"Did Jeff Levsky have eleven toes?" the one boy asked the other long distance. There was laughing on both ends of the phone. It was hard to get the question out.
"Ten toes, like everyone else."
"I'm pretty sure he had eleven toes," the Philadelphia end of the phone said. "Think. I'm pretty sure about this."
"I'm peeing my pants," said the New York end of the phone.

- - -

Jeff Levsky once spent three hours looking for his copy of The Catcher In The Rye in the bushes by the lake in a thunderstorm because the boys told him they'd seen it there.
"In those bushes," the one said.
"By the lake," said the other.
He was wearing a yellow rubber raincoat and his socks pooled around his ankles. They were missing their elastic.

- - -

There's a sign on the side of what looks like a barn on a rural route in Maine. BOUGHT AND PRAYED FOR BY MARK AND AMY, it reads. It's as big as the side of the barn, it goes on forever. It's been abandoned for fifteen years, at least. Sometimes when the New York end of the phone goes downstairs to buy a Coke, he thinks of that if the elevator's free of pretty girls or he's just taking a break from thinking about girls he wants to fuck.

- - -

"That'll never work," said Philadelphia.
"Come on. We'll roleplay it," said New York.
"Fine."
"Ring."
"Hello. Can I please speak to Jeff Levsky?"
A few minutes of computer research had yielded a surprisingly long list of Jeff Levskys.
"And then of course there's going to be someone named Jeff Levsky there," Philadelphia said, out of character, and then, "So, hold on a minute. Hello?"
"Jeff Levsky?"
"Yes?"
"How many toes do you have?"
"That'll never work," Philadelphia said.

- - -

Jeff Levsky got a puzzle in a package from his parents. It involved wooden blocks with different painted pictures of parts of dogs on each side. It was the kind of puzzle designed for eight-year-olds, but it'd bore even them, probably. Still, it was harder than you'd think. "Only three people in the world have solved this puzzle," he told the boys, who were playing cards and ignoring him.

- - -

Philadelphia was a nice guy but he thought physical deformities were hilarious. Clubbed feet made him laugh out loud.

- - -

"I'm less positive about it now than I was when I first said it," Philadelphia said.
"Could it have been someone else?"
"No. Jeff Levsky. He had an extra pinky toe growing out of his pinky toe. It had a tiny little nail and everything. I'm positive again."
"How'd it fit in his shoe?" New York asked.
"Oh. It was really small."

- - -

One year, Jeff Levsky had something wrong with his colon, or at least that's what he said. He kept a tiny prescription pillbox in his shaving kit with his toothbrush and shampoo. "These keep me alive," he said.
New York suggested flushing the pills down the toilets and would have, too, if Philadelphia hadn't stopped him.
"We can't actually do that," he said. Instead they told him his book was in the bushes the day it rained so hard you couldn't fall asleep because the noise off the tin roof was so loud.

- - -

On the computer, Philadelphia's secret handle's FILLETOFISH and he uses it to play chess against other people with other secret handles while he's at work. He gets pissed when he loses and, if you beat him, odds are good that you'll get a message that says something like "FILLETOFISH says shove it up your ass." He thinks he's really good.