Dr. Terry took his Triumph down the long driveway and onto the street that ran to the interstate toward Massachusetts. He rode north four miles and took the exit. He had another appointment in Rhode Island. The boy’s mother had asked him to meet with the school guidance counselor.
Moe Mosspaw suggested they rendezvous at a Howard Johnson’s off the highway. The restaurant was easy to find. Dr. Terry pulled up next to a brown Subaru. The driver was sitting behind the wheel. He looked at Terry and said, “Taking a trip?”
“Come again?”
The driver was a man in his late thirties with a pointed nose, high forehead, and horn-rimmed glasses. “Taking a trip? You know—Then Came Bronson. ‘Taking a trip? Wherever I end up, I guess.’ You’re Dr. Canyon?”
“Guilty.”
“I’m Moe Mosspaw.”
“Nice to meet you, Moe.”
“Thank you for making time, Doctor.”
“Call me Terry. Let’s get some clams.”
They found a booth in the back of the restaurant and got coffee. Dr. Terry ordered a clam roll. Moe Mosspaw asked for a BLT. They talked about Peter Wyatt without using his name, in case anyone was listening.
“Have you followed the research in frontal lobe development in adolescents, Doctor?” Mosspaw asked when the food arrived.
“I might have missed class that day.”
“It’s fascinating stuff,” the guidance counselor said. “Well, it’s fascinating if you spend fifty hours a week dealing with the problems of teenagers. There are arguments about exactly how this works, but in a nutshell, you know, the frontal lobe is the brain’s policeman. Reason, self-control, patience. That’s all frontal lobe stuff.”
“You mind if I smoke, Moe?”
“Not a bit. The bottom of the brain, that’s primal stuff. Impulses. Me hungry, me horny, me angry, me sleepy. During adolescence both parts of the brain are growing at a rapid rate. The whole time the brain is expanding, it’s also laying pipe between the different regions to carry messages.”
“Links.”
“Exactly. The axons are the lines that carry signals from one part of the brain to the other. Myelin greases some of the axons. But here’s the snafu—the entire brain doesn’t grow at the same rate. From about thirteen till eighteen the back section, the lizard brain, is firing like the Fourth of July, demanding sensation, lighting up the libido, begging to break the speed limit. The frontal lobe, home of restraint and reason, is the last place to get fully wired. We get mad with these kids for acting out, for making dumb, impulsive decisions. But that’s how their brains are designed. It’s only when they grow up that the lights go on in the front room and order is restored.”
Dr. Terry tipped back his head and dropped a fried clam in his mouth, saying as he chewed, “In my game we call this the id, the ego, and the superego. Curly, Larry, and Moe. Curly the id wants to go wild. Larry the ego is embarrassed. Moe the superego slaps Curly and pokes him in the eye. You’re saying that for the average teenager, Moe has no mojo.”
“Right—Curly is running the show.”
Dr. Terry tried to work out what this had to do with Peter Wyatt. He said, “You deal with a great many kids, the majority of whom are statistically normal. I deal with a small sample who are brought to see me because they have issues.”
“In my experience,” Mosspaw said, “all adolescents have issues.”
Dr. Terry agreed that was probably true. To get to see him, a kid had to have not only flipped out severely—he also had to have parents who could and would engage a psychiatrist. Mr. Mosspaw dealt with fifty times the adolescents Dr. Terry did.
“Whatever is causing our boy’s situation,” Terry said, “it’s not a lack of higher brain function. He talks so rationally, lucidly, he almost makes me wonder…” Dr. Terry paused. He wasn’t free to discuss Peter’s delusion with the guidance counselor.
Mosspaw asked him, “What were you going to say?”
“I know that a kid taking off his clothes in math class suggests a suspension of normal inhibitions. But in this subject’s case I think the appropriate axons are fully greased and logic is in the pilot’s seat. What I’m working on is if that logic is proceeding from a flawed premise.”
Moe Mosspaw had nothing but good intentions. His request to meet with the boy’s psychiatrist came from a sincere effort to understand what was going on with Peter and find the best solution for him while protecting all the students of West Bethlehem Veterans Memorial High School. It was the sort of above-and-beyond obligation Mosspaw assumed all the time. He did his best to put aside any worry that he was out of his depth talking adolescent psychology with a Harvard psychiatrist. Terry Canyon had treated him as an equal from the moment they sat down, but Mosspaw had lost the thread.
“What is the flawed premise you think Peter—sorry, the subject—is operating under?”
Dr. Terry flashed a smile and said, “That’s what I’m working on figuring out. Hey, you gonna eat those fries?”
The gate between them came down.