Fifty in Reverse

by Bill Flanagan

  This was a delicate call. Dr. Terry said, “I’m not condoning underage sex, Pete, but—you know, a little petting is normal.”

  Peter exploded. “You’re going to counsel a disturbed adolescent to have sex with a fourteen-year-old? You should lose your license, you charlatan!”

  Dr. Terry was surprised by Peter’s anger. His delusion could be progressing toward psychosis. Time to take a chance. He said, “Tell me about your wife, Peter.”

  “Fuck off back to Zabriskie Point, you hippie! We have something where I come from called the MeToo movement, Terry. Old men who try to have sex with young girls don’t fare well in 2020.”

  The doctor said, “I need to understand the world you believe you come from.”

  “We pay for water and television.”

  “Tell me about your wife.”

  “Janice.”

  “Tell me about Janice.”

  “I don’t trust you, Terry.”

  “You don’t have to. Where do you and Janice live?”

  “In Tribeca.”

  “Where is Tribeca?”

  “It’s a neighborhood in lower Manhattan. We have a house in Westchester. Since the kids left, we spend more time in the city.”

  “How many children do you have?”

  “Three.”

  “What do you do for a living?”

  The boy was mistrustful. Dr. Terry picked up a pen and a leather notebook. He flipped it open and gestured for Peter to talk.

  “I spent most of my career in radio.”

  “Deejay?”

  “Programmer. Now I work for a streaming service.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  “When did you meet Janice?”

  “I was thirty. She was twenty-five. She was playing in a band. The Bouviers. They weren’t much, but she was fantastic. A police chief’s daughter from Long Island. Smartest person I ever met.”

  “You loved music so much you married a musician.”

  “We fall in love with people who are what we wish to be.”

  Dr. Terry made a note of that. It calmed Peter to talk about the world he thought he had left. After ten minutes of circling, he spoke freely about the life he believed he had lost.

  “For a long while time passed slowly,” Peter said. “High school, college, moving to New York. It was like every month lasted a year. Until Janice and I got married. Then we went into life’s carpool lane. We had twins, a boy and a girl. Janice quit her band. I got a promotion. A friend of mine told me, ‘Children bring money. They leave you no choice.’ We took the kids to preschool. We went on family trips. I worked hard and attended lots of meetings. It was always almost Christmas or almost summer vacation. We had another boy and named him Peter after me. We moved to the house in Westchester but kept the apartment downtown. Our kids became teenagers and gave us the usual grief. I changed jobs for more money. We got a cat, and then we got a dog, too. We went to PTA meetings, school plays, tennis lessons, swim meets, and basketball games. Our parents got old, and we helped take care of them until they died.”

  The boy was choking up. Dr. Terry stopped writing. He closed his notebook and said, “Just talk.”

  “One minute we’re watching The Little Mermaid, and the next we’re going on university tours. Jenny went to college in North Carolina. James stayed close—NYU. People warned us about the empty nest, but Peter was at home, usually with a houseful of cronies, and James was nearby, and Jenny was back half the year, and the dog was barking at the cat, and I was busy. The nest felt full to me.

  “Until the day we left the youngest at college in California. On the flight back to New York Janice and I looked at each other, and it hit us. That’s it. The baby is out of the house. That chapter is over. And the strange thing about it was that the chapter I’ve just described didn’t feel like it took any longer than high school or college had. The three decades we spent as parents with kids in the house felt like four years, more or less. But when I looked up I was sixty and my hair was turning white. Janice is younger than I am, but in photographs we looked like old people. She called us the Van Winkles.

  “I started having dreams in which the past and future were mixed up. I’d be with my kids as they are in their twenties but with my parents still young. Or I’d be back in school but my wife would be there too. I enjoyed those dreams. It was like I was taping over old memories and they were bleeding through. That’s why, when I woke up in my childhood bedroom in 1970, I played along. I thought it was another of those dreams. The most vivid yet. It took me a long time to realize I couldn’t get out.”

  Peter stopped talking. He sat back and stared at a Navajo mask on the wall.

  Terry Canyon spoke quietly. “I want you to go somewhere with me, Peter. Consider this. When you were in 2020, you had your wife and children, but your parents were gone, right? They were a memory.”

  “Yes.”

  “Even though your parents, whom you loved, were dead, you were generally happy?”

  “Yes. I was happy. I had my children and Janice.”

  “I know how much you want them back. I can’t see inside your delusion, Peter, but I know it’s as real to you as this table. They’re as real to you as I am.”

  “They’re more real to me than you are.”

  “In 2020 you had your wife and kids but your parents were a memory. And that memory gave you comfort. Now you’re in 1970. Janice and the children are not here physically but they are alive in your memory. And your parents are with you again. You’re not alone.”

  Peter put his head in his hands. “It’s not a fair trade.”

  Dr. Terry said, “I know it’s not, Pete. But it might be a way to think about it that doesn’t hurt so much. It might be a way to hang on.”

  Peter held his fists against his eyes. Dr. Terry put a hand on his shoulder, and they sat that way without speaking for a long time. Finally, Peter looked up at the clock. It was ten past seven. His mother would be outside. He looked at Dr. Terry evenly and asked if this session replaced Saturday.

  The doctor said no, Saturday was still on. This was a bonus.

  “Okay,” Peter said, brushing his hair back. “See you Saturday.”

  “Count on it.”

  At the door Peter stopped and said, “If I remain stuck here, I’ll have to do everything exactly the same to get back to my old life. I’ll have to duplicate every step.”

  Dr. Terry said, “That makes sense, I guess.”

  “But see, I’ve already changed it. I didn’t become the school lunatic the first time. I didn’t strip naked in front of the class; I didn’t go to a psychiatrist. I never heard of Dr. Terry Canyon. Daphne Burrows never came over to my house and tried to seduce me in the hayloft. I’ve already ruined it.”

  “You haven’t ruined anything, Pete. You might be able to make it come out better.”

  “No,” the boy said evenly. “I’ve ruined it. I had it perfect the first time, but I had to lose it to know.”

  EIGHT

  The window of the school bus was fallout-shelter-sign yellow, stained with seasons of spit, snot, and sweat. Peter leaned his head against the glass and studied the town passing by. At the end of World War II, Bethlehem had been a collection of small farms circling a half dozen mill villages. Each village had a main street with a grocer, a cobbler, a barber, a hardware store, a bank, an auto-repair shop, and a beauty parlor. Each village had at least one church, one bar, and one place to eat. Each village had a grammar school. Half the villages had small department stores that sold clothes, shoes, and home furnishings. Two had movie theaters. Two had libraries. One had a tailor. One had a print shop. Doctors and dentists had offices in each village. The two high schools, West Beth and East Beth, were built between the villages on what had been farmland.

  The farms became suburbs in the fifties. Young families filled up the new housing developments. In 1970 Peter could see the old Bethlehem under the new plats and widened streets and gas station
s. He could also see what was coming: roads expanding to highways to carry commuters from all over the state to the new malls, the office parks, the multiplex theaters. The next few years would bring apartment buildings along the shore for bachelors, spinsters, and widows, followed by cheap multifamily units behind the train tracks. Along the way would come strip malls and 7-Elevens, every evolution of McDonald’s, Burger King, IHOP, Friendly’s, Wendy’s, TGI Fridays, Taco Bell, Ruby Tuesdays. Video stores would come and go. Then big box stores as the malls got old and began to fail. With the introduction of internet commerce many of the big box stores would be abandoned. The apartment buildings would fall into disrepair. Weeds would grow through cracks in the concrete. By the 1990s immigrants from Cape Verde, Southeast Asia, and Central America would move in and do their best to make lives for their families, while Peter’s generation’s daughters and sons would move back to the cities their grandparents fled. Peter could see the map of what used to be bleeding through the map of what was coming as the school bus rolled onto the grounds of West Bethlehem Veterans Memorial High.

  He saw something else. A group of about a dozen students were waiting to greet the buses. They were all wearing black armbands. Among them was Daphne Burrows.

  “US out of Cambodia!” a boy with frizzy Dylan hair shouted as the bus doors opened to let the students out.

  “Stop shooting kids!” a girl yelled.

  Daphne spotted Peter and pushed forward to hand him an armband. She looked him in the eye and said, “No more Kent States!”

  Peter felt as if he had been in a silent room and someone turned up the volume. The chants of the teenagers knocked him back. He said to Daphne, “Kent State—when did it happen?”

  “You really are loco, aren’t you, Peter? When did it happen? It happened yesterday. Did you pass out in the hayloft? It’s the only thing on the news. Students are going on strike across the country. All the colleges are closing.” She was lit up like Christmas. “High schools are going to be next!”

  Peter accepted the black armband and moved toward the school as Vice Principal Lockwood, Mosspaw, and a pair of gym teachers rushed to break up the radicals before they could rally any more buses. Peter headed to the pay phone by the nurse’s office and dialed Terry Canyon collect.

  The psychiatrist was in a net hammock on his front porch in Lexington, shoeless, writing in his leather notebook with a calligrapher’s pen. His secretary told him that Peter Wyatt was calling, distraught. Terry went inside and took the phone.

  “What’s happening, Pete?”

  “Doctor. Kent State—those four kids. I could have warned someone! I wasn’t even thinking… Jesus, my self-absorption… I was so obsessed with my own selfish… I could have done something.”

  The psychiatrist’s voice was even: “You didn’t mention anything about this to me, Pete.”

  “That’s what I’m saying! It was so long ago it didn’t occur to me I could change it. But I could have. Maybe that’s why I was put here—to save those kids. I was put here and I didn’t do anything to help!”

  “Pete. Buddy. Listen. What could you have done? Who could you have told? Who’d have believed you?”

  “I could have called the college, the dorms.”

  “Peter, if some crazy—forgive me, buddy—if some crazy kid had started calling the dorms on that campus saying the National Guard were going to shoot the demonstrators, the only possible consequence I can see is that you would have made things worse.”

  Peter asked, “What could be worse?”

  “Four students got killed for holding up signs. Imagine if they’d armed themselves. Could have been more people shot.”

  Peter sat down on the linoleum floor holding the receiver. Dr. Terry kept talking: “You couldn’t have changed anything.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Where are you?”

  “School.”

  “Tell you what. For our next session you write down for me every tragedy, every disaster, every bad thing that’s coming in the next six months, and we’ll discuss whether any of them can be prevented and how we can try to do that.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay?”

  “Yes, Doctor. Thank you.”

  The bell rang. A gym teacher rushed by, dragging Ricky DeVille by the black armband. Peter hung up the phone.

  In Lexington, Dr. Terry went back to his hammock and picked up his notebook. He flipped to the page with his musings about the strange case of Peter Wyatt. He began to scribble. Today he was considering right brain/left brain disjunction. Most people’s hemispheres were in sync most of the time, but there was a theory that a slight stutter between left and right sides could be responsible for déjà vu, the illusion that one had experienced an event before. The theory was that the event was registering in one hemisphere a split second before the other. In extreme cases the subject began hearing voices. Déjà vu became schizophrenia. Dr. Terry was open to all possibilities, but the great probability was that the boy didn’t warn anyone about the Kent State shootings because he didn’t know they were going to happen until he heard the news, at which point he was overwhelmed with the belief he had known it already. If this were true, something in the boy’s wiring was circling on itself. He was mistaking an echo for an experience.

  In math class Peter stared at his notebook and considered the assignment Dr. Terry had given him. He made circles on the page with his pen and tried to remember what came next. They were heading into the summer of 1970. What happened in the summer of 1970? The assassinations were over. Man had walked on the moon. Teddy Kennedy had driven off the bridge. The Mets had won the ’69 World Series. Woodstock and Altamont and Manson had entered the public vocabulary. A lot of history happened in 1969. But May of 1970? The Beatles broke up the month before. Apollo 13 made it back to Earth. What big news event was impending that Peter could use to prove he was from 2020?

  He could think of nothing. Did that mean that nothing memorable happened in the world in the summer after Kent State, or did it mean he was truly deluded? Were his memories between age fifteen and sixty-five a dream so vivid that it was trying to take over his life? If he could accept that—if he could simply act as if he accepted it—he might haul himself out of this chasm.

  What other option did he have?

  Daphne Burrows arrived in class late and raging. Ordered to remove the black band from her arm, she had wrapped it around her head. She took the seat next to Peter and whispered, “The pigs won’t win this one.”

  The math teacher said, “You’re late, Miss Burrows.”

  “Mr. Wood,” she said evenly, “I was denied my right to protest an unjust war.”

  “Don’t set yourself on fire in the quadrangle and I won’t give you detention,” the teacher said, and wrote an equation on the chalkboard. He was coming around the greater-than sign when the public address system crackled awake with the voice of Delores Marx, the earnest girl from the Ecology Club with the smile buttons on her knapsack.

  “Attention all students and faculty. There has been much concern expressed about the sad events at Kent State University and what it might mean for our own schedule and graduation exercises. We all feel for the families of the students who were slain and injured in this terrible tragedy, and for the National Guardsmen who are now being subjected to so much criticism. Vice Principal Lockwood wants to stress that while we all are upset, any talk of student strikes or walkouts will be treated as truancy. There will be a special meeting during E period today to give us a chance to talk through our feelings, share songs and poetry inspired by our emotional pain, and quell any anxieties we share.”

  Peter was struck by Delores’s use of quell. This was a statement drafted by a committee for sure. Delores was the sort of level-headed student the faculty would choose to deal with in a touchy situation, rather than risk the little Che Guevaras expressing their dissent with obscenities and eggs. It would be unkind to call Delores the class quisling, the boy considered, but not e
ntirely unfair.

  The announcement went on: “We would like to ask each class to elect two student reps to come to the small auditorium today at two for an open discussion about this event, which is of concern to us all. Teachers, please ask your classes to vote for their student representatives at this time and send their names to Mr. Mosspaw, who will chair the discussion. Thank you.”

  Well, that’s going to do those dead kids a lot of good, Peter thought, and went back to trying to remember something significant that happened in the summer of 1970 that he could use to prove he was not insane. The class began chattering about who should represent them at the Kent State meeting. Daphne put up her hand to volunteer, and in a smooth gesture slipped the black armband out of her hair and onto her raised arm. She was picked by the other kids, none of whom gave any sign of wishing to share the honor.

  Peter did not at first register Daphne’s saying, “I nominate Peter Wyatt to be the other class rep.”

  Peter heard a general moan from his classmates. He was, after all, the school wacko.

  He said, “I don’t really…”

  Daphne said, “Vote for Wyatt! If the administration tries to shut us up, he’ll take his clothes off on the evening news!” The students laughed, and hands shot up to make Peter their second delegate.

  The math teacher looked pained. He said, “You want to be our rep, Peter?”

  Peter was a thousand miles from shore. What could he do but ride the wave?

  “Sure, Mr. Wood. I’ll go.”

  He sensed the same muted disappointment from his classmates he had felt when he returned to class after the scandal and failed to act like a maniac. If they had to go to school with a crazy kid, did he have to be so boring?

  Daphne was delighted. When the teacher picked up the black phone on the wall to give the office the names of his two student reps, she reached over and punched the boy on the shoulder. “Bastille Day,” she whispered.

  It gave Peter a flash of apprehension. What if 1970 were only the first stop on a backward journey? He could wake up tomorrow in the Reign of Terror, riding a tumbrel to the guillotine. And Daphne—he could picture Daphne sitting in the front row knitting while blood sprayed her dress and his head flopped into her basket.