Fifty in Reverse

by Bill Flanagan

  Dr. Terry attempted a hoist. He said, “In the future, hotels on Mars?”

  “The whole space-travel thing kind of petered out.”

  “Did they cure heart disease? Develop ESP? What’s the big invention?”

  “We have hundreds of TV channels. You can watch them on your phone.”

  “Well, tell me this, water brother—is the society you come from more equitable? Does the Woodstock generation redistribute the wealth?”

  Now Peter had something to hold forth on. “When communism fell off the seesaw, capitalism shot up into the sky. No competition in the market of ideas? Well, in that case, let’s raise the prices.”

  Dr. Terry had never seen Peter so animated. Maybe it was because he wasn’t talking about himself.

  “In 1970, if you put your money in a bank, the bank rewards you, right?” Peter asked. “They pay interest. In 2020, the banks charge for every service. You take money out of a bank machine? You pay a fee. You write a check? You pay a fee. And the interest is, like, one percent.”

  “That makes no sense, Pete. What you describe would discourage people from saving.”

  “The banks discourage you from saving because the banks are now also Wall Street investment services that want you to take your money out of savings and put it in stocks so they can charge you for every transaction—which they encourage you to make as often as they can scare you into it.”

  “Banks and stock brokerages can’t be connected. It’s illegal.”

  “Not where I come from.”

  “At least we didn’t blow ourselves up in a nuclear war.”

  “Not yet. I’ll tell you what I really appreciate about being in 1970: spare tires. The other day I was driving with my mother and we got a flat, and boom, there it is. Right in the trunk. A whole other tire. I put on the jack, got out the lug wrench, we were on our way in fifteen minutes. In my time, there are no spare tires. We have donuts.”

  The doctor asked why the two were mutually exclusive.

  “Not pastries. Instead of spare tires cars come with these hard little inner tubes that you stick on until you can go to an auto shop and get your old tire fixed. But the little inner tubes can only go for sixty or seventy miles, and not over fifty miles an hour. Donuts. Worst thing about the twenty-first century. Beats COVID-19.”

  Dr. Terry realized he was watching a performance. Peter was riffing to avoid something.

  “Speaking of donuts,” Peter said, “in the twenty-first century the fast-food chains start rebranding themselves to fool the public into thinking they aren’t bad for them. Dunkin’ Donuts takes ‘Donuts’ out of their name. They’re just ‘Dunkin.’ Kentucky Fried Chicken drops ‘Fried Chicken.’ They’re KFC. The International House of Pancakes loses ‘Pancakes’—they become IHOP. They don’t make the food any better, they just change the branding.”

  Dr. Terry’s attention was drifting. He said, “So nothing’s better in the future?”

  Peter closed his eyes and thought about it. He said, “The cities. We make the cities nice. Harlem is high priced. Lower Manhattan is like Beverly Hills. You can pay four million bucks for a town house in Brooklyn. If I were you, Doctor, I would pick up a couple of brownstones in Williamsburg and sit on them.”

  Dr. Terry said, “Peter, I think you’re dreaming.”

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”

  The doctor checked the clock. Their time was up. They said goodbye and complimented each other on a positive session. Dr. Terry knew he had let the boy drift too far into the delusion. He had been putting on a show, and the psychiatrist wondered if it was a mistake to reward him with an audience. Progress depended not on arguing with his fantasy but in helping him to feel comfortable in the real world. If he could be steered to a place where he didn’t need the delusion as a refuge, he might be weaned from it.

  Nevertheless, he made a note to check on real estate prices in Brooklyn.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Peter was crossing the A&P parking lot when he saw Mrs. DeVille walking toward him lugging two large grocery bags. He ran over and took them from her and carried them to her house. She let him into the kitchen. He put the bags on the counter. She offered him a root beer. He took it. No one else was home.

  “Can I ask you something, Peter?” she said.

  “Sure.”

  “How well do you know this girl Daphne?”

  He took a long drink of soda while he considered his options.

  “She’s in my class. She’s smart.”

  “She’s fourteen, right?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Her mother warned me to keep Rocky away from her. What she said was, ‘Tell your adult son to leave my little girl alone.’ ”

  Peter had no idea what to say. He agreed with Daphne’s mother. It struck him that being Daphne’s mother must be a tough job.

  “I don’t trust the little bitch,” Mrs. DeVille said. “She smiles and uses perfect manners, but she’s laughing at us behind our backs. She snaps her fingers and Rocky jumps. It’s not like him at all.”

  There wasn’t enough root beer in the world to stall as long as Peter wanted. He finally said, “She’s really pretty.”

  “I knew girls like that,” Mrs. DeVille said, in a way that let the boy know the years had not healed the old wounds. “They think they shit ice cream.”

  Peter laughed, and Mrs. DeVille laughed too. She said, “You got another song you can play me? Take my mind off my middle boy being seduced by that little phony?”

  Peter did not protest. They went into the living room and he picked up the nylon-string guitar and played her Tom Petty’s “Wildflowers.” He didn’t sing it very well, but he got it across.

  “Where do these songs come from, Peter?” she asked. “How can you do this so well?”

  Peter looked into the woman’s beautiful, weathered face, and something cracked open in him. He didn’t have it in him to make up any more stories.

  “You know I’ve been under psychiatric care, right? You know I had a kind of breakdown.”

  She nodded.

  Peter said, “My doctor asked me to write down everything I remember about the place I come from.”

  “East Shore Road?”

  “No. The place I imagine I come from. See, Mrs. DeVille…” He stopped. She was regarding him with concern. He said, “Your name is Wendy, right? Would you mind if I call you Wendy?”

  “That’s fine.”

  “Terry, my psychiatrist, asked me to write down stuff I remembered about my delusion.”

  Peter was wearing a dungaree jacket. He fished in the pocket and pulled out the small lined notebook. He started reading:

  “You think after you’ve had one child you know what to expect, but it’s always a surprise. The twins were premature. We hadn’t even started Lamaze classes yet when Janice’s water broke. She was in denial; she said she had some shopping to do and would meet me at the obstetrician’s office later. I demanded she get into a taxi right away. The doctor took one look at her and sent us to the hospital, where Jenny and James were born less than half an hour later. They were rushed straight into oxygen tanks in the preemie ward. Jenny was healthy enough to move into step-down in two days, but James lingered in an incubator for three weeks, intravenous tubes running into his tiny feet. He was a month old before we were able to bring him home.”

  Peter looked up at Mrs. DeVille. She said, “Is this a story you made up, Peter?”

  “That’s the million-dollar question, Wendy. All evidence says it is. But I remember it all happening. Can I read you some more?”

  She said to go ahead.

  “When Janice was pregnant with Peter three years later, we did everything possible in fact and theory to make sure he made it to full term. It worked. The delivery date came and went, and still he showed no sign of making an appearance. A week later Janice was waddling around the apartment sweating and swearing that if the lazy little layabout didn’t hurry up and get moving, she was
going to send me in after him. She did everything to speed his entrance, culminating in her insisting we take the advice of her Norwegian aunt and go out to a nightclub to drink wine and dance until labor commenced.

  “If you ever want to clear a crowded punk club dance floor, step onto it with a woman so pregnant she looks like she’s about to deliver a medicine ball and with a face full of determination to do it right on the spot. It worked. She went into labor and we got to the hospital, where the doctor announced that the baby was upside down with the umbilical cord wrapped around his throat. Such circumstances demanded a Cesarean delivery, but our obstetrician was old-school—he was going to reach his hand in and turn the baby around. When word of this magic trick spread through the institution, a dozen interns and medical students rushed into the delivery room to watch and learn. Janice was toughing it out with pure primal motherness when one of the students leaned into her face and said, ‘You’re the bass player for the Bouviers! I saw you at Maxwell’s!’ ”

  He stopped reading. He was shivering. Wendy DeVille asked him what the story meant.

  “It’s the most important things that happened in my life after I grew up and left Bethlehem. Wendy, I know this will convince you I’m insane, but I believe I’m a sixty-five-year-old man from the twenty-first century. I believe I woke up back in my childhood last month. I’ve been trying to adjust, I’ve been trying to get over it, I’ve been trying for everyone’s sake to fit in and accept that it was all some kind of dream. But it doesn’t feel like a dream. I don’t know how to explain it, but I think it’s true. And either I’m dreaming now or else something happened to me that science doesn’t understand.”

  Wendy DeVille wore an expression that said that life’s habit of handing her tough situations never stopped finding fresh innovations.

  Peter forced a smile and said, “That’s how nuts I am.”

  He handed her the notebook. She leafed through it cautiously.

  “I don’t know what to say to that, Peter. This is why you took your clothes off in school?”

  “I was trying to shock myself awake. Didn’t work.”

  “And you think you’re sixty years old?”

  “Sixty-five. I’m too old for you.”

  She put her hand across her mouth. “What does your doctor say?”

  “Interesting case.”

  “What do your parents say?”

  “They’re walking on eggshells and hoping the doctor knows what he’s doing.”

  “What do you want to happen?”

  “I just want to be able to be honest with you, Wendy.”

  She got up and went into the kitchen. He stayed where he was. She came back with a plate covered with aluminum foil. She peeled it back to reveal five brownies. She put it down on the coffee table in front of him and said, “I baked these yesterday.”

  He said, “The songs are famous in the life I come from.”

  “You didn’t write the songs?” It was the first time she was visibly upset by anything he had told her.

  “There are two ways of looking at it,” he said. “If you believe that I’m from 2020, then no, I didn’t write the songs. They’re all hits from the last thirty years of the twentieth century. But if you think I’m a fifteen-year-old kid who’s suffering from a fantasy, then yes, I wrote them all. Which do you want me to be?”

  A voice came from the kitchen. “Hello? Anybody home?”

  Wendy DeVille made a cross face and called over her shoulder, “In here.”

  Daphne appeared. Her eyes widened when she saw the boy sitting with Mrs. DeVille.

  “I was looking for Rocky. Am I interrupting?” The edges of her mouth stopped just short of a smile. The girl was a homing pigeon for mischief.

  Wendy DeVille didn’t give an inch. She said, “Daphne, your mother made it very clear you shouldn’t be seeing Rocky, and she’s right. He’s eighteen years old.”

  “I don’t believe age has anything to do with love,” Daphne said happily. “Do you, Peter?”

  “It really doesn’t matter what you believe,” Wendy told her. “Stay away from Rocky.”

  “Okay, Mrs. DeVille,” Daphne said, switching gears, “from here on out my relationship with Rocky will be strictly professional.”

  Wendy shot her a what-does-that-mean glance, and Daphne smiled. “Musical. The band. We have to make our demo. Right, Peter?”

  “Is Daphne in your band now, Peter?” She gave him a look that said he better not cover for this little sneak.

  “I don’t know if it’s even a band,” Peter said. “We’re making a demo for Lou Pitano. Maybe that will be the end of it.”

  A male voice barked, “It better not be! I put my nuts on the line to get you this shot.”

  Barry DeVille entered from the kitchen wearing a dirty sweatshirt and acting like he hadn’t disappeared the week before.

  “Barry,” his mother said, suddenly happy. “You must be hungry.”

  “Beer, Ma,” Barry said. He looked at Daphne. “Why are you here?”

  “I was looking for Rocky,” Daphne said. She gazed at the wide-shouldered, V-shaped Barry like she might consider trading up the DeVille chain. Wendy shot her a look that could bring down a fighter jet. Daphne explained to Barry, “I’m doing some singing with the band.”

  “Oh you are, are ya?” Barry snickered. His mother put a brownie in his hand. He shoved it into his mouth without saying thank you. “You just decided that without me?”

  “Nobody knew where you were,” Peter said. As quick as it was out of his mouth, he wondered why he was defending Daphne.

  “Correction,” Barry said. “You didn’t know where I was because I didn’t care for you to know. Now let’s get this straight. This is my band. I started it with my brothers, I brought in Lou P., and I’m in charge.”

  “Do you play an instrument, Barry?” Daphne asked sweetly. It was a jab.

  Barry looked at her. “As a matter of fact, I play the drums. Maybe you heard of Joey and the Wild Ones? No? I forgot, you’re a baby. I brought my brothers into my band and then I decided, after talking it over with a certain serious record producer, to step out of the lineup to manage the group. A manager needs to be objective.”

  Peter said, “Glad you’re back, Barry. We go in with Lou to cut the demo next week.”

  Barry tried not to betray any surprise. He said, “That’s right.”

  “Am I singing?” Daphne asked.

  Peter started to say no and Barry cut him off. “That’s undecided. I need to hear you.” He looked around. “Where are Rocky and Rick?”

  “They’re not home,” Daphne said.

  Barry said, “So explain to me again—why are you two here?”

  His mother offered to make Barry a sandwich, but Daphne said, “Oh, Peter and I aren’t together. I just came by and interrupted him and your mom.”

  Mrs. DeVille fought the impulse to kick Daphne through the picture window. Barry fixed the boy with a stare a convict would give his hangman. Mrs. DeVille said, “Peter’s trying to find Ricky and Rocky, too. I think they’re at the go-kart track, Peter. Go look for them there. Barry, change your shirt and I’ll make you some eggs. Daphne, you go home.”

  Peter was glad to go. Daphne had no choice. The two of them walked out the door together. In front of the house was a rusty red 1966 Dodge Charger with overhead cams and a single silver racing stripe. Barry had come home with new wheels.

  They were crossing the A&P parking lot when Daphne said with delight, “Peter Wyatt, are you having an affair with my boyfriend’s mother?”

  She was ecstatic with the idea. It wasn’t so much that she believed it as that the anticipation of telling people filled her with joy. Peter was twenty feet away from her when he heard her call out, “When you told me you had a wife, you should have told me it was someone I know!”

  When he was thirty feet away she yelled, “If Rocky and I get married, you’ll be my father-in-law!”

  TWENTY-THREE

  Peter tr
ied to talk to his father about his conviction that he was on a return trip from the year 2020. Howard Wyatt took a can-do, Power of Positive Thinking approach to the discussions. His attitude was, “It’s great that we can talk this through, Pete. You have a brilliant mind, and whether at the end of this process we mutually come to the conclusion that (a) you’ve created an entire world in your imagination or (b) that you have indeed somehow been transported here from the future, we’ll arrive at that agreement through a logical analysis of the facts. Wherever they lead.”

  Peter knew his father. The judge did not consider for one moment that his son had upended the laws of physics and rewound his consciousness across fifty years, but he was going to play the role of impartial judge while working to reverse-engineer the verdict he wanted to achieve.

  Peter’s mother gave every indication of being open to persuasion. “Let me ask you something, Peter,” she said to him in the kitchen one evening when his father was in the library reviewing petitions. “Why do you define what’s happened to you as your being an old man who’s traveled backward in time?”

  “Well, Mom,” Peter said while putting away the dinner plates, “because as far as I can tell, I’m an old man who’s traveled back in time.”

  His mother shook her head. “You misunderstand me. Let’s accept that what you believe you’ve experienced is true. Why not define it this way: You’re a fifteen-year-old boy who’s somehow had a vision of his entire future life. You haven’t come back, you’ve experienced a premonition.”

  Peter tossed a can of Bosco in the trash. He said, “What’s the difference?”

  “The difference is how you think of yourself. It seems to me that if you insist on an identity as a displaced sixty-five-year-old, as a time traveler marooned in a past century, you will never be able to adjust and move forward with your life.”

  “I’m not going to give up on going home to my wife and children.”

  “I’m not suggesting that. I’m only saying that if you accept yourself as Peter Wyatt, born in 1955, fifteen years old in 1970, and destined to live well into the next century, you can accept all this foreknowledge as a sort of gift. A gift of prophecy, if you like.”