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by Killian Piraro and Richard Mavis | 09 Jan 2007, 0:00
[seeded by the cards]
"Mr. Jefe, didn't you get my message?" Natalia, a busty Russian, sat at a pine-veneer desk in a beige waiting room with a fake ficus in the corner. Behind her was the door to untold wonders, a shadowy cavern wherein miracles were learned. "Lucille had to cancel today, his aunt has fallen ill. Dysentery."
Jefe was crestfallen. "Henri!" he shouted after snapping his phone closed, "chastise!" And in minced Henri with the flyswatter. "Once, please, Henri." Jefe had adapted to armlessness respectably well. But the two armey things he found he couldn't be without—thumb wrestling and smacking his forehead—necessitated the hiring of a page. But pages had become expensive. With the extension of God-given human rights to darkies and Eastern Europeans came the expansion of servants' compensation. Anyway, for his efforts Henri earned a credit and a half each semester.
It would not normally have been such a tragedy to have to reschedule an appointment—people who work in offices are constantly in a frenzy of time conflicts and double-booking mindless meetings with other office-people—but this was not just a circular discussion in the conference room about how to increase sales or broaden appeal to include a younger demographic. This was a matter of dignity and self-edification, a brave quest to overcome his limbless adversity and restore that which so many of the limbed take for granted: the ability to bleed a manuscript by hand with the feared and respected red pencil. While he had learned, out of grim necessity, to wield the fabled utensil with his mouth (having proven undexterous with his feet), he found this humiliating and deeply depressing, much more so than any of the wide range of tasks he could no longer perform without assistance. So for Jefe, the discovery of Lamelegs Lucille was a divine beam of light in his otherwise unforgiving-of-late life.
After lunch one afternoon in 1952, Lucille—nee Umberto—discovered that he had been a subject of the government's early LSD experiments, had flash attained an expert's use and understanding of algebra, pidgin Hebrew, and the body language, and that his legs had quit working. This was unnerving news as, as his cookie crumbled, he had decided to take his lunch in the park that sunny afternoon. Easily, breezily, with his handy new channels of communication, Lucille was able to work out a deal with some passing, kind effeminates, who carried him home and, later, affectionately added the "Lamelegs" to his name.
"Maybe so," he said, "but I'm going to be this country's most famous Yogi within a year."
Which, of course, he was unable to become. Mr Berra had him beat by virtues of being America's wittiest baseball player and by being white. But he did succeed in revitalizing his legs. His work had garnered him the respect of hippies and office drones alike.
Next? Telekinetics. The supersensory powers with which he had willed his dead gams back to life could be applied to simple household chores, he discovered. He would come home after a long day walking around and pointing gloatingly at his fully functional legs and sit in the middle of the room and clean—sponges scrubbed, brooms swept, dust bunnies collected themselves. He fired his page.
Ever enterprising, Lucille figured the next logical step was to teach others, for a reasonable fee, how to make objects move and levitate. As a former member of the "challenged" community, he resolved to take only students who were unable to perform simple tasks.
Enter Jefe, sitting in his office, feeling distressed. But, as is often the case, the feeling was not entirely based on the facts: Lucille's aunt—however putrid she may actually be—was perfectly dysentery-free, and Lucille, instead of receiving students for their appointments, was clutching a boogie board, a wrath of will trying to kick in the center of the city's glassy lake. For he had quite suddenly and quite distressingly lost his legs again.
Will the brain to will the nerve to will the knees to move. You know this routine, he thinks.
Jefe stands and looks outside, at the market awning and the cars and the greying sky. Well, he thinks, as he does routinely whenever he feels frustrated or antsy, better head upstairs. "Henri!" The only thing he found that works it out very well is to go out to the smokers' terrace on the 57th floor and jump rope. "Sport!"
It was also getting dark a few miles away on the lake, where a figure was floating solo, clinging to a piece of foam and trying to remember exactly what it was he told the editor about the pencil.
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