Project Backwards; Chapter Ten

A Chapter by Michael Stevens

Chapter Ten:

Was he sitting on a couch? Steve groggily looked around him. Framed certificates hung on the wall. He couldn’t quite make out the writing. He sat there in the quiet room; indeed reclined on a couch; until his curiosity got the better of him. He stood up unsteadily and walked over to one of the certificates. It read; “Dr. Sigmund Freud has received this doctorate ...” He stopped reading at that point; Sigmund Freud! Just then, the familiar face of Sigmund Freud walked in the door. The familiar rather stern look, the short-cropped grayish, thinning hair, the graying, well-trimmed beard. Steve almost couldn’t believe it, but did believe it based on the others he had already met on his jumps through time.

“Ah, Steven, thank you for being patient; this damn explosive diarrhea; when you gotta go, you gotta go, huh?”

Too much information! thought Steve.

“Well now, where were we? Ah yes, I was just about to try some free association with you. I’ll say a word, and you tell me the first thought that pops into your head, okay?”

“Okay, I guess...”

“Here we go; mother.”

“Home”

“Sex”

“Love”

“Whipping cream”

“What? Ah, sweet, I guess.”

“Bag Pipes”

“This is ridiculous; I don’t know what you could possibly learn about me from those words. They are getting more and more strange.”

“I believe you have a repressed carnal desire towards your mother, involving whip cream and bag pipe music.”

“Bulls**t!”

“Oh, so you’re the doctor now, and all the plaques on the wall don’t mean dick!”

“You know; I’ve read that you’re so-called ‘theories’ were out there, and you believed some bazaar things, now I can see why!”

“I couldn’t help hearing you referring to my theories as ‘were’, not ‘are’; why do you think that is?”

Steve thought to himself, I’ll just tell him the truth; what’s he going to do, send me to a shrink? “Because I’m from the year 2012, and you died in 1939, so your beliefs have been studied for over 70 years.”

“Eh, ha, ha ha!” he laughed, “Do I look dead to you? I believe that this time travel nonsense is a manifestation of your shameful feelings of wanting to see your mother in a nightie.”

“What? You’re even more bazaar than I’ve heard you were!”

“I’m sick of you calling me bazaar, not to mention dead!” and he went nuts, coming at Steve with fists raised. For an older man, he was deceptively quick, catching Steve with several rabbit-punches to the face. Steve went down, and Freud kept coming; it wouldn’t be much longer, and the punishment Freud was dishing out on his face, would render Steve unconscious .

Just when he was feeling consciousness slipping away, Freud suddenly said, with his arm pulled back to deliver what probably would have been the knock-out blow,

“Oh-oh; time to hit the bathroom, quickly!” and he stood up and waddled away.

Steve shook his head, which sent waves of nausea pounding through his head, and thought he’d better get while the getting was good. “Get me out of here!” he tried to shout, but which only hurt his head again, then his world went dark.

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