Fading to Diapers

The needle went in at 7:42, and I know that because I watched the clock the whole time. Not the needle. I didn't watch that. I watched the second hand on the clinic wall, the one that stutters between the twelve and the one like it's thinking about whether to keep going, and I counted my breaths the way Dr. Larkin told me to. In through the nose. Out through the mouth. Four counts each. She said it would help with the panic.

It didn't help with the panic.

"Almost done," she said, and her voice had that careful, padded quality that people use around the dying and the very young. I wasn't either one, not yet, but the room smelled like both. Alcohol swabs and baby powder. The paper on the exam table crinkled under my thighs every time I shifted, and I'd been shifting for twenty minutes, and the crinkling had become a kind of music, the only sound in the room besides the hum of the refrigerator where they kept the vials.

I'm twenty-six years old. I have a lease on a one-bedroom in Rogers Park and a cat named Bishop who hates me and a job at a call center where I say the same seven sentences forty times a day. I have a mother in Phoenix who calls on Sundays and a father I haven't spoken to in three years and a therapist I stopped seeing because she kept asking me what I wanted and I kept not having an answer. I have a body that has never felt like mine, not in the way other people seem to mean it. Not in the way that makes them say *my* hands, *my* legs, *my* life.

Dr. Larkin pulled the needle out and pressed a cotton ball to the crook of my elbow. "Hold this," she said, and I did. She peeled off her gloves and dropped them in the bin and sat down on the rolling stool, and the stool squeaked when she settled her weight, and she looked at me the way you look at a dog you're about to leave at the vet's.

"You'll feel it in about half an hour," she said. "The first dose is mild. We titrate up over the next six weeks. By the end, you'll be at full saturation."

"Full saturation," I repeated. The words felt like stones in my mouth.

"It's a metaphor," she said. "Mostly."

I'd signed the papers. I want to be clear about that. Nobody forced me. Nobody held me down. I sat in a chair with a clipboard on my lap and I read every line, and the lines said things like *informed consent* and *voluntary regression* and *permanent neurological restructuring*, and I signed my name at the bottom, and my signature looked the way it always looks, like a spider fell in ink and dragged itself across the page. I signed it because I wanted to. I signed it because I'd been wanting something for so long that the wanting had become a kind of weather, and this was the first time anyone had offered me a forecast.

The clinic was on the third floor of a building that used to be a dentist's office. There was still a tooth on the sign downstairs, faded and chipped, and the elevator smelled like cloves. Dr. Larkin had a plant on her desk that was dying and a framed picture of a golden retriever that I was pretty sure was stock. She had soft hands and a voice that never went above a certain volume, and she'd explained the procedure to me twice, once in her office and once in the exam room, and both times she'd said the same thing at the end.

"This isn't about making you someone else," she'd said. "It's about making you someone you can live with."

I'd nodded both times. I'd wanted to believe her.

The cotton ball was soaked through. I dropped it in the trash and looked at the tiny red dot on my arm, and I thought about how small the entry wound was, how easy it would be to miss if you weren't looking. The chemical was already moving through me. I couldn't feel it yet, but I knew it was there, the way you know a train is coming before you see the light.

"Can I go home?" I asked.

"Not yet. We need to observe you for the first hour. Just to make sure there's no adverse reaction."

"Adverse reaction."

"Swelling. Rash. Seizure. The usual."

She said it like she was reading a grocery list. I laughed, and it came out wrong, too high, and she didn't laugh with me. She just watched me with those soft, careful eyes, and I understood that she'd done this before, that I was not the first person to sit on this table and count the seconds, that somewhere in her files there were other names, other signatures, other people who'd wanted something so badly they'd let a stranger put a needle in their arm.

The clock said 7:51.

I thought about the boy I used to be. Not the man I am now, the one with the lease and the cat and the call center voice. The boy underneath. The one who used to lie in bed at night and imagine what it would be like to wake up without the weight. Without the knowing. Without the constant, grinding awareness that something was wrong with the way he was put together, that the seams were showing, that everyone could see.

I'd tried to fix it myself. I'd tried meditation and medication and the kind of exercise that leaves you too tired to think. I'd tried dating men who looked like my father and men who looked nothing like him. I'd tried moving to a new city and then another one. I'd tried being someone else for so long that I'd forgotten what my own voice sounded like when it wasn't performing.

None of it worked.

The chemical was different. The chemical didn't ask me to try. It didn't ask me to be brave or disciplined or patient. It just went in and did its work, and the work was to take the boy I used to be and bring him back to the surface, and the man I'd become would just have to get out of the way.

That was the deal.

Dr. Larkin stood up and checked my pulse. Her fingers were cool against my wrist. "Good," she said. "You're doing good."

I wanted to ask her what she meant by that. Good at what? Good at sitting? Good at waiting? Good at letting a stranger decide what version of me got to live in this body? But I didn't ask. I just nodded, because nodding was easier, and because the chemical was starting to do something, a faint warmth in my chest, a loosening in my jaw that I hadn't noticed was tight until it wasn't.

"What does it feel like?" I asked.

"The first time? Like falling asleep in a warm bath. You don't notice the moment you slip under. You just wake up somewhere else."

"And the hypnosis?"

"That comes later. Once the chemical has done its work, the hypnosis just reinforces it. Think of it like a trellis. The chemical is the vine. The hypnosis is the frame that tells it which way to grow."

I didn't like that image. It made me think of being shaped, trained, bent toward someone else's idea of what I should be. But I'd signed the papers. I'd read every line. And the truth was, I didn't know which way I wanted to grow. I never had. That was the whole problem.

The clock said 8:02.

Dr. Larkin handed me a cup of water and a small white pill. "For the anxiety," she said. "It'll help with the transition."

I took the pill. I drank the water. I lay back on the table and stared at the ceiling, which was that same acoustic tile they use in schools and hospitals, the kind with the little holes that make you think of a speaker, of a voice coming from somewhere you can't see.

The warmth in my chest spread down my arms and up my neck. It wasn't unpleasant. It was like being held, if being held was something that happened to your insides instead of your outsides. I closed my eyes and I saw the boy I used to be, standing at the edge of a field, waiting for someone to tell him where to go.

I opened my eyes and the clock said 8:11.

"I think it's starting," I said.

Dr. Larkin wrote something on her clipboard. She didn't look up. "Good," she said. "Just let it happen."

And I did. I let it happen. I let the chemical move through me like water finding its level, and I let the boy come back, and I let the man I'd been start to fade, and somewhere in the space between one breath and the next, I stopped counting.