Jeffrey

If Jeffrey Wendell had been able to do the math he would have realized that he hated peanut butter. He had eaten peanut butter sandwiches every day at lunch for the past eleven years. Every day, at noon, he sat on a wooden bench against the wall inside the penguin house and ate two peanut butter sandwiches, an orange, and three Oreo cookies. He much preferred Fig Newtons but this was the lunch he had learned to put together in the training center. Jeffrey wasn't necessarily opposed to change; he simply had no concept of it. Not once in eleven years had it occurred to him that he had the option of substituting tuna, for instance, between the four slices of bread he laid out every morning to prepare his lunch. It became readily apparent to anyone paying the least bit of attention that a lot of things didn't occur to Jeffrey.

Against her husband, Earl's, wishes Esther Wendell had insisted on giving birth to their first child at home with only a midwife and her sister Emma in attendance.

While Earl walked laps around the kitchen table, chain-smoking Viceroy's, the three women readied themselves in the back bedroom for the business of delivering a baby. By the early 1960's this was no simple task. Thanks to major advances in medical science, giving birth had evolved into a complex series of breathing techniques, karmic exercises and assorted pharmaceuticals. In much the same way that dinner preparation had progressed over the eons from stealing some fire from the gods and reheating the yak casserole, to incorporate navigation, valet parking and a working knowledge of tipping percentages.

But Esther was from The Old School. The Old School was a small birthing center located on Main Street above the bank and was run by Madame Lula, a nursing school dropout who taught the precept of sticking as close to nature as the twentieth century would allow. Thanks in large part to the confidence inspired by the teachings of Madame Lula, Esther's was a textbook delivery. With one, not so minor, exception. It seemed that the very first thing, ever, that didn't occur to Little Jeffrey, was to breathe. By the time Emma had persuaded the little fellow it would be in his own best interest to take a few breaths and see how he liked it the damage had been done. The wiring of countless generations of random genetic engineering totally and permanently altered. A small life's direction and content changed forever in an instant. Inhale a moment earlier and he might have liked peanut butter, or, at least known that he hated it.

Occasionally, in such situations, Fortune rears its head and bestows some sort of compensation on the afflicted newborn, like photographic memory, incomprehensible math skills, or perfect eyebrows. In Jeffrey's case, Fortune slightly cocked a hind leg and sprinkled him with a rather dubious recompense for his diminished intellectual prowess. He appeared to exhibit no sign of emotion. Actually, he experienced the gamut of feelings deeply, fervently, honestly, backwardly, blindly, obliviously and unwittingly. But, unable to gain any kind of toehold in their maneuvers, and be able to stand up and have someone take notice, emotions were forced to process themselves through Jeffrey and gradually emerge as nothing more than physical symptoms.

No one ever knew whether he was upset because someone had just tracked up his freshly mopped floor, or, if he had contracted a new strain of influenza. Furthermore, no one cared or knew enough to wonder about it, including Jeffrey.

Once you've been branded as retarded, regardless of the degree, people seldom feel the need to look much deeper for excuses concerning any deviance in your behavior. And having only the one mind, such as it was, and one body, Jeffrey had no point of reference to make comparisons. This limitation alone precluded the thought that he might be the least bit different from ever entering his head.

For example, it never occurred to him to wonder why sometimes his face felt a little hotter than usual; or, why his fingers would occasionally seem to turn against his hands and attack them with all the force his nails could muster; or, why at quitting time every night when he had to leave the penguins it would be like a sponge had been hung where his heart should be, or, why the sponge seemed to expand and grow heavier until it felt as though his lungs had been packed in pudding; or, why he only found relief about halfway home on the bus as the pressure in his chest became so great it pulsed upward through his neck and throbbed behind his eyes until it forced the water out.

Jeffrey wasn't just "special". He was an "Olympic" qualifier.

And the best janitor the penguin house had ever seen.