me another year to get up the nerve to kiss her.
I studied the way they did it in the movies, practiced for months on the back of my hand. The problem was, I wasn't sure she wanted me to. Not that she turned away whenever our faces were close together, but she never indicated in any clear way that she was interested. Finally I decided to do it. With all those movies it seemed abnormal not to.
We were sitting on the sofa at her house reading Donald Duck comics, and I had been thinking about it all morning. I knew you were supposed to kiss sort of sideways so your noses wouldn't bang together, and when she turned toward me to show me Donald's nephews carrying picket signs reading: 'Unca Donald is stewped,' I made my move. I missed, of course, as first kisses often do, as Giselle's did before she ran out.
THAT afternoon I found Giselle in the exercise room talking animatedly with prot. La Belle was asleep in his lap. Both were jotting things down in their respective notebooks, and prot seemed quite comfortable with her. I didn't have time to join them, but she told me later some of the things they had discussed. For instance, they had been comparing the Earth with K-PAX, and one of the questions she had asked him, in a brash attempt to track down my patient's origins, was where he would like to live if he could live anywhere on Earth. She was hoping he would say 'Olympia, Washington,' or some such town in the upper West. Instead, he answered, 'sweden. '
'Why Sweden?' she wanted to know.'Because it's the country most like K-PAX.'
The subject then turned to those human beings who seemed most like K-PAXians to him. Here is what he said: Henry Thoreau, Mohandas Gandhi, Albert Schweitzer, John Lennon, and Jane Goodall.
'Can you imagine a world full of Schweitzers?' she hooted.
I said, 'John Lennon??'
'Have you ever heard 'Imagine'?'
I told her I would look it up.
Then she said something I had been wondering myself: 'You know what else? I think he can talk to animals!' I said I wasn't surprised.
I had no time for them that afternoon because I was on my way to Ward Four, where Russell was trying to get in. Apparently distraught with the loss of his followers to prot's counsel and advice, and his failure to wake up the catatonic patients, he had decided to convert some of the psychopaths. When I arrived I found the nurses attempting to get him to go back to his own ward. He was up on his toes shouting through the little barred window high in the steel door: 'Take heed that no man deceiveth you! For many shall cometh in my name, saying, I am the Christ; and shall deceiveth many!' Apparently his words were not falling on deaf ears, as I could hear laughter coming from inside. But he kept on yelling, even after I pleaded with him to go back to Ward Two. I ordered a shot of Thorazine and had him taken back to his room.
That same day two other things happened that I should have paid more attention to. First, I got a report that Howie had asked one of the residents how to perform a tracheotomy. Dr. Chakraborty finally told him, thinking Howie was going to show Ernie how easily he could be saved even if he were to get choked on something, despite the unfortunate example of his mother's demise.
The other event concerned Maria. One of her alters, a sultry female called Chiquita, somehow got into Ward Three and, before anyone discovered her presence there, offered herself to Whacky. But the results were the same as with the prostitute prescribed earlier. Facing this unexpected rejection, Chiquita quickly exited and Maria appeared. Though finding herself with a naked man engaged in self manipulation she didn't become hysterical, as you might expect. Rather, she immediately began to pray for Whacky, whose despair she seemed to understand completely!
On the lighter side, Chuck presented prot with a drawing summarizing his assessment of the human race, one of many attempts, I discovered, to impress prot so that he would take Chuck to K-PAX with him. It is reproduced here:
Purely by coincidence this diagram described almost perfectly our second applicant for the position of permanent director. He obviously had not bathed in weeks or even months. A blizzard of dandruff snowed from his head anddrifted onto his shoulders. His teeth seemed to be covered with lichen. And, like the previous candidate, Dr. Choate, who checked his fly every few minutes, the man came with excellent references.
Session Eleven
I had been gazing out my office window at a croquet match on the lawn below just before prot came in for his next interview. I nodded toward the fruit basket and asked him what sorts of games he had played as a boy. 'We don't have games on K-PAX,' he replied. 'We don't need them. Nor what you call 'jokes,' ' he added, scrutinizing a dried fig. 'I've noticed that human beings laugh a lot, even at things that aren't funny. I was puzzled by this at first until I understood how sad your lives really are.'
I was sorry I had asked.
'By the way, this fig has a pesticide residue on it.'
'How do you know that?'
'I can see it.'
'See it? Oh.' I had forgotten about his ultraviolet vision. With time at a premium, I nonetheless could not resist the opportunity to ask him what our world looked like from his perspective. In response, he spent nearly fifteen minutes trying to describe an incredibly beautiful visage of vibrantly colored flowers, birds, and even ordinary rocks, which lit up like gems for him. The sky itself took on a shimmering, bright, violet aura through his eyes. It appeared that prot's vista was tantamount to being permanently high on one or another psychedelic drug. I wondered whether van Gogh had not enjoyed a similar experience.
He had put down the offensive fig while he expounded on his exceptional faculty, and found one more to his liking. While he masticated I carefully proceeded: 'Last time, under hypnosis, you told me about a friend of yours, an Earth being, and his father's death, and his butterfly collection, and some other things. Do you remember any of that now?'
'No.'
'Well, did you have such a friend?'
'Yes.'
'Is he still a friend of yours?'
'Of course.'
'Why didn't you tell me about him before?'
'You never asked.'
'I see. Where is he now, do you know?'
'He is waiting. I am going to take him back to K-PAX with me. That is, if he still wants to go. He vacillates a lot.'
'And where is your friend waiting?'
'He is in a safe place.'
'Do you know where that is?'
'Certainly.'
'Can you tell me?'
'Nay, nay.'
'Why not?'
'Because he asked me not to tell anyone.'
'Can you at least tell me his name?'
'Sorry.'
Given the circumstances, I decided to take a chance. 'Prot, I'm going to tell you something you may find hard to believe.'
'Nothing you humans come up with surprises me anymore.'
'You and your friend are the same person. That is, you and he are separate and distinct identities of the same person.'
He seemed genuinely shocked. 'That is patently absurd.'
