She had completed her notes on the Eternal Return and moved on this week to biology and consciousness. She was studying how learning is passed down genetically, how animals inherit information through a process we don’t understand and that we dismiss with the limiting word instinct.
She felt her husband approaching. She knew his footfalls and his shadow before he put his hand on her shoulder.
“Joanne,” he said softly. “You have to come home. They want to close.”
She looked around the room. Where had everyone gone?
Howard Wyatt sat down next to her. “You learn anything?”
She tore off four pages of notes and folded them in half. She wrote on the back, Reverse transfer?
Her husband looked at her with kindness.
Joanne said, “Howard, I’ve been working through an idea. Consider this: We don’t understand what consciousness is. We don’t. We don’t know what causes it or where it ends. We look at the brain and we say, ‘That’s where consciousness lives.’ But that’s a primitive proposition. Really, it’s like saying love resides in the heart. All we know about consciousness is that it seems to parallel electrical activity in the brain—but it’s a rough correspondence at best. It’s not much better than measuring fate by the stars.”
“Joanne, if you start doing Peter’s astrological chart, we’re getting a divorce.”
She smiled. “All I’m saying is, we don’t actually know where consciousness resides or how it moves. We know it somehow nests in the brain, but no one knows how much of the brain it occupies. There are many cases of patients with severe head injuries finding skills attributed to the disrupted part of the brain manifesting elsewhere. A soldier loses the sphere that controls speech, and in a few months speech appears again, having migrated to a healthy part of the brain.”
Howard sat back in his chair. He nodded. He was making the same focused but unreadable face he wore in court when listening to testimony.
Joanne said, “Let me put it this way. A metaphor.”
“You’re teaching in parables now?”
“Imagine a species from beyond our galaxy looking through a giant telescope at us. They have no bodies; they’re made of gas. They’re compiling a record of life-forms in the Milky Way. They train their sights on Earth. Never heard of the place. They zoom in on New York City. What have we here? This planet seems to be populated by great concrete creatures, immobile and a thousand feet high. When the sun goes down, these creatures light up. They’re awake. They’re communicating with one another along electric lines. As the night proceeds, their lights go out; they’re asleep. Next morning they begin to operate again. Thousands of tiny little creatures are drawn into them and expelled out. That must be their food source. They suck these little bugs in and shit them out again.
“Now, it would never occur to these intergalactic census takers that the microbes going in and out are actually the ones with the consciousness. They would never suppose that the buildings, the lights, the power grid, the entire organized progress of the city is being run by the tiny bugs, not the concrete giants.”
Howard considered this. He said finally, “Well, we certainly have put one over on those alien gas creatures.”
Joanne touched his arm. “It’s a metaphor. Howard, we look at the brain the way they look at the buildings. They assume the consciousness resides in the entire structure, but what if it doesn’t? What if consciousness is cellular? What if it’s microscopic? It could be. It could be that all we think and know resides in a cell within our brain. And if that were true, Howard—what if consciousness is migratory? When the body dies, the conscious cell might move through the soil into a plant or tree. It might migrate through the earth.”
“Honey, we’re not Druids.”
“Howard, what if consciousness is actually hereditary? Why would that be any stranger than inheriting your father’s ears or your mother’s eyes? And what if somehow, in Peter’s case, a consciousness that was supposed to be moving forward through time somehow reversed course? What if Peter isn’t an old man who came back in time but a fifteen-year-old boy who has been fed a preview of his next fifty years?”
Joanne looked at her husband with an expression that was almost desperate. She wanted so much for him to comprehend what she was proposing. He didn’t have to accept it. He just had to comprehend.
All she got back was unwelcome sympathy.
He said, “We’ll never know, and it’s a waste of time guessing. Joanne, I know you want to believe in Peter. I know you want to support him. But he doesn’t need you validating his delusion or vanishing down tunnels toward the unknowable. He doesn’t need you to come up with arcane theories to justify his fantasy.”
Her face flushed. He knew he was on shaky ground. She was smarter than he was and could dismantle him in any debate, even if he was right and she was wrong. Especially if he was right and she was wrong. He knew that from experience.
Judge Howard Wyatt leaned toward Dr. Joanne Wyatt and whispered, “Our boy needs his mother to be at home and to know she loves him. That’s what Peter needs.”
The lights were clicking on and off. The library was closed. Joanne pulled the marked sheets out of the books on the table and put her papers into a large leather bag. She walked out of the building with her husband following her.
She put the key in the door of her car and waved to him.
He thought, “We can’t afford to lose her, too.”
She thought, “He never was good in a crisis.”
NINETEEN
Nothing could murder Peter’s faith in public education like health class. The teacher—a beefy former college football player with curly hair and a jutting chin—announced that today’s subject was “Condoms, prophylactics, sheaths, or, as you’ve probably heard older kids refer to them, rubbers, safeties, raincoats, the fez.”
He flexed his thick neck and stuck out his awning jaw.
“You guys gotta know about this stuff for when you”—here he almost snickered—“get married and consider family planning.” He was bouncing a half piece of chalk in his right hand. He looked around the room for someone not paying attention. His eyes fell on a chubby kid with a pubic mustache. The young teacher reared up like he was back in the URI Thanksgiving game and winged the chalk at the kid, who snapped to attention as it cracked against his ear.
“Frisco!” the teacher barked. “What are the two main reasons for using a prophylactic?”
Frisco rubbed his ear and considered. “Because the girl won’t let you do it otherwise?”
The teacher laughed. “You’re a scholarship student, aren’t ya? That’s not a bad answer. Girls! If any of you ever in your distant future lives find yourselves in a situation where you’re considering becoming intimate with someone like Frisco…”
A stereo-panned Ewww rose from the young women in the room.
“By all means, make such a course contingent on his having functioning protection. For your sake, for his sake, and for the sake of your unborn children, who we pray to God stay that way.”
The boy in front of Peter raised his hand. “Mr. McCabe?”
“Yes, Rolly?”
“Ain’t a rubber a waste of money? Don’t most guys just use one of their socks?”
The health teacher stared at Rolly, a pimply boy with one sleepy eye, to determine if he was making a joke. Nothing but sincerity registered on Rolly’s bumpy face. Mr. McCabe tried to stifle his amusement but couldn’t. His lips began to quiver, someone else laughed, and pretty soon the whole room was in hysterics while Rolly looked around and said, “What?”
Peter’s next class was at the far end of the school. He would have to haul ass to get there before the bell. He passed John North in the hall, who made a gesture that he wanted to talk. Peter nodded and kept moving. He turned from F wing into D wing and passed a large bulletin board, which Delores Marx had decorated with smile faces and a banner that said, “HAVE A NICE DAY!” Beneath that banner someone had tacked up a car
dboard sign with an American flag and the slogan “POWS NEVER HAVE A NICE DAY.” Some wiseass had come along with scissors and a stapler and moved the letters around so the sign now declared, “WOPS NEVER HAVE A NICE DAY.”
Peter arrived at the Language Lab and took a seat behind a plastic screen and put on the cheap headphones. Through the static a recorded voice said, “Bonjour. Je vais bien. Et vous?”
The French teacher sat at the front of the classroom looking bored and clicking through switches. You never knew when he was listening to you. Peter remembered an old trick—you just moved your lips as if you were answering, and when the teacher got to you he would think the microphone was broken and move on. Peter did that for a while before he got bored.
The taped voice said, “Comment allez-vous?” Peter sighed and said, “Bonjour, ma ami invisible. Je souhaîte que je pourrais dire que j’étais bien mais je me trouve dans un dilemma métaphysique. Je suis un enfant encore, emprisonné dans la Bastille de mon corps de quinze et forcé endurer le tedium d’un journée à l’école dans les printemps de 1970. Est ce qu’il y a un sant Gallic à qui je peux petition m’aider échapper et rétourner à la monde de mobiles et télévision réalité?”
He heard a ticktock in his earpiece. The French teacher had been listening. For a moment Peter wondered if he had found a way to prove he was from the future. In 1970 he could barely conjugate aller. He was bringing a college education and a lifetime of European travel into the Language Lab today. He waited to hear the teacher’s response.
The response was, “Ha ha, Wyatt. You go to the trouble of memorizing that whole spiel? Wouldn’t it have been easier to just do the homework? Get with it.”
The French teacher’s voice clicked off. The static came back on. Peter went back to moving his mouth with nothing coming out.
TWENTY
As Peter approached the rehearsal shed behind the DeVilles’ house, he heard a woman doing a passable impersonation of Grace Slick. “Don’t you want somebody to love?” It was not a trained voice but it was effective, on pitch and cutting through the squall of Ricky’s electric guitar and Rocky’s bass. Peter was curious until he got to the door. Then he was furious.
He said, “Daphne, why are you here?”
Daphne was wearing a W. C. Fields T-shirt that ended just above her navel, hip-hugger jeans, and an expression that projected Why, whatever do you mean?
She said into the microphone, “We’re just having fun, Peter.”
Rocky rested his wrists on his bass with an aplomb that was nearly Parisian. A long cigarette dangled from his lower lip. He said, “Daphne’s a good singer. Lou Pitano said we needed a good singer.”
Peter had no objection at all to handing over vocal duties to someone with a better voice than his own adolescent gargle. The object was to get the songs sold, not become the next Rod Stewart. But Daphne could sabotage the project. Not only was she emotionally unprepared for the work the boy knew was ahead of them but she was a troublemaker by instinct and aptitude. She would create chaos and then stand back and enjoy watching it. The amateurism of the DeVilles and the sleaziness of Mogul Lou were obstacles enough. Daphne would harpoon the whole plan just to see the carnage.
“He didn’t say a female singer,” Peter said. “ ‘Smokin’ in the Boys’ Room,’ ‘School’s Out,’ ‘Smoke on the Water’—those have to be sung by a guy.”
Daphne let the microphone slip by its cord down to the floor. She looked toward Rocky with an expression of innocent heartbreak. He reached out his long arm and pulled her close. “Oh my God,” Peter thought, “she’s hooked him already; the fragile-looking fourteen-year-old honor student has got the eighteen-year-old mondo under her thumb, and she’s going to wreck my band.”
“The Airplane has Marty and Grace,” Daphne said coyly. “I don’t need to sing on every song. Just once in a while.”
Peter made a quick survey of the moment’s politics. Rocky was clearly smitten, and Ricky would side with his brother. Barry’s whereabouts were unknown since his father came to town. Peter decided to stall.
“Maybe Daphne can sing in the demo session,” he said. “We can see how it works out later. Right now we have to keep rehearsing. Studio time is expensive, and I don’t want us to be into Lou Pitano for more dough than we have to be. Let’s work.”
Daphne smiled and went and sat on the battered old couch and drank a beer conspicuously. Peter saw her batting her eyes at Rocky. “This is going to end so badly,” he thought.
They rehearsed their songs for the demo session. Every pass got better. Rocky and Ricky stayed between the lines, found the pocket, kept it simple. They ran through “School’s Out” six times and “Smokin’ in the Boys’ Room” four times, and then “School’s Out” twice more. On the last pass Rocky began to vary the bass line, climbing up the neck, showing off for Daphne. Peter stopped the song.
“Rocky, you’re drifting. Stick to the figure.”
He said it without thinking. If Daphne weren’t in the room, it wouldn’t have caused a shrug. But Daphne was there, and Rocky the tough guy couldn’t be corrected in front of a girl by a little rich kid.
“You worry about trying to sing, sonny,” Rocky said. “I’ll play the bass.”
Peter wasn’t going to get Rocky back on track today. Better to let it slide and get him focused again tomorrow, when Daphne would, God willing, be gone.
“I have another song we should try,” Peter said. “Check this.” Rocky was looking at him suspiciously, but when the boy hit the riff from “Rebel Rebel” it changed the mood in the room for the better. Ricky counted off the beat and Peter hit the chords. Rocky listened for a minute while he lit a new smoke, nodded, and fell in. Peter closed his eyes and began singing. By the second chorus he was sharing his mike with Daphne. She yelled “rebel rebel” every time it came up and hummed loudly in between. She shimmied and bopped and pressed her leg against Peter as she leaned into the microphone. She sounded pretty good. She looked pretty good, too, he thought. To which he immediately appended the certainty that such thoughts would lead to disaster.
TWENTY-ONE
Dr. Terry Canyon was reading the Whole Earth Catalog when Peter came into the room. “I’d like to learn how to use a loom,” the doctor said.
“A substantial investment,” Peter replied.
The doctor closed the book. “Not if you make all your own clothes. Think of the long-term savings.”
“You going back to the earth, Doctor?”
“We all go back to the earth eventually.”
“Not me, apparently. I was preparing to journey toward the necessary end when I boomeranged back here to puberty.”
The doctor gave Peter his attention. “I thought we agreed to accept the reality in which we find ourselves.”
Peter shrugged and seemed to suck something out of his teeth. The kid had down the manner of a sixty-five-year-old, the doctor noted. Peter wasn’t in panic mode today. The doctor hoped he was working toward acceptance.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about what’s immediately in front of me,” Peter said. “Next year I get my driver’s license. I can get a job. I can get around.”
This was a positive direction. Even if Peter continued to believe he was an old man who had traveled back in time, if he could become a happy old man who had traveled back in time, if he could be grateful, if he could see the upside to his circumstance, he would be a long way toward becoming well adjusted. He might still be crazy, but it would be a quiet crazy that didn’t interfere with his functioning in society.
“How is your band going?”
“I’m not sure that wagon is going to make it over the mountain. Daphne has invited herself into the group, and she seems to be making sparks with the middle DeVille.”
Dr. Terry asked, “What’s the DeVilles’ family situation?”
“Three boys, single mom.” Peter didn’t want to let the psychiatrist know about his attraction to their mother. He steered the conversation back to safer territo
ry.
“Lou Pitano, the music manager Barry knows, is paying for the band to record some demos.”
“That’s exciting, man.”
“I don’t know where Lou gets his money. He’s probably a low-level pot dealer or something. In the music business you always start at the bottom.”
“What are you hoping to work your way up to, Pete?”
“Peyote dealer, I suppose.”
“Explain to me again what your job was in the delusion. When you’re sixty-five.”
“I work for a streaming service. For a subscription fee you can hear all kinds of music without actually buying any of it.”
“A personal radio station?”
“Sort of. I’m what’s called a content curator. I oversee a group of people who make playlists. ‘Chill-Out Songs for After the Clubs Close,’ ‘Nineties Britrock,’ ‘Twenty Deep Tracks from Zeppelin,’ or ‘Sexy Soul of the Sixties.’ ”
“How does that work? Do people have phone lines plugged into their hi-fi systems?”
“No wires. Everyone’s got a telephone in his pocket. There are little computers in every phone. You can look up anything instantly—like having an encyclopedia. People use their phones like transistor radios. You can order up a Rolling Stones song and it appears in your phone instantly.”
“Do people remember the Rolling Stones?”
“The Rolling Stones are still touring.”
Dr. Terry chuckled. Peter was really flying today.
“It’s not just the Rolling Stones,” Peter said. “What our parents and teachers think are passing teenage fads will be with us for the next half century. They just keep growing. Spider-Man and the X-Men and the Avengers are the biggest movies. The Who and Stevie Wonder. Double O fucking Seven. None of it leaves! By the time you’re sixty you feel like Jacob Marley hauling these chains of teenage enthusiasm behind you as you trudge toward the grave. Maybe that’s why I got pulled back here. I’ve been anchored by so much weight from my childhood that it finally just dragged my ass back down to the bottom of the hill.”
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