind, though the tests showed no special aptitude for this ability. It seemed to me more likely, however, that this patient could somehow divine arcane astronomical data much like the savants mentioned earlier can make computer-like calculations and pull huge numbers from their heads. But it would have been an astonishing feat indeed if he could have constructed a picture of the night sky. as seen from the planet K-PAX, which, incidentally, Professor Flynn had now chosen to call his previously unnamed planet. In anticipation of this result I think I was already contemplating the book the reader is now holding. So it was with some excitement that I nervously watched as he sketched his chart, insisting all the while that he wasn't very good at freehand drawing. I cautioned him to remember that the night sky as observed from K-PAX would look quite different from the way it does on Earth.
'Tell me about it,' he replied.
It took him only a few minutes. While he was sketching I mentioned that an astronomer I knew had informed me that light travel was theoretically impossible. He stopped what he was doing and smiled at me tolerantly. 'Have you ever studied your EARTH history?' he asked. 'Can you think of a single new idea which all the experts in the field did not label 'impossible'?'He returned to his diagram. As he drew he seemed to focus on the ceiling, but perhaps his eyes were closed. In any case he paid no attention to the map he was working on. It was as if he were simply copying it from an internal picture or screen. This was the result:
There are several notable features about his sketch: a 'constellation' shaped like an N (upper right), another like a question mark (lower left), a 'smiling mouth' (lower right), and an enormous eye-shaped cluster of stars (upper left). Note that he also indicated the location of the invisible Earth on his chart (center). The reason for the relatively few background stars in the diagram was, according to prot, that it never got completely dark on K-PAX, so there are fewer stars visible in the sky than one can ordinarily see, in rural areas, from the nighttime Earth.
However, it was clear that prot's and Steve's charts were completely different. Although not surprised to find that my 'savant' had his limits I was, nonetheless, somewhat disappointed. I am aware that this is not a very scientific attitude, and I can only attribute it to the post-midlife-crisis
syndrome first described by E. L. Brown in 1959, something that occurs most often in men who have entered their fifties: a curious desire for something interesting to happen to them.
Be that as it may, at least I would now be able to confront the patient with this contradictory evidence, which would, I hoped, help to convince him of his Earthly origin. But that would have to wait until the next session. Our time was up, and Mrs. Trexler was impatiently flashing me a telephone signal to remind me of a safety committee meeting.
ACCORDING to my notes the place was a zoo the rest of the afternoon with meetings, a problem with several of the photocopy machines, Mrs. Trexler at the dentist, and a seminar by one of the candidates for the position of permanent director. But I did find time to fax prot's star map to Steve before escorting the applicant to
