The next morning Anita woke him up and babied him as she had the night before. Howard allowed her to feed him and clothe him as if he was truly the eight month old he appeared to be. After breakfast, Anita changed his dirty diaper and dressed him in a fleecy baby-blue onesie before putting him in his playpen. She left him to play with his toys while she got dressed for work. When she was dressed, she went to the kitchen to prepare his diaper bag. When she was done, she returned to the family room to find him laying on his back sucking his thumb and waving his legs in the air indolently. Anita took him out of the playpen and hoisted him up to ride on her hip, then carried him into the kitchen. She stopped at the kitchen table for a moment to pick up her purse and put the strap over her free shoulder. The strap on her purse was immediately followed with the strap of his diaper bag. Thus accoutered, she carried him to the Suburban and opened the rear door of the van. Howard wasn’t terribly surprised to see that she had mounted a baby seat in the backseat of the Suburban. Underneath the babyseat she had placed a colorful plastic mat that extended for two feet in every direction from the boundaries of the babyseat to protect the leather upholstery of the Suburban. Despite his anger at Anita’s theft of his Suburban, Howard approved of her attempts to care for it properly. If his diaper or baby bottle leaked a little, the spill would be contained to the area covered by the plastic mat where the mess could be easily wiped off with a sponge. Within minutes, she had him strapped into the seat she had installed the night before. Despite his the high vantage point offered him by the baby seat in the Suburban, Howard could see little of what passed. The wing-like padded projections of the baby seat acted like blinders on a horse. He could only see objects that were directly in front of him like the backs of the front seats or the rear of Anita’s head. His shape of his eyeballs had changed with his body and given him the nearsightedness of infancy. Anything beyond the range of the hood of the Suburban was a hopeless visual blur. The gentle rocking of the Suburban as it navigated the city streets and the reassuring humming of the engine lulled him to sleep almost immediately. When the trip was over, Anita took her dozing infant out of the babyseat and strapped him into a folding stroller, then placed his diaper bag into the tray affixed to the bottom of the stroller before wheeling him into the Daycare Center.
After Howard arrived at the daycare, he didn’t object when the women put him in a playpen and treated him like the other infants in the nursery. He thought it was strange that no one seemed surprised at how small he had gotten in twenty four hours. Howard wondered about their reactions for a moment before his attention was captured by the bright blue ball in his playpen. He couldn’t concentrate on any thought more than a few minutes and was easily distracted by the slightest motion or sound. His sensorium had seemed to have multiplied a thousand-fold in the preceding twenty-four hours. Ordinary noises seemed to boom in his ears and colors leaped out of mundane objects that he would have ignored two months before. The soft clicks of the wooden building blocks as they tumbled against each other on the nursery floor sounded like the clash of concrete construction bricks. When he cried, his anguished screams blotted out the world. His wails drowned out the universe and left nothing but his psychic pain. His taste buds had revitalized and he re-discovered favors that he had not been able to savor since babyhood. The whole world seemed shiny and new. Even the simple act of picking up a baby toy was a new experience. His fingers had grown so short and pudgy that he had to wrap his entire hand around the smallest object to get a grip on it. He spent most of his day napping, waking only to have his diaper changed or be given his bottle. The Daycare workers fed him the bottles of thin, sweet formula that Anita had packed in the diaper bag before leaving home and were careful to put a clean cloth diaper over their shoulders before they picked him up to burp him. He frequently spit up formula when he was being winded. When it was time for lunch they’d put him in a high chair to spoon feed him from a little jar of pureed baby food that Anita had packed with his formula bottles.
Howard was oblivious to his treatment. Nothing seemed to matter to him. Even trying to talk like a toddler was too much effort, it was easier to grunt like a baby or cry to have his needs fulfilled. He gurgled in delight when Anita came to take him home, where he was fed, bathed, rediapered and allowed to play until it was time to be put in his crib. Sometimes at night she would pick him up and hold him on her lap while she watched TV. Howard would rest comfortably in the crook of her arm and would lay his head against her soft breast for a pillow. She would wrap her arm around his little body protectively and hold his diapered bottom on her lap with her hand. If he got fussy, she would stick a pacifier in his mouth to calm him down and drape his baby blanket over his legs and tummy. Howard found the combination of the pacifier and the secure nearness of her body soporific. He felt so warm and cozy in her lap. He would often fall asleep in her arms trying to watch TV with her. It was difficult to concentrate on the documentaries or dramas she favored and he could hardly keep his eyes open after listening for more than fifteen minutes. Every day that week was a repetition of the other, until he couldn’t remember how long he had been going to the daycare or even what day it was.
Howard barely noticed that each day they seemed to be feeding him less solid food and giving him more bottles of formula. At first Anita had fed him an entire jar of baby food at one sitting and had instructed his attendant at the Daycare to do the same. Gradually the amount she gave him was reduced until by the end of the week, he was down to half a jar. The lack of solid food didn’t make Howard any hungrier, the baby formula was very filling and Anita made sure he had more formula to drink every day. Anita changed the composition of his diet too. The pureed chicken and rice dinners he was initially given were slowly replaced with jarred vegetables, fruits and cereals. By the end of the week, Anita had withdrawn all meats from his diet and was only rarely feeding him prepared egg yolks. The change in diet made eliminating his poop very easy for Howard. The poo became so soft it fairly slid from his behind before he knew what was happening. The substitution of formula for solid food had another effect that would have surprised Howard had he thought about it; his stools were becoming less odoriferous. The strained carrots and peas produced few of the sulfurous compounds and aldehydes that composed the smellier components of fecal stench. Egg yolks were of course another story, but Anita was giving him eggs so infrequently that for all practical purposes, she could have honestly been said to have put him on a lacto-vegan diet. If she had somehow managed to put him on a diet that consisted solely of mother’s milk, the odor would have vanished entirely. As it was, the clues that would have told Howard that he had messed in his diaper were rapidly diminishing, leaving him utterly ignorant of the condition of his dydee. Unless he had eaten something untoward or someone pulled open the back of his diaper to check, he rarely knew if he had pooped.
Anita had asked the Daycare workers to chart his vitals during the day while she was at work. During the first week at the center they had him stand on a doctor’s scale to weigh him, but after he regressed to the size of a eight month old infant, they began putting him on a baby scale like the other infants in the nursery. He didn’t even fuss when they pulled down his diapers and stuck a thermometer in his bottom to take his temperature. He was long passed being humiliated by being treated like a baby. Besides, he kind of liked the feeling the thermometer made when the attendant popped it out of his behind; it gave him the same pleasant sensation he had when he pooped.
At least he wasn’t being ignored like the other babies in the nursery. Attendants would come in and sit down on the nursery floor beside him every day to play silly games with him at length every morning before they put him down for his nap. At first Howard found the games to be ludicrously easy, but as time passed the games became more difficult to play. It wasn’t that the games changed, after all, making stacks of building blocks didn’t admit of complex rules. Even so, the tall tower of ten blocks that was his best effort quickly gave way to a lesser stack of seven blocks a few days later and then five by the end of the first week. It was becoming more difficult to concentrate and weigh the exact position of each added block with respect to the stability of the tower as a whole. As a result, towers that were higher than his ability allowed tottered and swayed as he positioned the last block on top and then crashed to the carpet. Nonetheless, the attendant would always praise him for his efforts and suggest he try again. When he became annoyed at the foolish exercise, the attendant would switch to another game to amuse him. The other games too were easy at first, then became more difficult to do as time went on. The attendant would have him stack rings on pegs in ascending or descending order on the toy he had found so facile during his first week. After a few days, he had to study the rings for long periods to decide which one was the largest or smallest of the group so he could assign it to its proper place in the sequence. Sometimes she would get a pair of small plastic sand buckets and put a few balls in the bucket she held in her hand. The object of the game seemed to be to match the number of balls that she had placed in her bucket with an equal number of balls in his bucket. Like the other games, Howard found the game to be absurdly easy initially, but after a few days, counting the balls became almost impossible when they numbered greater than five.
When that failed, she would have him close his eyes and touch his nose with his finger. This took quite a bit of miming to get across without words. The attendant would smile at him invitingly and then close her eyes dramatically and touch her nose with a finger with exaggerated motions. Then she would open her eyes to see if he had aped her movements. If he didn’t, she’d repeat the theatrical exercise until he had. It only took two demonstrations at first to get him to copy her movements faithfully, but after a few days he discovered it was impossible to find the tip of his nose with his finger. It kept going into his eye or missing his head altogether. Sometimes she would lift his leg and have him touch his toes with his eyes closed. On the first day he found it easy, but on the second day he seemed to have lost his foot. He could only touch his toes if he was looking directly at them. Frequently he would lose interest in the game and start looking around the room for something easier and more interesting to do. When this happened the attendant would try to entice him into continuing the infantile play by demonstrating how simple it was. Howard would try again until his interest waned, then he would lose his temper and begin crying in frustration. His crankiness was always interpreted by the attendant as a signal that he wasn’t interested in playing anymore. She would pick him up and comfort him for a while in her arms and put him down in his crib for a nap after he had quieted. Every day [SW1]the nursery furniture seemed to get bigger to Howard. It wasn’t that he was getting any smaller, but his perceptions of the world changed as he gradually made the mental adaptation to his new environment. Anita informed the Daycare workers that he was to be referred to his baby name of Bri-Bri and they had complied without a word of argument. It didn’t matter to Howard what he was called. Since Anita had taken to calling him Bri-Bri, they was no reason they couldn’t call him that too. He stopped attempting to walk and crawled around his parquet floored room while he played. The huge size of adult shoes when he crept among the adults who took care of him became an accepted part of his world. When he crept on the wooden floor, the skin of his knees and the palms of his hands stuck to the slightly tacky surface of the waxed floor. He would often creep up to the plastic gate that separated his room from the rest of the house and peer out in wonder at how large the pictures in the hallway had gotten. He couldn’t remember who the subjects of the family pictures were, he only knew that it gave him a sense of security to see them there on the walls as they had always been. When Anita let him into the family room to play, she either sat on the couch and watched as he crawled at her feet or she would put him in his playpen. Occasionally, she would sit him in his walker so he could propel himself around the house with his feet but still have his baby hands kept out of mischief by the wide expanse of the plastic tray that was an integral part of the walker. Howard always enjoyed that, he would scoot around the house as fast as he could, bumping into furniture and caroming off corners in his search for new things to look at. If he found something particularly interesting, he would stretch his arms out to it in hope that Anita would get it and hand it to him. Most of the time she didn’t, but when she did, he would examine the object closely. Touching it and looking at it from all sides before he smelled it and put it in his mouth. For some reason, he had developed an almost overpowering urge to put things in his mouth. This almost always caused Anita to take the object away from him and put it out of his reach. He would cry a little when she did that. Once he had recovered from his disappointment, he would scoot off to another part of the house to explore. Everyday objects seemed to different to him after his change. Every time he looked at something, it felt like the first time he had ever seen it.
