dinner.
The candidate, whom I shall call Dr. Choate, exhibited a rather peculiar mannerism-he continually checked his fly, presumably to make sure it was closed. Quite unconsciously, it appeared, since he did it in the conference room, in the dining room, in the wards, with women present or not. And his specialty was human sexuality! It has been said that all psychiatrists are a little crazy. Dr. Choate did nothing to dispel that canard.
I took the candidate to Asti, a lower Manhattan restaurant where the proprietor and his waiters are apt to break into an aria at the drop of a fork and encourage their patrons to do likewise. But Choate had no interest in music and finished his meal in rather glum silence. I had a lovely time, however, catching a flying doughball in my teeth and singing the part of Nadir in the lovely duet from The Pearl Fishers, and still made the 9:10 to Connecticut. When I got home, my wife told me Steve had called. I rang him back immediately.
'Pretty amazin' stuff!' he exclaimed.
'Why?' I said. 'His drawing didn't look a thing like yours '
'Yes, Ali know. Ali thought your man had just concocted somethin' out of his head, at first. Then Ali saw where he had put in the arrow indicatin' the position of the Earth.'
'So?'
'The chart Ali gave you was for the sky as seen from Earth, except that it was transposed seven thousand lightyears away to the planet he calls K-PAX. Do you see what Ah'm sayin'? Lookin' back here from there, the sky would appear entirely different. So I went back to my computer, and voila! There was the N constellation, the question mark, the smile, the eyeball cluster-all where he said they'd be. This is a joke, idn' it? Ali know Charlie put you up to this!'
That night I had a dream. I was floating around in space and utterly lost. No matter which direction I turned, the stars looked exactly the same to me. There was no familiar sun, no -moon, not even a recognizable constellation. I wanted to go home but I had no idea which way it was. I was afraid, terrified that I was all alone in the universe. Suddenly I saw prot. He was motioning that I should follow him. Greatly relieved, I did so. As we proceeded he pointed out the eyeball cluster and all the rest, and at last I knew where I was.
Then I woke up and couldn't go back to sleep. I recalled an incident a few days earlier when I was running across the hospital lawn on my way to a consultation with the family of one of my patients. Prot was sitting in the grass clutching, it appeared, a batch of worms. I was late for the appointment and didn't dwell on it then. Later on I realized that I had never seen any of the patients playing with a handful of worms before, and where did he get them? I puzzled over this as I lay in bed awake, until I remembered his saying, in session two, that on K-PAX everything had evolved from wormlike creatures. Was he studying them as we might scrutinize our own cousins, the fishes, whose gills still manifest themselves for a time in the human embryo?
I hadn't yet found an opportunity to call Dr. Rappaport, our ophthalmologist, about the results of the vision test, but I did so the following morning. It is 'highly unlikely,' he told me, somewhat testily, I thought, that a human being would be able to detect light at a wavelength of three hundred angstroms. Such a person, he pointed out, would be able to see things only certain insects can see. Though he seemed extremely dubious, as if I were trying to make him the victim of a practical joke, he wouldn't go so far as to deny our examination results.
Once again I reflected on how remarkably complex the human brain really is. How can a sick mind like prot's possibly train itself to see UV light, and figure out how to diagram the sky from seven thousand light-years away? The latter was not completely outside the realm of possibility, but what an astonishing talent! Furthermore, if he was a savant, he was an intelligent, amnesiacal, delusional one. This was absolutely extraordinary, an entirely new phenomenon. And I suddenly realized: I've got my book!
SAVANT syndrome is one of the most amazing and least understood pathologies in the realm of psychiatry. The affliction takes many forms. Some savants are 'calendar calculators,' meaning that they can tell you immediately what day of the week July 4, 2990 falls on, though -they are often unable to learn to tie their shoes. Others can perform incredible arithmetical feats, such as to add long columns of numbers, mentally calculate large square roots, etc. Still others are wonderfully musically gifted and can sing or play back a song, or even the various parts of a symphony or opera, after a single first hearing.
Most savants are autistic. Some have suffered clinically detectable brain damage, while others show no such obvious abnormality. But nearly all have IQs well below average, usually in the fifty to seventy-
five range. Rarely has a savant been found to exhibit a normal or greater intelligence quotient.
I am privileged to have known one of these remarkable individuals. She was a woman in her sixties who had been diagnosed with a slow-growing brain tumor centered in the left occipital lobe. Because of this malignancy she was almost totally unable to speak, read, or write. She was further plagued by a nearly constant chorea and barely able to feed herself. As if that weren't enough, she was one of the most -unattractive women I have ever seen. The staff called her, affectionately, 'Catherine Deneuve,' after the lovely French film star, who was very popular at that time.
But what an artist! When provided with suitable materials, her head and hands stopped shaking and she began to create, from memory, near-perfect reproductions of works by many of the greatest artists in history. Though they ordinarily took only a few hours to complete, her paintings are virtually indistinguishable from the originals. Amazingly, while she worked she even seemed to become beautiful!
Some of her canvases now reside in various museums and private collections all over the country. When she died, the family generously donated one of her pictures to the hospital, where it graces the wall of the faculty conference room. It is a perfect copy of van Gogh's 'Sunflowers,' the original of which hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and one is just as awestruck by her talent as by the genius of the master himself.
In the past, the emphasis has been on trying to 'normalize' such individuals, to mold them into products more suitable to society's needs. Even 'Catherine Deneuve' was encouraged to spend less time painting and more time learning to dress and feed herself. If not cultivated and encouraged, however, these remarkable abilities can be lost, and attempts are now being made, at various institutions, to allow such people to develop their gifts to the fullest.
However, most savants are very difficult to communicate with. Normal discourse with 'Catherine,' for example, was impossible. But prot was alert, rational, able to function normally. What might we learn from such an individual? What else did he know about the stars, for example? Might there be more ways to arrive at knowledge than we are willing to admit? There is, after all, a fine line between insanity and genius-consider, for example, Blake, Woolf, Schumann, Nijinsky, and, of course, van Gogh. Even Freud was plagued by severe mental problems. The poet John Dryden put it this way:
Great wits are sure to madness near alli'd And thin partitions do their bounds divide.
I brought this up at the Monday morning staff meeting, where I proposed to let prot ramble on about whatever he wanted and try to determine whether there was anything of value he might have to tell us about his (our) world, as well as his own condition and identity. Unfortunately, despite the substantiating presence of 'Catherine 'Deneuve' 's priceless painting, there was little enthusiasm for this idea. Indeed, Klaus Villers, without ever having seen the patient, pronounced him such a hopeless case that more aggressive measures should be instigated 'at ze first suitable opportunity,' though he's probably more conservative in his approach to his own patients than anyone else on the staff. The consensus, however, was that little was to be lost by giving my patient a few more weeks to have his say before turning him over to the pharmacologists and surgeons.
There was another facet to the case that I did not mention at that meeting: prot's presence seemed to be having a positive effect on some of the other patients in his ward. For example, Ernie was taking his temperature less frequently, and Howie seemed a bit less frenetic. He even sat down one night and watched a New York Philharmonic concert on television, I was told. Some of the other patients were beginning to take a greater interest in their surroundings as well.
One of these was a twenty-seven-year-old woman whom I shall call Bess. Homeless and emaciated when she was brought to the hospital, she had never-not even once smiled, as far as I am aware. From the time she was a child, Bess had been treated like a slave by her own family. She did all the cleaning and cooking and laundering. Her Christmas presents, when she got anything at all, consisted of utensils and appliances, a new ironing board. She felt it should have been she who perished in the fire that devastated the family's tenement apartment, rather than her brothers and sisters. It was shortly thereafter that she was brought to us, nearly frozen because she wouldn't go to one of the shelters the city provides for the homeless.
From the beginning it was difficult to get her to eat. Not, like Ernie, because she was afraid to, or like Howie, was too busy, but because she didn't think she deserved to: 'Why do I get to eat when so many are hungry?' She
