Rube

Rube     

   Rube Goldberg Junior was nothing like his father. He, unlike his father, who had dedicated himself to the peculiarly intricate connections between things, people, and situations, found people to be little more than over rated guests of a planet that deserved better. His theories propelled thought to a level where it did not exist as imagined but took on an identity of the one who observed it. Envision a maze where there was more than one possibility of a destination. A collection of pieces put together with the influence of individual experience, allowing each participant to define a conclusion of their own making. Chaos many exclaim, is the ultimate indecisive end to the triviality that dictates that not all numbers should be taken literally. Rube says, take that number “too,” for example.

    Some say Rube was diagnosed with dementia or dyslexia, simply to relive the pain he experienced by seeing everything from the inside out of upside down. The diagnosis was to allow him the ability to view his world and those in it, without having to endure the empathy that surrounds the majority of emotional decisions that should be left to a pragmatist. 

   Rube decided that if his memory were to undergo a diminishing capacity to record information that would influence his reactions to life, he would, before it was too late, fill his remaining time with experiences, and record his reactions to them in the gray cells that kept his head, from sounding like a drum being peppered by the wonderful contradictions of summer, hail.

    To accomplish his devised plan, he would need to avoid all motion that was not on foot. He realized as the world sped by in an effort to arrive before it left, that many of life’s most precious observations were blurred or not seen at all. Walking he decided was the only way to encourage the ultimate number of recordings in any given outing, therefore increasing the likelihood that even if his diagnosis was incorrect, he would be so far ahead of the curve that neither he, nor they, would know whether he was coming or goin. He had attempted crawling but found the experience demeaning and hurtful, so disregarded his inclination for exemplary observations.

    The main objection, besides those of his feet, was the familiarity accrued by moving slowly but deliberately in the proximity of his tenement house. It caused his environment to resemble little more than a mundane romp through Trisha’s lipstick mercantile. He rarely left the block as the environment changed daily in such provocatively imperceptible ways; Rube could not be positive he had not experienced the place previously, and hated indecision. He did take solace from the familiarity that surrounded him however. He found as his ability to remember seemed to fade in and out like an old dial up connection, his olfactory senses became more acute.

 Rube had read a book early on in his formative years that suggested he would either die in a nuclear war or an environmental holocaust of his own making. It was the germ of inevitability Rube had not been able to escape. It followed him like a shadow, blackening all thoughts dealing with any form of happiness.

    It was this ominous cloud that caused him to take stock of his life, predict how much time he believed he had, the human race had, and decided rather than submit to the inevitability predestined to be his, he would fight back. He would do so through observation. He would see and record in his memory, everything that surrounded him. He would use his observations as ammunition in his war against complacency. He gave up riding in vehicles of any kind. They made it impossible to see, hear, experience all the things the earth had to offer before it would be gone.

   Rube’s dreams of an uninhibited future, mixed with the remnants of the reality that remained for him, left him confused, but confident of his confusion. He no longer was capable of definitively differentiating between reality and illusion. Cognizant of his deepening condition, he decided that he would take every opportunity to observe and record the sights and sounds of a world he was destined to forget. 

    Rube was not convinced what he suffered from was dementia. He felt his disconnection with the obvious was the intentional result of faith. He had debated the notion of faith for years, well a year. To believe in something you could not see or touch, bothered him. It was this annoyance that left him feeling life was simply a cartoon after all, and to dispute the fact only shortchanged the approximation of nirvana, a term he found amusing.

    He would dabble in chat rooms when there was little worth seeing, it being too stormy, or because of an explosion of violence, when he was advised by incoming suggestions from the media, to stay indoors. When he had examined every inch of his apartment and found nothing new to scrutinize, it left him susceptible to boredom. In his mind, boredom was the ultimate insult in a world filled with never ending questions. He had even gone so far as to install cameras in the areas of the house most frequented by rodents. He found their inability to relate to one another, because of their lack of self-esteem, discouraging, as he had held an earlier assumption that the human race had been modeled after the rodent populations of Nirvana. Nirvana being Rube’s fictional heaven that everyone couldn’t wait to get to, but spent their entire lives attempting to avoid.

   On his good days Rube walked for miles. He avoided discourse with people at all cost. They were distractions to what was important, in his view. It was during his walk on the 13^th of June, a Friday, at 5:41 AM, just as the sun was peeking over the top of Adolf Lufkin’s Bakery on Gillette Street, he saw it. A glint of light coming from a place it should not exist, and yet there it was, confirming his affinity for unpredictability.

    Rube maneuvered himself into a position that optimized the light, maximizing the effect it had on objects he felt didn’t belong, and yet there it was. He stooped to get a better look at the distraction that changed his entire outlook on man hole covers. There in that circular space that allowed the cover to slip into its bed and become a fixed amendment of the city’s waste disposal system, was a circular band of metal, a ring. He picked it from its narrow confinement and examined it in the dim light of the broken street lamp. 14 Carat, he recorded in his mind as he’d forgotten his pencil. The lettering would not come into focus as was often the case when he failed to wear his reading glasses which magnified everything, by five times, allowing him to traverse the city without being killed by traffic or falling down open stairwells that led to the underbelly of a city’s true spiritual nature, the cellars of corner stores.

    He was so familiar with his neighborhood; at times he didn’t realize he was without his glasses. He navigated the area strictly from memory and his acute sense of smell. Adolf’s bakery, the turpentine smell of the hardware store, the rotting contents of dumpsters behind the Coroner Café. A play on words that Rube considered not a very good one, considering the type of business it represented. His acute olfactory perceptions could tell you what the café’s special the previous evening had been, had he been asked.

    Rube made his way to the rear of the bakery. He knew the access code to the heavy metal door that prevented competitors from breaking into Adolf’s establishment and stealing his old family recipes. The place Rube could attest to, was a veritable fortress.

    Abe was a tall thin man, where Rube would have been described as having a more jovial appearance. Rubes inability to sleep and Abe’s obsession with work made the likelihood they would become, if not friends, tolerable acquaintances, which of course for the sake of this telling, became true. 

  Abe began to make his patented and sought-after Blintz concoctions at 4AM each and almost every morning, seven days a week. His Blintz-a-mania was renowned for bringing hidden talents from the shy, as well as subduing the arrogance of those who believed in auditory stimulation to win opponents to one’s particular point of view. The blintz in question came pre-buttered, injected with jelly, your choice of the two available, and cream cheese. The concoction was subjected to the dragon like flames of an oven for a minute giving the blintz a surreal glory normally reserved for guillotined queens.           

     Rube’s usual time to visit Adolf was during the transition period during the morning when the bakery switched from breakfast demands to the requirements of afternoon and evening. Rube pushed the familiar buttons and the door swung open. The smell of Blimkins wafted over him as did the steam from the dishwashing contraption he despised. He made his way by feel, through the maze of stainless tables ignoring the cataract fog that enveloped him, towards the office where he knew Adolf would be having his morning tea. He did not begin the Pizza dough recipe until after noon, and only then on days he felt like it. Truth be known it was where he recycled the left-over dough from his morning Blimkin production. 

    This particular morning something was different. As Rube looked at the ring he held gently in his hand, he couldn’t quite figure out what, until he slipped on a discarded Blimkin, fell headlong into the freshly boarded dough of the second batch, and lost track of the ring. It embedded itself like a reporter during the second gulf war, into the mountain of expanding dough on the table. His cry for help brought Adolf from the confines of his office. 

The first shot nearly hit Rube. The second one did. 

    Rube if nothing else, believed in transparency, especially when it came to ones actions concerning friends. He had been prepared to divulge to Adolf his fortunate find, the ring, when the bullet entered his chest, stopping just centimeters on the other side of his heart. He found as he fell to the floor, that he no longer had the inclination to tell Adolf anything, let alone anything pertinent about the ring he’d lost, possibly in the second batch of his secretive, “Blimkin dough.”