Fifty in Reverse Read online

  Peter said, “Barry DeVille cemented his status as a teenage legend at West Bethlehem when, after being sentenced to six months at the reformatory, the judge asked if he wanted to say anything to the court. Barry answered, ‘Yeah—I turned in a druggie. Where’s my hundred dollars?’ ”

  Dr. Terry ran his hands through his thick hair and said, “That’s a funny story, Pete. So that I have it straight—this all happened in this reality we’re living in here, or this happened in your delusion?”

  The smile left Peter’s face. He said, “It never occurred to me that my memories from before 1970 wouldn’t apply to this… uh… this version. I’m just getting used to the idea that the last fifty years of my life have been erased. I hope I can at least count on the first fifteen.”

  Dr. Terry’s job was to row the boy back to shore, not push him farther out. He said, “I can look up Barry DeVille’s record. See if it’s the way you remember it. I’m a doctor—I can get away with all kinds of shit.”

  “Right.” Peter looked sadder than the psychiatrist had seen him look before. He looked like he was drowning.

  “I think I might have had a stroke,” he said. “That would explain why this dream is enduring. Maybe I am in a coma, my wife begging the doctors to bring me out of it, my children imploring me to hang in, come back.

  “My boy James would stay with me the whole time. I’m sure of that. He would be whispering in my ear, telling me they’re with me. Jenny would take care of her mom. She’d be pummeling the doctors and nurses with questions. She’s probably on Wikipedia, diagnosing my condition and coming up with experimental cures. Janice would be stoic. She wouldn’t want the kids to see how worried she was. She’d give them jobs to keep them occupied. I’m afraid Janice and Jenny would create a vortex of escalating assignments for each other and the boys. That might cause Pete Junior to withdraw. He wouldn’t know how to deal with my being comatose, and the chatter between his mom and his sister would send him out of the hospital and into his car to drive around until his head cleared. I just hope he doesn’t start drinking.”

  Dr. Terry studied the boy. Peter lifted his fingers and wiggled them in front of his eyes. He slapped himself hard. Dr. Terry jumped but Peter held up his open hand to say it was okay. He said, “A stroke would explain it. My consciousness might be fleeing from blocked neural pathways down alternative synaptic corridors. I could be burning up these obscure storage centers looking for a trail back to clarity.”

  Dr. Terry said, “The way you talk, I almost find it plausible that you’re a sixty-five-year-old man. What’s hard for me to believe is that I’m a figment of your imagination. I mean, I’m conscious in here too.”

  “You’d have to say that, though, wouldn’t you?” Peter said. “Look, Dr. Canyon, if any of these ninth-grade memories are useful as fuel to get me back to 2020, burn them up! Take them all! I never need to remember anything about 1970 again.”

  When their time was up, Terry Canyon said so long and put his hand on Peter’s shoulder. Beneath his show-off vocabulary, the kid was really scared.

  He walked out of the Wyatt house toward his Triumph. The days had gotten longer and the weather was warm. The air was sweet with blooming lilacs. Judge Wyatt came out of the house and approached him. Dr. Terry saw Mrs. Wyatt watching from the kitchen door.

  “He’s a brilliant kid, Mr. Wyatt,” he told the father. “He could ace the verbal portion of the SATs tomorrow, that’s for sure. He’s able to articulate everything he’s going through. I can’t tell you how helpful that is.”

  The judge gave a tight smile and nodded, struggling to get out what he wanted to ask. “Is there a chance this might be physical?”

  “What do you mean?”

  The judge turned away from his wife and lowered his voice.

  “There’s no reason to check for a brain tumor, is there?” He looked ashamed of himself for saying the words.

  “I really don’t think so. I mean, I can order some tests if you want, but there’s nothing to suggest anything like that. At all.”

  The judge nodded. “Good. Sure. Good. Just thinking of every possible—”

  “I don’t know what’s going on in Peter’s head exactly, sir,” the doctor said. “But that kid’s special. Once this is settled he’s going to have a fantastic life.”

  The father said, “He’s convinced he already has.”

  FIVE

  Dr. Terry took his Triumph down the long driveway and onto the street that ran to the interstate toward Massachusetts. He rode north four miles and took the exit. He had another appointment in Rhode Island. The boy’s mother had asked him to meet with the school guidance counselor.

  Moe Mosspaw suggested they rendezvous at a Howard Johnson’s off the highway. The restaurant was easy to find. Dr. Terry pulled up next to a brown Subaru. The driver was sitting behind the wheel. He looked at Terry and said, “Taking a trip?”

  “Come again?”

  The driver was a man in his late thirties with a pointed nose, high forehead, and horn-rimmed glasses. “Taking a trip? You know—Then Came Bronson. ‘Taking a trip? Wherever I end up, I guess.’ You’re Dr. Canyon?”

  “Guilty.”

  “I’m Moe Mosspaw.”

  “Nice to meet you, Moe.”

  “Thank you for making time, Doctor.”

  “Call me Terry. Let’s get some clams.”

  They found a booth in the back of the restaurant and got coffee. Dr. Terry ordered a clam roll. Moe Mosspaw asked for a BLT. They talked about Peter Wyatt without using his name, in case anyone was listening.

  “Have you followed the research in frontal lobe development in adolescents, Doctor?” Mosspaw asked when the food arrived.

  “I might have missed class that day.”

  “It’s fascinating stuff,” the guidance counselor said. “Well, it’s fascinating if you spend fifty hours a week dealing with the problems of teenagers. There are arguments about exactly how this works, but in a nutshell, you know, the frontal lobe is the brain’s policeman. Reason, self-control, patience. That’s all frontal lobe stuff.”

  “You mind if I smoke, Moe?”

  “Not a bit. The bottom of the brain, that’s primal stuff. Impulses. Me hungry, me horny, me angry, me sleepy. During adolescence both parts of the brain are growing at a rapid rate. The whole time the brain is expanding, it’s also laying pipe between the different regions to carry messages.”

  “Links.”

  “Exactly. The axons are the lines that carry signals from one part of the brain to the other. Myelin greases some of the axons. But here’s the snafu—the entire brain doesn’t grow at the same rate. From about thirteen till eighteen the back section, the lizard brain, is firing like the Fourth of July, demanding sensation, lighting up the libido, begging to break the speed limit. The frontal lobe, home of restraint and reason, is the last place to get fully wired. We get mad with these kids for acting out, for making dumb, impulsive decisions. But that’s how their brains are designed. It’s only when they grow up that the lights go on in the front room and order is restored.”

  Dr. Terry tipped back his head and dropped a fried clam in his mouth, saying as he chewed, “In my game we call this the id, the ego, and the superego. Curly, Larry, and Moe. Curly the id wants to go wild. Larry the ego is embarrassed. Moe the superego slaps Curly and pokes him in the eye. You’re saying that for the average teenager, Moe has no mojo.”

  “Right—Curly is running the show.”

  Dr. Terry tried to work out what this had to do with Peter Wyatt. He said, “You deal with a great many kids, the majority of whom are statistically normal. I deal with a small sample who are brought to see me because they have issues.”

  “In my experience,” Mosspaw said, “all adolescents have issues.”

  Dr. Terry agreed that was probably true. To get to see him, a kid had to have not only flipped out severely—he also had to have parents who could and would engage a psychiatrist. Mr. Mosspaw dealt with fifty times the adol
escents Dr. Terry did.

  “Whatever is causing our boy’s situation,” Terry said, “it’s not a lack of higher brain function. He talks so rationally, lucidly, he almost makes me wonder…” Dr. Terry paused. He wasn’t free to discuss Peter’s delusion with the guidance counselor.

  Mosspaw asked him, “What were you going to say?”

  “I know that a kid taking off his clothes in math class suggests a suspension of normal inhibitions. But in this subject’s case I think the appropriate axons are fully greased and logic is in the pilot’s seat. What I’m working on is if that logic is proceeding from a flawed premise.”

  Moe Mosspaw had nothing but good intentions. His request to meet with the boy’s psychiatrist came from a sincere effort to understand what was going on with Peter and find the best solution for him while protecting all the students of West Bethlehem Veterans Memorial High School. It was the sort of above-and-beyond obligation Mosspaw assumed all the time. He did his best to put aside any worry that he was out of his depth talking adolescent psychology with a Harvard psychiatrist. Terry Canyon had treated him as an equal from the moment they sat down, but Mosspaw had lost the thread.

  “What is the flawed premise you think Peter—sorry, the subject—is operating under?”

  Dr. Terry flashed a smile and said, “That’s what I’m working on figuring out. Hey, you gonna eat those fries?”

  The gate between them came down.

  SIX

  Peter found fifteen dollars in his dresser and walked into town to the record store. He came back up the driveway with three new LPs: Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew, Emitt Rhodes’s self-titled first album, and John, the Wolf King of L.A. He opened the kitchen door and saw his mother standing, stirring cake mix in a bowl and smiling at him with an expression between delight and conspiracy. He followed her gaze to the kitchen table, where Daphne Burrows sat drinking a cup of coffee, a bandage on her slit finger.

  “Your friend came by to see you, Peter,” his mother said.

  “I wanted to see if you had the homework from math,” Daphne told him like no one was even supposed to believe it.

  Peter was pretty sure this was the first time a girl from school had appeared at his home since his classmates got too old to trick or treat. His mother was beaming. Daphne was wearing a tan shirt with pearl buttons and loose silver bracelets on both wrists. She was lovely. Peter was sad to see how hopeful this surprise visit made his mom. She had to be thinking, “Maybe my boy is normaling up.” She didn’t know that Daphne was an engine of destruction. Sipping her coffee, she looked like the sweetest girl in the world.

  “You live in such a nice place, Peter,” Daphne said. “I had no idea there was all this land up here.” She turned to his mother and explained, “We live over in Buttongreen. Rows of ranch houses.”

  “Buttongreen is beautiful,” Peter’s mother said, working the cake batter like a throttle. “These old houses, something’s always breaking. I often wish we lived in a new home.”

  Daphne said, “Would you show me around, Peter?”

  Peter would have said yes to anything to get her away from his mother. He put down his records and held open the screen door. She picked up a large cloth handbag with Apache braiding, thanked Mrs. Wyatt for the coffee, and followed him out the door.

  They walked across the driveway and through a gate in the stone wall toward the horse barn.

  “Your mother seems sane,” Daphne said. “Do you get your craziness from your father?”

  Peter said, “I’m sui generis. What brings you here, Daphne?”

  “Homework.”

  “Five or six kids from algebra class live in your neighborhood.”

  “Don’t you like me coming by?”

  “I’m very flattered.”

  “Something smells like perfume.”

  “Hyacinths. My mother plants them. They’re blooming now.”

  She reached into her Indian handbag and brought out a small bottle of vodka. She unscrewed the top, took a swig, and held it out for Peter.

  He said, “Daphne, you’re fifteen years old.”

  She said, “Not for three and a half months.”

  “Stop it.”

  “Have you ever had a drink, Peter?”

  “Daphne, I’ve had every inebriant from tequila in Guadalajara to absinthe in Morocco.”

  “You really are crazy.” She took another swallow and wiped her mouth on the hand with the bandaged finger. They arrived at the horse barn and the boy unhitched and swung open the upper door of the first stall. A smoke-colored horse with a charcoal mane pushed his large head out and nuzzled him. The boy became emotional.

  “Rooke,” he said to the horse. “How are you, fella? It’s good to see you again. It’s good to see you.” He ran his hand behind the horse’s ear and said, “We should get him some oats.”

  Daphne asked him, “Why are you upset?”

  “I haven’t seen Rooke in a long time.”

  “Don’t you live here?”

  Peter led her to the tack shop at the end of the barn. There were saddles mounted on short beams coming out of the wall and a black potbellied stove in the center of the room. He opened a grain drawer and scooped out some oats into a coffee can. They went back outside, and he showed her how to hold her hand flat and let the horse take them. At the first lick of the animal’s big tongue she squealed and dropped the oats on the ground. Peter scooped them up and fed them to the horse.

  “He won’t bite you, you don’t have to worry,” he told her. “He just can’t see very well.”

  “Is that all he eats?” she asked.

  “He eats hay.”

  “Can we feed him hay?”

  “He’s already eaten.”

  “Please? A little?”

  Peter shrugged and led her up a flight of wooden stairs to the hayloft. It was stuffy. It felt like a hundred degrees. The boy told her to watch her head on the beams and follow him. She grabbed his hand and stuck close. They entered a room stacked with hay bales, and he hauled open a wooden door on rollers to let in fresh air and light. He bent to grab a bale of hay. She took a long drink of vodka and said, “Do you ever make out up here?”

  He didn’t turn to look at her. He said, “You’d come away with a rash. This hay is like a thousand needles.”

  “Needles in a haystack,” she said. She put her hand on the back of his neck. He looked at her. She had unbuttoned her shirt. She had a black ballet top underneath. Peter got flustered.

  She said, “I’m hot.”

  “Let’s feed the horse.”

  “Aren’t you hot? Take off your shirt, Peter.”

  “Stop it, Daphne.”

  “Have a drink.”

  He stood up straight. She pushed against him, belly to belly. Peter was red-faced. Daphne Burrows was excited. When she kissed him, he was vibrating. Lust boiled in him like lava getting ready to blow. He felt every part of his body becoming erect, his spine stiffening and his brain swelling in his skull. Blood filled his eyes. Just when he was certain that nothing could stop this explosion, a thought came screaming across his mind: If he gave in to Daphne now, he would cut all ties to his wife and children. He would be gone into 1970 forever. He would never get home.

  As Daphne reached for his belt he grabbed her wrist hard and whispered, “This can’t happen.”

  She said, “It’s happening already.”

  “No,” Peter insisted. He squeezed her wrist and pushed her away from him. “You’re fourteen years old. Fourteen! Do you understand what that means?”

  “I’m fifteen in August.”

  “Listen to me, Daphne. You’re a child! If you don’t change your behavior, you’ll head toward a lot of trouble!”

  He sounded like her grandmother, she thought, but he looked like he wanted to throw her on the hay pile.

  She said, “You don’t have to be scared, Peter.”

  “I’m terrified! I don’t want to be here, and I don’t want you to be here.”

  S
he said, “A little vodka would help you feel better.”

  He struggled to say anything, and when he did it was, “Listen to me, Daphne. I’m married!”

  It hit Daphne that perhaps she should be a little scared herself. She understood the boy was crazy. She hadn’t understood what crazy really was. Peter rolled the wooden door shut, walked out of the room, and waited for her on the steps. She took a minute to button her shirt, brush off her clothes, and put the top back on the vodka. She hoisted the Apache handbag onto her shoulder and followed him out of the barn.

  When Peter came back into the kitchen his mother asked if his friend was staying for dinner. He said she left.

  “She seemed very nice. Have you known her long?”

  “I guess I have, yeah. A long time.”

  “Did you help her with her homework?”

  “Not really.”

  “Well, she seemed very nice.”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s good for you to have friends your own age to talk to, Peter.”

  He looked at his mother with something close to grief. He said, “No one is my age, Mom.”

  SEVEN

  The boy’s mother called Dr. Canyon and asked for an emergency session. Peter was the worst he had been. The doctor said he had other patients, but if they wanted to come to Massachusetts he would fit the boy in at the end of the day. At 6 p.m. Peter was at his door.

  “I don’t believe I can hold it together anymore,” Peter told him. “Daphne tried to get me to have sex with her.”

  Dr. Terry asked if they did anything. Peter said, “She’s a little girl for God’s sake.”

  “She’s your age, Pete.”

  The boy glared at him and said, “Respect my delusion. I’m sixty-five years old in here! In 2020 I get aroused about once every full moon. But now, this body—fuck, it’s like I’m in a hormone swamp. I didn’t remember how horny fifteen-year-olds are. My sex life has been on a gentle decline for twenty-five years, and now it all comes rushing back at once and I can’t do anything. It’s maddening!”