Oh, how we laughed at him! We did. We laughed. How we laughed! Maybe he was extraordinarily stupid. Maybe there were some too-sweet or too-sour juices sloshing around in his brain. We didn’t know. We didn’t care. He was a sucker par excellence and we laughed and laughed. That was back in school, when being a sucker was one of the worst things to be. We pasted kick mes on his back. We tied his shoelaces together. We grabbed his cap from his head and wouldn’t give it back. We punched him in the belly and took his lunch money. And we laughed.

But he laughed along with us. We said, "We’re laughing at you, not with you," but that didn’t stop him. He laughed and laughed. "Why are you laughing?" we said. "We just poured lentil soup down your shirt. You should be crying." "Because you guys are having such a good time," he answered. "And that makes me happy." Can you imagine? That’s why I thought his brain juices were most likely tainted.

I wouldn’t have forgotten him anyway, I doubt that I would ever have really forgotten him, but I ran into him again around five years later, professionally. I was selling. He was buying. I stated a price, an arbitrary, inflated price meant to start me off in a good place for negotiating. He accepted it outright. I was caught off guard. This had never happened before. I said, "I might be able to bring it down a little since we went to school together." He said, "Nah. That’s okay. I believe in paying full value." When I related the story, my coworkers and I had a good chuckle. When his invoice was stamped Paid, I won salesman of the month.

Ten years passed and I did forget him. Almost. He was always there, I believe, in the back of my mind. Whenever I witnessed a scam, whenever I saw someone get the better of someone else, and especially whenever someone laughed as others abused him, he peeked through the folds of my gray matter. I never noticed him. I was too busy holding my own.

Then, one afternoon, I saw him from a café window. He was dirty, skinny, disheveled, nearly dead. I watched as he panhandled. A dime. A quarter. Finally, a dollar. His face brightened. He began to cross the street. He was coming to the café to get a little food. Outside the door, another panhandler tapped him on the shoulder. They had a brief conversation and he gave away his only dollar. The other man scurried away. He stood there with an elated grin.

I invited him in and bought him lunch. "What can I say?" he said. "I can’t say no. I like to make people happy." "But look at the state it’s left you in," I pointed out. "Yes. I know," he said. "But I don’t mind." And he started laughing. I couldn’t bring myself to join him. His juices were certainly spoilt.

Then, over rice pudding, he told me he had been building an ark. He said that God had been speaking to him for months, through dreams, Ouija boards, shell game shills, and a greasy preacher with a homemade business card. "God has?" "Yes. He says, ‘You’re exactly the guy I’ve been waiting for.’ So now I’m God’s sucker too, I guess." And he chortled around his spoon.

The next day was when the rain began. Since then, nobody much laughs anymore.