Mark Dunn - The Age Altertron

“What are you laughing about, you chubby baby!” Rodney squeaked.

“ You !” answered Wayne. “Those underpants look huge on you!”

“And you don’t have on huge underpants yourself?” Rodney shot back.

“I guess so,” said Wayne sheepishly. “I guess we both look pretty foolish.”

“Oh you look adorable!” said Aunt Mildred as she picked Rodney up and put him down on the floor. Then she went to Wayne’s bed and began to undress him. Once the boys had both been set upon the floor, they attempted together to pull themselves up into a standing position by climbing their little hands up their bedposts. After some grunting and a great deal of effort, they got themselves to their feet. It was a good start.

“Now come toward me, boys,” said Aunt Mildred, lowering herself to a squat. “Let me see if you are still babies or if you’ve reached the toddler stage yet.”

Rodney took a step away from his bed and promptly fell down. Wayne took a step away from his own bed and then another step and then another, each one coming faster than the last, until he was hurtling uncontrollably toward Aunt Mildred, on a collision course with her bony knees. Just short of his great aunt’s outstretched arms, Wayne toppled headlong to the floor.

“But that’s a good sign, isn’t it?” said Aunt Mildred, helping Wayne into a seated position and then clapping her hands gleefully together as if the boys really were babies who required encouragement. “It means that you just have to work at it a little and you’ll both be up and walking around in no time.”

Rodney scowled. “What are you talking about, Aunt Mildred?” he said through his tiny baby mouth. “We’re not going to stay like this! I’m sure that the Professor is in his laboratory right this moment working on a machine to undo this. Can you take us to his house?”

“Right now? Right this very minute? But I have to get you some breakfast! I have to buy baby food! I have to go up into the attic and find your high chairs and find the double baby carriage that I used to roll you around in. It will take me all morning to get things ready for us to go to the Professor’s house. Why don’t I just call him up on the phone and have him come over?”

Rodney and Wayne looked at one another and shrugged. It probably did work better for the Professor to come there.

“Now crawl around if you like, but be careful and don’t pull any table lamps down on your heads.” (Aunt Mildred was always worried about things coming down on people’s heads and giving them amnesia as was always happening to the characters in her favorite radio soap opera Helen Grant, Backstage Nurse. )

Rodney scowled anew. “Aunt Mildred, we might look like babies to you, but we’re actually thirteen-year-olds who are merely trapped inside the bodies of babies.”

Aunt Mildred nodded. “I must remember that it is our physical bodies that have gotten younger and not our brains, or else you would not be able to talk to me the way you are and would be drooling a little. Please forgive me, boys. But I must say, though: it is such a delight to see you so young and adorable again. I so hated it when you boys had to grow up.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” said Wayne, trying his best to be agreeable, but still sounding like something the world had never before seen: a sarcastic baby.

From down the hall now came the sound of a ringing telephone. “Speak of the Devil! That could be Russell — I mean Professor Johnson!” exclaimed Aunt Mildred, clapping her hands together excitedly.

The now fifty-three-year-old Aunt Mildred who didn’t look a day over forty-nine put her hand to her chest as if to slow her fastbeating heart. “I wonder what the Professor will look like! Quite dashing, I’m sure!”

Wayne and Rodney sat on the floor and stared at each other in silence as they listened to their aunt scampering down the hallway. Then they could hear her talking on the phone, although she was too far away for them to tell what she was saying.

“You just watch, Wayne,” Rodney finally said. “I’ll be running all around this house before the end of the day. By tomorrow the both of us will be hard at work in the Professor’s lab, helping him to make this calamity go away.”

“And how will we do that , Rodney? I can’t even make my fingers work by themselves. Look. I’m trying to point at you but all the fingers are pointing together.”

“Then we have to train our hands the same way we will train our legs!” Rodney was trying to have a positive attitude but it wasn’t easy for him.

“At least I’m further along with the walking than you ,” said Wayne, beaming. Wayne was proud of the fact that he had just propelled himself across the room upon his own two legs while Rodney was still having difficulty taking his very first step.

Rodney looked around for something he could throw at Wayne to put him in his place. Seeing nothing that he could even lift with his small arms, he just sat and sighed until Aunt Mildred came back into the room. She was no longer smiling. In fact, she seemed quite upset.

“It’s really quite terrible. I don’t even know how to say it.”

“Say it!” said Wayne. “Tell us what’s wrong.”

“Boys, that was Petey’s father, Mr. Ragsdale. Petey is gone. He wasn’t in his bed when everyone woke up this morning.”

“But if Rodney and I woke up as babies, then Petey would have woken up as a baby too!” said Wayne. “Has he been kidnapped?”

Rodney shook his head sadly. “I can tell you what has happened, Wayne. How many years younger were we when we woke up this morning?”

“A little over eleven-and-a-half years was our estimate,” said Aunt Mildred gravely.

“And how old was Petey yesterday?”

“He turned eleven in July,” said Wayne.

“So Petey hasn’t been kidnapped. It’s even worse than that: he hasn’t even been born yet!”

In which the Professor puts his head out a window, Becky makes a mess in the kitchen, and a lost child places an important telephone call from an undisclosed location

Later that morning, Rodney and Wayne sat on the sofa in the room which their aunt called “the den” and which the boys called “the TV room,” and which their father had nicknamed his “bear cave.” Mr. McCall had given the room this name because it was the place where he watched all of his football games, roller derby matches, and championship boxing. This was the room in which Mr. McCall allowed himself to growl at the television and to be a grumbly bear when his favorite boxer or favorite football team did not perform their best. (Or when one of his favorite female roller derby skaters took a bad fall and eight other skaters skidded and tripped and landed right on top of her. Then the growl and the grumble would be replaced by a very loud ‘OOOF!’ or ‘YOWCH!’ or ‘MAN OH MAN, THAT HAS GOT TO HURT!’”)

Outside of this room Mr. McCall wasn’t much of a bear at all, but a soft-spoken man who made a quiet living writing books. Mr. McCall wrote serious, scholarly books about fairs and festivals and rodeos and circuses — any event in which people gathered together to throw balls at cans or watch animals do amazing things or observe people from other lands dressed in their native costumes.

When Mr. McCall was a young man, he attended the 1939–1940 New York World’s Fair, at the time one of the largest world’s fairs that had ever been staged. Mr. McCall later wrote a book about the New York World’s Fair, and one could find within the den/TV room/bear cave many pictures and posters and souvenirs from the fair. The souvenir Rodney and Wayne liked most from their father’s collection was a tabletop model of the fair’s “Trylon and Perisphere.” The model sat on a little table next to Mr. McCall’s easy chair. The actual Trylon was a tall, pointy tower that rose into the sky like the Washington Monument. Its companion, the Perisphere, was so large in actuality that fair visitors could ride a long escalator right into the middle of it to find out what the “World of Tomorrow” was going to look like.