Yergo was the perfect man, perfect, that is, except for his name. But he loved his name. He loved being Yergo. He loved the sound of it. He loved the spelling of it. He loved the knock-knock joke possibilities of it, e.g., Knock knock. Who’s there? Yergo. Yergo who? Yergo-ing to come to the door, aren’t you? He loved the strangeness of it, because to him it felt strange, always strange, even though it had been his name for all of his years, and his father’s name before that and his grandfather’s name before that. But, mostly, Yergo loved his name because of its imperfection. If he had been given Dagwood or Buck or Constantine or Forrest or any other perfect name, he would have been altogether perfect, i.e., godly, and Yergo knew, as he expected any person with any sense at all to know, that godliness is not all it’s cracked up to be.

Yergo could lift a Cadillac with his left hand and a forty-foot yacht with his right.

Yergo could multiply in his head any pair of numbers of however many digits.

Yergo could sing and play the piano, accordion, trombone, banjo, and timpani.

Yergo could write poems, novels, histories, philosophies, and treatises.

Yergo could speak English, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Portuguese, Hungarian, Finnish, Korean, Japanese, Arabic, and Urdu.

Yergo could win any woman’s heart with a single smile.

Yergo could do a quintuple axel.

Yergo could speak to animals.

Yergo could fly.

Yergo could cause a city to disappear by snapping his fingers.

At one time or another, Yergo had actually done each of these things. The last one he regretted somewhat although the city was small and ugly and full of people he didn’t like because they were self-centered. His perfect conscience gave him no peace until he snapped his fingers again and the city reappeared.

Feeling that he should do something beneficial with his gifts, Yergo found the ten sickliest, ugliest, hungriest, poorest orphans in the world and adopted them. Whatever their given names had been, he changed them all to Yergo: Yergo 1, Yergo 2, Yergo 3, etc., in order of age. Yergo placed his hand on their chests and cured their illnesses, their deformities, and their malnutrition. Then he sent them to expensive, exclusive private schools where they received excellent educations.

At this point God decided that He had had enough. He grew angry. "Who does this Yegro think he is?" He growled. He came to Yergo in a dream and told him to quit it. So Yergo did. He took a job in a convenience store and ceased taking advantage of his multifarious abilities. Every night, with his children looking on, Yergo knelt down beside his bed and humbly thanked God for his name. God, however, had already stopped paying attention to him.