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?”