Tommy reluctantly allowed her to put a spoonful in his mouth. Mary studied each expression on his face as she ladled in more spoonfuls. After three spoonfuls he grimaced at the taste of the squash and turned his head away in utter disgust. He couldn’t eat another mouthful of that crap or he’d toss his cookies then and there. “You’re not Bobby!’” she yelled, “Bobby loves squash! Tom always hated squash. You’re Tommy!”
“She knows who I am!”, he thought in panic. He began making hand motions to try and tell her what had happened. She looked shocked as she realized that he was trying to communicate with her.
“You can still think, can’t you?”, she asked.
He nodded his head vigorously.
“Do you know what’s going on?” he nodded again.
“Hold up two fingers on each hand so I’ll know this isn’t a coincidence.” Tommy gave her a Nixonian greeting which had previously become popularized during WWII as Winston Churchill’s famous single-handed victory gesture.
“Do you know who I am?”, she asked.
He nodded assent.
“Was there a mix-up at the Daycare Center?”, she queried.
He nodded again.
She laughed and said, “Do you mean that Marge has Bobby?”
He nodded again.
“Well, I’ll call her so we can exchange babies. Does your Mommy know you can still think?”, she asked in a slightly bemused tone.
He shook his head “No.”
He moaned and started to cry. She stood in shock for a moment and then a quizzical expression came over her features. She took the bowl from the tray and removed the tray from the high chair. She looked down at him while he sobbed. She hesitated, then put three of her fingers down into the front of his diaper. “Did you wet your diaper?”, she demanded.
Tommy nodded and continued to sob. Her expression softened and she said, “I’m not going to call your Mother, at least not for the moment. Now, calm down while I get you a dry diaper. I’ll be right back.”
His crying had quieted to sniffles when she returned and kept looking down at his diaper and weeping. “Are you finished? Is that all? “, she asked.
“Yes,” he nodded.
He frowned looking down with an expression of intense concentration on his face. He looked up at her, then his expression changed to surprise and he started to cry again. “Well, ……What’s wrong now?”, she demanded.
His face blushed crimson in embarrassment. The smell of a dirty diaper assailed her nostrils. She smiled broadly and said with venomous condescension, “Did little Tommy make a poopy in his dydee?”
He nodded miserably.
“Well, well, well. What would you do to get a clean diaper? Would you suck your thumb?”, Mary demanded of her ex-husband.
He nodded vigorously.
“Sooo…You LIKE sucking your thumb!”, she exclaimed with an air of astonishment and disgust, “I didn’t really believe Marge when she told me you had sucked your toes the first day we went shopping. But now I know! That explains why it took you four years to quit smoking! You’re no better than some of the little boys I had when I was teaching Kindergarten and First Grade. If you had been one of my students, I’d have marked your personality in your student file as horribly immature! It’s obvious that you’ve never matured beyond the oral stage of personality development. I’m sorry that I misjudged Marge! I had thought that she was exaggerating for effect! Now I know she was telling the truth! You don’t only suck your thumb, you like to suck your toes too! I wish I had known how infantile you were before I married you! Since you didn’t object to sucking on a baby bottle the other day while we were shopping I guess you enjoy nursing a bottle too! You must have been ecstatic when I breast-fed you yesterday!”
Mary went on, venting her anger at what had happened to their relationship by telling him, “You know, I felt sorry for you because I thought that your mind was completely gone and that you needed to be nursed like a baby. What a fool I was! You managed to get the best of both worlds, didn’t you?”
She put her face close to his and said, “You fixed it so your Mommy could take care of you and then inveigled me into nursing you the way you’ve always wanted! You’re disgusting, do you know that? For two cents, I’d take you over my knee and give you the spanking of your life!”
Thomas whimpered helplessly under the hurricane of female emotions that battered what was left of his frail defenses. Copious tears ran down his face as he looked up at the livid face of his former wife.
Mary smiled grimly at the effect her tirade was having upon her ex-husband, he appeared to whither and become even more helpless under her hurricane of anger. She renewed her attack on the weeping pseudo-infant who was inescapably secured to the high chair before her. She leered down at her captive audience and said in a tone that dripped the vitriol of absolute aversion with the sadly reduced state of her ex-husband, “Sooo,…It appears that you’re a crybaby too! Well! I’m not surprised! I’ll bet you get a real kick out of peeing and pooping in your diapers! You deserve to be an infant, do you know that?”
Thomas hung his head in shame, the last two days had proved he did enjoy making messes in his diaper like a baby. She was right. He did deserve to be an infant! Just as he began open his mouth to wail his sorrow at what he had become, she laid into him again with words that marked his soul like a metal-tagged, cat-o’-nine-tails.
The gorge rose in her throat as she bore down on the nine month old infant in front of her with her ex-husband’s mind, “Now I know you for what you are! This explains all the brown stains you left on the back of your undies almost every day since we got married! It also explains your dribbling in your pants when you peed standing up, doesn’t it? When I think about all the times I worried about you having some sort of medical problem that was making you incontinent, I could just scream!
Remember when I discovered you with Bobby’s diapers in your undies? I thought that you were just worried that you’d wet the bed and appreciated your thoughtfulness. Or have you forgotten that little incident? Did you really think I would ever forget finding my husband with his baby son’s diapers stuffed into his undies? You like the idea of being dominated and cared for by women, don’t you? You like peeing and shitting your pants in front of them so they’ll have to change your dirty dydees! You never wanted to be a man! You just went along with the process of growing up because you had to! If you had your way, you’d spend the rest of your life cooing and gaaing at every woman who thought you looked sweet, who would change your dydees and feed you!”
Thomas’s head dropped to his chest as her words wounded his soul. She was right. He was less than nothing. He had never earned the right to call himself a man. He was and had been an infant at heart all of his life. Bitter tears of acceptance of his absolute lack of moral character rolled down his cheeks.
Mary could see that she had him on the ropes, knowing that it would only take a few more well chosen remarks to reduce his adult mind to its proper state of submission. In her mind, he was less than a limp-wristed, effeminate, panty-waisted male, at least homosexuals had the strength and character to act like adults. The poor imitation of a male who sat before her had deliberately made himself a permanent infant. She intended to make him comprehend in the most graphic terms possible that his social position had fallen from the respectable rank of husband/provider to the lowest rank possible for a human; for the next ten years, his station in life would be that of helpless babbling infant under a woman’s care. She was still livid about the loss of her husband and wanted to make him pay for his foolishness in spades! “Would you crawl on the floor at my feet, Baby?”, she asked in an attempt to get him to agree to completely humiliate himself in front of her by groveling abjectly at her feet.
He nodded again, but less vigorously.
“Good,” she said with a smile of superiority, “because you’re going to get the opportunity to crawl on your belly like a helpless infant wearing nothing but a tight little cloth diaper to show off your cute little tush in front of my video camera. When you’ve gurgled, bubbled and sucked on enough baby toys to establish how infantile you’ve become, I’ll come over and turn you over so you can lay on your back on the carpet. Then I’ll put a ba-ba full of nice, warm baby formula in your hands and let you nurse on the nipple while you kick your cute little feet in the air in delight. You’ll look darling when a big yellow stain of pee-pee appears on the white cotton diaper between your legs while you nurse on your ba-ba! When you finish your formula, I’ll come over and sit you on a nice waterproof plastic playpad while I burp you! I’ll even turn up the microphone volume on the camera so no one will miss your baby belch.
Won’t that be fun? Then I’ll set you down on all fours to play on the pad with your baby toys until you’ve made a nice poopy in your dydees for Aunt Mary. Then she’ll lay you on your back again and slowly unpin your diapers in front of the camera so everyone will see what a mess you’ve made of yourself. Aunt Mary will tickle you on the side to make you giggle as she drops the dirty dydee to the pad between your legs so everyone will know how much you enjoy wallowing in your turds and pee. Then she’ll get your sweet little bottom all nice and clean again while she talks babytalk to you and you babble back at her with a sweet rosebud smile on your face. When she’s done, she’ll get up to fetch a clean cloth diaper for you. When I do, I’m going to zoom down on your crotch with the video camera so everyone can see what a tiny little pee-pee you gave yourself in exchange for your manhood. Then I’ll come back and rediaper you while you make cute cooing noises of pleasure. For the finale, I’ll do a closeup of your face as I blow on your tummy with my lips and make you chuckle with delight! And since you’ll be so adorable, I’m going to share your charms with everyone!
Once the formula hits the market, I’m going to show the video tape to ALL of our friends so they can see for themselves what a baby you’ve become! Who knows? Maybe I’ll send the tape to “America’s Funniest Home Videos” and win a prize! On the other hand, the tape will have historical value that may make it worth more than the prize money. I guess I’ll have to hire an agent to sell the video for me. Just think, you’ll be a star! Think of how big an audience that a video of the world’s most famous scientist creeping on the floor on all fours and shitting in his pants like an infant would draw! Hmm, I think I’ll zoom in on your face just at the right moment so the entire world will see you drooling in ecstasy while you take a dump in your dydees. Little Tommy would like everyone to see what an adorable baby he turned himself into, wouldn’t he? I could make millions from the tape alone, do you realize that?”
Thomas whimpered in fear. He knew that she was serious and would do exactly as she said. After he grew up again, the world would know his secret. If he was very, very lucky, he might be able to hire some woman to be his nanny and take care of him when he grew to old for his mother to care for him. Which, given the way his mother had been acting, might be in about forty years.
Mary tapped her foot impatiently and said, “Well? Are you going to cooperate, or do I take down your dydees and give you the spanking of your life? Don’t worry about Bobby. Your final humiliation won’t take long! I know that your mother will take good care of Bobby for a few hours. After all, she’ll think he’s her baby just like I thought you were mine. She’ll look after Bobby better than any Daycare can! Just think of it, baby! YOUR Mommy will be lavishing the love on your son that is rightfully yours! How does that make you feel after all your work to get back into her arms? Does that bother you? Does it make you feel sick to your stomach? I hope it does! Because that’s how you make me feel; sick to my stomach!”
Thomas couldn’t agree and shook his head “no”. Despite all that had transpired, his last shred of masculine dignity prevented him from abasing himself before the world. Mary nodded at his decision and removed the tray from the high chair. Within minutes, he was across her lap to receive maternal punishment from the hand of his ex-wife. She tugged at the back of his disposable diaper, pulling it down to expose his bare bottom.
Whap! Whap! Whap!
She gave Thomas three solid slaps on his fanny and asked, “Are you going to do as I say or should I continue?”
Thomas lay defiantly motionless across her lap. He had no intention of surrendering to her will.
“Okay,” Mary said, “If that’s the way you want it! We’ll do it your way!”
Mary laid into him with a will, intending to spank him until his spirit was completely broken. His little bottom quickly turned beet-red under the violence of her blows. Thomas began to squirm from the mounting agony that radiated from his inflamed backside. “Oh God!”, he prayed silently, “Please make her stop!”
Mary said nothing as she continued to rain blows down on his behind. She knew from the way he writhed that the pain would soon become unendurable. Mary redoubled her efforts, increasing the number of whacks per minute to bring his punishment to a conclusion in the quickest time possible. If she didn’t stop soon, he would become badly bruised and she didn’t want Marge to know what she had done to her baby boy.
Thomas whimpered at the pain of his tortured bottom and his wounded ego. The mortification of being paddled on his bare behind by his ex-wife was as psychologically punishing as the physical torment he was undergoing. He prayed over and over for the humiliation and torture to end, but his silent petitions went unanswered. The agony and shame reached a crescendo and he began bawling like an infant.
Mary increased the tempo of the spanking once again as her ex-husband wailed in helpless agony. After four more minutes of flogging his bottom with her palm, he began choking on his tears and peed uncontrollably in his diaper.
A few minutes later, his wails died down to broken sobs as she beat him into complete submission. Thomas was more than willing to agree to anything she wanted, but he had no way to indicate that he had given up. The spanking continued until his painful plaints diminished into an whimpered mewl of utter surrender. The combination of helplessness, humiliation and agony had broken him. He was beyond thought or action. He could only lay on her lap and accept the punishment that seemed to be endless.
Abruptly, Mary stopped flailing his bottom. She pulled his diaper up again and sat him on her lap, cuddling him to her bosom in a complete reversal of her behavior that simultaneously mystified and confused him. In a fraction of a second, Mary had transformed from a vengeance-bent Fury with the attributes of a Grecian demigoddess to a consoling, comforting mother-figure. Thomas’s mind couldn’t compass the sudden change so it retreated to a behavior that he had used when he was utterly baffled by the adult world when he was a small child; he wept, sniveling like a small child while he rested his head against her protective breasts. “Are you going to do what I say?”, Mary demanded gently as if she was speaking to a naughty child.
Thomas nodded his tearful, red-visaged agreement and tried to hide his face in her bosom as he began to wail again. She tenderly pushed him back and said, “Here Honey, suck on this! It will make Aunt Mary’s baby feel all better!”
Thomas allowed her to shove the nipple of the pacifier she held into his mouth. A few muffled sobs escaped the infantile gag, but it effectively shutoff Thomas’s incontinent blubbering.
“Suck on your binkie, Baby!”, Mary commanded with a creamy smile of victory over her former husband.
Thomas meekly began pulling rhythmically on the latex nipple with his mouth and tongue and was surprised to discover that Mary had been right; it did make him feel better. He nuzzled his nose deeper into her bosom in an attempt to find solace in human nearness.
“I think we can forego the video tape, Sweetheart,” Mary said consolingly as she pulled him free of the safety of her chest and put her bent forefinger under his chin to raise it in a display of her adult prowess. When he was looking directly into her eyes, she continued, “You’ve been punished enough for one day! Remember the spanking Aunt Mary gave you, Honey. If you’re ever defiant or naughty again around Aunt Mary again, she will spank you so hard you won’t be able to sit down for a week. Do you understand me?”
Thomas nodded his head woefully.
Mary smiled at his defeated demeanor and said patronizingly, “Little Tommy is only an itsy-bitsy baby now. If he doesn’t want his sweet bottom spanked, he’ll listen to his elders. Does Aunt Mary’s baby understand me?”
Thomas nodded tearfully and tried again to hide his face in her bosom like a small child. This time Mary allowed him the privilege of being succored by nestling his face in the cleavage between her breasts. She patted his back affectionately as she said, “Aunt Mary is going to ask your Mommy if she can babysit you sometime next week. That will give you and Bobby time to play together. Won’t that be fun?”
Thomas moaned weakly behind his pacifier, thinking of how demoralizing the experience would be. She had totally destroyed his sense of self-worth with the spanking. He suddenly realized that he had never loved or trusted his wife with the same diligence that he had shown his mother. Somehow Mary had always seemed like an outsider who was trying to interfere with his relationship with his mother. Thomas realized the that he had invited her severe treatment because of his lack of trust when they were married. Thomas whimpered a bit more and wished that his mother was there. She would take care of him. It didn’t matter if she babied him and kept him in diapers. All he wanted at that point was to be cared for lovingly and without imposed psychological distress.
Thomas wanted to go home. He was ready to return to the arms of his mother no matter how smothering her love was. Whether he was in diapers or not had become a moot point. He no longer cared about how he was dressed or where he peed or pooped. Thomas didn’t even care whether he drank from a glass or sucked on the nipple of a nurser. He just wanted the assurance that he was loved and would never be punished in the same way again. His punishment at his ex-wife’s hand had both astounded him and completely demoralized him. His absolute helplessness had been made perfectly clear by the punishing paddling his ex-wife had given him. Thomas had been made acutely aware he could no longer defend or take care of himself. He had become dependent on the love and good will of the adults who ruled his life. All he could think about was how much he wanted his Mommy!
When Thomas peed and pooped his diaper again a half-hour later, he bawled like an infant in distress. He couldn’t help himself; his self-control had completely vanished. After a few minutes, Mary took him out of the playpen and carried him to Bobby’s nursery for a diaper change. When she put him on the changing table to remove his dirty dydee, he was like a limp rag in her hands; his ability to resist had been irrevocably shattered. Thomas had ceased to care about the image he projected to his ex-wife. The spanking had reduced him to a sniveling, whimpering shell of what he had once been. She babbled maternal babytalk down at him as she taped the clean diaper in place and tickled him on the stomach to lighten his mood. When that failed, she sat down in the rocking chair with him and nursed him at her breasts. Thomas suckled hungrily but without any joy or sexual excitement. Until his mother came to reclaim him, the world was only a sequence of meaningless grey shadows that had once had importance. Without his mother’s presence, it didn’t matter what happened to him. As far as he was concerned, none of it was real.
The afternoon dragged on slowly with him indolently playing with Bobby’s baby toys in the playpen. Although Thomas desperately wanted Mary to call his Mommy, there was no way to message his need to her. From the sneer on her face as she watched him play in his son’s playpen, she seemed disinclined to give up her control of her former husband prematurely. Mary wanted him to experience what it was like to be her baby in the smallest detail, so he would know and regret his actions to the fullest.
Every once in a while she would come and stand by the playpen and make disparaging comments about his manhood. Fortunately for Thomas, his partial escape into unreality inured him to her petite humiliations. He ignored her statements as meaningless adult gibberish. The intense boredom of his confinement to his son’s playpen made him fall asleep frequently, causing hours to pass without notice. The phone rang and Mary went to answer it, hoping it was Marge telling her she discovered the mixup and was coming over to exchange babies. She had tired of the game of humiliating Thomas. It wasn’t much fun if the victim acceded to one’s every demand and mortifying whim. Instead, of it being a call from Marge, it was a call from a man who identified himself as a police officer was on the line, asking her she was Mary Burns and if knew a woman called Marge Burns. Mary answered carefully that she did and there was a long pause at the other end of the line as if the caller had something to say but was reluctant to put into words. The policeman finally said, “We found a card in Mrs. Burns wallet that indicated you and your husband are her next of kin. I regret to inform you that she and a child who remains unidentified were struck by a pickup truck this evening while turning onto Mulberry drive. Both occupants of the car were killed instantly in the crash.”
Mary turned white as a sheet, saying, “Oh Dear God! No! This must be some kind of mistake!”
“No mam,” the male voice on the phone said with conviction, “The picture on the driver’s license and the fingerprints that were taken from the woman’s body positively identify her as Mrs. Marge Burns, who lived at one-‘o-one Martindale Drive. The vehicle she was driving, a light blue ninety-two Chevy sedan, was also registered to her. We’d like your help in identifying the baby boy who died in the accident with her. Legal papers in Mrs. Burn’s purse seem to indicate that the boy in question was her son, but the police department is unsure of the identification. The papers seem to indicate that her son was forty years of age and she had recently been made his legal guardian. They also indicate that her son was recently divorced from you, is that true?”
“Yes…”, Mary whispered into the phone. The world had suddenly become surreal to her as if she was actually having some terrible nightmare from which she would soon awaken. Her baby couldn’t be dead! He just couldn’t!
The police officer took a deep breath as if preparing himself for the next part, then said, “The department is having difficulties reconciling the evidence that your ex-husband, a forty-year-old man is the same person as the baby boy, who has been tentatively identified by the coroner as being approximately nine-months old. There are some other anomalies about this case we would like your help with, mam. According to her driver’s license, Mrs. Burns was sixty-one years old, but the woman who died in the accident was in her early twenties. Can you shed some light on that. mam?”
“My ex-husband was a biomedical researcher…”, Mary began, “And…and he had developed a treatment to restore youth. He gave his mother a treatment so she could be twenty-two again.”
“And your ex-husband, what happened to him?”, the officer asked, trying to draw her out. So far the ex-wife’s story matched the evidence that the police had found at Mrs. Burn’s house. When they pulled the twenty year old woman out of the wreckage, with a purse whose driver’s license was issued to a sixty-year-old woman, the department had suspected foul play. They sent two squad cars and an evidence team over to Mrs. Burn’s house. When they arrived, they discovered no evidence that a forty-year-old man lived there, but instead they had found a fully equipped nursery. Examination of Mrs. Burn’s diary indicated that both she and her son had somehow been rejuvenated. The curious thing about the diary was that the woman’s handwriting had changed in the past two weeks. Up until two weeks ago, Mrs. Burn’s handwriting had had the shaky, spidery cramped style that one expects of a woman who suffered from rheumatoid arthritis of the hands. Then overnight, the handwriting had taken on the appearance of someone who was in the prime of health. If the fingerprints on the body hadn’t confirmed that the woman was in fact, a sixty year old woman named Mrs. Burns, they would have never believed it. The story was just too fantastic to be true. Still, there was corroborative evidence from the woman’s ex-daughter-in-law to be considered. Some of the investigators theorized that a clone had been substituted for Mrs. Burns, but that was definitely a minority opinion.
“Mam?” the officer queried, “I asked you about your husband…”
Mary answered the investigator’s question dully, “My husband was accidentally dosed with the youth treatment and became a baby again.”
“I see,” said the officer, “Is there anyone else who can corroborate your story?”
“Well,” Mary said speaking slowly because of her state of psychic shock, “There is the family lawyer. He drew up all the papers and knows about what happened to both them.”
“His name was on the papers we found in Mrs. Burn’s purse and he’s already been asked to come in for questioning,” the officer said.
Mary was appalled. Questioning? Did the police think that some crime had been committed?
“Is there anyone else?”, the investigator asked.
“Well, there’s the president of the company he worked for. He knows about it. He gave my husband a huge cash bonus and awarded him a large block of stock for his discovery. The treatment is secret until they finish the final tests and get it approved by the FDA. He would be able to tell you about it if you agreed to maintain the company’s secret,” Mary answered.
“Excellent!”, the officer said, “Would you mind coming down to the hospital and identifying the body of the baby boy? We have a patrol car waiting outside when you’re ready.”
“Patrol car?”, Mary thought, “They must have believed it was some sort of plot and expected me to run out of the house the minute they called. She told the investigator, “I have a baby that can’t be left alone. It will take me a few minutes to get him dressed, would that be okay?”
“Certainly, mam,” the officer said sympathetically, “Take all the time you need.”
“Oh and I’ll need your officers’ help to put his baby seat in the patrol car. It’s illegal to have a baby in a car on your lap. I wouldn’t want to get into trouble,” Mary said sincerely.
“I understand, mam,” the investigator said solemnly, “I’ll call the officers on the radio and ask them to assist you with your baby. I’ll meet you at the hospital, okay?”
“Yes…”, Mary said distantly, “…at the hospital.”
Mary put down the phone and took Tommy into the nursery. It was a bit chilly and she decided to put him in a sleeper. As she opened the snaps on the sleeper and slipped it over his head, she kept asking herself how Bobby could be dead. It was too horrible to be true. A fey look came into her eyes as she pulled the sleeper down over his disposable diaper and snapped the floppy fabric of the sleeper’s legs around his thighs and feet. She looked at the adorable face of the infant on the changing table by her side and compared it to a recent picture of Bobby which hung on the wall; the face was the same. “Noooo!”, she thought, “It’s a lie! Bobby isn’t dead! He’s right here in front of me!”
She glanced at the framed pictures of Bobby on the wall as she carried Tommy out to the living room, thinking, “How could God let a sweet little baby who looked like that get killed? It’s impossible! Pictures don’t lie! This is Bobby! Tom was the one with Marge! He spent all those years figuring out how to become young again just so he could be at his mother’s side. If anyone died with Marge it must have been him! He was wearing the same color plastic pants coming out of the Daycare that he wore when Marge carried him in. There was no way that they could have switched both them and their plastic pants.
My imagination ran away with me when I fantasized that little Bobby answered me. The strain of our separation and divorce made me lose my senses for a little while. I’m alright now. I just daydreamed that Tom and Bobby got switched because I was angry with him. I wanted to humiliate him for leaving me by making him act like an infant. Of course Bobby behaved like a baby. What else could I expect? He’s only nine-months-old! The police know what they’re doing. They told me what happened. It was Tom who died in the accident, not my little baby boy!”
“Come on, Baby!”, Mary told Tommy rhetorically as she gathered up her purse, keys and Bobby’s blankie and diaper bag as she went to the door, “Mommy has to go to the hospital with the nice police officers and she can’t leave you here.”
She went outside, closing the door behind her and locking it. When she got to the Police car, one of the officers opened the rear door and held it open for her, then said, “Mam, Inspector Gates radioed and told us you needed the baby seat out of your car to put in the squad car. If you would be so kind as to lend me your car keys for a moment, I’ll go and get it for you.”
“Oh! Thank you, that’s very considerate of you!”, Mary exclaimed as she handed over her keys, “The key with the black plastic top on the end unlocks the doors.”
“Yes, mam,” the officer said, “I’m familiar with car keys. Just sit on the edge of the backseat and I’ll be back in a minute.
True to his word, the officer was back in short time with the baby seat in hand. The officer helped her out again and fastened the baby seat securely in the backseat of the squad car with safety belts and then invited Mary to get her son settled in his seat. Mary strapped him in carefully and was led around the car by the officer, who opened the door for her. The police officers that Inspector Gates had sent were both fathers of young children and had a justly deserved reputation for solicitousness with women with babes in arms. Inspector Gates had told them that the woman had just lost her mother-in-law and husband in a MVA so they were being especially gentle with her. They had been instructed to see her to the morgue at the hospital and knew what kind of grisly experience awaited her. It was not an experience that they would have wished on the wives of their worst enemies. From what they had heard of the accident over the radio, the truck that had hit them slewed around and it’s long-range, side-mounted gas tank had split open on the car’s passenger side. Sparks from the collapsed tie-rod assembly on the passenger car’s folded front wheel as the metal grated against the macadam had ignited the spilled gasoline within microseconds of impact. While the woman who drove the car wasn’t burned, the male in the car had been badly burned. Fortunately, the force of the impact had broken both of the car’s occupants necks causing them to die instantly and painlessly.
Mary’s confused condition made the ride to the hospital seem short. When they arrived, she asked the police officers if they intended to stay or whether she should take the baby seat out of the squad car. They reassured her that they had been instructed to escort her to the proper place in the hospital and wouldn’t leave without her. She expressed her gratitude and wrapped Tommy up in the receiving blanket and held him to her shoulder before she began walking between the two uniformed men to the elevator and rode down into the hospital basement. When they got out, they lead her a winding path through empty corridors roofed with green painted pipes and conduits until they reached the morgue. Although a four by twelve inch wood-grained, engraved plastic sign over the door clearly indicated what the room beyond the heavily locked door was, Mary hadn’t noticed.
Inspector Gates met them at the door, and left the two officers outside as he escorted Mary and the baby in himself. They walked through the chill air of the morgue straight back to the area used by the deniers. The Inspector opened a second door to reveal a white-tiled floor with inset floor drains and a work area which was populated with solidly mounted stainless steel tables with six-foot long and three-inch deep depressions to catch and drain bodily fluids while the cadavers were autopsied. The sharp, slightly-sweet, pungent tang of formaldehyde from innumerable necropsies mixed with biting, acid reek of chlorine-based disinfectants that the janitors swabbed the floor with each night to produce a carcinoginous vapor that lingered evilly in the air.
In the center of the room there was a large dialed hanging scale marked in kilograms hanging from the ceiling. A large stainless steel, scoop-like bucket hung by three chains from the organ weighing scale. Chain Mary shivered at the thought of what the scale must be used for. The sides of the room were lined with shimmering steel cabinets that matched the rest of the furnishings. Everything was immaculately clean. Aside from Xerox copies of standard operating procedures affixed to the cabinet doors and the inevitable clipboards full of forms to be filled out by the deniers hanging from hooks on the walls, one would think that work was never done in this room. Unfortunately, the coffee pot that sat on the counter underneath the cabinets at the near end of the room with the metal trash can full of empty paper cups positioned on the floor next to the pot belied the image of disuse. Those who died of crime or misadventure would come to the hospital’s morgue whether they willed it or no; because this room was for the County government, literally the dead end.
At the end of the room, were the stainless steel doored refrigeration units that housed the cadavers waiting for examination or deposition of the remains. After checking the name on the red cardboard label that rested in the plastic envelope that was glued to the door, the Inspector pulled on the handle to unlatch the refrigerator door. He halted in respect as Mary drew the blanket over the head of the baby in her arms protectively to shield his eyes. She didn’t want her baby to have any memory of what she was about to see. The Inspector nodded grimly as if agreeing with her decision to guard the innocent from the reality of human death. Then he opened the door fully and pulled out the long tray which held the remains of Mrs. Marge Burns. Her body had been covered with a long drape of hospital green so that only the vague outlines of the body that was beneath could be discerned. The Inspector pulled back the drape to enable Mary to view Marge’s face. He asked Mary in formal tones, “For the record, Mary Burns, do you recognize this woman?”
Mary only looked at Marge’s face a moment before she turned away and said, “Yes Sir, that’s my mother-in-law…I’m sorry, she was my mother-in-law,…No…I meant my ex-mo…”
Although Thomas’s head was covered by the receiving blanket, he had listened closely to what was going on and the positive identification of his mother as deceased caused him to begin wailing uncontrollably. The vast room’s walls were tiled half-way up the sides to make them easier to clean. They reflected his wails of sorrow perfectly. The room echoed with the distressed infant’s howls of ultimate loss.
“Don’t cry, baby! Momma’s here!”, Mary said soothingly, trying to quiet the screams of her son.
The Inspector put his hand on her arm sympathetically and said, “I understood what you meant. You’ve identified her and with the fingerprints, that’s enough. Please forgive me if I have to ask you to view another body. I want you to try to calm yourself now, if not for your sake, then for your baby’s sake. From his reaction, I know he’s attuned to your feelings. Please accept my apologies in advance. I know it’ll be difficult. We think that the body we have is your ex-husband’s body. I want to warn you that the truck that hit your ex-mother-in-law’s car ruptured it’s fuel tank and there was a fire. The body on the passenger side was badly burned. So much so, that we can’t get a sample of the fingerprints. The hands on the body were badly charred. Your identification of the body is crucial to conclude the accident investigation.
I’ve spoken to the president of your husband’s company and I’ve agreed to keep the oddities of your husband’s death from the press in order to preserve the company’s industrial secrets unless there are unforeseen complications that require further investigation. Your uncooperation might constitute such a complication. The president of your husband’s company tells me that you, as his sole beneficiary, would stand to gain tremendously by his death when the announcement of your husband’s discovery is made. Please understand, Mrs. Burns, I’m not accusing you, but we have to know who this individual is so we can lay the matter to rest.
Inspector Gates didn’t mention that the president of the company threatened him with prosecution under the Federal Industrial Secrets Act if he released information that would reveal the company’s plans about the youth formula prematurely. The president told him (and he believed every word), that if the secret was revealed, the company would put all of its resources into bring to justice the person who destroyed the value of their discovery and stock. Millions of dollars were more than sufficient to overwhelm the County’s legal resources. If they sued, he didn’t have a snowball’s chance in Hell of surviving the onslaught. His superiors would throw him to the wolves in a heart beat to save their own asses. If the Inspector was convicted of Industrial Espionage, he’d be facing five years in a Federal penitentiary. The lifespan of a Police Inspector would be less than a spring mayfly’s voyage from pupae to death in a correctional institution. The Inspector had lived a long time and come to feel that under certain circumstances, discretion was the better part of valor. As far as he was concerned, he planned to keep mum. Nevertheless, there was no reason he could think of to reveal his vulnerability to what might be (however improbable) a suspect.
The Inspector respectfully covered Mrs. Marge Burns face with the green drape and closed the long drawer, closing the door and snapping the latch firmly in place. Then he checked label on the compartment to the right of the one he had just opened and unlatched it. As he opened the door and began to pull out the drawer, he stopped dramatically, so as to make his final statement, “Again, Mrs. Burns, I truly apologize for this, but I must. It’s my duty. Please forgive me.”
The Inspector slide the long drawer about a foot and then stopped. The body contained within the drawer could not have been longer than thirty inches and was probably less, given the way that the drape fanned out from the top of the tiny covered feet.
As she looked down at the dead baby’s still face, lying wrapped in a hospital green surgical drape to conceal the worst of his injuries, she saw the face of Tom imprinted on the impact-bruised, grayed visage. The baby’s eyes were closed, but had they been open, she was sure that it wouldn’t have made any difference in her opinion. Miraculously, the baby’s hair was unburned, although a strong odor of cooked pork emanated from the refrigerated drawer. The chin and nose were obviously Tom’s, Mary was sure of that. Certainly, they were those that he wore as a baby, but there was no doubt in her mind that the body in front of her was Tom’s. After all, who else would look like her baby? The resemblance between father and son was unmistakable. Tom was dead. There was no question of it in her mind.
“That’s Tom,” Mary said with a note of finality, “I would know his face anywhere, even as a child.”
The baby in Mary’s arms began howling anew, screaming his objections to the misidentification of the body.
“You’re sure? You’re absolutely sure?”, the Inspector asked over the din to confirm the identification.
“Yes, I’m sure. You had him covered up so I couldn’t see his body. But did YOU look at the color of the plastic panties he was wearing? Did they survive the fire?”, Mary asked.
“Parts of his clothing survived,” the Inspector admitted reluctantly as he covered the baby’s face with the drape and closed the drawer again.
“Well then,” Mary said angrily, “Check the Daycare where we put the boys into this morning! The Daycare workers on duty will tell you what he was wearing! My son wore blue plastic pants while Tom wore aqua pants. What color of plastic pants was the baby wearing? If you want to ask them, the name of the facility is ‘Tiny Tots Academy’. Do you need their address and phone number? I have it right in my purse!”
“That won’t be necessary, mam. I’ll call the Daycare tomorrow as you suggest. I’m sure that their evidence will be enough to identify the baby here and wrap up this case,” the Inspector said with conviction, “Thank you. I think that we’ve asked enough from you for one night. The officers outside will take you and your son home. Frankly, I don’t think you should concern yourself about our investigation any further. I believe you and the facts fit the evidence. I want to tell you personally how sorry I am for your loss. Please understand that I was only doing my duty to identify the dead. Go home and get some sleep, Mrs. Burns. Spend some time with your son. After awhile, your memories of this night will all seem like a bad dream. Some officers will bring an affidavit to your home tomorrow attesting to what you told me tonight. If you have any problems with it, please call me. Here’s my card. If the affidavit is acceptable to you, then sign it and the investigation, at least your part of it, will be over.
Mary walked slowly out of the morgue carrying the sobbing Thomas in her arms. In one moment, he had lost his son and mother as well as any chance he had to escape his fate. Once the MVA case was closed, his identity as Bobby would be permanently established. It was plain to Thomas that Mary was mentally incapable of even considering that he was anyone other than her beloved baby boy. Marge’s and Bobby’s death had caused a psychotic break in her reality. No amount of evidence would convince her that her baby Bobby was dead. Like most people, she wanted what she wanted when she wanted it and no amount of rational argument would make a difference. Thomas had recognized from his own infantilism that most people are emotionally little better than small children. Unlike infantilists, most people they think that their rationalizations for their childish wants and demands are adult in nature.
Thomas knew that politicians were aware of this facet of human nature and that they used it instinctively to manipulate the public to increase their power. For that reason, the natural tendency of every democracy was to decline into a patriarchal dictatorship as the politicians veered the ship of state towards a parental role rather than the partnership role that every founder of a democratic state originally intended. Historically, the ancient democracies of Israel, Greece and Rome sank into kingdoms as the people demanded the “right” to be relieved of their responsibilities to think and act for themselves. Hitler demolished the budding democratic government in Germany in less than a decade by the same tactics and Thomas had seen third world countries fall within days to the people’s lack of political sophistication. The natural desire to return to childhood rather than embrace the difficult decisions of adulthood had historically destroyed not only individual personalities if left unchecked, but also governments and nations.
At least, Thomas mused in his sorrow, an infantilist knew the perils of acting like an infant in an adult world. If an infantilist found a mate who dominated him completely and he disagreed with the situation, then he could get a divorce and walk away. That wasn’t true of government or the fictional construct called “society”. When government decided to take the paternalist approach to its citizens, then they had no choice but to obey or be murdered by the police. An infantilist’s emotional need to be mothered or fathered by a real person rather than by a philosophically driven desire to be parented granted them a measure of immunity from the lure of government paternalism. Infantilists as a whole don’t deny their feelings and condemn themselves to repeat the mistakes of the past.
As Thomas considered the long view of history and the nature of human desire, the instinctive psychic abilities of a baby blossomed in Thomas’s mind like a lotus blossom; suddenly his future unfolded in his mind like petals opening up to reveal the heart of a flower. His ex-wife/mother would never recover from her loss and she would continue to see him as her baby. Thomas saw his rolodex watch being taken from his mother’s jewelry box per the instructions in her last will and testament and being placed in Mary’s hands. Mary would in her turn, place his gold wristwatch in her jewelry box. After five years, her milk would dry up and she’d put him on formula. Her madness would keep her from taking him to a doctor until he began growing again. By then his fate would be sealed.
He’d never regain his continence nor would he ever be able to talk more than a few baby words. The world would think its most famous scientist had died in an auto crash. Initially, he would be labeled as a mentally challenged child and his inability to speak would be diagnosed as severe retardation. Failure to thrive physically was another symptom of a particular genetic disorder which caused retardation. Further testing wouldn’t be necessary in his case; the symptoms would point to a particular disorder and nothing else. He would be medially labeled and put in his slot to await the early death that his doctors predicted.
After ten years, when Thomas began to grow again, Mary would begin to emerge from her illusory world. After a day of weeping and crying over her lost son, she was serendipitously called by one of Thomas’s old friends to see how she was doing. When he heard what had happened, he recommended that she see a psychiatrist friend to help her deal with her feelings of grief. After a month of hypnotherapy, she would know what she had to do. She would engage a powerful group of Washington lawyers with connections at the highest levels of government to create a permanent trust in her infant husband’s name for the hundreds of billions of dollars that had continued to grow in size as the years had passed. Little did she know that the senior partner of the law firm was the legal advisor to a secret government group codenamed, “Majestik 12”.
Until Thomas had matured enough for him to take control of his wealth, Mary arranged for the executors of the trust to see that he would be cared for by a succession of nannies in an isolated house high in the Colorado Mountains. Once she saw that her ex-husband/baby was properly cared for, she would take her car and run it off the side of a cliff in a fit of depression about her wasted life and lost child. The one-year-old Thomas would be truly alone in the world except for the nanny who would change his diapers, feed him baby food and nurse him from baby bottles. When each nanny in her turn tired of caring for him, another would be found and then another as decades passed. After Mary died, his gold wristwatch would be carefully secured by the executors of his trust; it would be locked in a safety deposit box deep in the vaults of a souless, impenetrable bank, never to emerge again.
Thomas wailed. Not just for himself, but what he saw coming for his country. The government of America would become a dictatorship of politicians and lawyers. The rich would hire lawyers to construct legally enclosed encastrametations that could not be broached by common man or the IRS. The poor would become poorer as higher education became less reachable. Automation and ultra-high speed computers with artificial intelligence would replace the lower ranks of the work force as the four-gigabit per second processor became commonplace and heuristic self-re-programming auxiliary job chipsets came into general use for low and medium priced computers.
When the heuristic self-re-programming auxiliary job chipsets were released, Microsoft Corporation, the largest software company in the world, announced that it intended a new release of Windows 98 with capabilities that far surpassed NT 9.0. The company had reconsidered its OS structure in the light of the new hardware and had decided to resurrect the long dead Win98 in a new form. They would abandon the monolithic block structure that had been the hallmark of NT’s architecture and use the heuristic hardware to create a “self-aware” OS. According to press releases, Win10 would reprogram itself on the fly to meet any challenge and construct drivers to match any device that was installed. Aging Bill Gates proudly announced that the Beta version had performed “flawlessly and had met every test that the programmers could devise”.
When one of the reporters present at the press conference had asked if he could attach his AI (Artificial Intelligence) “Einstein” (the successor to the rather slow, stupid, ancient “Newton” palmtop), gray-haired “Old” Bill (as the industry called him) agreed. The result was a disaster for Old Bill; the reporter’s AI had correctly divined that it was connected to an enemy computer and had imaged the hard drive onto it’s unused space before activating a self-defense program that wiped Old Bill’s drive and made the head of the hard drive on Bill’s desktop unit vibrate at ultrasonic frequencies to burn out the motor. Within seconds, Bill’s demonstration was in ruins as the thermal control circuitry mediated by the software on the hard drive died and his secretly overdriven eight gigabit per second processor cooked itself in an futile attempt to compensate. Smoke poured from the demo unit as “Old” Bill went down in flames.
In the meantime, aside from Microsoft’s difficulties, food and housing riots would ensue from the increasing rate of joblessness, causing the State to focus on “Bread and Circuses” as it had in Rome. Only this time, it would be “TV Dinners and TV” for the masses. Food stamps would be replaced by TV stamps; which would guarantee every “citizen” full Cable TV, an eight megabit per second Internet connection and five POP accounts as well as a Web site and three TV dinners (approved by the FDA) per day. Within ten years a Constitutional Amendment would be passed denying the right to vote to anyone who was on TV welfare. Nutrition would slide into a pit from which the public would never emerge. Agribusiness would make fortunes from the government giveaway of TV dinners. It wasn’t necessary to waste any advertising monies to leverage the populace out of the trap which it had complacently allowed itself to fall into. The national taste in TV programming would slide southward of Italian TV. Nudity and fetishism would be commonplace. Drug use would be almost universal as the people gave themselves over to hopelessness. The only bright side to the dismal future which Thomas beheld in his mind was that the police would give up their fruitless drug wars against the poor and desperate.
By that time, the drug lords would be part of the elite and warfare against them would be made illegal. Marijuana would be part of what kept Amerika from revolting against its masters and would become part of the “Bread and Circuses” program (as it was derisively referred to in closed Senate Conferences on ‘How to Deal With Popular Unrest”) What the drugs didn’t take, State-sponsored gambling in the form of the lottery would. When that failed, the Federal government would lower taxes on alcohol substantially in order to keep the populace drunk, drugged and hooked on TV. By that time, there would be no difference at all between organized crime and the government. They were the same animal. The personages who ruled either organization would be the same. “A difference which makes no difference is no difference”, ipso facto, the government would become a criminal organization.
Actually the changes in government attitude had been happening since WWII, but no one wanted to admit it. Once Janet Reno, the Attorney General of the United States, who acted as the “situation manager” that ordered BATF to assault and burn a wooden church building full of parishioners in Waco, Texas down to the foundations in “order to protect the children” inside, it became supremely evident that the government’s gloves were off. No group or people could resist the will of the Federalist apparatchiks. To resist the government meant death. The Constitution of the United States of America was a de facto joke to anyone “in the know” by the year 2000.
The small town governments acted accordingly and rewrote the law of the land as they went. Citizens had no rights. The rights of the people that weren’t subsumed into the power-hungry maw of the Federal government were left as crumbs for the black-hearted crows of State and Local tyrannies. Populations and private property became financial resources to be “harvested” at will. The lawless cops could do as they pleased; they were the official “gangs” that enforced the illegal and immoral acts of local governments gone mad.
Amerika was, ipso facto, in a legal state of anarchy. There was no law, only the ever-changing and bribe-biased opinions of the rulers. When the government breaks the law, there is no law, only individuals trying to survive. The government tried to stem the tide by invoking the death penalty in as many cases as it could, but its efforts only cheapened lives and made murder more prevalent. The message from the government was clear and understood by those who lived by violence. Murder by government or individual was in, tolerance was out.
In 1998, one group of heinous white-supremacists in small town of Texas beat up an African-American and tied him to their pickup truck to drag their victim down the street. They left pieces of the innocent man all over the highway. The press went crazy for twenty-four hours decrying the injustice of the black man’s death and then fell silent as the poor man’s demise fell out of public interest. He was only another victim. America had become a land of victims.
The Amerikan government had made it clear that it was the enemy of religion and of the people as a whole. Local and Federal Judges and Prosecutors died by the dozens as the people made their personal will known and followed the moral example of the government. IRS agents had been ordered to arm themselves in the late nineteen-eighties. In many ways this had been a good idea for its time; when one sends lawless thugs out to mug the American public, Americans have a disconcerting tendency to shoot at robbers no matter who their criminal “Godfathers” might be.
Congress tried their collective best to rectify the situation, but the budget and politics always made any effective change impossible. In 1998, the Senate and House both had IRS “reform” bills before them. The Senate version of the bill had a $18.3 billion dollar price tag for IRS “honesty”, whereas the House’s bill came in approximately 3 billion dollars cheaper. The House version, which was approved by a majority of both parties and was therefore largely symbolic, died in Committee as expected. The Senate’s version, which was championed by the Republican philosophical diehards was thwarted by the liberal Democratic faction over the largely theatrical objections of the Democratic President, expired after extensive debate on the floor of Congress. It was all a sham. No one had any intention of paying over sixteen billion dollars for reform of the IRS; the showmanship had all been smoke and mirrors for re-election. The government’s thugs would go on extracting revenue by “hook, crook or outright theft” as had become customary since WWII. Citizen-slaves had no rights! Any money the IRS deigned to leave the commoners were “unharvested resources” to be taken from the slaves at a later date. The idea of having a “Citizen Review Board” for the IRS was considered by Washington insiders to be ludicrous in the extreme. Who could govern a populace that wasn’t properly terrorized by their government? Certainly not the adolescent-minded and rebellious citizens of the United States! The childlike citizens of the U.S. had to be kept in place by their betters!
Although the secret group called Majestik 12 had originally been formed in the 1940’s to deal with the possible invasion of the United States by extraterrestrials, it had extended its mandate when secret battles in space had shown that the inhabitants of the Earth were capable of defending themselves. Captured spacecraft had been disassembled and patiently reverse-engineered to reveal the technological secrets of the aliens. As each member of the group aged and died, another was selected to take his place. President Reagan’s Star Wars Initiative hadn’t been an effort to make the U.S. secure from missile attack from the Soviet Union, but the culmination of forty years of research into alien technology. When the American flying saucers met the aliens in space, the extraterrestrials were soundly defeated. Unknown to the world, America had won its first Space War.
Instead of quietly toasting their victory and slipping away into quiet retirement after winning the Space War, the invisible government schemed to tighten its hold on the reins of power. They had secretly bought stock in Thomas’s company when it was still a fledgling company and had supplied some of the data upon which Thomas’s discovery was made. They knew of Thomas’s discovery and what had happened to him and his mother. The existence of a means to rejuvenate each member meant that the group would never have to replace a member due to death by old age again. As each year passed, their power would grow until they would utterly control every human life on the planet. Nothing could be allowed to block their path to absolute power!
The successors of Majestik 12 made plans to assassinate the President of the United States just as their predecessors had when John Kennedy had spun out of their control. They reasoned that the assassination of the sitting President would so shock the country that the public would clamor for an end to terrorism and mandate real gun control. Intensive government surveillance on the public would become a fact of life as national ID cards were issued with every individual’s complete medical, educational and personal history digitally encrypted into a rewriteable magneto-optical storage area built into every card. Aside from the individual’s name, date of birth, social security number and color photo in plain text on the front of the card, the individual’s fingerprints and DNA would be encoded into the storage area on the rear for instant identification. The cards would replace all cash and credit cards and thus provide the means of tracking every monetary transaction that the subject made. For the first time in history, no one outside of prison would be immune from the prying eyes of government. The leaders of the invisible government could envision a time in the near future when they could destroy an individual by denying him credit, emptying his bank account, erasing his educational achievements, removing his licenses and modifying his medical history to show that he was an untreatable paranoid schizophrenic who had escaped from a maximum security institution for the criminally insane. The cards represented total power over Americans and the plotters lusted after it in much the same way that a heroin addict looks forward to his next fix.
The President’s secret plans for the public were laudable, but he had refused to take the final step in securing ultimate power for the group. That refusal, in their eyes, was a form of treason against the invisible government. The President would expiate his sin by dying so that their plans could proceed without interference from the so-called “Chief Executive”. The aging ex-military sharpshooter who had engineered the Kennedy assassination was called in and briefed on his new mission. The stone-faced, chain-smoking killer nodded his agreement with the invisible government’s plans and asked for an effective closure date for his mission. They told him that he was not to commit until the order was given, but to prepare a plan that could be executed within two weeks of the action order. In the meantime they asked him to take care of a small security breach on one of the group’s “special” projects. The hit wasn’t particularly difficult, they told him. They only wanted him to arrange a fatal traffic accident for two unimportant individuals. They slid a sealed manila envelop with photos and the personal details of the intended victims across the polished mahogany table and told him that the action was to be concluded as soon as possible. He stood up and nodded again, leaving the room while dragging the invisible chains of Karma he had forged by the multiple murders of innocents behind him.
For reasons his physicians couldn’t fathom, the elderly killer had developed a pronounced limp in his right leg. No one except the members of Majestik 12 knew that the smoking killer had used a more vicious version of the CIA’s programming technique to make Jack Ruby shoot the poor patsy that had been set up to take the blame for Kennedy’s assassination; Lee Harvey Oswald. Lee was a purblind fool whom the CIA had been using for years. He was so stupid that he thought he’d be able to penetrate Soviet intelligence when the CIA asked him to renounce his citizenship and move to the U.S.S.R. under deep cover. Actually, his entry had been a diversion for a deeper penetration that the CIA was planning. Under a sort of “Gentlemen’s agreement” the Russian government allowed him to emigrate and live in Moscow. The Soviet government were running deep moles of their own and didn’t want to overly excite the American government at the time. After his usefulness was ended in Soviet Russia, his controllers pulled him back to the United States for reassignment. Majestik 12 picked up his dossier and knew they had the perfect patsy for a high level assassination when they needed one. He was an ex-marine, so everyone would naturally believe he was an expert with a rifle even though his records indicated that he was a lousy shot at any range with any sort of weapon. All that was needed for him was to be in the right place at the right time for him to be blamed. Then he would be killed by a CIA-controlled sociopath and no one would be the wiser. Majestik 12 had agents within both the CIA and the FBI. Any evidence that failed to correspond with their manufactured truth would disappear as certainly as John Kennedy’s bullet riddled brain would disappear from the Dallas Coroner’s morgue.
The termination of the woman and child went off without a hitch. It had been child’s play to rig the side tank of the pickup to split on impact and dump gasoline all over the road. The driver was a nobody who no one would miss. He had been a down and out alcoholic construction worker who had lost all of his friends and family to the bottle. He had subsisted from day-to-day eking out a living as a day worker at a temp agency that specialized in single day jobs for the barely employable. The only things of value he had managed to retain from his former life were a few of his carpenter’s tools and his old pickup truck. It wasn’t difficult to find a near bum to be a disposable assassin by promising him steady work, nor was it arduous to drug him and reprogram his already sodden brain into slamming his truck into the target car at the correct moment. The flames destroyed both the assassin and his tiny victim. The impact had killed the woman instantly. There was no evidence that any crime had been committed. It was only another MVA. For the smoking killer, it was all in a day’s work.
Fortunately for the sitting President of the United States, his assassination wasn’t necessary for Majestik 12’s plans. The downhill slide of the Pacific Rim economy changed everything. Even the President, who was widely reported to be a waffling, womanizing, draft-dodger became tough on the public. Unfortunately for Majestik 12’s plans for world domination, control of the American public became impossible when the millennium arrived. After the IRS debacle of the year 2000, the American public had had enough and had become positively dangerous.
When the IRS computers collapsed due to the Y2K syndrome (Year 2000), none of the returns for the year 2000 could be processed. By 1998, it had fallen short of its plans to fix the “Year 2000 Problem” on sixty-six of one hundred and twenty seven of its most vital systems and the price tag for the program patches and chip replacements had zoomed from $250 million to $1 billion. By the year 2000, they had managed to fix only seventy-three of its network servers and the balance of the improperly programmed servers crashed catastrophically on Jan 1, 2000. Nothing could be processed; returns were stalled, audits became impossible, and the refunds and the Earned Income Credit that people needed to pay bills went unpaid to deserving citizens.
Not that the government was broke; far from it! Money was pouring into government coffers from corporations who had foreseen the problem and updated their software years before, but the government’s ability to analyze tax returns or disburse monies was crippled. The computers of the Treasury’s Department of Financial Management Services, which disbursed checks for Social Security as well as Medicare, Medicaid, and Veteran’s Benefits had not had a single upgrade and went down completely. Oldsters and youngsters alike went hungry, homes were lost and all the government would permit was to declare that it had “Sovereign Immunity” for its negligence.
The public was livid. Regional IRS offices were bombed and/or attacked by angry mobs. The Congressional Mail Server went down as the server became flooded with literally billions of angry email messages from the citizenry. When local offices of the FBI attempted to investigate the IRS bombings, their offices were bombed as well. FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Administration) attempted to convince the President to revoke the Constitution and impose a dictatorship under its mandate to assume absolute control of the country in a time of national emergency, but the President refused. The Executive office had long term plans that it wanted to be kept secret from the enemies of the State. Concentration Camps and “Disposal Facilities” were being constructed secretly to deal with the nonconformists and ne’er-do-wells that the government had on its hit list. When the time came, FEMA would be called upon to invoke the emergency provisions of its mandate that would enable Martial Law be legally declared. In the interim, the government was quite happy with the chaos that filled the void. The chaos that was enveloping the nation would make it that much easier to effect a total dictatorship when the time was right.
Homosexuals, transvestites, transsexuals, infantilists, pederasts, feminists, known petite drug users, computer hackers of all ages, members of any non-Western or non-Christian cults were slated for the “Disposal Facilities” under construction. Known Asian, Latino, Black and Jewish radicals had their FBI dossiers tagged with “black” flags to indicate that they would make a one-way trip to the ovens as soon as the facilities were ready. (The senator from Utah was most insistent that the Mormon population be left alone. After an intensive review of the religious group’s history of patriotism, it was reluctantly decided to allow the Mormons to continue to exist if their missionary work was completely quashed by Federal fiat.) Liberals and leftist pinkos were to be forcibly re-educated in Concentration Camps, after which they would be released. The government psychologists promised that once they had been “psychologically treated”, the former liberals would be unable to resist any authority figure for the rest of their lives.
Secret government computers had been compiling lists of target subjects for years. The NSA (National Security Agency) had maintained lists of “problem citizens” since the Internet’s inception and had devoted huge resources to ferreting out the “Enemies of Democracy.” The government “knew” where everyone lived and what they thought.
Since the 1960’s, even the U.S. Army had been involved in the subversion of democracy; the Fifth Army’s Intelligence Server situated in the southwest corner of the old limestoned-walled fortress of the Quadrangle of Fort Sam Houston had been amassing incriminating data on American citizens slated to die or be re-educated under a new regime. The Army’s server collected data on those citizen-individuals who had publicly disagreed at any time with the government’s position on anything and thus made themselves suspect as traitors to the absolute rule of Federalism. The Army’s Intelligence Department had secretly studied the public and had infiltrated most political organizations including both ruling parties. Since their activities were both illegal under civil law and forbidden by military law, the intelligence operations were kept secret from both the public and Congressional Oversight Committees.
When the time came, a single “Long Night of Knives” would be all that was necessary to remove the elements of society which harbored “criminal thoughts” against the government or its policies. Convict rapists and pederasts, as well as the criminally insane and mental incompetents without familial support (i.e., those unfortunates who were under State “care”.) would be transported by the fastest means possible to the nearest “Disposal Area” where they would be gassed and incinerated immediately. Unlike Hitler’s inefficient, bribe-ridden government, the Federalist bureaucracy determined it could “vanish” the “unproductive population” without a single trace or clue within weeks.
When the Armed Forces went unpaid because of the revenue problems caused by the IRS’s and Congress’s lack of diligence, national incidents of ghastly terrorism by high explosives increased by three orders of magnitude.
America exploded in an orgy of bombs that were carefully placed by the opposition to cripple the government while causing the least number of civilian casualties. The infamous bombing in Oklahoma City had taught the American Resistance Movement a valuable lesson. Civilians were to be left strictly ALONE! The Resistance had learned that they could do as they pleased as long as the public at large was left to live its life unmolested. When IRS agents were kidnapped during the 1980’s and abandoned in the Texas desert along the Mexican border to wander naked and barefoot while their IRS pickup burned, the people of South Texas chuckled in quiet glee. As far as the people of San Antonio were concerned, the two agents had been subjected to a well-deserved lesson in humility to which no one objected. The perpetrators of the so-called “crime” were never identified.
After a time, the hurrah over the kidnapping died down and the infamous acts of the IRS in San Antonio continued unabated. As far as the American citizens as a whole in the year 2000 were concerned, it was well past time for another lesson in bureaucratic humility.
A limited analysis of random samples of the residues of the explosives revealed that munitions produced for the Armed Forces were being employed against the government. The National Guard was called out to protect IRS workers, but as the workers went home they were followed and individually slain in an orgy of outrage. It took five years and twenty billion dollars for the government to upgrade its computer systems. By that time, the American public had lost all respect for the Federal government and saw the IRS for the enemy it truly was. Without the IRS, the government could not fund its most evil functions.
When an IRS auditor came for a visit, most small business opened their books fully and let the agent assess the toll. When the agent left the office and walked out the door, the owner frequently followed him down the street with a sawed-off, double-barreled shotgun under his or her business jacket. More often than not, the small business owner simply pulled out the shotgun and squeezed both triggers to loose both barrels as the IRS agent reached his car and blew the IRS bastard in twain. Then the owner would quietly pick up the agent’s brief case and remove it from the scene for disposal before the police arrived. Public anger being what it was, the FBI rarely found anyone who would testify against the murderer and the shooting was put down as a gang-related driveby shooting. Deaths of IRS agents mounted. For the first time, unscrupulous IRS auditors were being shot in the back faster than they could be replaced. After all, how many misanthropic, ethics-free accountants were available in the labor market?
The IRS seriously considered hiring ex-cons with a history of bilking the public but the idea was nixed due to the re-training costs involved in changing a conscienceless con man into a loyal member of the government’s Infernal Revenue Service. The CIA had a developed a technique during the Cold War that could regress anyone’s personality to a mental age where loyalties could be induced or changed. Unfortunately, many of the individuals who were subjected to the technique became infantile and became incontinent of both bladder and bowel as well as developing a tendency to suck their thumbs in moments of stress. The idea of sending out diapered agents was abhorrent to the IRS and the thought of having agents start sucking their thumbs while arguing with a “delinquent” citizen sent shivers up the spines of the IRS’s management. The only recourse was, of course, retraining, but the process of rebuilding the resulting infantile personality needed long and arduous psychological counseling and reprogramming before that person could function minimally as an adult again. In the end, they decided that it was too expensive and dropped the idea, however attractive it seemed on the surface.
Despite the overturn in government ethics, life went on. The problems with the IRS caused the more fascist members of the government to shelve its plans for a “Restructuring of American Society” for a time when it was deemed that the remaining public would accept it. In time, the Super-Rich, those who had become the Barons and Dukes of America in power but not in name, would rule the land. Thomas knew that the dream of democracy in America would be over soon and his work would be part of the cause of its demise. He had seen the effects of the formula he created and the thought sickened him. The New Amerika would be a land of the poor and disadvantaged, ruled by the fabulously wealthy and the exceedingly ancient whose wealth made them ageless and thereby effectively deathless. He envisioned “Old” Bill Gates use his fantastic wealth to immediately became a teenager again. His vast fortune would insure that he would never grow a day older.
The Justice Department attempted to sue Mr. Gates for the imagined crime of his, “monopoly on youth”, but since he was unable to purchase Thomas’s company at any price, the suit collapsed by its lack of merit. (Thomas’s company had wisely bought back the public shares of their stock prior to the announcement of their discovery. As a result, the holders of the company’s private stock became wealthy beyond even Bill Gate’s wildest imaginings. Thomas’s undivided stock and royalties on his discovery made Mary one hundred times richer than any of the other stockholders.)
Thomas’s wife/mother would die within ten years due to grief-induced mental illness. The lawyers who administered the gigantic trust that would be established in his name would discover that the hundreds of billions of dollars they controlled were too great a temptation to resist. The political power conferred by managing the trust made them the most powerful individuals in the world. Silent agreements would be made to maintain the status quo; they would have no intention of turning over control of the world’s largest accumulation of private wealth to someone who couldn’t even be potty-trained. A few well-placed bribes in high places secured the passive acquiescence of government. Majestik 12’s members smiled and let the lawyers have their dreams of fortune. They would take the money away from them soon enough. A few “accidents” and the only member of the trust left alive would be Majestik 12’s own man in the firm. The power that had accrued to the trust would be Majestik 12’s alone. Before Thomas’s body had attained the age of eighteen months again, they would use the full strength of the formula to regress him back into a nine-month-old infant. He would never be allowed to become old enough to claim the wealth that his work had created. He would be regressed over and over, every score of years, in a successful plot to retain control of the trust. He would go on and on, century after century, as an infant…There was no end in sight. Thomas would drift aimlessly in a timeless sea of baby formula and dirty diapers. He would be a baby forever!
Thomas wept and whimpered all the way home in the squad car. What made matters worse was that he had peed and pooped in his diaper sometime while they were in the hospital and he never knew it. Only the rising reek from his diaper and the itching caused by his incipient case of diaper rash gave him a clue as to what he had done. He had become as truly incontinent as any infant.
The police officer that had removed the baby seat from Mary’s car courteously volunteered to restore it to its former place in the backseat of Mary’s vehicle while Mary sat in the heated police car with her babe in arms. Once his task was finished, he returned her keys and escorted the grieving woman and weeping baby to their front door. The officer offered his condolences and wished them good night before returning to his squad car.
Majestik 12’s second operative watched clandestinely from a car parked down the street as the woman emerged from the car with her baby. His superiors had decided to forgo the second act of “wet work” in an uncharacteristic act of mercy. As long as the woman thought that the baby was her son, she would be safe. The minute she came to her senses, they could always arrange an “accident” for her as well.
Mary dropped her purse on the couch and proceeded immediately to the nursery to change Bobby. Once there, she laid him on the changing station and lifted his legs to put a cloth diaper beneath his bottom before undressing him. She, unlike Marge, had learned the technique from her Mother. Marge had learned from sad experience that a plastic pad that becomes soiled by a dirty bottom is far more difficult to clean than washing a mildly soiled cloth diaper. Mary began unsnapping the fasteners that closed the inseam that ran up Thomas’s feet all the way up to meet at his crotch. Once his legs had been freed of the confining material, she lifted his legs with one hand and tucked the bottom half of the sleeper behind his back to protect it from soiling during the diaper change.
Thomas was beside himself with both embarrassment and emotional exhaustion. He was wet, dirty and his mother and son had died that night. His wife had gone mad and had decided that he was her baby even though he had identified himself clearly earlier in the evening as her husband. His bottom itched from a case of diaper rash and he was famished. He couldn’t even talk about his grief over his loss. As a consequence, the infantile instincts encoded into the neurons of his brain took over and he became fussy and fretful. He cried.
With a quick flick of her finger, Mary set the mobile in motion that she had placed over the changing station to reduce Bobby’s fidgeting while she worked on him. She sniffed as she pulled the diaper down between his legs, saying, “Peeu! You’re really stinky tonight, Bobby! If I didn’t know better, I’d think that someone had tried to wean you without my knowledge. I wonder what the dickens got into your gut! You must have some sort of intestinal infection! That’s okay, Baby, Mommy will let you sleep late tomorrow to get over it. This has been a trying day for the both of us.”
Mary topped and tailed him quickly, then applied a thick coating of Diaperene to his paprika-hued, papule-peppered bottom. After she had treated his diaper rash with the sticky white cream, she wiped her hands on a clean baby wipe to prevent the oils in the cream from getting on the tapes and rendering the adhesive unusable. Then she lifted his bottom again and slid a disposable Nighttime Pamper under his bottom and drew it over his crotch to tape it down securely without bothering to put baby powder on him. Being the modern, informed mother that she was, she knew that baby powder didn’t really prevent diaper rash, but only made a baby smell better for adult’s olfactory sensibilities. While she had no objection to little Bobby smelling good, she didn’t want to spend more time changing him than she had to that night. He was obviously tired and cranky and it was well past his bedtime. Since he had not wet his sleeper, she decided to let him sleep in what he was already wearing rather than discomfit him by changing his clothes for no reason. Once she had given him his evening breast feeding, she was sure he would fall into a deep slumber until morning.
She picked him up from the changing station and settled down in the large rocking chair in the corner of the nursery by the crib. Once there, Mary decided to forgo the receiving blanket that she normally wrapped Bobby in while she nursed him and unbuttoned her blouse to reveal her nursing bra. When she unfastened the cup over her right breast and presented her nipple to Bobby’s mouth, Mary was floored when he seemed to reject her teat. Mary persisted, forcing the nipple between his lips and using her fingers to start the flow of milk into his mouth. Bobby struggled wildly for a few moments as if she was doing something unnatural to him, but after his mouth filled with his mother’s milk, and he swallowed convulsively, he seemed to quiet somewhat. Mary was truly surprised that her baby boy had suddenly found suckling objectionable. She put his odd behavior down to the stress of the evening. She had read that babies often perceived and reacted to the stressful emotions of their mothers. Certainly she had undergone a stressful night; both her ex-mother-in-law and her regressed ex-husband had died in an auto accident.
As Bobby drained her right breast, she turned him around in her arms and switched him to her left teat. This time, he took it without fussing, so she was reassured that her baby had only been reacting to the events of the evening. Once he was finished, she took the cloth diaper that always lay over the right arm of the rocking chair and laid it across her shoulder. She put Bobby to her shoulder and patted his back gently, producing a prodigious belch as she winded him. Then she took him back in her arms and held him close to her bosom while she removed the diaper from her shoulder and returned it to its customary place on the arm of the rocking chair.
Instead of putting him in his crib after feeding as she normally would, Mary rocked and cuddled her baby for almost an hour. At first Bobby didn’t drift off to sleep the way she would have expected him to, but after thirty minutes of gentle rocking, he fell fast asleep in her arms. She continued to rock, dissipating with repetitive motion her own angst over her ex’s death. Finally, with her eyelids drooping, she put the sweetly slumbering Bobby in his crib for the night and sought the solace of her bed.
When Thomas woke in the morning, his sleeper had already been removed. The ego shattering spanking had been forgotten amidst the horror of his mother’s death. His adult mind, such as it was, had returned to relative normalcy. Mary had finished topping and tailing him and was slipping a clean diaper under his bottom. In loving manner, she sprinkled him lightly with baby powder and gently massaged it into the pubic skin of her sleepy baby. Then she opened the tube of Diaperene and squeezed out a dollop on her tip of her index finger and held his ankles with one hand to hoist up his legs and administer a thin coating of the protective cream over his peritoneum and rectal area. After she lowered his bottom onto the soft padding of the disposable diaper and wiped her fingers clean with a baby wipe before taping him securely into his clean dydee.
Strangely, that morning Thomas didn’t feel the embarrassment at having his diaper changed by his ex-wife that he did the afternoon before. “Perhaps,” he mused to himself drowsily as she fussed about closing the top on the baby powder and capping the open tube of Diaperene, “I’m getting used to diapers. On the other hand, I wasn’t awake when and if she cleaned my butt last night. All I know was the feel of her fingers as she put the cream for diaper rash on my ass and then rubbed baby powder onto my crotch.
Christ, it felt good when she rubbed the powder into my crotch! I could go for that even if I wasn’t a baby! God, I wish I could tell her how much I missed her when I had to go back to my mother’s house! That’s the worst part of being an infant again; I can’t fucking well talk to anyone! And her tits, Jesus! They blow me away! I liked them before Bobby came, but the way they’ve gotten bigger since she started nursing has driven me absolutely crazy! Christ! I begged her for months just after Bobby was born to let me have just a sip from her tit and she rejected my requests out of hand. I would have given anything as an adult to suck milk from her tits.
The weird thing is that now that I’m little again, her boobs look like the teats of a giantess and make me even more horny! When she put her nipple in my mouth last night, the idea of being treated like an infant really grossed me out! When she nursed me before putting me to bed, all my desire for her tits returned in spades. I guess I got my wish, but it was one Hell of a surprise! Then her milk started flowing and I totally lost it. When her nipple got erect, it filled my entire mouth! If she nurses me again today, I don’t know what I’ll do. God knows I want it, but I’ll probably cum in my diaper if she does it! I’m not going to fight it the way I did last night. If she wants to nurse me, then I’m her babe! Oh-oh, she’s bending down to pick me up! Damn! I hate being picked up by my armpits! She’s holding me next to her chest again. Jesus! Her boobs are bigger than my chest. Damn, it’s comfortable being carried by her. Oh! We’re going to the rocking chair. Does that mean what I think…
God! This is heaven! She’s holding me next to her huge breasts and patting my diapered bottom. What is she doing? Oh God! She’s going to breast-feed me again. She’s unbuttoning her blouse. Dear God, I don’t think my heart can stand it! I’m having palpitations! Look at the size of her boob! Jesus! It’s enormous! It’s almost as big as my head! Ohhhhh, she’s stroking my cheek with her nipple! My head is turning towards her boob automatically. No, no, this isn’t what I wanted! I just wanted a little titty before I fucked her! I don’t want to be suckled like a baby! Ohh, God! I can’t stop my head! Oh Dear Jesus, my mouth is going for her tit! Her aureola must be half the size of my face! No, no….”
Thomas’s mouth took in her nipple instinctively and began to voraciously suckle Mary’s teat. As the thin, sweet milk filled his mouth with warmth, he began to drowse again and slip back into slumber. He drained one teat and then the other in less than ten minutes, and woke as Mary held him across her lap and tenderly winded him. She brought him back to the changing station and held him down with one hand while she reached down to his sock drawer and brought forth a pair of white cotton socks with matching fluffy little white pom-poms stitched to the toes. In a thrice, she worked the clean socks over his tiny feet and laid him back in his crib to sleep until it was time for her baby to get up.
When he awoke again, Thomas was wet. He whimpered a bit in discomfort until Mary appeared in the doorway of the nursery. He got on his hands and knees and crept to the side of the crib to call out for Mary when she appeared in the doorway. At that moment, his bowels decided to loose themselves and he dumped prodigiously in his dydee and emitted a huge fart. Mary came to the side of the crib and looked down with a mother’s smile of satisfaction with her baby’s timely bowel movements. “Good!”, she thought, ” I was so afraid that yesterday’s the excitement would make him constipated. Babies’ digestive tracts are such finicky things, that one can never be absolutely sure.”
Tiny baby farts escaped his behind making little popping noises between the passing of each loose stool. The back of Thomas’s diaper began filling with a yellowish-brown muck that had the consistency of pudding. “Is Bobby going poo-poo for Mommy?”, she asked redundantly, patting his head condescendingly over the rail of the crib.
Thomas whimpered again as he pooped once more into the steadily filling diaper. Mary patted his head again affectionately; she had no intention of changing him until he was done dumping in his dydee. She had learned early on in Bobby’s infancy that to change him too soon after a bowel movement was to invite another eruption from his nether regions and cause her the double-duty of changing him again in a few minutes. “I’ll change him when he’s finished making his poopy,” she thought to herself as she watched his face redden as his abdomen contracted and pushed the last stool from his rear end.
“He looks like he’s almost done, but I’ll give him a few more minutes to make sure,” she thought to herself as a look of temporary look of relief came over Thomas’s face, “His bottom is protected with diaper cream so there’s no hurry.”
She went over to the changing station and took out one of the pacifiers that were stored in the clear acrylic jar that stood next to the container of baby powder. She stuck it in his mouth and went to the rocking chair to await his final poop of the series she was sure wasn’t finished.
A few minutes later, his gut exploded with a long, sonorous fart that echoed from the walls of the room. His intestinal tract was unused to a diet consisting solely of mother’s milk, hence the gaseous production that led to his bubbling behind.
Mary took the last sound as a signal that he was finished and took him back to the changing station on the dresser to change his diaper. She took off his socks first to keep the his poopy diaper from soiling them, then quickly changed him, dressing him in a diaper only for the warm spring morning. Then she carried him out the living room to let him amuse himself in his playpen while she cleaned house.
Thomas lay on his back watching Mary through the semi-transparent mesh walls of his playpen. He sucked his thumb idly and wondered if she would ever get over her madness and remember who he really was. In the long run, she’d have to realize that something was wrong in the next month or two when he failed to grow like a normal infant. Unless the rational part of her mind had gone on a permanent vacation, she would soon have to come to the conclusion that something was very wrong indeed with her baby. In the meantime, Thomas reflected, there was nothing he could do about it but wait. Thomas looked at his knees that had drawn themselves up to his chest and marveled at the flexibility of his baby legs. When he took one of his feet in his hands to examine it, he discovered that he could bring his foot all the way to his face effortlessly. A sudden urge to suck his big toe hit him and before he knew it, his digit was engulfed by his lips as it was drawn into his mouth.
Boredom overtook him as it had the day before and he fell asleep in the playpen lying on his back. When he awoke, it was time for his noon feeding and Mary had already taken him from the playpen to sit on her lap. A few minutes later, he found himself laying on her lap with as she opened her blouse and unfastened her nursing bra. In seconds, he was suckling at her teat.
Suckling had become so natural to over the two days that he had come home that Thomas that hardly thought about the unnaturalness of being breast-fed three times a day by his ex-wife. The thought of being weaned and separated from Mary’s nutritious bounty made him quake in anticipatory fear. Without teeth, he couldn’t eat and there was no one else to take care of him save his ex-wife; he was absolutely helpless unless some took charge of his life and cared for his every need. Since his mother had died, there was no one left who had ever cared for him but Mary.
When Mary changed his soiled diaper later in the day, she was pleasantly surprised that Bobby’s messy diaper was almost odorless again. Mary decided that he must have gotten over his intestinal infection since his diet hadn’t changed. Unknown to her, Thomas’s milk diet had almost completely replaced the remnants of solid food that remained in his intestine. If Mary’s mind had been whole, she would have realized that the baby food that Thomas’s mother had fed him a few days before was the cause of his previous reeking diaper. By the next day, his feces would have virtually no odor whatsoever as the last vestiges of baby food were flushed from his system by Mary’s milk.
On the following day, his stools would have no odor at all. The combination of his regression and his wife’s milk would return the absolute innocence of infancy to Thomas. His wife/mother would cuddle the sweet-smelling little baby who had become the center of her existence on an hourly basis in her arms and adoringly pamper him. He would be loved and accepted no matter what he did. Nothing he did would be wrong. Quite literally, his shit wouldn’t stink!
Thomas was half-drowsing when Mary picked him up again. In the interim, he had lost the ability to focus his eyes precisely and he saw her in a haze that made her appear as if she was dream that he had wished for all of his life. All the horror of the past two weeks had distilled itself in his subconscious and it had made a decision on its own. As far as his subconscious was concerned, he was an infant. While he slept, the adult templates of memory and behavior had been overwritten with the more primitive and reliable templates of infancy.
Mary smiled down at her and he smiled back; it was obvious to him that she adored him with all of her heart. He reciprocated her feelings without thinking. When she began to speak to him in a motherly babble, he listened with his soul. To Thomas’s reduced intelligence, somehow things had changed, but the important things had remained the same. Mommy loved him!
The timber of Mary’s voice became indistinguishable from what Thomas remembered of his real mother as his wife’s face melded with his childhood memories of a maternal visage looking down at him with love. The two personages were blending themselves in his mind until he couldn’t demarcate a difference, if there ever had been. Suddenly, Thomas was filled with a sense of absolute trust and love for his wife/mother. His mother hadn’t died, she was right there, holding him in her arms with breasts full of milk waiting for him to suckle when he was hungry again. The memories of being alone in college faded as he snuggled closer to her ample breasts and basked in the glow of maternal love.
Thomas decided that his mother had always been at his side and had never once left his side or abandoned him. At one time his mother seemed to have changed slightly as she briefly became his wife and mistress, but then their world had changed again to allow the two of them to return to their proper relationship.
Mary stroked Thomas’s thin baby hair affectionately, lulling him into blissfully complacency. His vision of the future evaporated as his mind dimmed and returned to an earlier state. Slowly, Thomas’s psyche slipped into a wordless rapture which would keep him securely cocooned until the sad day his mother left him forever. Until that day, however, he would be utterly content with his life as a perpetual baby. When Mary died, his mind would reawake to face the horror of being an adult mind trapped in an infant’s body for eternity. The realization that his work had caused the loss of his mother, wife and infant son as well as the capacity to act like an adult would draw his psyche back into adulthood kicking and screaming at his fate. Then the adult infant’s whimpers and wails of sorrow would start and go on…endlessly.
Mary sighed with evident regret and said sadly, “I wish your father was alive to see you grow up, Bobby. I miss him so much!” She looked down at the beguiling infant face peering back up at her with love and concern in it’s wide innocent eyes. Mary cuddled him closer to her breasts as she said tenderly, “I love you, Sweetheart, and know you love me too. I can see it in your eyes.”
Drool rolled down Tommy’s chin as he smiled winsomely and began to blow delighted bubbles of spit. He snuggled against mommy’s warm body and cooed his commitment to Mary inarticulately. There was no doubt in his mind that his mommy loved him. Tommy loved his Mommy with all of his heart; he always had.