Speaking the same language as the nurse, a language Bill couldn't understand, the old man gestured towards Bill in an exaggerated manner, flashing a wide smile.
As if suddenly inspired by something, the old man no longer glanced at Bill. Immediately clapping his hands, he opened the door, and half a dozen people entered the room, each resembling Albert Einstein and carrying various oddly-looking devices.
While the room buzzed with activity, Bill couldn't notice anything due to his low vantage point. He could only grasp that these strange people had come for some reason, and this thought both soothed and worried him.
Straining his neck as much as he could, he looked around. His mother was once again lost in thought, but there was nothing else of note to him.
Only a minute later, Bill saw his familiar nurse enter the room, smile at him, turn to his mother, say something to her, and lift him up.
As they carried him out, Bill was struck by how the equipment brought into the room looked like fake scientific gadgets from a cartoon.
Bill: "Hmm..."
Rolling over to the crib frame, Bill pulled himself up. It had been a long time since he'd seen the old man with the golden gloves.
He still slept a lot, but not as much as before. With time, he started distinguishing "words" rather than just incomprehensible sounds.
Shortly after the incident with the old man, Bill was moved to a nursery for most of the day. Although he still slept in the same room as his mother, he no longer had to stay in the crib all the time.
His nurse was still the same middle-aged woman. If not for the bottle, he would have thought she was a professional wet nurse, considering he had seen her every day since birth. Thanks to her, Bill could now somewhat understand the meaning of various words because she almost constantly talked either to him or to the other infants in the nursery room.
Bill: "Well, I hope she gets paid for overtime, ha-ha."
He had repeated the same joke to himself for the five hundredth time, and it involuntarily made him smile. Overall, the days turned out not to be as bad as he had thought.
He wasn't sure exactly how much time had passed. Initially, he tried to keep track of the days, but after a few weeks, it no longer mattered. He was a healthy, growing infant, and his mother's condition seemed to have improved after the old man's visit. She still didn't speak and barely moved her face, but now he saw the nurse help her stand up and slowly walk around the room several times.
Whenever Bill saw this, one thought crossed his mind: "She is so tall..."
Unable to measure her height directly, he made a few assumptions. The first assumption: he was not a dwarf, but of average height. If this assumption was correct, then the nurse must be about one hundred sixty-eight centimeters tall, which would mean his mother must be at least eight feet tall. At a minimum.
This was bordering on an unreal height. To imagine this, his mother was tall enough to look down on Shaquille O'Neal or Yao Ming. A regular six-foot-tall man standing next to her would look like a child next to a parent.
Even stranger was the fact that the nurse could help this giant woman stand up and was confident enough in her strength not to fear what might happen if such a large woman fell.
If Bill had a second thought when he saw his mother stand and walk, it was how proportionate she was. When he saw her on the bed, he could tell that her head and hands looked quite normal. This was a good sign, as very tall people usually have bone problems.
Unusually shaped hands and heads are the most common signs, but they also tend to walk hunched over due to the immense strain on their bodies.
"But she walks completely normally..."
And that was the most important thing. His mother had been bedridden for at least a month—a period long enough for even physically fit people to start experiencing muscle atrophy—but when she got up, she looked like an ordinary beautiful woman—well, except for the fact that Bill couldn't quite get used to her elongated proportions.
He had lived many years, seen and heard many strange things, and although this didn't top his rebirth, it was one of the most unusual occurrences in his life.
"Well, it's good that she can be healthy."
Thinking this, Bill took a few steps while holding onto the crib railing and sat back down as his muscles began to tire.
Reflecting on all this, he came to another thought. One that had been bothering him since he stopped counting the days.
"Where is my father?"
Bill was born at a time when society expected children to be born only after marriage, and if a child was conceived before the wedding, the wedding was supposed to take place before the child was born. Over time, many things had changed, but in his heart, he still believed in this, especially considering that contraceptives had become better and more widespread.