A short story that invites readers to ponder the perplexing case of the two Richards…
by: Itto & Mekiya Outini
One spring morning, the revelation Richard had been dreading for years finally came. The day was mild, suffused with the odors of hyacinth and petrol fumes, and the day was scentless, blustery, and cold. Richard was grading papers in his office at the American University of Beirut, and Richard was delivering a lecture in Cloth Hall Court, Leeds.
The revelation — achieved, as it happened, by Richard’s colleague, Dr. Abdullah Khalil — was that there were two Richard Billingses.
“Hello? Excuse me?” Abdullah rapped on the office door as if scolding it for something. He wore an overlarge suit, which billowed about his brittle bones, a wafting seahorse of a man. Looking at him, Richard had to fend off the impression of a disembodied skull and spinal column floating about disconsolately in search of warmth and shelter.
Richard had already finished scribbling A’s on all his students’ papers, but the interruption came as he was going through them for a second time, making sure that all the A’s were the same size lest they should arouse petty jealousies and adorning each of them with intricate serifs. He always handed back papers that looked as if they’d fallen into the hands of medieval rubricators.
“Perhaps you can help me make sense of something I’ve discovered,” said Abdullah, wafting over to the visitor’s chair and settling onto its surface like a feather abandoned by the breeze. “It’s rather peculiar.” From his suit he withdrew a sheaf of printed papers. Richard could easily imagine whole libraries concealed within that suit along with his skeletal colleague. “I received this from a friend,” said Abdullah, laying the first of the papers on the desk. “A professor in England.” Never having managed to get himself to Europe, Abdullah was palpably pleased to count among his correspondents a professor in England.
Richard examined the printout. It was a conference itinerary. Halfway down the list of speakers, circled was his name.
“Then I found this,” Abdullah went on. “And also this.” Side by side, he laid the CVs: Richard Billings’, and Richard Billings’. Richard didn’t have to examine them. He’d updated his CV just last week, copying and pasting the most recent accomplishments of Richard Billings before clicking upload. Nothing about the American University of Beirut had been copied, or pasted.
“Then I thought there must be some mistake,” Abdullah went on, “so I asked my friend to confirm that you were really there, in England. He said he’d attended an event with you just last night, and that you were scheduled to speak again this morning.” He laid his next two printouts on the desk, the grainy, black-and-white faces of the two Richard Billings. Unlike the CVs, they were not identical. “I asked him which of these two men is the world-renowned professor of rhetoric and composition,” he said, “and he told me that it is most certainly not the one with the beard. He has met you many times, Richard, and you have never had a beard.”
Richard’s fingers fled like frightened birds into the silky, salt-and-pepper tufts that blossomed from his chin.
“It seems to me,” said Abdullah, “that our dean might like to know that his most esteemed professor of rhetoric and composition is in possession of a beard to which he has no right.”
“You know, Abdullah,” Richard said weakly, “it’s quite a common name.”
“That may be,” said Abdullah, “but there’s no record of any other Richard Billings with your sterling credentials. I’ve searched, you see. There’s an American baseball player. There was an editor with Lifestyle Magazine. There’s a financier. Yet there’s only one professor of rhetoric and composition, and he teaches at the University of Canterbury, not here in Beirut. And he does not have a beard. It seems to me, Richard, that the dean should like to know that the significant salary you’ve managed to squeeze from him has been predicated, all along, on a misunderstanding.”
“Please, Abdullah.” Lurching forward, Richard seized his colleague’s hands. “You mustn’t do this. Without my career, I’ve got nothing. No family. No place in the world. Understand, I’m at your mercy.”
“You’re at the mercy of the truth,” said Abdullah, fastidiously disentangling his fingers. “Nothing more.”
That night, Richard tossed and turned. He kicked and kicked until his sweaty sheets were gone, then retrieved them from the floor and wrapped them tightly around himself until he felt that he was suffocating. The restlessness of Beirut’s midnights hadn’t bothered him in years, but suddenly every car horn jarred him, bringing cold sweats to the pebbled surface of his skin.
He thought of who he’d been eight years before, when he’d arrived in Lebanon, a middle-school drop-out from Jacksonville, Florida, unemployed and unemployable, addicted to everything, committed to nothing, dissolute, pretentious, lovelorn, and insatiable, with degrees only from YouTube, where white men in barong tagalogs and dishdashas had assured him that white men could make it abroad.
That good-for-nothing hovered in the darkness above him with his glittering septum piercing and his leering eyes.
Hours later, he rose in the gray light of morning, insensate to the orange notes on the crisp spring air. He splashed cold water on his face. He donned a suit. He went downstairs and hailed a cab.
On the way to campus, he remembered with a jolt his meeting with the dean, who wanted to discuss his students’ grades. He nearly collapsed stepping out of the cab. His knees trembled gelatinously on his way up the stairs. He’d eaten little since the previous afternoon, digested nothing. His stomach and intestines writhed like headless worms.
The graded papers rustled in his trembling hands as he crept through the halls. He took a deep breath when he reached the dean’s door, but found no room in his deflated lungs. He choked and spluttered as if he were drowning.
The dean was a heavy-set man who smiled placidly at everyone and everything, even when he was furious. He smiled placidly at Richard. “Come in.”
Richard sat in the hard metal visitor’s chair.
“Your students,” said the dean. “They’re doing well?”
“Yes, Sir.”
“All of them?”
“All of them, Sir.” Richard placed the papers gingerly on the desk between them. He straightened their edges. He made sure that the A on top was plainly visible. He smiled weakly.
“What you’re saying,” said the dean, “is that each and every last one of your students is most certainly on track to receive an A?”
“That’s right, Sir.”
“Just to confirm—” the dean fluttered his bench-brush-like eyebrows, “—there’s not a single student under your supervision who may be at risk of receiving, say, an A-minus?”
“Certainly not, Sir.”
“And certainly not a B, I presume? Or, God forbid, a C?”
“Of course not!” To Richard’s horror, a bright giggle leapt from his mouth and flew about the room like a bird. “Never a C, sir.”
“You’re certain?”
“Oh, yes,” said Richard. “More than certain.”
“Well.” Smiling placidly, the dean reached across the desk and gave Richard’s shoulder an avuncular squeeze. He looked him dead in the eye. “You’re all right, then.”
Itto and Mekiya Outini write about America, Morocco, and all those caught in between. They’ve published fiction and nonfiction in The North American Review, Modern Literature, Fourth Genre, The Good River Review, MQR, Chautauqua, The Stonecoast Review, Mount Hope, Jewish Life, Eunoia Review, Litbreak, New Contrast, DarkWinter, ExPat Press, Lotus-Eater, Boudin, Gargoyle Magazine, and elsewhere. Their work has received support from the MacDowell Foundation, the Steinbeck Fellowship Program, the Edward F. Albee Foundation, and the Fulbright Program. They’re collaborating on several books, running The DateKeepers, an author support platform, and co-hosting a podcast and YouTube channel, Let’s Have a Renaissance.
