Everything seemed so huge and foreign to him after he began his daily internment in the Daycare center. Even the nipple on the baby bottle seemed to be getting larger. His adult mind started fading out for hours at a time, letting his infantine subconscious rule his body. As the intervals between adult thinking became longer, it became more difficult to assume full control after his mind cleared. Sometime during the first week, Howard tried to talk and was dismayed to discover that he couldn’t even manage the simple speech of a toddler. All that came out of his mouth were incomprehensible gurgles. Howard gave up and let the women do as they pleased with his body without comment.
Instead of the games they played in the past, the attendants would bring him stuffed animals in cardboard boxes. They would let him look at the toys for a few minutes, then cover up the boxes and either add, remove or leave the toys alone. Then they would expose the toys within and note his surprise or lack of interest. At first it was easy to remember what was in the box, but as the days passed he had problems remembering how many toy duckies or bunnies he had seen. Frankly, he couldn’t even remember who his regular attendant was during the second week. Somehow his memory had edited out any distinguishing features that differentiated the attendants from each other. As far as Howard was concerned, they were all the same. He was warm and well fed and no one ever tried to stop him from taking the naps that ate up a large part of his days. The calendar became meaningless as entire days were swallowed and digested by his subconscious without his adult mind waking to see what he was becoming. When they did let him out to play on the floor, it was always under the watchful eye of an attendant. He would crawl around the infant play area mouthing various toys, leaving a trail of drool wherever he went. Sometimes he would just sit and put his fingers in his mouth or roll over on his back and suck his toes. On occasion his adult mind would wake from its slumber and wonder what the Hell he was doing. He would take his toes out of his mouth with an embarrassed look on his face and glance around to see if someone had seen him behaving like an infant. Invariably, someone had. Loose infants on the floor were always carefully watched at the Daycare to keep them out of trouble. When he was caught in one of his humiliating acts, he would stick his toes back in his mouth to continue the pretence and hide his chagrin. His attendant always got a big grin on her face when he sucked on his toes so he did it fairly often to get her to smile at him. She would often get out a Polaroid camera and take pictures of him creeping on the floor or sucking on his fingers and toes to add to the chart she kept of his vital signs. Baby Bri-Bri loved being the center of attention.
When Bri-Bri appeared nervous or couldn’t sleep when it was his naptime, his attendant would put him in a small white swing that was powered by a windup music box and let the motion of the swing and tinkling notes of the music box sooth him to sleep with its tinny mechanical lullaby. The deep plasticized cloth seat of the swing had leg holes that the attendant guided his legs through like a giant pair of loose panties. When he sat in the swing, the front of the seat came over his tummy almost up to the level of his chest. The “A” frame of metal support pipes on either side was more than sufficient to maintain stability of the swing. Bri-Bri couldn’t fall out or tip the swing over no matter how hard he tried. The deep seat and his free hanging legs gave him no purchase to push or pull himself out of the seat. He couldn’t have gotten out of the swing unassisted even if he had wanted to free himself. Like the yielding nylon mesh of his playpen, the swing was only another means of keeping him captive in the soft protection of his nursery/prison. Bri-Bri didn’t mind, he was rapidly becoming institutionalized. It was easy to lie back and let everyone do all the work and thinking for him. Thinking was too difficult and his diminishing vocabulary made it almost impossible to conceive of anything beyond his immediate needs. Only terrible fear could spur his once active mind back into normal function. Since an infant’s life is protected from the terrors of youth and the more intellectual fears of adulthood, he vegetated. His infant’s body and neurology was incapable of normal speech, making his poor efforts at rational thinking a waste of time. If he was wet or hungry, he cried and his attendant saw to his needs.
On Saturday morning the weather was warm and overcast so Anita made plans to go to the park. The weather was warm and dry so she decided that a T-shirt and diaper would be sufficient for little Bri-Bri. Since she didn’t know how long they would be there, she put an overnight diaper on him with a doubler stuffed in the front of the diaper. She packed his diaper bag with his T-shirt if it became sunny and a couple of soft drinks for her in his diaper bag and put him in the baby seat in the back seat of the Suburban. When they arrived, she took him out of the back seat and sat him in his stroller. True to her word, she hadn’t asked him to walk beside her. Bri-Bri had dim memory of Anita promising him that she would never again make him walk beside her in the park and realized that she had not lied. All he had to do was sit in the stroller while Anita did all the work. At first Bri-Bri was embarrassed to be seen in nothing but a diaper, but he soon got over it. The only people he saw on the path were a few glazed-eyed joggers who were so high on their own adrenaline that they barely noticed the attractive mother pushing a diapered baby in a stroller. It was obvious that the only visual information that was being received through the filter of their oxygen-starved, glycogen burning metabolism was the signal that an object was in their path. They guided around automatically to go huffing and puffing off into the tree shrouded distance. A few minutes into the stroll through the park, he realized that he wouldn’t have to worry about finding a restroom. By the time he knew he had to go, he would have already relieved himself in his diaper.
Bri-Bri quickly forgot his state of relative undress and concentrated on the green world that surrounded him. He was fascinated with the number of colors on the leaves of the trees he saw. He had never known there were so many hues of green and yellow. He tried to count them on his fingers, but the profusion of subtle shades made him run out of fingers before he had finished enumerating the colors on one branch alone. He gave up and decided to enjoy the outing from his new perspective. He was so close to the ground that he could discern the blades of grass that sprang up on either side of the asphalted path. Acorns carpeted the ground beneath the enormous oaks and had been scattered all about the park by an army of industrious squirrels intent on burying their nutritious booty. Where the old pecan trees grew, thousands of pecan hulls littered the ground in profusion. It was a nut gatherer’s paradise. The huge limbs of the pecan and live oak trees arched and twisted over him like the vaulted ceiling of a green gothic cathedral. Green-grey clumps of Spanish moss hung from the branches lending an unearthly surrealistic quality to the ancient trees. The long dangling trails of moss looked like the forgotten favors of saintly earth-maidens who had passed and left filmy kerchiefs in honor of the majesty of the venerable life who ruled the wood. The very air seemed to glow with the verdant vibrations of botanical life. Squirrels ran up and down the trunks with abandon in their protected reserve. They gathered acorns and pecans, chased each other and chittered down at him like living gargoyles that served to frighten evil spirits away from the holy place. Bri-Bri discovered that the mere act of breathing was an experience to be savored. When he inhaled, his nostrils were filled with the rich forest aroma with its hints of growing and decaying life.
