Somebody's Fool by Richard Russo

Author:Richard Russo [Russo, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2023-07-25T00:00:00+00:00

Benign

“THERE HE IS ,” said David Proxmire, glancing up from his computer screen when Rub entered, stomping snow off his boots, in the entryway. In the year he’d been working at Harold’s Automotive World on the outskirts of North Bath, Rub hadn’t missed a single Sunday, nor had he even been late. Yet despite his manifest reliability, his boss always evinced surprise to see him, as if he’d just about given up hope that Rub would appear. Of his four jobs, this one at Harold’s was Rub’s least favorite, and his least favorite part of his least favorite job was David Proxmire himself, who had inherited the business two years earlier from his older brother Harold. The two brothers could not have been more different. Harold, eight years David’s senior, had been tall and lanky and gray from head to toe—hair, eyes, stubble, clothing, even skin color—whereas his younger brother was short, rotund, clean shaven and florid. Had the Proxmires been in a lineup with eight other white men, they would’ve been the last two you’d have picked as brothers. Temperamentally, they were, if possible, even more dissimilar. Where Harold had been taciturn in the extreme, David was loquacious, a man of numerous, unfettered opinions that appeared linked to nothing in the real world—not personal experience or reading or even television. Where Harold had been soft-spoken, reticent, David was loud and untroubled by self-doubt.

Proof that they were indeed related by blood became evident only when you peered inside their skulls, which everyone who entered the office of Harold’s Automotive World was invited to do. Here, along one long wall, David had strung a series of both his brother’s and his own CT scans. The first thing you noticed about each was the cloudy white fibroid mass, a benign but inoperable cyst, nestled up against each man’s brain. The pictures were chronologically sequenced to illustrate the slow, relentless growth of each man’s cyst. Harold’s had resulted, two years earlier, in a massive cerebral hemorrhage. The one in David’s skull was considerably smaller, but it, too, was clearly growing. If he was on Harold’s timetable, he had a half-dozen more years before his brother’s destiny became his own.

One would’ve thought—or at least Rub would have—that such knowledge would occasion in the younger Proxmire a morbid dread, but instead his cyst appeared to inspire only wonder, a dizzying awe that its owner felt compelled to share, at excruciating length, with others. If you didn’t know better you’d think he was proud of the damned thing, that it represented proof positive that he was special, rather than genetically befucked. He seemed particularly fixated on and infuriated by the use of the word “benign” to describe something that had killed his brother and would one day, presumably, kill him as well, and more efficiently than many tumors deemed “malignant.” “How can it be benign if it’s going to kill me?” he asked each new person with whom he shared the ongoing narrative of his head.

Indeed,

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