'Bring him along.' How these things happen I haven't a clue, but by Monday morning everyone in Wards One and Two knew that prot was coming to the house for a barbecue. Almost every patient I ran into that day, including three of Maria's alters, who kept fastening buttons unfastened by other personalities, and vice versa, complained, good-naturedly, 'You never invited me to your house, Dr. Brewer!' To every one of them I said, 'You get well and get out of here, and I'll do exactly that.' To which most of them replied, 'I won't be here, Dr. Brewer. Prot is taking me with him!'
All but Russell, who had no intention of going to KPAX: His place was on Earth. Indeed, with everyone in Wards One and Two enjoying a picnic on the hospital lawn, except for Bess, who stayed inside out of an imaginary rainstorm, Russ spent all of the Fourth in the catatonic ward, preaching the gospels. Unfortunately, none of those pathetic creatures jumped up and followed him out.
That same Monday morning Giselle was waiting for me again in her usual outfit, same piney bouquet. I asked her as politely as possible to please call Mrs. Trexler for an appointment whenever she wanted to see me. I started to tell her that I had patients to see, a lot of administrative work, papers to referee, letters to dictate and so on, but I had barely begun when she said, 'I think I know how to track down your guy.'
I said, 'Come in.'
Her idea was this: She wanted to have a linguist she knew listen to one of the interview tapes. This was one of those people who can pinpoint the area of the country where a person was born and/or grew up, sometimes with uncanny accuracy. It is not based on dialect so much as phrasing-whether you say 'water fountain' or 'bubbler,' for example. It was a good suggestion, but impossible, of course, owing to patient/client privilege. She was ready for this. 'Then can I tape a conversation with him myself?' I saw no compelling reason she should not, and told her I would ask Betty to arrange a time convenient for her and prot. 'Never mind.' She grinned slyly. 'I've already done it.' And she literally skipped away like a schoolgirl to get in touch with her expert. Her piney aura, however, stayed with me for the rest of the day.
Session Nine
IT was a beautiful Fourth of July: partly cloudy skies (I wonder why it's always in the plural-how many 'skies' are there?), not too hot or humid, the air redolent of charcoal grills and freshly cut grass.
A holiday seems to generate a feeling of timelessness, bringing, as it does, blended memories of all those that came before. Even my father took the Fourth off and we always spent the day around the brick barbecue pit and the evening at the river watching the fireworks. I still live in my father's house, the house I grew up in, but we don't have to go anywhere now; we can see the nearby country club display right from our screened-in terrace. Even so, when the first Roman candle lights up the sky I invariably smell the river and the gunpowder and my father's Independence Day cigar.
I love that house. It's a big white frame with a patio as well as the second-story terrace, and the backyard is loaded with oaks and maples. The roots are deep. Right next door is the house my wife grew up in, and my old basketball coach still lives on the other side. I wondered, as I gathered up the sticks and leaves lying around the yard, whether any of my own children would be living here after we've gone, picking up loose twigs on the Fourth of July, thinking of me as I thought of my father. And I wondered whether similar thoughts might not have been buzzing around Shasta Daisy's head as she sniffed around her predecessor's little wooden marker barely visible in the back corner behind the grill-Daisy the Dog: 1967-1982.
By two o'clock the coals were heating up and the rest of my family began to arrive. First came Abby with Steve and the two boys, then Jennifer, who had brought her roommate, a dental student, from Palo Alto. Not a man, as we had thought, but a tall African-American woman wearing copper earrings the size of salad plates that hung down to and rested on her bare shoulders. And I do mean tall.
As soon as I saw Steve I told him about the variance between Charlie Flynn's description of the figure-eight orbit of K-PAX around its twin suns, and prot's version, which, if I understood it correctly, was more of a retrograde pattern, like that of a pendulum. Later I showed him the calendar and the second star chart prot had concocted-the one describing the sky as seen from K-PAX looking away from Earth. Steve shook his head in wonder and drawled that Professor Flynn had just left for a vacation in Canada, but said he would mention all this to him when he got back. I asked him whether he knew of any physicists or astronomers who had disappeared in the last five years, particularly on August 17, 1985. To his knowledge there had been no such disappearances, though he joked that there were a few colleagues who he wished might quietly do so.
Freddy arrived from Atlanta, still wearing his airline uniform, alone as usual. Now everyone was here for the first time since Christmas. Chip, however, had better things to do and soon went off somewhere with his friends.
Just after that Betty showed up with her husband, an English professor at NYU, who happens to have a black belt in aikido. They had brought prot and one of our trainees, whom I had invited primarily because he had been an outstanding amateur wrestler and he, too, would be helpful in case prot showed any indication of turbulence. Shasta Daisy, extra nervous when so many people are present, barked at everyone who arrived from the safety of the underside of the back porch, her usual refuge.
Prot came bearing gifts: three more star maps representing the heavens as seen from various places he had 'visited,' as well as a copy of Hamlet, translated into pax-o. He hadn't been out of the car for five seconds, however, before an extraordinary thing happened. Shasta suddenly ran at him from the porch. I yelled, afraid she was going to attack him. But she stopped short, wagged her tail from ear to ear as only a Dalmatian can,' and flattened herself against his leg. Prot, for his part, -was down on the ground immediately, rolling and feigning with the dog, barking, even, and then they were up running all over the yard, my grandsons chasing along behind, Shakespeare and the charts blowing in the wind. Fortunately, we managed to recover all but the last page of the play.
After a while prot sat down on the grass and Shasta lay down beside him, bathing herself, utterly calm and content. Later, she played with Rain and Star for the very first time. Not once did she retreat to the porch the rest of that afternoon and evening, not even when the nearby country club celebration started off with a tremendous bang. She became a different dog that Fourth of July.
As, so to speak, did we all.
That night, after the fireworks were over and our guests had gone, Fred came into the family room downstairs, where I was shooting some pool and listening to The Flying Dutchman on our old hi-fi set.
For years I'd had the feeling that Fred wanted to tell me something. There had been times during pauses in conversations when I was sure he was trying to get something off his chest but couldn't quite bring himself to do it. I never tried to push him, figuring that when he was ready he would tell me or his mother what was bothering him.
That's not entirely true. I didn't press him because I was afraid he was going to tell us he was gay. It is something a father doesn't ordinarily want to hear-most fathers are heterosexual-and I'm sure his mother, who will not be satisfied with less than eight grandchildren, felt the same way.
Apparently motivated by a conversation with prot, Fred decided to come out with it. But it wasn't to tell me about his sexual orientation. The thing he had tried to bring up all those years, and couldn't, was his deep-seated fear of flying!
I have known dentists who quake at the sight of a drill and surgeons who are terrified to go under the knife. Sometimes that's why people get into those fields-it's a form of whistling in the dark. But I had never encountered an airline pilot who was afraid to fly. I asked him why on Earth he had decided on that profession, and he told me this: I had mentioned at dinner years before that phobias could be treated by a gradual acclimation to the conditions that triggered them, and had given some examples, such as fear of snakes, of closets and, yes, of flying. I had taken him with me to a conference near Disneyland when he was a boy, having no idea he was apprehensive about the flight.
That was why he went to the airport the day after he graduated from high school and began to take flying lessons-to work out the problem on his own. It didn't help, but he continued the training until he had soloed and flown crosscountry and passed his flight test. Even after all that he was still afraid to fly. So he figured the only thing to do was to enroll in an aeronautical school and become a professional pilot. He obtained his commercial
