Waves of Modern Thought

The world of Robert Rudkin was very small. The city of Dukeport whirled all around him but he had just the narrow track from his job to his neighborhood of Chapel Rock, to his one bedroom walk-up in a sprawling colony of towers called Trinity Palace. His routine gave him comfort and command. He’d lived at Trinity Palace two and a half decades, so long now that he could go along the familiar street without thinking, without feeling, and lay his quick judgments with a jaded eye. But at times his emotions could still ambush him, same as anyone. And because they had such a narrow channel to run in they hit very fast and hard.

It was in the streetcar where it started. Rudkin was riding home on the crowded car. He was standing and outside the window he could see the commuters all bunched up at the stop. The streetcar halted and passengers boarded, pressing in. As they did they were holding the doors. The operator had to warn them. The train was full. The train was two cars long and she used the intercom so she could be heard from her little booth in front. She barked out of the grainy loudspeakers at everyone.

“This streetcar is full. There is another one behind us. This streetcar is full!”

Her voice was tight and aggravated. The tinny speakers made it shrill. She didn’t hide her contempt. She was impatient already, with everyone, a babysitter to a car of children. She threatened that the doors would break. She promised the train would go out of service. She almost shouted. She transmitted her misery through all the cars.

And that started it. Rudkin felt the first flicker of an awful mood go over him like the shadow of a cloud. The day was hot. That made things harder. The sun was still bright in the summer evening.The passengers were sweating quietly in the hot car. It exhausted Rudkin. It made his legs weak and his patience short and it brought out all his hate.
His attention caught on a man shuffling in the aisle asking for money. There were scabs on the man’s face. His hair was so greasy it appeared wet. The man wore too many filthy layers in the heat and he smelled like an open wound. The smell made Rudkin dizzy and disoriented, like a slap in the face. He held his breath. He gritted his teeth and sweated and gripped the hold-bar tightly to control himself.

Then it was Rudkin’s stop and when the doors slid open he pushed his way out. Outside the door waiting to board were three old Chinese women carrying silvery bags of groceries. They had green onions, and dried chilis, sprouts, and wet fermenting roots. Rudkin saw a whole fish in one bag, strong-smelling stuff. The women stood together around the door and blocked the way. They shuffled into the doorway with little, useless steps when he began to plead with them to please make way, he was getting out, please! They talked to each other in Chinese, oblivious to him. And suddenly he hated their tiny arthritic bodies, the ugly gnarled hands, and the cheap ugly sun hats over their badly dyed hair. Cheap! His thoughts were shouting. Cheap and oblivious! Couldn’t they use a streetcar efficiently? Their ignorance disgraced him. Their presence in the small sphere of his life diminished him. He wanted to scatter them like bowling pins. They only came up to his elbow. Then the doors were closing. He was only half out. The women squeezed by him without a thought. The doors caught on his exhausted shoulders and some rude alarm buzzed in his ears and there was that irate operator again howling through the speakers as he pushed out to the platform.

The platform was an island of cement in the wide street. Rudkin crossed to the busy sidewalk and was engulfed. Kids galloped through the crowd shouting to each other and swinging their backpacks carelessly and Rudkin hated them too. They had acne across their sweating faces. And dirty braces over their crooked teeth. The young girls were in garish makeup. Dark, stray pencil marks all around their eyes and loud, red lipstick to match their angry pimples. They ruined the easy beauty of their youth. They didn’t have any kind of grace. They grinned stupidly at one another and when they caught eyes with a stranger there was that obnoxious flash of unconvincing defiance which betrayed real panic. He hated them.

And all the rest in the crowd too. Around Rudkin there were grubby office workers in their big ill-fitting American shirts and dull, flapping polyester pants clinging rudely to their legs. There were tight groups of young men going together to drink, spending the first real money of their naive lives on overpriced cocktails mixed by a preening bartender in some showy place. He stomped along past the long front window of a local market and Rudkin had hate for the line of dreary patrons waiting to purchase the boxed ingredients of some coarse dinner for their dull families. In the last light before dusk people did their rituals after work. They walked their little, nervous pets, catching up the tiny beads of shit in bags. Joggers ran near the curb. Rudkin hated them so much. These queer joggers! He glared after them with rage as they passed in their goofy headbands and the skimpy nylon shorts that overexposed their grotesque hairless legs. He hated them all.

At the gate of Trinity Palace Rudkin caught his toe on a step and had to catch himself. His hate ballooned. It stretched him unbearably inside. He needed to regain control of himself. He climbed to his apartment. Dropping his things to the floor he went right to the bathroom and ran cold water in the sink. He watched it fill up like a font. He unbuttoned his collar. Then he bent and put his face full in the water. Even his ears went under and the muffled sound was like being sealed up in a vault. It was his mind and there was a chant going in there. Deep breaths, it said. Deep breaths.Thankfully the fire in him was doused somewhat. He stood straight and let the water run from his face. And his lungs filled with air and the cold water was good. He scooped water in his hands and brushed it with his fingers through his hair. He rolled his sleeves back and brushed the cool water up his arms. Deep breaths. With both hands he gripped the bowl of the sink.

And Rudkin looked at his hands. He hated his hands. They were freckled, knobby mitts. They were like an ape’s hands. Above the sink was the mirror and in the reflection he saw the whole close wreck of his face. He winced. The skin of his cheeks was blotchy and wet. He was balding in front and he hated his pale goose-pimpled pate. He hated the hair he had left. It was grey and dripping. He looked ragged. He hated the persistent hunch of his shoulders. He hated his thin, ugly chicken neck. He caught the smell rising out of the damp shirt. It was of coarse hair and stale, coffee sweat. He was disgusting to himself. His clumsy paws, the grimy sink, his lonely house. Even his eyelids were crumbling, deflating over his eyes. But the eyes themselves were hard, peering out. His eyes went on hating and hating into the mirror until Rudkin was grinding his teeth. Hating and hating so that Rudkin had to put his face back in the water and hold it there like he was muffling a scream and not look into the mirror again until the fire was smothered completely.