Wilbur Daffodil-11 Swain

Dr. Wilbur Daffodil-11 Swain, born Wilbur Rockefeller Swain, was a pediatrician, senator from Vermont, and the final President of the United States. He is the main character and narrator of the novel Slapstick.

Family Background and Childhood

He was born in New York City with a dizygotic female twin, Eliza Mellon Swain. Wilbur later described his and his sister's 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", with blue eyes. 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. Wilbur later remarked that he never loved his parents, or anyone, and that neither he nor Eliza were emotionally vulnerable as a result of this upbringing. They were raised 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, and headed by Dr. Stewart Mott. They were often dressed by practical nurses for imaginary upper class social events which they would never attended due to their freakishness. As a child, his favorite toy was supposedly a rubber tug boat.

The twins argued that the United States Constitution failed to realized that the wealthy and powerful would produce a separate artificial extended family

Despite their presumed idiocy, the twins were extremely intelligent when they were together, a fact which they hid from adults. Wilbur could read and write English by age four, by age seven could do so in French, German, Italian, Latin, and ancient Greek by, as well as do calculus. He had read all of the thousands of books in the library by age ten, and once stated that he believed there was no book in an Indo-European language before the First World War that he had not read. The two assumed their intelligence to be simply another consequence of their freakishness, as was also perhaps their "capacity and determination to be utterly happy all the time", which he and Eliza 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 Wilbur always did all reading and writing for the two.

They 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. Even toward the end of his life, Wilbur would still eavesdrop on his granddaughter Melody and her lover Isadore, saying "[o]ld habits are hard to break." Wilbur's was the more practical and experimental intelligence, Eliza's the ability to juxtapose and create 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.

On the evening before their fifteenth birthday, Wilbur and Eliza, 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. 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, Dr. Cordiner described Wilbur as serious but easily distracted by his sister, with poor comprehension and low normal intelligence for his age, although capable of menial work as "a fillingstation attendant or a janitor in a village school". 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 his sister 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."

Education and Medical Career

Wilbur was sent to a school for severely disturbed children on Cape Cod, driven there with his parents. Due to his height, he was a respected basketball player in prep school and later in college, even with his narrow shoulder and "voice like a piccolo". Almost immediately, he began forgetting about his sister. School life was structured so that he never returned home, instead visiting Europe and attending summer camp. While no genius and incapable of originality, he had a better than average mind and was patient and orderly. He was the first student in the history of school to take the College Board, on which he did well enough to attend Harvard. His father was killed in car accident during first year of medical school, and Wilbur was made the executor of his will. By this point, he had become the conceited "master of a great house on Beacon Hill" with a special suite for when his mother visited. Driven to and from school in a Jaguar, he threw near nightly parties at which he appeared only briefly, and already began dressing as he would when he became president. However, he did not enter puberty until his last year at Harvard Medical at age twenty-three. After their father's death, Eliza, who had been institutionalized by the family, was released by the efforts of attorney Norman Mushari, Jr., who encouraged her sue the institution for damages and her family for her share of the inheritance, which neither Wilbur nor his mother opposed.

The "Ether Monument"

Shortly afterward, Eliza and Mushari visited Wilbur's home in Boston. Initially hostile and insulting, her ultimate goal was to initiate physical contact between them, 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. 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. After Wilbur graduated bottom of his class at Harvard Medical School, his mother threw him a party at Ritz in Boston, across from Public Gardens. During the party, he was lead by a supposed bellboy to a nearby monument for the first use of anaesthetics in the United States. There, Eliza 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".

The "Budweiser" Clydesdales

He became a pediatrician, practicing rural medicine in house where he was raised, with a clinic and small children's hospital. He had a phrase from the Hippocratic Oath—"If you can do no good, at least do no harm"—chipped over the front door. However, it worried the parents, suggesting weakness on his part, so he removed it. He used the manuscript he had written with Eliza on child-rearing in his practice. As access to technology declined, he had a Clydesdale horse named Budweiser that he used for transportation. Three weeks before his fiftieth birthday, he was visited by a thumb-sized Chinese emissary, the first in the United States for twenty five years, calling himself Fu Manchu. Having been told by Eliza of their childhood theories hidden in the mausoleum's urn, the Chinese agreed to transport her to Mars in exchange for access to their ideas, which Wilbur granted.

On his fiftieth birthday, he 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 in an avalanche on Mars, signed Fu Manchu. This same day was the first heavy gravity event, which killed Budweiser, who attempted to remain standing. In shock, Wilbur returned to his home, despite the many injuries around him in town. Looking through the rest of his mail, he found a dozen sample pills of tri-benzo-Deportamil, produced by the Eli Lilly Company to treat the symptoms of Tourette's. On a whim, Wilbur took two, which filled him "with contentment and confidence". This began a nearly three decade addiction, when he immediately ordered two thousand doses. He then read and was inspired by the newly recovered treatise he and Eliza wrote on producing artificial extended families.

Political Career

At the age of fifty, shortly after the death of his mother, who was living with him, Wilbur closed his medical practice and ran for United States Senator from Vermont, taking advantage of his size by using the slogan "It takes a Big Man to do a Big Job!" At the age of seventy, he mounted a campaign for president centered of he and Eliza's plan and featuring the slogan "Lonesome No More!" By this time, his attire had become what he considered "clownish": claw-hammer coat, striped pants, pearl-gray vest, festooned with a gold watch chain that once belonged to John D. Rockefeller from which a Phi Beta Kappa key and plastic daffodil hung, with matching spats, choke collar and tie, and a top hat, although by the end of his presidency, this had been reduced to a moldy homburg.

Gravity had become variable again, but less severely. On the campaign trail, speaking to people about loneliness and as a campaign technique, he would relate that his horse Budweiser was the only creature in whom he could confide before her tragic death. By this point, tri-benzo-Deportamil was no longer manufactured, but he kept a large quantity in the Senate Office Building, with which he maintained his "unflagging courtesy and optimism" and youthful energy level. His family plan involved assigning every American a new middle name consisting of a noun and number between one and twenty, resulting in ten thousand siblings and one hundred and ninety thousand cousins, whose names shared the proper nouns.

He won, becoming the tallest American president. By his inauguration, energy resources were so scarce that the computers assigning new names were powered by burning documents from the National Archives from the Nixon administration. Once he himself was assigned the new middle name "Daffoldil-11", he had Oval Office repainted yellow in celebration. His name also made him a brother of a White House dishwasher named Carlos Daffodil-11 Villavicencio. As he and Eliza had predicted, there was a great deal of public opposition to the new families, which took to wearing buttons reading "Lonesome Thank God!" Originally, changing of names was prevented, although decades later, when the practice became commonplace with few problems, he admitted it "was wrong to be so rigid about that". Crowds began congregating at the White House of people claiming to be new relatives of the President and First Lady, Sophie Rothschild Swain. Wilbur believed that the new experience of companionship would humanize these once lonely people and "allow them to climb the evolutionary ladder in a matter of hours or days, or weeks at most."

Family directories were printed and kept at every State House, City Hall, police department, and public library. Wilbur found himself brother to the Chief of Police of Batavia, New York, the former Light-Heavy-weight Boxing Champion of the World, and the Prima Ballerina of the Chicago Opera Ballet. Most Americans were happy with the new family scheme, despite the country itself being bankrupt and decaying, but then millions died of The Albanian Flu and, centered in Manhattan, The Green Death. Regional monarchs arose, but many people retained their new assigned family as their primary identity. People continued to send news to the White House, although the staff there were dying like the rest of the population. Two thirds of the way through his second term, Albanian Flu killed much of his staff, leading Wilbur to personally answer the telephone. Shortly afterward, contact with the Federal Government ceased. By this time, there was no more Congress, Federal Courts, Treasury, or Army, only 800 people left in Washington D.C. His supply of tri-benzo-Deportamil dwindled and Wilbur began to believe he would die when they were gone.

The helicopter Marine One prepares to land on the South Lawn of the White House

One day, two strangers appeared at the White House, neither of whom recognized the increasingly disheveled Wilbur as president. The first, Byron Hatfield, brought a message from the widow of a physicist in Urbana, Illinois whose husband had developed a means of communicating with the dead. She had spoken with Eliza in the afterlife, who requested to talk with Wilbur. The second, Bernard O'Hare, was an Air Force captain stationed at the bottom of a secret underground silo in Rock Creek Park who came up to find out "what on Earth was going on". He had access to a Presidential helicopter with thousands of gallons of fuel, which he maintained himself for two years.

The two left the White House, with Villavicencio, whom Wilbur planned to leave with the Daffodil's congregating in Indianapolis, then to Urbana, and finally Wilbur's childhood home in Vermont. Despite the suffering and poverty in the city, Indianapolis gave a special welcome to Wilbur and his brother Villavincencio, causing O'Hare to wish he too were a Daffodil, which Wilbur granted. There the three observed a weekly family meeting of the Daffodils, which greatly impressed Wilbur, who briefly addressed them. Afterward, he traveled to Lake Maxinkuckee to meet with the King of Michigan, Stewart Oriole-2 Mott, at his Summer Palace. There, in his capacity as President, Wilbur signed away any claim by the United States over the former Louisiana Purchase in exchange for one dollar which was never received. They spoke briefly about the King's grandfather, Wilbur childhood doctor, and then he continued on to Urbana to talk with his deceased sister.

Later Life and Death

Arriving in Urbana, he communicated with Eliza using a device called The Hooligan, accompanied by the widow of the discoverer, Wilma Pachysandra-17 von Peterswald and her son and Wilbur's brother, David Daffodil-11, who suffered from coprolalia due to Tourette's. Eliza informed him that the afterlife was exceedingly dull and implored him to die quickly so the two of them could think of ways to improve things. In later years, he would worry about revealing to others his foreknowledge that the afterlife is merely boredom. 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.

Finding only 11 pills of tri-benzo-Deportamil remaining, he contemplated his death and gave them to David after his disorder caused him to insult Wilbur. He underwent withdrawals for six days, tied to a bed at von Peterwald's house. At some point, the two had sex, resulting in a son of whom Wilbur was unaware. O'Hare then flew Wilbur to Manhattan, where he intended to die, but was instead captured by members of the Raspberry family. Discovering he was a doctor, they forced him to take the antidote to The Green Death and treat the family's patriarch, Hiroshi Raspberry-20 Yamashiro, who had pneumonia. Upon his recovery, the family offered the choice of several of their treasured possessions as a reward. To be polite, Wilbur took a candlestick, establishing the legend of his fondness for them and leading to his well-known nickname, "The King of Candlesticks".

The Empire State Building

He was invited to become a Raspberry, but did not care for their communal life nor their practices as searchers for the kidnapped Jesus. He moved into the lobby of the Empire State Building, with food provided by the Raspberries. When Vera Chipmunk-5 Zappa arrived, she was given the antidote to The Green Death as well so she could serve as Wilbur's nurse, which she did for a while before founding her farm in the Turtle Bay area. Much later, twelve year old Melody Oriole-2 von Peterswald arrived pregnant and pushing a dilapidated baby carriage which contained, among other items, a Dresden candlestick, which she presented to Wilbur as an offering. She identified herself as his granddaughter and he welcomed her, despite having no memory of fathering a son, although he was later convinced of the truth of her story.

The two lived together for four years in the lobby, later adding Melody's lover, Isadore Raspberry-19 Cohen. After the two discovered ballpoint pens and stationery from the Continental Driving School on the sixty-fourth floor, Wilbur began writing his autobiography, which he would not live to complete. He died shortly after his one hundred and first birthday, for which Melody, Isadore, and Vera threw him a party. At the party, a drunk slave broke the candlestick Melody originally brought. At his final birthday party, Wilbur drank too much but was mesmerized by a display made possible by Vera: a thousand candles which she had her slaves make from a colonial-era mold were fitted to Wilbur's collection of candlesticks and lit, making him feel as though he were God, surrounded by the Milky Way.

Personal Life

By the time he was fifty, his mother sold her house in Turtle Bay and moved in with him to his childhood home in Vermont until her death shortly after his fiftieth birthday. After he returned to Vermont to found his pediatric practice, Wilbur married an equally wealthy third cousin named Rose Aldrich Ford, who was unhappy because Wilbur did not lover her and never took her anywhere. They had a son, Carter Paley Swain, who was normal and, to Wilbur, uninteresting. They divorced and she and their son moved to a comdominium in Machu Picchu in the same building as Eliza. Wilbur never heard from them again. He later declared that he was not "good at loving", further admitting that he was a bad parent.

Before his first run for president, he married a second time to Sophie Rothschild Swain, nearly a half a century younger than him. However, she also divorced him and also moved to Machu Picchu, objecting to his program of creating artificial extended families. Wilbur again noted that he was not marriage material. He thus became the only president to divorce while in office. A night of heavy gravity destroyed Machu Picchu, presumably killing Wilbur's son and two ex-wives. In his late 70s, during withdrawals from tri-benzo-Deportamil, he fathered a son with Wilma Pachysandra-17 von Peterswald. This son in turn would father Melody Oriole-2 von Peterswald, Wilbur's granddaughter who would later seek him out in Manhattan.