K-PAX IV: A New Visitor From The Constellation Lyra

EPILOGUE

A short time after fled’s departure I got another call from Wang. “We have reason to believe,” he confided, “that she is leaving soon—perhaps from a football stadium somewhere in the Western United States. But never fear: we have every one of them staked out, and—”

I patiently explained that she had already gone.

“Gone where? The boss wants to see her. There has been an invitation from the United Nations for her to speak to the General Assembly.”

“You’re too late,” I reluctantly informed him. “Maybe on her next visit. She was planning to tell us—”

“Hang on,” he mumbled. Apparently he was trying to set up a recording device. Or perhaps looking for a pencil. “Okay, shoot.”

“She had a message from prot. He wanted to give us nine suggestions for avoiding a visit from the Badguys. Unfortunately, we will probably never know what they were.”

‘Nine? That’s too complicated. The boss isn’t going to like that. Can’t you make it one or two?

“There aren’t going to be any,” I repeated slowly. Fled is already back on K-PAX by now.”

“But we had a meeting scheduled for midnight tonight….”

“She won’t be able to make it.”

Another pause. “What did she say about Mr. Dartmouth?”

“He ought to see a mental health professional as soon as possible. And, incidentally, she suggested that you do the same.”

“I’ll have to get back to you on that.” That was the last I heard from Messrs. Dartmouth and Wang.

* * *

As of this writing, everything is back to normal at home and at the Manhattan Psychiatric Institute. I get all the hospital news from Will, who tells me about the many new patients, all difficult, all interesting. Although I’m glad he enjoys discussing them, I only half-listen sometimes.

Steve and the boys show up now and then, but not very often—all are busier than ever. Our son-in-law did show us some pictures of the late-night picnic, which turned out surprisingly well despite the darkness—Star may have a future in photography as well as acting. But it was chilling to see them and remember that fled had actually been with us not so long before. She looked amazingly human in her candlelit poses with the family: smiling, with her arms draped around one or another of the boys. As a result of all this, and the hair of fled’s head encased in plastic, Star was elected to the student council. Unfortunately, he couldn’t stand the boredom and quickly resigned from that post.

Fred is starring in a new Broadway show and is hoping to reprise the role in Hollywood (we’ll see about that—the starring role he told us about earlier had already fallen through, the film having been relegated to “development hell”). And Jenny and Anne did make the trip to New York, and we to California. Karen is planning several more trips for us, including a month-long tour of the entire Southwest with a stop at the Grand Canyon, where fortunes are being made by vendors selling all kinds of ape paraphernalia, and to the Siegels’ favorite country, Poland.

I rarely visit the hospital anymore, but I did stop in to see Jerry not long after my final retirement. He no longer interacts with anyone, so he’ll probably be at MPI the rest of his life. Despite this grim outlook, I believe he is the happiest patient there. I don’t know whether he remembers how he was for a while, but, if so, he must be doubly happy. He finally finished the miniature MPI, and rebuilt the Eiffel Tower. His current project is a matchstick version of the great pyramid at Giza, which almost fills his room (he sleeps inside it).

I left him with the usual hug, and a “’Bye, Jer.”

“’Bye, Jer, ’bye Jer, ’bye, Jer,” he replied, without hugging me back. To me it sounded like music.

One other note from the hospital: last Christmas, Hannah Rudqvist married Cliff Roberts and has become an American citizen and a permanent member of the MPI staff. It wasn’t embarrassment that caused her blushing problem, but a physiological response to the detergent she was using coupled with heat and perspiration. She wasn’t even aware of it. Who knows—perhaps that was one of the reasons Cliff was attracted to her (besides her good looks). Or maybe it was something else. The mysteries of love should remain just that, and I wish them both well. Incidentally, her new husband wasn’t really a womanizer. He started that rumor himself because of his innate shyness. People!

Freddie was also married, in the fall of 2005, though not to the ballerina but to the actress who played Meg Ryan so convincingly that Darryl dumped her. Perhaps they should have waited awhile—they’re already having problems they never had for the few months they were living together before the wedding. Life is so weird!

I mentioned to Will that, while he and Hannah were meeting to plan my retirement party, I had suspected they were having an affair. “I knew you would never do a thing like that,” I fatuously told him.

“No more than you would, Dad,” came the obvious reply.

According to news reports, a sizable number of the people who became vegans or vegetarians in an attempt to secure a ticket to K-PAX have not gone back to eating their fellow beings. As a result, the air is a little cleaner, water shortages have eased a bit, and global warming has slowed down significantly. Encouragingly, perhaps, there is even some evidence that the general population has become fractionally more aware that our planet is but a speck in the cosmos, only one of countless trillions throughout the universe. In this sense alone, perhaps, fled’s visit has had an impact of potentially monumental consequence.

It’s possible that some of this apparent awakening is due in part to the telecast of the pilot program for the reality show filmed at MPI, which, in fact, included fled’s warning that the Badguys could show up in 2020. I don’t know whether the producers did this just to make the show more exciting to the viewers, but the end result was that some people must have heard the message. Perhaps it’s a start. In any case, I did get two voiceovers on the show, including my defense of fled’s mating habits and putative offspring. Freddy said I was “brilliant.” I wasn’t, of course, but it’s nice to have a son who thinks so.

Not long after the telecast of the pilot episode, the series itself was canceled. Not just the mental hospital part—all of it. Apparently, like most popular TV programs, the reality show blueprint had already begun to run its course, beaten to death by spinoff and repetition. (The only formulas that seem to be unaffected by overexposure are the endless identical cop shows and sitcoms, which most people can’t seem to get enough of.)

In other news, son-in-law Steve has been awarded the 2007 Copernicus prize in astronomy, primarily because of his work on the speed of light. Since its value is directly related to the expansion of the universe, he discovered that it is possible, in fact, to show that the rate of expansion is slowing down, rather than accelerating, as other evidence had suggested. He did this by making exquisitely sensitive measurements of the speed of light over a period of one year, and when this calculation is carried out to eighteen decimal places, the value of c is clearly slowing at an infinitesimal, though measurable, rate. Furthermore, he found that the light coming from at least two distant galaxies “winked out” as a result of the slowdown in light speed during this same time period. The awards committee favorably compared his studies to the special relativity theory formulated by Albert Einstein a century earlier. Fled’s help in initiating Steve’s findings was not mentioned in the citation, however.

There was considerable e-mail following her departure, much of it debating the proposal that the great apes belong to the same genus (Homo) as us, and their concomitant designation as “people.” Though many correspondents disagreed, a surprising number took the view that the apes should, at a minimum, enjoy freedom from pain, invasive experimentation and incarceration, i.e., much like mentally disabled humans. Some farsighted responders suggested further that if apes should be allowed such rights, why not all the other animals?

Knotty issues to be sure. But perhaps no more so than the question of whether all of us (including the non-human animals) have alter egos living on other planets in the galaxy, or even in other galaxies. K-PAX alone harbors countless beings who might well be our mental counterparts, just as the great apes are our physical cousins.

On the other hand, there was the inevitable pack of letters from those who can’t accept anything that doesn’t fit their preconceived view of their world. This is a typical one: Mandidn’tcrawloutoftheoozeorevolvefrommonkeys!TheBiblesaysweweregivendominionoverthebeastsofthefields,touseinanywaywewant.Theanimalsdon’thavesouls,thereforetheydon’thaveanyfeelings,thereforetheydon’tfeelpain.Andwecan’tbreedwiththem,either.That’swhytheyarecalledanimals…. I wish I could be so sure of how many toes I have as some of these people are about their place in the universe.

Some correspondents wanted to know whether fled came to promote sex between the primate species, and if I agreed with this notion. Of course I don’t, and I don’t think she did, either. Her point was that our similarities far outweigh our differences, and appearances shouldn’t be the only criteria for acceptance among our peers.

No further word from fled. I even sent her an e-note once after she left, but of course there was no reply. Yet. But who knows—the message may be floating in cyberspace and a response may come any day. Will she ever visit us again? Probably not, but maybe fled’s half-Earthling son or daughter will make the journey. And if his father was human, what would the kid be like? Something like a hairless chimpanzee? Or perhaps a very hairy human, like the mechanic down at the local garage? Incidentally, the results of the naming contest came in last summer, and the winner was “edam,” a cross between “adam” and “eve” for a being of unknown gender, according to Smythe. Not very original, perhaps, but did you do any better?

Beyond that, will other K-PAXians show up some day? If so, will they be taking any of us back with them as prot and fled have done? And will Abby and Giselle and Gene be making a return trip to their home planet sometime soon, as fled suggested? I hope so; I’d love to ask them some questions. For example, did Phyllis become visible when she touched down on the purple plains of K-PAX, and has Rocky finally found beings who don’t rouse his ire? Does Cassandra still sit on a bench somewhere and contemplate the future, or did she find enough stimulation to keep her thoughts rooted in the present? Is Darryl in love with a Meg Ryan hologram? And did all those great apes mingle with the orfs and adjust well to their new environment? Are there ape-orf hybrids running around everywhere?

On the other hand will we, in another short decade and a half, receive a visit from the Bullocks, who seem to be some of the nastiest beings in the universe? Or was fled just trying to scare us into behaving ourselves, much like we might tell our children about the “bogeyman”? If so, then perhaps she was lying to us about everything else. But if she was telling the truth, do we have the will to correct some of our mistakes before it’s too late? Again, only time will tell. All we know for certain is that the universe is an unimaginably big place, filled with surprises. How little we know of it even in the twenty-first century. I hope we will soon learn to do away with our petty, stupid wars, no matter how seemingly righteous the cause; begin to conserve and protect our common environment, which is deteriorating with far greater rapidity than anyone would have thought even a few years ago; and reduce the human population and learn to share our still-beautiful planet with the other species who inhabit it with us.

Even if we manage to survive the century under the present conditions, what kind of world will we have if it becomes an oven supporting only a few species, including ourselves and our pets, all huddled in environmentally-controlled apartments on higher ground, while the coastlines become underwater playgrounds for scuba divers? Or if we continue to kill our neighbors, with ever more dangerous and sophisticated weapons, over who owns the last of the fossil fuels or professes the wrong religious beliefs? If so, whatever the Bullocks do to us couldn’t be much worse than what we’ve done to ourselves.

My generation may have been the last one on Earth to live without worrying about running out of space, of fuel, and of other natural resources including even air and water. But now our planet is having a tough time surviving us. Yet, even with the future in serious doubt, we’re still in thrall to the world’s leaders, who worry primarily about conserving their own wealth and power. How is it possible that we still support the hamburger chains, the tobacco industries, the gun manufacturers? Our very survival, I believe, depends on the answer to that and related questions.

Whatever happens, of course, won’t make much difference to us old farts; we’re not going to be around much longer anyway. What we’re talking about is our grandchildren, and their grandchildren, and the world they will have to deal with. Or does that matter enough to any of us, including them? Sometimes I wonder….