precinct where he had been brought in originally, as indicated on his admission records, to request that they check whether anyone answering his description had disappeared on or about that particular date. And to inform them of prot's possible visit to Alabama in October. She came in later with a batch of letters for me to sign, and mentioned that the police had promised to let us know if anything turned up. 'But don't hold your breath,' she snorted.
WE find out a lot about our patients not only from the nursing staff but also from the other inmates, who love to talk about one another. Thus it was from his roommate Ernie that I first learned that Howie had become an entirely different person-cheerful, even relaxed! I went to see for myself.
Ernie was right. On a cool Thursday afternoon I found him calmly sitting in the wide sill of the second-
floor lounge gazing out the window toward the sky. No dictionaries, no encyclopedias, no counting the threads in the big green carpet. His glasses, whose lenses were usually fogged with grime, had been cleaned.
I requested permission to sit down with him, and struck up a casual conversation pertaining to the flowers lining the high wall on the other side of the lawn. He was happy to produce, as he had many times in the past, the common and Latin names of each of them, something of their genetic history, nutritional value, medical and industrial uses. But he never took his eyes from the dark gray sky. He seemed to be looking for something-scanning was the word that came to mind. I asked him what it was.
'The bluebird,' he said.
'The bluebird?'
'The bluebird of happiness.'
That was an odd thing for Howie to say. He might well have known everything about bluebirds, from their eye color to their migratory habits to the total number worldwide. But the bluebird? Of happiness? And where did he get that gleam in his eye? When I pressed him on this I learned that the idea had originated with prot. Indeed, my problem patient had assigned Howie this 'task,' the first of three. I didn't know at the time what the other two were, and neither did Howie. But the first was assigned and accepted: Find the bluebird of happiness.
Some of the temporaries in Ward One quickly dubbed Howie 'the bluenerd of sappiness,' and in Ward Four there was talk of a blue beard stalking the grounds, but Howie was oblivious to all this. Indeed, he was as single- minded as ever toward his illusive goal. Nevertheless, I was struck by the placidity with which he had taken up his stint by the window. Gone were the fitful checking and rechecking, the rushing from book to book, the feverish scratching of pen on reams and reams of paper. In fact, his tablets and ledgers were still spread out all over his desk and the little table he shared with Ernie; apparently he had dropped what he was doing and didn't even care enough about his lifetime of records and notes to file them away. It was such a refreshing sight to see him calmly sitting at the window that I couldn't help but breathe a sigh of relief myself, as if the weight of the world had been lifted from my own shoulders, as well as Howie's.
Just before I left him the sun came out, illuminating the flowers and bathing the lawn in gold. Howie smiled. 'I never noticed how beautiful that is,' he said.
Thinking that hell would freeze over before he spotted a bluebird in upper Manhattan I didn't bother to change his semiannual interview, scheduled for September, to an earlier date. But it was only a few days later, on a warm, drizzly morning that the wards were filled with the rare and delightful sound of a happy voice crying, 'Bluebird! Bluebird!' Howie was running down the corridors (I didn't witness this personally, but Betty told me about it later), bursting into the exercise room and the quiet room, interrupting card games and meditation, finally grabbing a smiling prot by the hand and tugging him back to the lounge, shouting, 'Bluebird! Bluebird!' By this time, of course, all the patients-and staff, too-were rushing to see the bluebird for themselves, and the windows were full of faces peering out at the wet lawn, shouting 'Bluebird!' as they spotted it, until everyone was shouting 'Bluebird! Bluebird! Bluebird!' Ernie and Russell and even the Duchess were caught up in the excitement. Betty said she could almost hear movie music playing. Only Bess seemed unmoved by the event, recalling all the dead and injured birds she had encountered in her joyless lifetime.
Eventually the bluebird flew away and everything settled back to normal, or almost so. Or was there a subtle change? A gossamer thread of something-hope, maybe?-had been left by the bird, and someone rushed out to retrieve it. It was so fine that, after it had dried out, no one could actually see it, except for prot, perhaps. It remains in Ward Two today, passed invisibly from patient to patient as a sort of talisman to alleviate depression and replace it with hope and good cheer. And, amazingly, it often works.
Session Six
MY next session with prot took place the following afternoon. Smiling profusely when he came into my examining room, he handed me what he called a 'calendar.' It was in the form of a scroll, and so complicated that I could make little sense of it. But I thanked him and motioned to the basket of fruit on the side table by his chair.
I waited to see if he would bring up the subject of Howie and the bluebird, but he never mentioned it. When I finally asked him about it he bit into a cantaloupe and shrugged. 'It had been there all the time, but nobody had looked for it.' I didn't mention the larger issue of his assigning 'tasks' to the patients. As long as the results were positive, I decided to allow it for the time being.
After he had finished the last kiwi, fuzz and all, I turned on the tape recorder. 'I'd like to follow up on something you told me earlier.'
'Why not?'
'I believe you said there is no government on K-PAX, and no one works. Is that right?'
'Quoit roit, guvnuh.'
'I must be dense. I still don't understand how things get done. Who builds the libraries and makes all the equipment for them and installs it and runs it? Who makes all the holographic software, if that's the proper terminology? Who makes your eating utensils and your clothes? Who plants the grains? What about all the other things that you surely need and use on K-PAX?'
Prot smacked his forehead with the palm of his hand and muttered, 'Mama mia. ' Then, 'All right. Let me see if I can make it complicated enough for you to understand.' He leaned forward in his chair and fixed me with his penetrating black gaze, as he did whenever he wanted to make sure I was paying attention. 'In the first place, we hardly ever wear any clothing on K-PAX. Except once each cycle-
every twenty-one of your years-when we have some cold weather. And nobody plants the grains. You leave them alone and they plant themselves. As for the libraries, if something needs to be done, someone does it, capisci? This goes for everything you would call 'goods and services.' Now do you get it?'
'Surely there are jobs no one wants to do. Hard labor, for example, or cleaning public toilets. That's only human nature.'
'There are no humans on K-PAX.'
I glared back at him. 'Oh yes, I forgot.'
'Besides, there is nothing that needs to be done that is really unpleasant. Look. You defecate, don't you?'
'Not as often as I'd like.'
'Do you find it unpleasant?'
'Somewhat.'
'Do you get someone to do it for you?'
'I would if I could.'
'But you don't, and you don't think twice about it. You just do it. And it does have its rewards, right?'
The tape indicates that I chuckled here. 'Okay. There are no undesirable jobs. But what about the other side of the coin? What about the specialty jobs that take a lot of training? Like medicine. Or law. Who does those?'
'We have no laws, therefore no lawyers. As for the former, everyone practices medicine, so;, in general, there is no need for doctors, either. Of course there are some who are more interested in such matters than are others, and they are available whenever anybody needs them. For surgery, Primarily-'
'Tell me more about medicine on your planet.'
'I knew you'd get around to that sooner or later.' He settled back into his familiar pose. 'As I suggested a moment ago, there isn't much need for it on K-PAX. Since we eat only plants, we have almost no circulatory
