Eliza Mellon Swain

Eliza Mellon Swain was the twin sister of Wilbur Daffodil-11 Swain, the main character and primary narrator of the novel Slapstick, with whom she formed a joint genius in childhood. Together they developed the concept of artificial extended families, which was the major policy achievement of Wilbur's presidency, as well as co-authoring the bestselling pseudonymous work So You Went and Had a Baby.

Family Background and Childhood

She was born in New York City with a dizygotic male twin named Wilbur, who would later describe their appearance as "neanderthaloid", with six digits on each hand and foot, two additional nipples, coarse black hair, and "massive brow-ridges, sloping foreheads, and steamshovel jaws". They were christened in the hospital rather than a church due to their condition. Assumed to be mentally disabled, they were expected to die before the age of fourteen. The two were children of Caleb Mellon Swain and Letitia Vanderbilt Swain, née Rockefeller, both of whom possessed great inherited wealth. The twins were descendants of the Rockefeller, du Pont, Mellon, Vanderbilt, and Dodge families, among others. They were brought up in a house on family property in Galen, Vermont built by an ancestor, Professor Elihu Roosevelt Swain, which was modified and staffed for their needs, headed by Dr. Stewart Mott. They were often dressed by practical nurses imaginary for upper class social events which they would never attended due their freakishness.

Charles Darwin, whose theory of evolution was critiqued by the twins

Despite their presumed idiocy, the twins were extremely intelligent when they were together, a fact which they hid from adults. The two assumed their intelligence was simply another consequence of their freakishness, as was also perhaps their "capacity and determination to be utterly happy all the time", which she and Wilbur believed meant being in each other's company with servants and food, in a peaceful, book-filled home. Intimate physical contact between the two increased their genius, although Eliza remained illiterate her whole life, with Wilbur doing all reading and writing for the two. It was she, however, who could make "the great intuitive leaping" of understanding, memorizing, juxtaposing, and creating new ideas. Together they developed critiques of Darwin's Theory of Evolution, saying creatures would be too vulnerable while developing their improvements, and the United States Constitution, which failed to recognize that elected officials and the wealthy, like all humans, would come to see themselves as a separate, artificial extended family. They also concluded from the great building projects of the past that Earth's gravity must have once been subject to more variation. To deal with the flaws of the Constitution, they devised a system whereby every citizen would be made a member of an artificial extended family. The two discovered a system of hidden rooms and passageways in the house, where at night they would read and discuss. They would pretend to sleep sixteen hours a day, in their large, custom-made cribs. Their reputation for sleeping well allowed them time in these hidden areas of the house for study and eavesdropping. Eliza matured sexually at age seven and by the time she was a teenager weighed a quintal.

On the evening before their fifteenth birthday, Eliza and Wilbur, from a secret passageway, overheard their mother loudly declare her hatred for her children and her wish that they would die. After calming down, she expressed hope for any small sign of intellect and humanness from either twin. Seeing this simply as a problem to be solved, they produced a large sign to hang in their parents' bedroom during the night, proclaiming they could be "as smart or as dumb" as anyone wanted them to be. The next morning the two dressed themselves and informed the staff that a "miracle has taken place overnight" and that they were now intelligent and refined people. With her "rich alto voice... as lovely as a viola", it was Eliza who primarily spoke for the two. When their father came down to see them at breakfast, he was horrified to realize that he and his wife would now be required to somehow love these new human beings. Realizing their error, Wilbur and Eliza attempted to act like imbeciles again, which only made the situation worse.

They were forced to take psychological and mental tests separately by Dr. Cordelia Swain Cordiner, although when separated, their joint intelligence died. They named their personae at these times "Betty and Bobby Brown". The two had a limited telepathic link that grew useless when they were more than three meters apart. After their testing—during which, Eliza had to have the questions read to her and her answers written down—Dr. Cordiner described her as "an amusing chatterbox" with low normal intelligence for her age, but unlikely to ever learn to read or write. She claimed that both twins seemed smarter than they really were because they were capable of memorizing facts but knew nothing of "life as it is really lived". Having no ambition, they could not be disappointed by life. Since Wilbur was tested as the smarter of the two, Dr. Cordiner suggested enrolling him in a special school for children in his condition. Overhearing this, the two announced that they would kill themselves if forced to be separated, which Dr. Cordiner casually dismissed, since her testing had shown no proclivities toward suicide. They asked to be retested as a pair, which Dr. Cordiner rejected until confronted by their mother. When retested, they answered every question correctly, but to do so, they became physically entangled with each other, horrifying their parents and Dr. Cordiner, leading to their separation. Before parting, they hid papers with their ideas and critiques in a funerary urn in Professor Swain's mausoleum. Wilbur then told Eliza he loved her, but she responded negatively, saying the phrase was "just a way of getting somebody to say something they probably don't mean."

Institutionalization and Release

Patriot Pat, the primary logo of the New England Patriots from 1961 until 1992

The next morning, she declined to see her brother off to his new school. She herself was kept in an expensive institution, which her mother would later say cost two hundred dollars a day and which discouraged family from visiting. After her father killed in automobile accident, Eliza's release was secured by an attorney, Norman Mushari, Jr., who encouraged her sue the institution for damages and her family for her share of the inheritance. She then proceeded to insult her family in the press almost daily, but would not allow herself to be photographed. Instead, she gave interviews from an old confessional booth from a church that was being torn down. She said that while institutionalized, she frequently sang the song "Some Day My Prince Will Come" awaiting her brother to take her away, which he never did. When Wilbur and their mother sent a telegram saying they loved her, she sent a reply saying she loved them too. Eliza easily regained control of her share of the inheritance unopposed by her brother and mother, and immediately purchased half-interest in the New England Patriots football team. She claimed from then on to be wearing a jersey for the team in her confessional booth and certainly wore it on the day she first appeared in public, walking with Mushari to her brother's home. By then, she was a chain smoking, bent over figure. She also had problems with alcohol and bad skin. She told her brother that Mushari, whom she called Normie, was now the only family she had, calling him her "mother and father and brother and God, all wrapped up in one".

Her visit with Wilbur was initially hostile and insulting, but her ultimate goal was to initiate physical contact, recreating their single, shared genius. The two then engaged in five days of pandemonium, during which they held captive Mushari, their mother who was visiting from Turtle Bay, and the household servants, tying them to chairs and feeding them peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Wilbur read aloud from his school books, all of which he'd kept, leading the two of them to write a book together on pediatrics which became one of the best selling of all time. It was eventually published as So You Went and Had a Baby under the pseudonym Dr. Eli W. Rockmell, "a sort of garbling" of their names. However, its title and authorship on the manuscript was The Cry of the Nocturnal Goatsucker by Betty and Bobby Brown, which came from a term for the birds also called whippoorwills, which they found in a dictionary as children. Eliza was so shattered by the ordeal as to nearly require institutionalizing again. The two would never come in physical proximity again, and Eliza moved to a condominium Machu Picchu, which had become a haven for the wealthy of the globe. She took up golf and never wrote or telephoned her family. During a graduation party for Wilbur, she had him led to a monument commemorating the first use of anaesthetics in the United States. There, she appeared hovering in a helicopter with a bullhorn and recited to him from Shakespeare's thirty-ninth sonnet. He again declared his love her and she responded: "God guide that hand and mind of Dr. Wilbur Rockefeller Swain".

Death and Afterlife

The Martian surface

When a representative of the People's Republic of China came to Machu Picchu looking for lost secrets of the Incas, Eliza offered access to the theories she and Wilbur had developed in their youth, in exchange for transportation to their Martian colony. An emissary calling himself Fu Manchu visited Wilbur who took him to the mausoleum, where the information was found to be valuable enough for Eliza to go to Mars. On his fiftieth birthday, Wilbur received a message from Eliza dated two weeks earlier, stating she was going to China. There was also a more recent letter informing him that Eliza died, signed Fu Manchu. This same day was the first heavy gravity event. She was killed in an avalanche of iron pyrite at the outskirts of the Chinese colony on Mars. Her will indicated that she wished to be buried wherever she died with a simple tombstone reading "Here Lies Betty Brown". The scheme for artificial extended families that the two developed together, which he recently rediscovered due to Fu Manchu's visit, would become the centerpiece of Wilbur's presidency.

During Wilbur's first presidential term, Wilma Pachysandra-17 von Peterswald, the widow of a physicist in Urbana, Illinois, was contacted by a Chinese delegation, who revealed that shortly before her husband's death, he uncovered a method to communicate with the dead. They taught her the technique, through which she spoke with Eliza in the afterlife, who insisted on talking with Wilbur immediately. The widow wrote him a letter, which he received during his second term in office. When he arrived in Urbana, Wilbur utilized a device called The Hooligan to speak with Eliza, who revealed that the afterlife was exceedingly dull and implored him to die quickly so the two of them could think of ways to improve things. Together the two also quickly determined explanations for The Albania Flu and The Green Death: the former were Martians eventually repelled by the immune system, the latter were microscopic Chinese who meant no harm but were fatal when absorbed by normal-sized humans.