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 Joanne 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.”
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.”