The Jeffery Interview

THE JEFFREY INTERVIEW PROLOGUE: BEFORE THIRD GRADE The recorder was already running when the reporter leaned back. “You told me the School came later. So where does your story really begin?” Jeffrey smiled beneath the crow hat. “Depends which beginning you want.” “The human one.” “That narrows it down.” The reporter stared. Jeffrey laughed. “Fine. August 18, 1980. Reno, Nevada.” The story began beneath a red sky. At 5:55 in the evening, a crimson-violet aurora spread across the desert. In Jeffrey’s telling, the sunset did not simply fall. It folded, as if something behind the ordinary world had leaned close enough to be seen. Inside a hospital, a child opened his eyes. For one suspended moment, the clock seemed frozen. Then the world continued. His mother would later tell stories about the mystery of his conception. His father could not understand what he could not explain. Jeffrey never described that beginning as simple villainy or abandonment. “Sometimes confusion breaks a family before anybody realizes they’re holding the hammer,” he told the reporter. Jeffrey’s earliest school years were quieter than the sky that welcomed him. Fluorescent hallways. Small chairs. Crayons scraping paper. Teachers explaining rules before children understood why they existed. Jeffrey watched. Patterns interested him more than instructions. A repeated smile. A copied laugh. The way children changed themselves to belong. The way adults could call something support while the child inside it experienced something else. He was eventually placed in special education. “They were trying to help,” Jeffrey said. “But help and understanding aren’t always the same thing.” “You remember that young?” “I remember strangely.” That was all Jeffrey gave him. Outside school, he ran. Across bluffs, fields and dirt roads, testing breath, endurance and the edges of his own body. In the story-layer that would later grow around those memories, the wind carried lions, dragons, wings and shifting colors. But the boy did not yet possess those names. He only knew movement made the world feel larger. By eleven, stranger experiences had begun collecting around ordinary life. A room might feel wrong for half a second. A person’s outline might seem different. A dream could become more

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