Losman sat on the edge of his bed staring at the little yellow pills in his palm. When he flipped them over, he discovered to his dismay that each pill had a serial number scored in fine, minute grooves. Two of the pills had the same number, 087651234-H, while the third had a slightly different number, 087651235-I. What did these numbers mean? Did they equal the dosage? Was one pill the pathway to babyhood memories, the other to later memories?
Which one should he take? It wasn’t like he could call up Pelin and say, “Hey, I stole some of your pills. Can you tell me what the serial numbers mean?”
When Losman was a boy, he’d read the popular Choose Your Own Adventure novels like everyone else his age. But he never made it far in any of them because his characters were always picking the wrong direction, bluntly ending the story down some dead-end path. It was a pattern that had followed him throughout his life. If given a choice between two directions, Losman always seemed to go the wrong way first. With 50/50 odds you had as good a chance of picking the right direction as the wrong one—and yet, somehow, he’d go the wrong way. Was it just dumb luck?
What if he picked the wrong pill and instead of visiting Mrs. Graham’s classroom returned to watch his toddlerself learn how to poop on the can again? That wasn’t at all what he wanted. What he wanted was the lower dosage pill, the one that could take him to Mrs. Graham’s classroom and his crying mother, but which of these pills was the lower dosage? Was there a clue in the numbers? Even if there was a clue, how could Losman know?
This was a serious problem with no solution, and it troubled him. He would have to simply guess, and he didn’t like his odds of making the right choice.
With his heart racing, Losman cleared his throat and jerked his head.
In every other way, he was ready. After Kat had picked up Aksel, Losman had jogged three times around the lakes, making himself good and tired. During the sessions at the FuturePerfect lab, he’d always slept through the night, dead to the world. Which meant that if a burglar or murderer entered his apartment while he was off in memoryland, he wouldn’t wake up. So he’d made double and triple sure the apartment door was locked. No one was getting in while he slept.
He briefly considered the ramifications of popping the pill on his own, but he dismissed any concerns.
After all, what could go wrong? It wasn’t like this was his first time taking BhMe4. By now he was an old pro. In the lab, he was hooked up to a machine, but the machine only read his body’s responses to assemble data for Pelin and Jens. He didn’t need the machine, just a bed and the pill. Sure, he might wake up with a boner and a headache, but eventually they would go away. He would be fine.
What he felt now was a pull, a hard tug. Two nights ago, he’d been this close to learning what felt like a vital truth. The desperation in his father’s voice was palpable, Denise, what’s wrong? And Paul McCartney singing in his ear: will you still need me, will you still feed me. Something was there in these memories, he could feel it. Something crucial, and he was on the edge of it. All he needed to do was pick the right pill.
He jerked his head a few times, cleared his throat, and steeled himself to make his decision.
He fingered the pills in his palm, touching each one carefully, as if they might speak to him, tell him pick me, pick me. But of course they said nothing, and in the end he scooped up one of the 087651234-Hs and brought it to his mouth. It made sense to pick what he assumed was the most common pill, didn’t it?
No, actually it didn’t. It made the opposite of sense. Pelin and Jens were focused on his baby and toddler memories, age zero to three, and that’s mostly what he’d visited the past few weeks. But since he’d taken the babyhood pills in the lab, the common serial numbers were probably those. Right?
Well, maybe. He’d taken three random pills from Pelin’s bottle, so he couldn’t be completely sure. Go with the one you don’t think is the right one, he thought, because that means it’s probably the right one.
Shit. What ridiculous logic.
Exhaling a long, resigned sigh, Losman put the two 087651234-Hs back in his dresser. There was just no fucking way to know which pill was the right one. He shoved the 087651235-I into his mouth, chasing it down with a glass of water, and lay down on his bed, closing his eyes. Centering his mind, pushing all thoughts aside, he dialed up the two memories he wanted to visit: his crying mother and Mrs. Graham.
He was in a semi-dark room, the only light a soft green glow to his left. As his eyes adjusted to this new situation, Losman noticed his chubby baby hands were raised up in the air before him like a supplicant’s, tiny fingers reaching for.… for the baby mobile above. Adult him recognized the mobile for what it was, the solar system: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto, back when it was still considered a planet. Driven by their own shifting gravities, the planets slowly tilted from side to side.
He heard the baby in him splutter and squeal and fart, a self-satisfied noise machine delighting in the sounds it produced, and he figured he’d taken the wrong pill after all.
Because he wasn’t interested in this moment. This was a random splice of his babyhood with no consequence. Something was different here, too. The light? The air? His baby body? Yes, that was it—his body was different. There was no tension in it. No stress. This was one of his happy memories.
But he wasn’t looking for happy. Happy wouldn’t get him the right answers. How could he jump to another memory?
He puzzled over this question. This was the first time that he’d even considered he could steer the ship, actively shift from one memory to the next, like lucid dreaming. But if he’d taken the wrong pill, he could only do so much.
Losman tried to close his eyes, his baby eyes, but could not. When he was in the baby body, the baby was in command. Instead, he focused his adult thoughts on his mother, his mother, his mother, his mother….
And now, suddenly, it was bright daylight. Baby Losman shrieked in laughter. Adult Losman, inside his babyself, saw his vision bobbing up and down. Up and down. Presently he understood why: he was in one of those bounce sets kids have when they’re too small to stand. And he seemed to be enjoying himself very much, baby Losman was, yipping and squealing with pleasure. Losman felt this pleasure ripple in waves through his adultself; it made him feel warm and loved and cozy. But as soon as adult Losman understood where he was, he glanced around searching for his mother. What would he find in this memory? Why was he here? Once again, the ripples suggested it was a happy memory.
Which was not what he wanted.
Baby him was barefoot, and his naked toes scratched against a hard, wooden surface. They were on the patio of their new home in Manayunk. There was a smoky grill. The smell of barbecue. There was rock music, Jefferson Airplane’s “Somebody to Love.” Baby Losman did not recognize the smell or the song, but of course adult Losman did. Adult Losman knew that baby Losman would soon grow accustomed to his parents’ religious devotion to the soundtrack of the 1960s and 70s, but adult Losman had already lived to see this future. There was also a cat named Poobah in this memory, a ginger tabby that had been struck by a car and killed when Losman was six. But here it was very much alive, batting at a golf-ball-sized toy with a tinkling bell inside. Baby Losman watched, mesmerized, as the cat pawed at the ball and hopped after it, mewling.
Baby him bounced, bounced, bounced until adult him felt queasy. His mother sat in a lawn chair reading the Enquirer, her face concealed from view, a green bottle of beer in her left hand. A screen door behind Losman screeched open and banged shut, its rusted hinges squealing, and heavy feet stomped onto the deck. Losman felt the vibration in his squat baby legs.
Dad.
But baby Losman was facing the wrong direction. Turn me around, adult Losman thought, turn me around.
This was another happy memory, even if he never got to see his dad. His parents conversed, their voices muffled, unintelligible, as if Losman’s ears were clogged. The memory went on and on until Losman’s mother gathered him up, lifted her shirt, and crushed baby Losman to her breast. Adult Losman felt his baby lips open wide and latch onto his mother’s pinkish-brown nipple. He felt the baby in him suckling and warm, creamy milk flowing into his mouth. To adult Losman, his mother’s milk tasted of coffee and Yuengling lager.
Soon his eyes drowsed close.
Then fluttered open. He lay on the couch now, warm piss streaming into his diaper. For baby and adult Losman alike, it felt good, so good to just let it go. He closed his eyes and returned to the joy of unthinking sleep.
Back in his crib now, he heard a noise baby him didn’t like. Since he didn’t know what it was, it frightened him. The unarticulated language of a baby’s emotion sensed dread in the grunts, moans, and squeaky bed coils: Daddy was hurting mommy.
No, no, no, adult Losman thought. I don’t want to be here. I can’t unhear this. This was an anxiety memory. Anxiety memories sucked.
He tried to force his way out, focusing his attention on a memory he’d witnessed at the lab, his crying mother. In his mind’s eye he pictured opening up the file, pulling it out of a cabinet..
You put the male part in the female part, he heard his dad say as if from a great distance, far, far in the future. You do it like this, son. Insert the male part right here. Just stick it in the hole. There. See? Easy peasy.
No!
The scene shifted, but not to where Losman had hoped. He was now in a highchair, in the kitchen in Manayunk, and his dad was seated beside him, feeding him buttery mashed potatoes with a silver spoon, making airplane noises with each mouthful he pushed toward baby Losman.
“Brrrrrrrrrrrrrr—incoming! Open up for Air Danny!”
Baby Losman’s mouth closed around a spoon laden with food and he was gumming the bland, paste-like substance.
His dad’s beard was trim and neatly groomed. No gray yet. He had a full head of hair and those same thick, plastic eyeglasses he would wear for decades. He looked like a graduate student in dentistry. Adult Losman did the math. If he was an infant in this memory, his dad must be twenty-seven—much younger than Losman was now.
His father squinched his face into a parody of a clown. Baby Losman laughed, spewing a hunk of food on his high-chair tray. A fucking happy memory again.
“Oh, look what I’ve done,” his dad said in mock seriousness, wiping baby Losman’s mouth with a paper towel. Adult Losman felt the force of his father’s hand scrape against his chin and, in spite of himself, delighted in the touch. His father was a whole person again, his mind sharp and there. Young. Still relatively fit and muscular. What a gift, adult Losman thought, a bonus.
I love you, Dad, he said. But, of course, his father couldn’t hear him.
And now they were playing catch in the local park. Losman saw the baseball coming right directly at his face and in the very last instant the glove went up and caught the ball and Losman was throwing it back to his waiting dad, who snatched it out of the air and tossed it back. Again and again and again. His dad wore a plain white T-shirt, cut-off jean shorts, and a Phillies cap. This memory was a few years later, and his father had a beer belly now, a soft, round lump like a partially deflated basketball, but he must’ve been in his mid-thirties. Still the strong, vital man Losman had adored as a boy. The version he remembered the best, active and happy and a little goofy.
He’d picked the right pill after all, he thought, momentarily disoriented, but his rare triumph didn’t last. In the very next instant he was dumped into a blackness so sudden and total he feared he’d gone blind. He was bodyless now, floating in an empty space as vast as a universe or as tiny as a pinhead, he didn’t know which. Entombed, that’s the word that came to him. And he screamed in terror.
Time passed—how much Losman wasn’t sure.
“Hello!?” he called out, his adult voice a disembodied echo like before. He felt for his arms and legs and face, but found he had no arms, legs, or face. “Hello!!?”
No babyself.
Absolute silence. Deathlike stillness.
A streak of red lightning flashed through the blackness, sizzling and popping like fire before vanishing. A moment later, another. And then another. And then another. Until the blackness around him was luminous with thin, sinewy forks of crackling, blood-red lightning.
And then, jarringly, he was thrust into his babyself again, wrapped in his father’s strong arms, going up and down. Loud music blared from an 8-track player, Led Zeppelin’s “Tangerine.”
It was his childhood bedroom in Manayunk. And oh was it a relief to see.
His father was painting the wall with a thick brush smeared with navy-blue paint. Losman’s toddler hands reached into his line of vision and rested on his father’s much larger hand, and Losman could feel the tiny hairs on his father’s fingers.
“Are you helping out, buddy?”
The smell was acrid, harsh—and adult Losman suddenly recalled this smell. This stench. How it had lingered for years in his bedroom, faint but ever-present. He’d slept in it, played in it, lived in it. Hated it. Now he watched helplessly as his father splattered it on his walls.
His father began to sing along with Robert Plant, off-key, tone deaf, right in baby Losman’s ear.
And the scene shifted once more. His father was gone, and he, Losman, was walking down the street with a teenaged Aksel, a bright, sunny day in Copenhagen and the two were headed to the park. Aksel was tall and slender now, gangly, with long, scraggly hair and an Adam’s apple. Acne pitted. He carried a baseball bat and a glove, Losman a bucket of wiffle balls. They found an empty patch of grass beside a woman in a yellow bikini. When Losman set the bucket down, she turned and looked up at him, but her face was cracked and fragmented, like shattered glass.
How was this possible? he wondered. How? This was no memory. This was the future. Or, no, it was some sort of fantasy mixed with his memory of yesterday.
Why was he here? In this place? Something was missing too, he sensed, something essential. Something he couldn’t name. He was moving his feet, he was walking, but he had no volition. He was not in control of his own body. He was hovering above it, observing the scene as if from the height of a drone, in a soundless vacuum, a surreal silence.
The woman in the yellow bikini faded like a ghost and vanished.
Clouds formed, gray-black and immense, and scurried across the darkening sky. It began to rain. Buildings rose up like thousand-eyed monsters, fell away. Colors dripped, and Copenhagen melted into a runny black smudge.
Losman watched himself reach out to Aksel, dropping his hand on the boy’s knobby shoulder. But when Aksel turned around, it was not Aksel—it was himself, it was Losman—and he realized what was missing in this fantasy: his babyself.
His babyself was gone, and Losman was sitting on a riser in Mrs. Graham’s classroom surrounded by his classmates, but their faces were as fragmented as the woman in the yellow bikini’s had been, as though some kind of acid had been spilled on this memory and it had been contaminated, destroyed. But his classmates weren’t important to him, Losman thought, only Mrs. Graham. And her face was not distorted. It looked exactly as he remembered. She was seated on a chair before her students. A short, plump woman with thin, dark hair and skin like bleached stone, she was wearing a simple black skirt matched with a blue blouse, a colorful silk shawl, and hoop earrings.
“Ladies and germs!” she announced like the ringmaster of a circus. Her voice was surprisingly brassy, deeper than Losman recalled. She placed a record on the turntable and dropped the needle carefully. “Please listen to the brilliance of this song.”
The needle scratched the record, and the familiar trio of clarinets formed the intro to “When I’m 64” and Paul McCartney was singing the first verse.
Losman had done it. He’d found the memory. He was here. Finally, he would find out what had happened. But even this triumph was short-lived, because in that very same moment he noticed something truly horrifying. He was in his adult body, and he was completely, undeniably, one-hundred thousand percent certifiably naked and erect.
And he was instantly propelled through a thick, smoky haze toward a circle of white light.
Losman came to, on his knees, naked. Slowly and groggily, he emerged into the bright, effervescent light of consciousness. A few moments later, Losman saw a hand—undeniably his own—diddling with his penis, whapping it back and forth like a toy. Without his eyeglasses, Losman’s vision was bleary, unfocused. He tried to squint but could not.
What the fuck? Was he awake, he wondered, or still inside a memory?
Laughter emerged from his throat, but it was not his laughter. It was the small, mousey laughter of a delighted child, a toddler.
Where am I? What’s happening?
The laughter, louder this time, more hysterical. The insistent bark of a seal.
Losman saw the floor getting closer, his body somehow moving on its own, his erection like the dial of a compass guiding the way. He was crawling on his knees now, feeling no pain, no sensation whatsoever, pulling at the box of toy trains, tipping it over, spilling its contents with a clatter. He watched his hands aimlessly push a stack of tracks. What was happening to him? How were his hands moving?
And Losman realized, to his horror, that he was awake and inside the mind of his babyself, who was now in charge. The pill had worked in reverse. Rather than his adultself entering his babyself to retrieve his memories, his babyself had entered his adultself and overtaken his body. Losman could see through his own nearsighted eyes, but he was incapable of acting or moving his own limbs. His body had become a toy, like Optimus Prime, one of Aksel’s Transformers, and Losman was simply a tiny passenger within its skull.
Fuck.
His hands tossed the tracks aside, and Losman’s giggling babyself returned to his penis. When the erection suddenly deflated, becoming as flaccid as a cooked noodle, it was a small mercy.
But this mercy only seemed to confuse the toddler, spurring him to acts of aggression. Something was wrong with his toy. With the toddler in charge, Losman’s body shifted its hips, and his soft penis waggled from right to left, left to right. The toddler clutched the penis with Losman’s hand and slapped it back and forth.
How long have I been in here? When did I climb out of bed? When did I remove my clothes? He couldn’t recall anything of the morning; it was like having a blackout following a night of excessive drinking. Judging by the light in the apartment, a bright boxy square entering from the east and casting its wide net on the couch and the dining table, it definitely was morning.
Losman focused every ounce of energy on influencing the toddler in charge. Get up. Find my glasses. Put some clothes on for god’s sake.
Get out of my body.
Let me be me.
But influencing the toddler in charge was like eating tomato soup with chopsticks.
What if I’m stuck like this forever?
Losman wanted to cry. He should have listened to Pelin; he shouldn’t have stolen her pills.
Sound emerged from his mouth, an indecipherable blabber, the approximation of human speech. Losman recognized it as the nonsense sounds a baby makes when it’s learning language.
Losman was still on his knees, the toddler inside him was still diddling with his penis, when there was a knock on the door.
Trapped like a prisoner inside his own head, all Losman could do was watch. A blur of movement, his naked body squatting on his haunches, blabbering babytalk. Crawling forward.
Toward the door.
No. Please no. Don’t go to that door!
But he was not in control, the toddler was. Blurting gibberish, the toddler pulled and yanked and prodded at the handle. From deep within the kid’s muffled brain, as if far down the end of a long, spacious hallway, Losman heard a woman’s voice on the other side of the door, unintelligible. Lo…n? Lome?
Somehow—as if accidentally—the toddler unclicked the latch and whoever was in the hall slowly inched it open.
When Losman saw who it was, even in a blurry, unfocused form, he wanted to crawl into a cave and die. He wanted to put a gun in his mouth and pull the trigger. He wanted to leap out the window to his death. He wanted a nuclear explosion to destroy the world. He wanted to be anywhere, anywhere, but right here, right now, inside the head of his naked body. Literally helpless as a baby. Taking that pill had been a terrible, terrible blunder, and he would pay for this blunder for the rest of his life as surely as his name was Daniel P. Losman. Beginning now. From behind the veil, Losman watched as Caroline slowly took form in the doorway. She wore a flouncy blue summer dress patterned with what appeared to Losman’s poor eyes to be yellow daisies. Perched like a huge bird on her head was an enormous, wide-brimmed sun hat, which, when coupled with her silky white, elbow-length gloves, made her look like one of those fashionable women who dudded up to watch the Kentucky Derby. A small, slender rope of hair, dyed purple, poked out from underneath the brim. She was barefoot, and her toenails were painted a plum-purple to match her hair.
The toddler in charge was captivated by this new thing in the room, a big-hatted woman with purple hair and toenails.
After the split-second it took Caroline to fully absorb the elemental fact of Losman’s spectacular nakedness, she reared a step back, stifling a scream with her hand.
“Oh my God,” Caroline said, eyes bulging from their sockets. “Losman? What are you doing?”
In response, the toddler in him shrieked with delight. Yeeeeeee!
“Losman? What’s the matter with you?”
The toddler in charge blathered babytalk. Caroline stood frozen in place, her eyes darting from Losman to the stairwell, from danger to safety. Fight or flight.
I’m not going to hurt you! Losman screamed. But of course she couldn’t hear him.
Losman’s arms shot up as if to say, Pick me up! Pick me up!
Caroline retreated until her back was jammed against the door frame and she couldn’t go any farther. She peered into the hallway and seemed poised to run, to escape this bizarre spectacle, when the toddler in charge of Losman’s body suddenly tipped him to the floor and began to bawl. Whaaaaaaaaa.
“Losman, my God. What is wrong with you?”
I’m in here! Help me.
He blacked out. Returned to that vast dark space with its streaking red forks. The sky—if you could call it that—filled with an aurora borealis of glowing light. Explosions of bright red dots, splashes of ink, networks of lines. That sizzling sound like frying bacon. Losman saw this like in a dream. From within this pulsing glow, a plush toy with huge eyes stared at Losman, its stumpy arms and legs lacking hands and feet. Solly! Though it had no mouth to speak, Losman heard it plainly say in a child’s pleading, trusting voice, “Up! Up!”
He was thrust into a new memory, into a new consciousness, one that shivered and pulsed and tried desperately to expel him. Something gripped him and began to thrash him about. Like being in a mosh pit at a heavy metal concert, he felt he was being pushed and shoved by many hands at once. He was standing at his 8th grade locker next to Alicia Adams, the cute blond he’d crushed on until she was a sophomore and moved away. Horrified, Adult Losman recognized the scene, and he wanted to back out immediately, but he was forced to watch.
“Hi,” Alicia said, giving his younger self a cute little wave.
Young Losman could not speak to Alicia, could not even look at her. He rummaged pointlessly in his locker—for what? His books? Adult Losman was overwhelmed by the raging emotions inside his gawky adolescent self, the heart-pounding fear and crippling anxiety, and felt like he was on fire, burning up from within.
“Are you going to the dance on Friday?” Alicia said. Losman was surprised to hear her deep Long Island accent, the way the ‘a’ in dance stretched like a piece of chewed bubblegum. Had he noticed that back in school? He remembered, vaguely, that she’d moved to his district in 5th or 6th grade, but at that age he wasn’t particularly interested in dialects. Young Losman dared a quick glance in Alicia’s direction, allowing adult Losman to see that she was wearing a turtleneck sweater patterned with bright red squares across her chest. Her enormous hair was spiked up high with what must’ve been an entire can of ozone-depleting hairspray, and she smelled of Baby Soft perfume. Adult Losman felt an incredibly powerful urge to touch Alicia’s ostrich poof of hair, to crunch it down beneath his hand until his fingers were sticky. Alicia glanced back at the three girls who’d made Losman’s life a constant churn of humiliation throughout middle and high school—Jenny Woods, Amy Potter, and Stephanie Torrance—and because his younger self wouldn’t let him fully enter his consciousness, adult Losman saw what his younger self never did: the smile. The girls’ stifled giggles. This was a trick, a dare, and poor Losman was the target.
“Maybe,” his younger self managed to say. “You?”
“I am. Do you want to go with me?”
“Me?”
“Uh huh. Do you want to go with me?”
“Okay. Yeah. Sure!”
“I know you do,” Alicia said, ramping up to deliver the line that would haunt Losman for months. First she blinked rapidly and jerked her head, mocking him without mercy. “But there’s no way I’d go with you, Blinky.”
She spun on her heels and returned to her cluster of friends, who roared with laughter and high fived her. “Oh, my God,” he heard Amy Potter say. “I can’t believe you actually did it!”
Adolescent Losman leaned his forehead against his cool metal locker and crumpled inside, and adult Losman felt the hot tears brimming in his eyes. A teacher emerged from her classroom, Mrs. Johnson, and gently touched Losman’s shoulder. “Losman?” she said. “Can you hear me, Losman?”
“Can you hear me, Losman?” Caroline said. Losman’s eyelids slowly parted, and he saw Caroline’s blurry face hovering inches from his, her hand lightly tapping his cheek. She spoke to him like a mother to her feverish child. “Losman, I don’t know what’s happened to you, but you’ve got to wake up.”
The toddler in charge babbled his response.
Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. He’s still in there.
Caroline stood up and moved out of the toddler’s sight. A moment later she returned with a T-shirt, shorts, and a pair of tighty-whities. She dropped the garments on the floor one by one. “You need to put something on before Kat arrives, Losman.”
At this the toddler mewled like a giant baby.
Kat’s coming?
Because Losman’s body was dead weight, Caroline had to roll him back and forth to pull his underwear on, grunting from the strain. The toddler made no effort to help. A bead of sweat formed on Caroline’s forehead, and her face flushed crimson. Once his underwear was on, she paused to take a breath before repeating the process with his shorts, until Losman looked like a man ready for a nice brisk jog on a beautiful spring day.
Caroline looked him over. She said, slowly, as though he were deaf or dumb or both, “Kat will be here any minute. Do you understand?”
There was a series of loud knocks on the door, three hard claps. Even through the muffle in his ears, Losman could hear them. He groaned, knowing that it was Kat and fearing her fury. Why the fuck would you do this to yourself? he imagined her yelling. He would have no answer. A moment later, Kat entered in a flurry of movement. As if on cue, Losman’s lips made butterfly noises and he began to blabber.
Jesus fucking Christ.
“How long as he been like this?” Kat asked Caroline, staring down at him on the floor as if from a great height, her face a blur.
“I don’t know. He was like this when I arrived.”
Kat squatted and put her hand on his forehead. “He doesn’t feel hot.”
“I don’t think it’s a fever. He’s just acting—really strange.”
“Losman,” Kat said. “Losman, can you hear me?”
I can hear you!
“He’s not responsive,” Caroline said. “Shouldn’t we call an ambulance?”
No! Don’t call an ambulance! Call Pelin! Look in the drawer!
Losman’s hand tugged at his crotch, and Kat pulled it away.
“He’s been doing that a lot,” Caroline said. “I can’t make him stop.”
Kat pursed her lips in a tight, thin line, the way she did when she was chewing on a particularly meaty question. She cupped his chin and turned his head this way and that. Leaning forward, she lowered her face to Losman’s, close enough that he could see the fuzzy blond down of her facial hair, and gently lifted his eyelids. It was as if he were sitting in a command tower and this giant fifty-foot-woman was putting her eyeball directly up to the glass and peering inside—as if she knew he was in there.
To Caroline, she said, “His pupils are dilated. Did you notice that?”
Caroline came forward and leaned in next to Kat. With their heads side by side, they appeared to Losman like blue-eyed conjoined twins, though one had a bright streak of purple hair. He babbled and drooled.
“Losman,” Kat said. “Are you on drugs?”
You could say that.
Caroline said, “He told me the other day that he’d taken some pills from this memory therapy he was part of.”
“The fucking idiot!” Kat hissed in English. She walked away and returned a few moments later holding what Losman recognized as a business card: Pelin’s. She must’ve found it on his desk. He’d forgotten about that card, and seeing it now jolted him with relief.
The toddler had begun to whimper. It was now hungry.
Caroline stuck her finger in Losman’s mouth, and the toddler began to suckle, making the wet, squishy, satisfied sounds of a nursing child.
Great. Just great.
Kat took out her cell phone and punched in Pelin’s number. She jammed the cell to her ear and began pacing the floor out of Losman’s view.
Pelin must’ve answered her phone right away, because Losman suddenly heard Kat’s raised voice punctuated by moments of silence.
“What the fuck is wrong with him?”
…
“He’s acting like a baby!”
…
“How am I supposed to know?”
…
“What do the pills look like?”
…
“What color did you say? Yellow?”
…
Losman’s toddler mouth continued to suckle on Caroline’s finger.
“I found them,” Kat said. “Two yellow pills with BhMe4 inscribed on them. Is that what you mean? Yes? Okay. You have to do something.”
…
“How long will you be?”
Kat hung up. She stood over Losman. “You stole her pills? What the hell were you thinking?”
I don’t know.
“Look at you. Jesus Christ.” She took a deep breath and turned to Caroline. She exhaled. “I’m sorry, but I have to go. If I stay here any longer, I’m going to explode. This Pelin woman will be here in fifteen minutes. She says she’ll take him to their lab. Can you stay with him until she arrives?”
“Yes.”
“Thank you,” Kat said, sounding both relieved and exasperated. She stormed out of Losman’s apartment, slamming the door behind her.
I’m really sorry, Kat. I didn’t mean for this to happen.
“Well,” Caroline said to him, “I guess you’re hungry. Let’s get you something to eat.” She found Losman’s eyeglasses on his nightstand. “Are you in there, Losman? Do you need your glasses?”
Yes, please.
With some difficulty, she helped him to his feet and guided him clumsily to his small dining table. She rummaged in his drawers until she found one of Aksel’s bibs and put it on him. From the fridge she withdrew a carton of yoghurt and scooped the yoghurt into a ceramic bowl with a spoon. She sat down beside Losman, dipped the spoon into the bowl, and scraped up a blob of yoghurt. “You know what’s funny?” she said. “I spend a lot of time imaging myself as someone else, getting dressed up, pretending. And here you actually are someone else. A baby. What’s it like?”
Caroline held Losman’s chin steady and inserted the spoon into his mouth. “I know you can’t talk, so I’m going to do it for you. I wonder if you’ll remember what happened to you when you return to normal.” She paused to give Losman a look of grave concern. “I hope you return to normal, Losman.”
You and me both.
Caroline peered into his face with her cool blue eyes. “My ex-boyfriend used to like it when I wore costumes,” she said. “It turned him on. I didn’t dress up for him, I did it for myself, but I let him believe it. It was easier that way.”
The toddler spat a hunk of yoghurt from Losman’s mouth and laughed hysterically.
“I want to find myself, Losman,” Caroline said, patiently wiping his mouth and chin with a tea towel, “but I also want to be someone else. Do you know what that’s like? To be stretched in two directions at once?”
I know exactly what it’s like.
“You’re really a piece of work right now, Losman, you know that?”
She lay the soiled tea towel down on the table. “I grew up on the west coast of Jutland, on the North Sea, about as far away from Copenhagen as you can get. I hated it there, Losman. Hated it. I was desperate to leave.” She paused to scoop another spoonful of yoghurt. “I can’t ever live there again. It would kill me. My brother is the assistant branch manager of the Brugsen in my hometown. Working at a grocery store is a practical occupation, my parents say, because people need to eat. You’ll always have a job, they tell me, you can’t make any money drawing measly portraits. That’s what my parents think I draw. Measly portraits. When are you going to get a real job? they ask. They don’t accept me for who I am and it’s demoralizing. Their attitude is like a poisonous worm in my brain, constantly feeding and drizzling its toxins, and thanks to this worm, sometimes I think they’re right. I am worthless, I will never amount to anything. That’s why I dress up like others, Losman: I want to be someone else. You probably don’t know what that’s like.”
I do, Caroline! Trust me, I do.
Caroline went on in this vein for several minutes, and Losman was startled by her high degree of self-loathing. He listened as the toddler whined.
“When I was ten,” she said as she was changing his shirt, which was now lumpy with thick white splotches of yoghurt, “my family rented a cottage in Skagen. You know Skagen, right? The beautiful port town famous for its light and its beaches? When the tide is low there, temporary islands form. Sandbars. They are very pretty, but also really dangerous because the North Sea, Skagerrak, and the Kattegat all collide there. Well, that summer a German tourist swam out to one of these sandbars about a kilometer from shore. Before long the tide rolled in and cut him off from the mainland, trapping him. The waters raged all around him, crashing into one another, and slowly ate up his island. Within minutes he’d drowned. There was nothing he could do. He’d watched his island shrink, knowing that he was going to die.
“I cried and cried, Losman, until my mother took me back to the cottage where we were staying. To this day, she thinks I was crying because the man drowned. It was very sad, it really was, and I don’t mean to make light of his death, which was awful, but I wasn’t crying for him, Losman. I was crying because even at age ten I understood the symbolism in his death. I was afraid I would drown if I stayed in West Jutland.
“I don’t know how many times I’ve painted this man since. Someday I will show you my collection.”
I want to go with you to Skagen, Caroline, I want to see your collection.
By the time Pelin arrived—with Jens in tow—Caroline had fed Losman, cleaned his face, and changed his shirt. Like a mother preparing her son for a school trip, she’d even packed his Phillies duffel as an overnight bag with a change of clothes, his toiletries, and a snack.
Jens shoved his hand under Losman’s armpit and guided him slowly down the stairwell, ramming the full force of his bulk against Losman’s body. Since Losman couldn’t offer any help, it was slow going, and he could hear Jens’s muffled panting heavy in his ear; a big man who was clearly more comfortable in a library than a gym, his face turned the color of a freshly harvested peach from the exertion. Pelin and Caroline followed closely behind, helping whenever necessary to keep Losman’s body balanced and stable on his feet. Once they’d finally reached the sidewalk, a passerby gawked at Losman as he toddled toward the open car door, mouth open, drooling like someone who’d had a stroke.
Fuck off!
Jens carefully lowered him onto the backseat and Losman slid down on his side, limp as a doll. Pelin climbed in the back with him and sat on the edge of the seat. From the medical kit at her feet, she withdrew a syringe as long as a butter knife. The last thing Losman saw before his eyelids closed was the look of severe disappointment on Pelin’s face as she jabbed the needle into his thigh.