Fifty in Reverse

by Bill Flanagan

  The doctor said, “Peter, I’m very happy you have goals in this reality, and Amy sounds like a terrific girl. I think you’re wise to take things slowly. She is only fourteen.”

  “Right—and I was married for thirty-five years and have grown children.”

  “You might want to hold off laying that on her. But,” the doctor said, “it’s good that you’re being positive about the upside of being a healthy fifteen-year-old with your whole life ahead of you. That’s progress.”

  Peter became reflective. “I miss my wife and children terribly, Doctor. It’s hard to accept that they weren’t real. In a way, it’s worse than if they’d died. To behave as if they’d never lived…”

  Shit, he was slipping again. The doctor mumbled something sympathetic.

  Peter closed his eyes and steadied himself. He was silent for a long time. Then he said, “Did you know I can go twelve hours without having to pee?”

  The doctor told him, “Fate giveth, and Fate taketh away.”

  The boy said, “Fate has made of me a yo-yo.”

  SIXTEEN

  Peter took a bus across town for band rehearsal. When he got to Buttongreen, there was no sign of any DeVille brother in the rehearsal shed. He waited awhile, strumming a guitar. He tried to work out the chords to a Steely Dan song. After half an hour he gave up and walked past the empty swimming pool to the back of the house and knocked on the kitchen door. Mrs. DeVille came and opened it. She was wearing a sleeveless turtleneck with a small rip at the collar, black Capri pants, and no shoes. Her toenails were bright red. Peter saw that she had beautiful toes.

  “Hi, Peter.”

  “The boys around, Mrs. DeVille? We were supposed to practice.”

  “Oh, honey, their daddy showed up unexpectedly. Only way he ever shows up. Rocky and Ricky went with him and their little brothers to the drag races.”

  “There are more brothers?”

  “Their daddy has two little boys with his new wife. She has a twelve-year-old, too.”

  “Jeez, they’re like the Osmonds.”

  “Yes, well, Ricky and Rocky did me a favor, getting them all out of here. Raymond and I can stand to see each other for about nine minutes before one of us forgets to pretend to be civil. It’s good they see their father, though.”

  “Okay. Well, tell them I came by.”

  “You want to come in for a Coke, honey?”

  He stepped into the kitchen, and Mrs. DeVille went to the refrigerator and came out with a Tab. She asked if that was okay and Peter said yes, and she poured it into a glass and handed it to him.

  She said, “I’m glad you’re friends with Ricky, Peter. He’s more sensitive than he lets on, and he’s very smart. In first grade his teacher told me his IQ test said Ricky was gifted. Don’t tell him I told you that.”

  “He’s a smart guy,” Peter agreed. He couldn’t get over how pretty Ricky’s mother was and how awkward that made him feel.

  “I’m glad to see him making friends with a nice boy like you, a boy from a good home. A nice family.” She was looking into the middle distance. “All I wanted for my boys was to have a good home life, a solid upbringing. Raymond and I got married so young. But, you know. If we hadn’t, I wouldn’t have Barry…”

  “I think,” Peter said, “that successful marriages are impossible to predict. A husband and wife need to be about fifty-five percent identical and forty-five percent compatible opposites.”

  Ricky DeVille’s mother looked at Peter with curiosity. “What does that mean, honey? Compatible opposites?”

  “Maybe the husband is good at making money but bad at hanging on to it. The wife is his compatible opposite—she keeps the books, pays the taxes, and keeps the operation solvent. Maybe he’s impatient and she’s always late. She teaches him to relax, and he gets her to church on time.”

  “You are a very wise young man. Did you learn this from your parents?”

  Peter couldn’t say he’d learned it from thirty-five years of marriage, so he gave his mother and father credit. He knew he should shut up, but he liked the way she looked at him—impressed.

  “It might sound stupid,” Peter said, “but I think in every successful romantic relationship, one person is the cop and the other the crook. The crook drinks too much at the dinner party and the cop drives home. The crook forgets to do the Christmas shopping but the cop has it all wrapped up. In a really good marriage, the two people swap playing the cop and crook. Two cops and you have no fun. Two crooks is chaos. Two people switching back and forth makes for a solid marriage.”

  Ricky DeVille’s mom stared at Peter. There were little lines under her large green eyes.

  “You’re how old, Peter?”

  “Fifteen.”

  “Ricky says you write wonderful songs. He speaks highly of you.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Will you play me a song you wrote?”

  Peter began to say he didn’t have a guitar. She walked into the next room and came back with a nylon-string acoustic. He took it and tuned it and leaned against the sink. What to play for the abandoned first wife with the red toenails and the wounded eyes?

  He sang “Buckets of Rain,” which Bob Dylan wouldn’t record until 1975. When he finished, Mrs. DeVille looked at him as if he’d appeared with the Virgin Mary in a circle of flame.

  “Honey,” she said, “you wrote that song all by yourself?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Oh my God. Play me another.”

  He said, “You don’t have a piano, do you?” and she said yes, there was a spinet in the living room. They went to it and he sat with his back to her and found the chords and sang Springsteen’s “Racing in the Street,” a song about failed dreams and faded glory. He knew what he was doing. When he got to the line “wrinkles around my baby’s eyes and she cries herself to sleep,” she let out a little gasp. He let the last chord ring and then took a moment before turning to look at her. Her eyes were wet.

  “I don’t know how a boy your age could know those things.”

  “I just do.”

  “Ricky told me about how you got in trouble…” She waited to see from his expression if it was okay to bring up the scandal. He nodded. “Why did you do that, Peter?” and then, in a whisper, “Take off your clothes like that?”

  “I’m not sure I can explain it,” Peter said. “I think I wanted to do something that would make everything change. I wanted to turn the chessboard over. If I did something I could never take back, at least it would get me out of the way things were. Have you ever felt like that, Mrs. DeVille?”

  “Two times,” she said. “Once when I wasn’t much older than you are now and I ran off and married the boys’ daddy.”

  “When was the second time?”

  “Every day since.”

  They watched each other.

  She said, “I’m glad you’re friends with my boys, Peter. You’re a good influence on them. Ricky is special, but he doesn’t believe he is. His father was never a good example. Barry tried to be strong, and you see where that led… Every time his daddy shows up Barry disappears. I might not see him for a week now.”

  “How come you never remarried?”

  Mrs. DeVille blushed. She said, “A thirty-eight-year-old woman with three rowdy boys…”

  “But you’re so beautiful…” Peter was surprised it came out. He watched it land.

  She looked at her feet, at those perfect toes and nails painted red, for who? For nobody. She said, “Well, aren’t you sweet to say so.” She stood. “I have to go to the A&P in case their daddy forgets to feed them.”

  She looked straight at him, and the boy got the message. He drained the rest of his soda and thanked her for the drink.

  She said, “Thank you for the concert, Peter,” and took his glass and went into the kitchen and washed it. He waited a minute after he heard her turn off the tap, and when she didn’t come back into the living room he called out, “Okay, then. Thanks, Mrs. DeVille. Bye.”

>   He left by the living room door. It was a big surprise, he thought, to find someone else in 1970 who was as stranded as he was.

  SEVENTEEN

  Dr. Terry spent Sunday morning in his hammock rereading all his notes on Peter Wyatt. He had a new idea.

  “I’ve been treating Peter the adolescent,” he wrote in his leather journal. “What would happen if I tried treating Peter the sixty-five-year-old man?”

  At their next session the analyst asked Peter what had been going on in his life in the weeks before he woke up in 1970. Did he have any big problems, any pressing worries in his life in 2020?

  “Christmas shopping. I always ended up doing all the Christmas shopping for our kids, Janice’s siblings, my sisters’ families. I was way behind. I remember thinking there should be a cutoff for having to buy gifts for nieces and nephews once they get out of college and are self-supporting, but Janice insisted we get something for everyone, and she could never decide what. She’d go to the mall for five hours and come out with a pair of couch pillows. It always fell to me, and I remember thinking I was out of time and had no ideas.”

  Dr. Terry said that if that was his greatest source of anxiety, Peter was living a very lucky life. The psychiatrist tried steering the boy toward deeper water. “You told me that the tough thing about being over sixty was that you didn’t know if you should plan on living five more years or thirty. Were you losing a lot of friends, Pete?”

  “Not losing,” Peter said cautiously. He stopped talking for a full minute before he said, “You get to know so many people in a lifetime—it seemed like every month we heard about someone else getting sick.”

  Dr. Terry waited.

  Peter swallowed. “Remember the kid in the high school play who tried to pass for an old man by putting talcum powder in his hair? That’s who I saw in the mirror every morning. For thirty years I kept saying, ‘Pipe down in there,’ ‘Leave your little brother alone,’ and ‘Turn out the lights and go to sleep,’ until one night the house was as empty as a ballpark in November and I had the quiet I’d asked for. And I didn’t want it.”

  “Tell me who was sick,” the doctor said.

  Peter struggled. “Everybody was getting cancer. Cancer of the throat, cancer of the esophagus, prostate cancer in the men, breast cancer in the women. They went for radiation and chemo and surgery and got worse and then got better. They went back to their jobs and lives but now with shadows in their eyes that suggested they’d looked over into the abyss and couldn’t forget what waited for them. Janice told me she felt like we were being surrounded by illness.”

  The doctor nodded. Peter continued.

  “A buddy of mine, a Rolling Stone writer named Charlie, learned he had a brain tumor. They operated. When he woke up they told him, ‘We got most of it.’ You don’t want to hear ‘most’ in those circumstances. Charlie never married. He had no family. He took the news with a good humor I could hardly comprehend. He made jokes about how having brain cancer wasn’t as bad as having to go on the road with the Sex Pistols. One day we were walking back from his chemotherapy. He was leaning on me. He said, ‘Pete, I have a scheme. You know my apartment is rent-controlled.’ I said okay. Charlie said, ‘This being Manhattan, I’ve already had a couple of discreet inquiries about whether I’d consider willing the apartment to someone in exchange for a nice cash payment immediately.’ I said, ‘You’re not serious,’ and Charlie said, ‘Cancer brings out the best in people. Two different acquaintances have gently suggested they would pay me big money today to add their names to my lease so that when I expire, they can assume residency.’ I said wow, and Charlie told me he was thinking of taking them up on it. I said, ‘You’re not,’ and he said, ‘Yes, I am, but here’s the hook: I’m going to sell my posthumous lease to ten or fifteen different schnooks for ten grand each. I can bank at least a hundred thousand dollars, and by the time any of them find out about it I’ll be dead! What could possibly go wrong?’ I said, ‘You could go into remission.’ Charlie said, ‘Shit, Pete, you’re right. Wouldn’t that be my luck?’ ”

  Peter looked at Dr. Terry. They both smiled. The psychiatrist gestured for the boy to keep talking.

  “After Charlie died I continued to get up and go to work and to the gym and watch TV, but I found myself slipping out of time. One summer evening I was walking down the street toward my house carrying a grocery bag and I thought, ‘I used to live around here.’ Where did that come from? I still lived there.

  “More and more often I experienced… not melancholy, but a sort of gentle displacement. Like the light was changing and time was falling away. It felt familiar somehow; I had known this before. I finally placed it. It was the feeling I used to get as a kid in late August when summer vacation was running out. Only now it wasn’t summer fading—it was my life. The long days never felt sweeter than they did as they escaped.

  “In my dreams the years started bleeding into each other. I would be driving along in the car with my kids in the back when they were little and my mother as she was when I was a child in the seat next to me. Fifty years ago and ten years ago and yesterday afternoon jumbled together. I had dreams in which I was in our apartment in Tribeca and when I opened the closet door I found myself in my childhood bedroom. It was like the old days of reel-to-reel tapes where you would record over a song but still hear an echo of it playing under the new track.

  “I started to look forward to falling asleep. I liked seeing my parents again. I enjoyed spending time with my children when they were small. I knew I was dreaming, but that didn’t make it any less fun. Until the day I drifted off in my swimming pool in 2020 and woke up here, with roosters crowing and my father alive and telling me to get out of bed before breakfast got cold.”

  Dr. Terry pushed his chair back. He swung around and hauled open a drawer in a table and pulled out a pocket-size notebook. He tossed it to Peter.

  “I told you before to write down big events. Now I want you to write down memories of your life in the future. Trips you took. Arguments with your wife. Stories about your kids. I don’t need to see what you write, but I’d be interested to hear you talk about what comes up.”

  Peter asked what he was thinking.

  “First thing they teach you in shrink school, buddy. Never tell the patient what you’re thinking.”

  “What are they gonna do, Terry? Take back your diploma? I told you everything that’s going to happen for the next fifty years. It’s only fair you tell me what’s going through that head of yours.”

  Dr. Terry said, “It’s not a formed opinion. It just occurs to me that maybe on some level you wanted to be fifteen again. It’s a safe refuge.”

  They stared at each other.

  “Bingo,” Peter said. “Terry, you cracked the case. Can I go home to 2020 now?”

  “I don’t know, Pete. You certain you really want to?”

  EIGHTEEN

  Peter’s mother sat at a long library table with a yellow pad in front of her. On either side of the pad were stacks of books. She had pages marked with slips of paper. She had a red pen and a green pen in front of her and a black pen in her hand.

  A thin woman with a Mia Farrow haircut approached her and said, “Joanne? Joanne, how are you?”

  Joanne Wyatt looked up and ran through a roll call of moms from Peter’s grammar school PTA. She clicked on the right name.

  “Dorothy, hi. What brings you to the stacks?”

  “Returning overdue books. I found two volumes of Tolkien in Eleanor’s closet and a copy of The Harrad Experiment checked out at Christmas under her bed.”

  “How is Eleanor? All As?”

  “She wants everybody to call her Pasa now. I think it’s something to do with sympathy for Cesar Chavez.” Dorothy’s face turned from amusement to concern. “How is Peter?”

  Joanne’s throat clenched. She was the mother of the crazy boy.

  “He’s doing very well. Thank you for asking.”

  Dorothy tried to sneak a casual look at the books J
oanne was reading. She said, “Biological science. Not my best subject.”

  “I’m doing research for an article. Academic journal. Boring stuff.”

  “You never stop, do you, Joanne? A doctorate, three kids. Everything you have to deal with…”

  Joanne thought there might be an accusation in that. Why was she working on an article when her child was having a public breakdown? She told herself she was being oversensitive. Dorothy didn’t have the depth to be duplicitous.

  “Say hi to Eleanor for me. Or Pasa, if she prefers.”

  “I will. And give my best to Howard. And Peter, of course.”

  Joanne smiled and nodded and went back to her work. She had a new schedule. Each evening after she filled the dishwasher with the dinner plates, she came to the library for an hour to do research on possible explanations for Peter’s condition.

  Last week she had dug deep into Jung and Nietzsche’s writings on amor fati and the Eternal Return—the theory that energy recurs in similar forms across time and space. Eternal Returners believe that all of nature operates on a loop with slight variations. It could explain Peter’s dilemma. There could have been a crossed wire between two cycling lives, and her son had picked up the memories of a parallel Peter.

  Eternal recurrence had been part of the science of civilizations through recorded history, from Egypt to India to the Pythagoreans. “You can’t dismiss Pythagoras,” she thought. “His math still checks out.”