Kim was aroused from his daydream by Mandy’s grating voice commanding him to stand up. The girls had finished mopping the floor and Mandy had unlatched the tray table from Kim’s high chair. Heather leaned over him and was about to unfasten the chair’s web belts when she realized that they, too, were very wet. “Ugh!” she yelped. “I don’t want to get pee all over my hands.”

Uncharacteristically, Mandy took charge. “Here, I’ll do it, Heather. Move.” She seemed to give Kim’s sopping diaper an extra squeeze as she worked at the belt buckle, unaffected by the dampness, perhaps because she knew its true source. While Heather bathed the others in the bright video light and resumed taping, Mandy went behind Kim and raised his arms, still joined at the wrists, above the back of the high chair. With a tight grip on his encumbered arms, she steered Kim toward the chest freezer. The wet diaper sagged heavily between Kim’s legs and tugged at his hips.

As the spotlight followed their progress, Mandy narrated the bizarre scene that Heather was recording. “As you can see, ladies and gentlemen, Heather and I were shocked to discover that Kimmie here, Heather’s brother and my neighbor, has been spending his summer vacation down in the basement wearing diapers and baby clothes. He likes to sit in a high chair like a baby, lay in a crib like a baby and drink from a bottle like a baby. We thought he was just playing at being a baby, but,” Mandy reached her hand around Kim’s waist and patted the front of his diaper to demonstrate its wetness, “we were even more shocked to find out that he wets his diapers like a little baby, too. Kimmie is obviously too much of a baby to take care of himself, so we are going to take care of Baby from now on.” They stood before the chest freezer, where the girls had spread an unopened white plastic trash bag in the center of the blanket. “We need to waterproof Baby’s wet diapers before we finish dressing the little darling, so we’re going to put this on,” Mandy concluded as she pointed to the plastic bag. “Hop up here, Baby,” she ordered.

Inspired by the painful pressure of Mandy lifting his bound wrists toward his shoulder blades, Kim climbed onto the freezer and positioned his wet butt in the middle of the bag. Mandy pulled the plastic between Kim’s damp thighs to his waist, overlapped the front corners with the back, and peeled another long strip of silver duct tape with which she fastened the bag like a thin plastic diaper over his wet cloth diaper. After she had tucked the edges of the plastic around the diaper’s leg openings, she said to the camera, “Well, it’s not perfect, but if Baby doesn’t wet again, it’ll at least keep Baby’s clothes and the furniture dry.”

“Okay, Baby, the coast is clear,” Heather called from the kitchen. “Come on up.”

Kim stared numbly at the rectangle of harsh light at the top of the stairs until Mandy prodded him again from behind. “Let’s go, Baby. Off to Heather’s room,” she directed. Kim mounted each step as if it were a huge obstacle, with the weariness and reluctance of a prisoner climbing a gallows. His wet diaper had chilled noticeably from exposure to the basement air and chaffed his thighs as its soaked weight sagged and swayed with every movement. His makeshift plastic pants crinkled soft accompaniment to his awkward, bow-legged gait and the excited pounding of his pulse.

As Kim emerged from the dim subterranean nursery into the fluorescent brilliance of the kitchen, he peeked out from under the brim of his baby bonnet just long enough to spot Heather silhouetted against the bay windows of the breakfast nook peering at him through the camcorder. He blinked back the light and quickly looked down, like a notorious fugitive futilely attempting to avoid the prying lenses of news cameras after his arrest. Kim tried to put all thoughts on hold, to block all incoming data from his overwrought brain, and focused on the somnambulistic shuffling of his bare feet across the cool and shiny linoleum of the kitchen floor.

Bits and pieces of Mandy’s tireless banter for the camera filtered through Kim’s trance: “…finally convinced Baby to come out of, well, not exactly the closet, but out of the basement…public debut of the big baby girl…the little diapered debutante…just need to get her dressed up…a fashion show of infant apparel from Europe’s finest designers…what every fashion-conscious big baby will be wearing this fall…an outfit cute enough to do justice to this cute baby butt,” she concluded, patting Kim again on the behind. “Oh, wait a minute,” Mandy continued. “Heather, I think we can untape baby Kimmie’s hands now. She’s being a much better baby. Are there any scissors?”