Gene Brewer by K-Pax

Author:K-Pax
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2012-03-06T23:10:35+00:00

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.

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