Fifty in Reverse

by Bill Flanagan

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  For my son, Frank

  Great thanks to Theresa DiMasi, Sam Ford, Anja Schmidt, Samantha Lubash, Amy Bell, and Max Meltzer, and to Paul Muldoon for the close read.

  —Bill Flanagan

  ONE

  The boy read typed directions to his mother as she drove through a suburb inside Boston’s Route 128 halo. They turned right, past the statue of the Minuteman, and parked outside a large white house that was home and office to Dr. Terry Canyon, the motorcycle psychiatrist who had a way with today’s troubled teens.

  His mother insisted on walking the boy to the door and handing him over. It was tough on her. She believed that bringing her child to a mental health professional was evidence she had failed as a parent. She brought him anyway. Her love was greater than her pride. She shook hands with the doctor’s assistant and told the boy she would get some coffee and be back in an hour, waiting right outside. The mother was more nervous than her son.

  The boy took a seat in a parlor overfilled with small couches, settees, and hassocks. An antique Spanish guitar was mounted on the wall, along with large color photos of southwestern landscapes and Mexican pyramids. Shelves were crammed with tiny Aztec figurines and Navajo masks, a feathered tambourine, and half a dozen clay pipes. A door slammed and a tall man flew into the room like he was launched from a catapult. He dropped a sheaf of loose papers on one of the couches as he came toward the boy, sticking out his large hand.

  “Peter Wyatt! I’m Terry! Terry Canyon! Hey, man—good to meet you!”

  The boy offered his hand and was pulled into a hug. Terry Canyon was six feet three inches tall, beefy, with thick blond hair rolling over his collar and ears. He wore a tan jacket that might have been skinned from a deer, blue jeans, and an open neck checked shirt. His belt buckle and ring were turquoise, the color of his eyes. He grinned above a large, dimpled chin. He squeezed the boy, let go of him, laughing, and said, “So they’re telling you you’re flip city, huh? Sent you to the witch doctor to get your cranium reconfigured. Ouch. I’ll tell you who I think is nuts, Pete. These dried-up old conformists with their pie charts and statistics and demographic studies who wouldn’t know a moment of uninhibited bliss if it tripped over their wheelchairs. Shit, man. You took off your clothes? So what? Let’s outlaw nature, for Christ’s sake. Let’s write a rule against the human body. I wonder if in fifty years they’ll look back and say, ‘Those people in 1970 were so insane they covered themselves with pieces of colored cloth even when it was hot outside. Why? Because they were ashamed of their genitals.’ How sick is that?”

  “It’s nice of you to say so, Doctor,” the boy told him.

  “Call me Terry, Pete.” He plunged into an overstuffed green couch. He felt through his pockets and came out with a little cigarette—a Tijuana Smalls. “Hey, you smoke?” The boy shook his head no. The doctor lit up. “Good for you. Bad habit. I’m working my way up from Luckys. So—I’m glad you were able to make the trip up here. You freaked out by this whole thing? You shouldn’t be. Yossarian, right? Catch-22. The only sane response to a crazy world is to act nuts. You feeling okay?”

  “Well, Terry, I’m in a pickle.”

  “Go on, Pete, tell me more.”

  “I’m under the impression that I went to sleep in the year 2020 as a sixty-five-year-old man and woke up a few days ago, here in April 1970, fifteen years old again. I played along for a while. I enjoyed it. Seeing my parents alive, our old house, my school. But the longer this went on the more anxious I became. Why was I not waking up? Had I had some kind of accident? Have I gone mad?”

  Dr. Terry weighed the invitation. He did not speak. The boy looked to be a young fifteen. Tall and gangly with a long neck like someone had grabbed a cute ten-year-old under the ears and yanked him until he stretched.

  The boy continued: “Whatever was going on I figured was beyond my control. I’d wait it out. But after three days I thought, I have to get out of here. I need to shock myself out of this dream. I considered jumping off the roof, but that might have gone really wrong. I could have ended up still in 1970 with a broken back. So I took off my clothes in front of the math class. Classic nightmare scenario. I thought it would wake me up. Didn’t work.”

  Dr. Terry mulled this over. “You gave your actions due consideration.”

  “My options were limited.”

  “You’re from the future.”

  “That is how it seems to me. If it’s a fantasy, it’s a detailed and intricate one. You want to know the history of the Red Sox for the next fifty seasons? They win the World Series four times, but not until after the year 2000.”

  “You’re Billy Pilgrim. You’ve become unstuck in time.”

  “No, I’m stuck. I want to get home to my wife and children. I want to get home to Starbucks and flat-screen TVs. I miss my iPhone. I’ll never complain about the autocorrect function again. I miss Alexa.”

  “Alexa is your wife?”

  “No. My wife is Janice. Alexa turns the lights on.”

  Dr. Terry got up and walked around the room, exhaling blue cigar smoke. “Look, if I refer to your future life as a delusion, I don’t want you to take offense. It’s just the terminology we use in the trade.”

  “Fine with me.”

  “Great. So listen, let’s test this delusion. Okay?”

  “Fire away.”

  “Who are the presidents of the United States from now until your time?”

  “Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush one, Clinton, Bush two, Obama, Trump.”

  “Wait—you’re telling me Ronald Reagan becomes president?”

  “Two terms—1981 to 1989.”

  “Pete, he’ll be a hundred years old in 1989. Wait, let me get some paper, I should write this down.”

  The boy went through the list again. The doctor took notes. He said, “Can you tell me the vice presidents?”

  “Yeah, let me think. Agnew, Ford, Rockefeller—”

  “Nelson Rockefeller?”

  “For about two years.”

  “Shit.”

  “Agnew gets arrested for taking bribes and Gerald Ford replaces him as Nixon’s VP. Then when Nixon resigns…”

  “Nixon resigns?”

  “Under threat of impeachment.”

  “I love this.”

  “Ford becomes president and appoints Rockefeller, then Ford is beaten by Jimmy Carter.”

  “Jimmy?” Dr. Terry was writing as fast as he could.

  “Carter’s vice president was Mondale. Reagan has George Bush Senior, who succeeds Reagan and picks as his VP Dan Quayle…”

  “Now you’re just making up names.”

  “Bush and Quayle were followed by Clinton and Gore, who were followed by Bush Junior and Cheney…”

  “Bush Junior?”

  “There are a lot of Bushes. Who are followed by Obama and Biden. Then comes Trump. If I tell you about Trump, you’ll have me committed.”

  Dr. Terry studied his papers. “Right. Okay. Can we do an experiment, Pete?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’m going to jumble up these presidents you gave me and see if you remember them the same way. Cool?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  For the next ten minutes Dr. Terry asked the boy which president Mr. Gore served under, what years Ford came and went, who suc
ceeded and preceded Clinton—he zigzagged up and down the list trying to throw him off. The boy didn’t make any mistakes. He didn’t mix up Quayle with Cheney or think that Obama came before Carter. The doctor was impressed with his consistency. He said, “This is a very structured delusion.”

  “Look, Doctor,” the boy told him, “we can do this all day. We can talk the next fifty years of sports, music, TV, world events. Get this—Eastern European communism falls in 1989. The Soviet Union dissolves. Nelson Mandela becomes president of a free and integrated South Africa. All kinds of big stuff happens. President Obama was black.”

  Dr. Terry walked over to a shelf and studied the bleached skull of a steer. After a minute he declared, “Pete, I’d like to work with you regularly. Two, three sessions a week. How would you feel about that?”

  “You’re seeing a book in your future…”

  “I’m seeing a remarkable case study, that’s for sure. And listen, man, I studied with Tim Leary at Harvard, okay? I’ve been on vision quests. I am open to exploring worlds beyond our senses. I say this to you in full honesty: I will take this journey with you wherever it leads us. I admit I’m not convinced you’re actually a time traveler from the next century. I’m a doctor, I have to be skeptical of supernatural propositions. But I’m not closing any doors to my own knowledge. If in the course of this expedition you can make it reasonable for me to believe you’re from 2020, shit, I’ll be pleased and excited. I’m not going to con you, and I trust you won’t con me, and we’ll see where this road takes us. You in?”

  “I can’t ask my mother to drive me to Lexington twice a week. We live in Rhode Island.”

  “One afternoon a week here and I’ll come to you Saturday mornings—how’s that?”

  “Sure, Terry. Be nice to have someone to talk to about all this.”

  “Solid.”

  The boy told the doctor, “You can’t be my shrink and say solid. One or the other.”

  “Deal.” Dr. Terry leaned forward and spoke in a low voice. “Pete—anything we talk about in session is in total confidence. You understand that, yeah?”

  “I do.”

  “Okay, then. Nothing to do with your treatment, but tell me this. Marijuana. 2020. Legal?”

  “Some places, Doctor. Massachusetts, Maine, Vermont, Colorado, Illinois, Michigan, Nevada, Alaska, the whole West Coast. It’s getting there.”

  Dr. Terry nodded. Peter spent the rest of the hour describing a world without rabbit ears or milkmen. By the time he got to the extinction of cursive writing and cloth diapers, his mother was outside.

  TWO

  As the junior guidance counselor at West Bethlehem Veterans Memorial High School, Maurice Mosspaw was responsible for one-third of the school’s 3,200 students. His duties stretched from the morning session, which began at 7:25 a.m., to an hour past the end of the afternoon session at 5:15. Because of overcrowding the school day was staggered. Upperclassmen started early, freshmen stayed late. Moe Mosspaw had school all the time.

  Peter Wyatt stripping naked in algebra I was high on Mr. Mosspaw’s list of priorities. The Wyatts were a respected and connected family in Bethlehem. The father was a judge. The mother was a teacher’s nightmare, the retired head of the Foreign Languages department at Providence College. When her oldest daughter was flunking science back in ’65, Joanne Wyatt went through all the science teacher’s written comments and sent them back with corrections in substance, grammar, and the proper spelling of the plural hypotheses.

  When the second Wyatt daughter was going to be dropped from French II, the mother sent the girl to live with a family in Toulouse for the summer. She came back to school in the fall, conjugating like she was born in the sixth arrondissement.

  Any kid losing his mind in the middle of the school day was a problem for Mr. Mosspaw, but Peter Wyatt’s breakdown was a special knot of burdens. If it had been a poor kid, a kid with a history of discipline issues—a screwup—they could have shipped the trouble out of the school. But the Wyatts wanted their son reinstated, and they had the money, the connections, and the legal vocabulary to make their case.

  Mosspaw was not against it. He barely knew the kid. What he knew very well was that once a fifteen-year-old boy had swung his snorkel at a dozen ninth-grade girls, there were going to be twenty-four angry parents who would not want that boy back in the room with their daughters. Some of them were respected and connected, too.

  Vice Principal Alice Lockwood was a tall woman who had served in the Peace Corps in Africa after skipping out on her final vows as a nun. She was a serious person. She had sympathy for a disturbed child, but her first duty was to protect all the other children. She would expect Mr. Mosspaw to handle the Wyatt problem in a way that wouldn’t cause more trouble for the school or escalate into anything ugly. The guidance counselor was confident that whatever he did would be wrong.

  In the faculty lunchroom he spoke to Mr. Wood, the algebra teacher in whose class Peter Wyatt had unveiled.

  “How do you feel about the Wyatt boy coming back tomorrow?”

  “Gonna keep his dingaling in his dungarees?”

  “You think the other kids will be upset?”

  “Upset? I don’t think they were upset. I think they were amused. I think if we left it up to the kids, it would make the yearbook’s annual highlights section. I’d be more worried about Wyatt. Shit, Moe, he won’t be able to make it out of the locker room without every thug from Oakland Beach slapping the back of his skull and calling him Lady Godiva. Don’t worry about the other students. If this poor head case comes back to school, worry about him making it through the week alive.”

  Mosspaw went back to Vice Principal Lockwood and said that as it was almost the first of May, how about if Peter Wyatt took the rest of the semester off and resumed classes in September? He could study at home for his finals, or he could go to summer school. Ease back in.

  The vice principal raised a piece of paper. “This is a note from Dr. Terrence Canyon. Harvard psychiatrist. He strongly recommends that Peter return to class immediately. He needs to start putting this behind him.”

  Mosspaw said, “Okay, if you think so.”

  “It’s not my decision, Maurice. I don’t know the boy. This is your call.”

  It was settled, then. Whatever happened, Moe Mosspaw would get blamed.

  Peter Wyatt returned to algebra I the next day. First period. He walked in with his eyes looking straight ahead and took his place at his desk. He didn’t hide from any of the faces staring at him, but he didn’t stare back.

  Wood came in and pushed a soft leather briefcase across his blotter and looked around with practiced indifference. He said, “Pipe down. Get out your workbooks. Wyatt, you got any surprises planned?”

  The class chuckled. Peter stood up from his desk and said, “I want to apologize for the other day, Mr. Wood.”

  “Don’t apologize to me, Peter.”

  “I want to apologize to the class. I’m very sorry.”

  His classmates’ faces told Peter that his words meant nothing to them. He was still a nonentity who had mutated into a psycho. He was moved to improvise a better story.

  “The truth is,” he told the class, “I was tripping on acid when I took my clothes off.”

  It was as if an electrical connection had been switched on under every desk. The kids’ mouths formed grins and grimaces and little Os. Wood looked like he was going to execute a flying tackle.

  “I didn’t know what was happening to me,” Peter continued. “I stopped by Lynch’s Variety Store before school that day to get some gum and a certain… person who no longer goes to this school said, ‘Hey, Pete, try this gum, it’s a new flavor.’ I took a stick of what I thought was Beech-Nut and didn’t think any more of it until about an hour later when I was sitting in homeroom and saw the bones of my hand and all the veins glowing.”

  The teacher had missed his shot at a figure-four leglock and had to rotate to Concerned Adult Mode.

  “That must ha
ve been frightening, Peter. Did you tell your doctor?”

  “The doctor told me. I had no idea. I thought I had lost my mind.” He watched the reaction from the teacher and the students and then added, “Imagine my relief.”

  Wood said it was an important lesson to all the students and told Peter to take his seat. The classroom buzzed with low and excited voices until the teacher barked a page assignment and workbooks opened. Math class began its turgid procession.

  Peter attempted to focus on the equations. The girl next to him was trying to catch his eye. She had switched places to be near him. Daphne Burrows was the most dangerous girl in ninth grade. She was wearing earrings in the shape of tiny daggers and a choker made of purple ribbon that emphasized her long neck. Peter knew that Daphne delighted in being bad. As she was bright, articulate, and delicately beautiful, her misbehavior faced few impediments. Daphne was a nihilist as well as the only freshman who knew what that word meant and had read the key texts.

  Until Peter took off his clothes in class, Daphne never noticed him. When all the kids said he was crazy, it got her interest.

  When Daphne had his attention, she laid her left hand, palm up, on the edge of her desk. He watched. She took a tiny art-class razor attached to the end of a metal pencil and ran it down her outstretched forefinger. A red line appeared. She lifted her finger and licked it. She whispered, “I’m crazy too.”

  Wood asked who knew the reciprocal of negative nine, and Daphne raised the uncut hand. She recited the answer perfectly. Then she said, “Mr. Wood, may I go to the nurse? I’m bleeding.”

  The class turned to her. She held up her other hand and said, “My finger.”

  Peter watched her gather her books and leave the room. When she was outside the door she gave him a wink. He understood that his troubles were multiplying.

  The story that the kid who took off his clothes in algebra class had been dosed with LSD went around the school as fast as a sneeze. Peter Wyatt became famous as a victim of illegal hallucinogens and a walking warning to parents and teenagers that THIS COULD HAPPEN TO YOU if you didn’t keep your eyes open and reject candy from strangers.