Once the thighs’ anterior targets were achieved and touched with one or both lips, the upper portions of his genitals were simple, and were protrusively kissed and passed over even as plans for the ilium and outer buttocks were in conception. After these achievements would come the more difficult and neck-intensive contortions required to access the inner buttocks, perineum, and extreme upper groin.

The boy had turned seven.

The special place where he pursued his strange but newly mature objective was his room, which had wallpaper with a jungle motif. The second-floor window yielded a view of the back yard’s tree. Light from the sun came through the tree at different angles and intensities at different times of day and illuminated different parts of the boy as he stood, sat, inclined, or lay on the room’s carpet, stretching and holding positions. His bedroom’s carpet was white shag with a furry, polar aspect that the boy’s father did not think went well with the walls’ repeating scheme of tiger, zebra, lion, and palm, but the father kept his feelings to himself.

Radical increase of the lips’ protrusive range requires systematic exercise of the maxillary fasciae, such as the depressor septi, orbicularis oris, depressor anguli oris, depressor labii inferioris, and the buccinator, circumoral, and risorius groups. The zygomatic muscles are superficially involved. Praxis: Affix string to Wetherly button of at least 1.5-inch diameter borrowed from father’s second-best raincoat; place button over upper and lower front teeth and enclose with lips; hold string fully extended at ninety degrees to face’s plane and pull on end with gradually increasing tension, using lips to resist pull; hold for twenty seconds; repeat; repeat.

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Sometimes the boy’s father sat on the floor outside his bedroom with his back to the door, listening for movement in the room. It’s not clear whether the boy ever heard him, although the wood of the door sometimes made a creaky sound when the father sat down against it or stood back up in the hallway or shifted his position against the door. The boy was in there stretching and holding contorted positions for extraordinary periods of time. The father was a somewhat nervous man, with a rushed, fidgety manner that always lent him an air of imminent departure. He had extensive entrepreneurial activities and was in motion much of the time. His place in most people’s mental albums was provisional, with something like a dotted line around it—the image of someone saying something friendly over his shoulder as he heads for an exit. Often, clients found that the father made them uneasy. He was at his most effective on the phone.

By the time the child was eight, his long-term goal was beginning to affect his physical development. His teachers remarked on changes in his posture and gait. The boy’s smile, which appeared by now constant because of the effect of circumlabial hypertrophy on the circumoral musculature, looked unusual also—rigid and overbroad and seeming, in one custodian’s evaluative phrase, “like nothing in this round world.”

Facts: the Italian stigmatist Padre Pio carried wounds that penetrated both hands and feet medially throughout his lifetime. The Umbrian St. Veronica Giuliani presented with wounds in both hands and feet, as well as in her side, which wounds were observed to open and close on command. The eighteenth-century holy woman Giovanna Solimani permitted pilgrims to insert special keys in her hands’ wounds and to turn them, reportedly facilitating the pilgrims’ own recovery from rationalist despair.

According to both St. Bonaventura and Tomás de Celano, St. Francis of Assisi’s manual stigmata included baculiform masses of what presented as hardened black flesh extrudent from both volar planes. If and when pressure was applied to a palm’s so-called “nail,” a rod of flesh would immediately protrude from the back of the hand, exactly as if a real so-called “nail” were passing through the hand.

And yet (fact): Hands lack the anatomical mass required to support the weight of an adult human. Both Roman legal texts and modern examinations of a first-century skeleton confirm that classical crucifixion required nails to be driven through the subject’s wrists, not his hands. Hence the, quote, “necessarily simultaneous truth and falsity of the stigmata” that the existential theologist E. M. Cioran explicates in his 1937 “Lacrimi si Sfinti,” the same monograph in which he refers to the human heart as “God’s open wound.”

Areas of the boy’s midsection from navel to xiphoid process, at the cleft of his ribs, alone required nineteen months of stretching and postural exercises, the more extreme of which must have been very painful indeed. At this stage, further advances in flexibility were now subtle to the point of being undetectable without extremely precise daily record-keeping.

Certain tensile limits in the flava, capsule, and process ligaments of the neck and upper back were gently but persistently stretched, the boy’s chin placed to his (solubly arrowed and dotted) chest at mid-sternum and then slid incrementally down—one, sometimes 1.5 millimetres a day—and this catatonic and/or meditative posture held for an hour or more.

In the summer, during his early-morning routines, the tree outside the boy’s window became busy with grackles coming and going, and then, as the sun rose, filled with the birds’ harsh sounds, tearing sounds, which, as the boy sat cross-legged with his chin to his chest, sounded through the pane like rusty screws turning, some complexly stuck thing coming loose with a shriek. Past the southern exposure’s tree were the foreshortened roofs of neighborhood homes and the fire hydrant and street sign of the cross street and the forty-eight identical roofs of a low-income housing development beyond the cross street, and, past the development, just at the horizon, the edges of the verdant cornfields that began at the city limits. In late summer the fields’ green became more sallow, and then in the fall there was merely sad stubble, and in the winter the fields’ bare earth looked like nothing so much as just what it was.

At his elementary school, where his behavior was exemplary and his assignments completed and his progress charted at the medial apex of all relevant curves, the boy was, among his classmates, the sort of marginal social figure who was so marginal he was not even teased. As early as Grade 3, the boy had begun to develop along unusual physical lines as a result of his commitment to the objective; even so, something in his aspect or bearing served to place him outside the bounds of schoolyard cruelty. The boy followed classroom regulations and performed satisfactorily in group work. The written evaluations of his socialization described the boy not as withdrawn or aloof but as “calm,” “unusually poised,” and “self-containing” [sic]. The boy gave neither trouble nor delight and was not much noticed. It is not known whether this bothered him.

Nor was it ever established precisely why this boy had devoted himself to the goal of being able to press his lips to every square inch of his own body. It is not clear even that he conceived of the goal as an “achievement” in any conventional sense. Unlike his father, he did not read Ripley and had never heard of the McWhirters—certainly it was no kind of stunt. Nor any sort of self-evection; this is verified—the boy had no conscious wish to “transcend” anything. If someone had asked him, the boy would have said only that he’d decided he wanted to press his lips to every last micrometre of his own individual body. He would not have been able to say more than this. Insights into or conceptions of his own physical “inaccessibility” to himself (as we are all of us self-inaccessible and can, for example, touch parts of one another in ways that we could not even dream of touching our own bodies) or of his complete determination, apparently, to pierce that veil of inaccessibility—to be, in some childish way, self-contained and -sufficient—these were beyond his conscious awareness. He was, after all, just a little boy. His lips touched the upper areolae of his left and right nipples in the autumn of his ninth year. The lips by this time were markedly large and protrusive; part of his daily discipline was tedious button-and-string exercises designed to promote hypertrophy of the orbicularis muscles. The ability to extend his pursed lips as much as 10.4 centimetres had often meant the difference between achieving part of his thorax and not. It had also been the orbicularis muscles, more than any outstanding advance in vertebral flexion, that had permitted him to access the rear areas of his scrotum and substantial portions of the papery skin around his anus before he turned nine. These areas had been touched, tagged on the four-sided chart inside his personal ledger, then washed clean of ink and forgotten. The boy’s tendency was to forget each site once he had pressed his lips to it, as if the establishment of its accessibility made the site henceforth unreal for him and the site now in some sense “existed” only on the four-faced chart.