Richard Russo - Everybody's Fool

He’d waited back in the parking lot for over half an hour, praying for the voice in his head to say something else, but instead the buzzing in his ears had returned, only louder. Sleep. Dear God, sleep was what he needed. If he couldn’t find a room out there, he’d conk out in the vast Lowe’s parking lot. And tomorrow he’d hand in his resignation. In the unlikely event anyone objected or wanted to know why, he’d tell them he was hearing voices and going batshit crazy. Maybe he’d drive to Utica, to the state mental hospital, in hopes they could sort him. They hadn’t done shit for the mayor’s wife, but who knew?

So profound was his exhaustion that when Raymer came to the ten-foot mound of earth sitting in the middle of the blacktop and blocking both lanes — as if lowered from the sky — he pulled up and stared at it, unsure if what he was looking at was even real. Could it be, like the voice in his head, a figment of his insanity? At the top of the hill stood a gnarled tree, mostly dead from the look of it, tipped over at an absurd angle, exposing its root system to the open air. In the moonlight, the whole thing put him in mind of an absurdist painting, its details dreamlike, their deliberate inclusion meant to induce wonder. The most bizarre of these was the oblong box protruding from the soil at pavement level where something ornate and silvery, a handle of some sort, reflected Raymer’s headlights. It took a minute for the composition to add up to a casket whose lid, he now saw, was askew. Above, a good fifty yards up the hillside, a great gash in the slope suggested that there, until recently, the hill itself and the tree and the casket had all resided.

In other words, what he was looking at had a rational explanation. His eyes weren’t playing tricks. All the trees in the Hill section were old, and many were dying, literally falling over. The torrential rains had loosened the hummocky ground, causing this section to pull loose and slalom right down to the road. The external world was what it was and operating as it always had. Tomorrow, when citizens asked the chief of police What the hell? he’d have a comforting explanation ready. Though reassured that he hadn’t come completely untethered from reality, Raymer nevertheless found himself overwhelmed with sorrow. He was, he realized, actually weeping, gently at first and then more violently, his shoulders quaking with sobs. It was as if mundane and mechanistic things were suddenly revealed to have been specifically designed with an eye toward maximum cruelty and guaranteed suffering. Bad enough that our relationships with the living should always be undermined by fear and venality and narcissism and a hundred other things, but it seemed especially awful that we couldn’t be faithful even to the dead. We put them in the ground with expressions of love and admiration and eternal devotion, promising never to forget, though then we did, or tried to. The old judge they’d buried just this morning was already receding from the collective memory. Nobody except Raymer remembered his poor mother anymore, and when he was gone it would be as if she never existed. No wonder the dead protested. No wonder their caskets came lurching up out of the ground, their lids awry, as if to say, Remember me? Remember all your promises? Poor Becka. If she was angry at him, could he blame her? He hadn’t even made any of the usual promises. He’d put her in the ground because he was her husband and that was his duty, but he’d been unwilling to forgive or forget her perfidy. Tonight, he now realized, he’d managed to get things exactly backward. It was his anger at Becka that was metastasizing into something lethal, not hers at him. She wasn’t vengeful beneath the ground; he was vengeful above it, his rage fueled by the corrosive knowledge that someone else had loved her better and more truly than he ever did. Another man had made solemn promises and, as the bouquet of roses testified, even kept them.

The buzzing in his ears stopped abruptly.

Oh, listen to yourself. Do you have any idea how pathetic you are?

Sorry, what’s that?

Well, how would you describe yourself?

Unable to decide whether he was the accused or the accuser, Raymer was speechless in his own defense.

Be honest, for once, then.

Honest?

I know, a brand-new concept.

Go fuck yourself.

Okay, but think twice about that.

I know who I am.

At this, much hilarity. You don’t have a fuckin’ clue. The old lady was right. His voice changed here. Who is this Douglas Raymer? Who is this Douglas Raymer? A perfect impersonation of Miss Beryl back in eighth grade. God, you kill me, you really do.

Raymer waited for the laughter to stop, which it finally did.

Okay, so, this black chick, the voice continued. You say you know yourself? Then explain to me why you’re messing around with her?

Raymer could feel his shoulders shrug. He thought about Charice, what a nice evening it had been when it seemed as if she liked him. He couldn’t remember the last time he enjoyed himself nearly so much. I don’t know, he admitted.

Sure you do.

It’s complicated.

It isn’t. Try being honest.

Well, he thought. Right now I could really use a friend…

See? That’s exactly the kind of bullshit I’m talking about. What you want is to see the butterfly on her ass.

You know what? You’re not a good person.

Finally. Now we’re getting somewhere.

Raymer opened the car door and vomited lamb chops and asparagus and red wine onto the ground, hoping he’d expelled whatever had taken up residence in his head along with the contents of his stomach. No such luck.

Feel better? the voice wanted to know when he shut the door again.

I do, yes.

After a pause, I’m not your enemy.

You’re hardly my friend.

That remains to be seen.

Leave me alone. Go back where you came from.

I’m where you came from.

No, you rode in on a bolt of lightning. When this tingling stops, you’ll be gone.

No.

Raymer swallowed hard and tasted the rancid truth of this.

So, I gotta ask: aren’t you even a little curious?

About what?

About what’s on the card, you dope.

My hand won’t open, Raymer said, holding up his claw to where anyone could see it, as if he weren’t completely alone.

Try again.

This time, sure enough, the fingers slowly began to flex, his skin suddenly alive with a thousand pinpricks. Inside his fist was the crumpled florist’s card, which he smoothed out, as best he could, on his pant leg, then held it up to the light. GILCHRIST’S FINE BLOOMS, it said in raised letters. Below this was the ubiquitous wing-footed Mercury, bouquet in hand.

Turn it over.

Raymer opened the door and vomited again, mostly dry heaves this time.

Quit stalling.

Can I tell you something? Raymer asked.

Anything.

I’m so tired of being everybody’s fool.

He expected to be laughed at, but he wasn’t. I’m here to help.

Raymer regarded the card, thinking about the choice he was being given. When I know, will things be different?

Let’s find out.

What if they’re even worse?

Turn the fucking card over.

Raymer did. There was just one word, scripted in what Raymer guessed must’ve been an elegant hand before the ink ran. There looked to be five or six letters. The first was clearly an A, the second, most likely, an l. Alfred? Alton? No, the other legible letter — second from the last — seemed to be a y. Allen, but spelled with a y ? Finally it came to him. It wasn’t a man’s name at all, just the word Always.