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 license, became an instructor, hauled canceled checks all over the Eastern seaboard, usually in the middle of the night and often in bad weather, and after a couple of years of that he was as horrified as ever at the prospect of leaving terra firma. Then he got his air transport "ticket," as he called it, and went to work for United Airlines. Now, five years later, after a brief conversation with prot, he had finally come to me for help.
We were a long time down in the family room, playing Ping-Pong and throwing darts and shooting pool as we talked. Nine years a pilot and he still had nightmares about plunging to Earth from awesome heights, taking forever to fall through empty space, falling and falling and never reaching the ground.
I have had many patients, over a quarter century of practice, who were afraid of flying. For that matter, it is quite common among the general population, and for a very simple reason: Our ancestors were tree-dwellers. As such, a fear of falling was of considerable evolutionary valuethose who did not fall survived to reproduce. Most people are able to overcome this fear, at least functionally. On the other hand there are some who never go anywhere they can't get to by car or train or bus, no matter how inconvenient.