By Jonathon Atkinson

Selected as winner of the 2023 New Ohio Review Fiction Contest by Megan Giddings

Infants develop the ability to see during their first months of life. They can’t discern figures against a background until they’re two or three months old, a milestone whose achievement comes as a shock. The resolution of so much detail out of that myopic blur is overwhelming, frightening; hence, at least in part, their characteristic astonished stare. Their field of vision remains cloudy until they are about a year old, at which point—setting aside the effects of our immersion in language and concepts, the coursing rush of lived life—a child’s vision reaches typical adult levels.

In the end, after considering dozens of ways of simulating an infant’s eyesight, we just smeared globs of Vaseline over the lenses of some old swimming goggles. That was one of the first things that we learned: exactitude, strictly speaking, wasn’t very important. The suits themselves we made using sweatshirts and sweatpants from the Target by our apartment complex. For each suit, we layered one sweatshirt over another; we then quilted the two sweatshirts together, creating many small pockets into which we stuffed hundreds of tiny glass beads. We repeated this layering and quilting technique with the sweatpants. The glass beads, which we ordered online in bulk, were what people use to fill weighted therapy blankets.

The suits were heaviest around the torso, to simulate the state babies are in before they can crawl, when they’re just learning to roll over. More important than the sheer amassment of weight, though, was finding its most effectively disorienting distribution. We wanted to unbalance, destabilize, ourselves. Our arms and legs could move freely—that was good—as long as we felt, and persisted in feeling, uncoordinated. We kept the hoods of the sweatshirts up to approximate the particular heaviness of an infant’s head.

*

We briefly considered taking turns playing the parent, or at least a supervising adult of some kind—a babysitter?—before abandoning that idea on grounds of creepiness. The two of us would be babies together. We read widely in preparation (“What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”, The Philosophical Baby, An Actor Prepares), but most important, probably, was Methods and Use of Hypnosis and Self-Hypnosis, by Bernard Hollander. I don’t know if this book is widely known, or how people with a serious interest in hypnosis would regard it. It’s old, originally published in 1928. We found a tattered copy at a Friends of the Library Sale. As the title suggests, the book offers guidance on self-hypnosis, although Hollander is quick to emphasize the inferiority of this approach compared to hypnosis by another person. “The relative inefficacy of self-hypnosis may be likened to the well-known inability to tickle oneself,” Hollander writes, “that poignant signal of the difference between self-affection and affection by another.” Though we regarded this truism skeptically—is it really impossible to tickle oneself?—we had the most success inducing trances in each other in tandem. We started each session that way.

*

The first session took place one evening in early January, after we got home from work. We drew our thick, beige curtains, left behind by whoever rented the apartment before us, put on our suits, and lay on the floor, a kitchen timer set for an hour.

My expectations were low. That seems important to say. This was the sort of idea the two of us would have talked about years before: the sort of joke that would have popped into one of our heads while doing the dishes, or in the final moments before falling asleep. The key to these jokes, or flights of fancy, was to draw out their entailments fully, to spell out the whole goofy scenario in exact detail. In this case, the back-and-forth kept escalating, I think, because we realized that fashioning these suits would actually be pretty low-tech. There was so little we felt we could do, but this seemed possible.

Rolling over for the first time felt like a miracle. You have to understand—I wasn’t one to get swept up in things. I would’ve thought my self-consciousness would get in the way, but for whatever reason, I settled right into the concerted focus of these evenings, the two of us lying on the rug, staring out at the large, blurry room. Rain (it rained so much that year) gusted against the window and tossed in the branches of the small gray trees that lined the sidewalk. Train horns blared in the distance. The pipes twisting through the hollows of our walls hummed. I could hear all of it so clearly. We had agreed that until the timer went off, we would only communicate using baby noises, and it was best to let those come—surface, we said—after an initial period of silence. They sounded less forced that way. In the morning, we sometimes wondered if these noises corresponded to the ones we had made as infants, if they resembled our original infant squeaks, our guttural murmurs.

*

When we put on the suits, we forgot how we had spent the preceding part of the day; forgot our weak, aching bodies; forgot that we were too tired to talk, to think. We hated our jobs, but knew that we couldn’t find different work, and that even if we did, whatever we found would be fundamentally indistinguishable from what we had been doing before. We forgot about that, and forgot, it sometimes seemed, where we were, and who we were to each other, and who we were. I had a sensation of dissolving, sometimes. It was as if we had always only been pretending, we said, and now we weren’t. A sensation of learning, constantly, furiously.

But although the suits aided us more in forgetting than in remembering, that forgetting was always incomplete. They never delivered us to anything resembling the temporal oblivion of actual infancy. This was disappointing at first, although we soon decided we were glad. The knowledge that something can end is the respite of memory, we said. And if something can end (the before of before and after), something can begin.

*

Spring came—April, then May. Daylight began to glow along the edges of the curtains, a high, faint outline that eventually outlasted our hour on the floor. We would scoot around, inching forward, struggling in what now seemed an impulsive way, as if we couldn’t help ourselves. I would roll over and tuck my knees under my belly, preparing to crawl. Or, still lying on my back, I would kick at the air, or brush my bare feet against the floor like an unsteady horse.

The effect of the suits had already begun to wear off. But because the change was subtle, for a while we were able to go on telling ourselves we were imagining things. Maybe the effect won’t ever wear off, we said; yes, that seemed unlikely, but then, so did this whole enterprise.

One of us would start to laugh, or sob, and soon the other one would join in, purely based on the sound rocking the body inches away. The laughter and especially the sobbing lacked all proportion. I can’t believe our neighbors never complained, that no one ever knocked on our door.

Our chins dripped with drool from sucking at our own hands and wrists. I pissed myself once but felt no shame. The hour was almost over, and maybe I dimly sensed that; I waited until the alarm went off to get up and change my pants. Sometimes we fell asleep on the floor. We would lie very still, our heads nestled in the crooks of our arms and our shoulders touching—so slightly that the sensation was less of touching someone else than of the air on your face when you first step outside.

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Jonathon Atkinson mentors with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop, has published work in Bright Wall / Dark Room and The Third Rail, and lives in Petaluma, California.