The Ticking Heart Read online

  The

  TICKING

  HEART

  ANDREW

  KAUFMAN

  COACH HOUSE BOOKS | TORONTO

  copyright © Andrew Kaufman, 2019

  first edition

  Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Coach House Books also acknowledges the support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit.

  Any resemblence to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Title: The ticking heart / Andrew Kaufman.

  Names: Kaufman, Andrew, 1968- author.

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190142987 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190143037 | ISBN 9781552453896 (softcover) | ISBN 9781770565845 (PDF) | ISBN 9781770565838 (EPUB)

  Classification: LCC PS8571.A892 T53 2019 | DDC C813/.6—DC23

  The Ticking Heart is available as an ebook: ISBN 978 1 77056 583 8

  Purchase of the print version of this book entitles you to a free digital copy. To claim your ebook of this title, please email [email protected] with proof of purchase. (Coach House Books reserves the right to terminate the free digital download offer at any time.)

  For Carl. My brother.

  1

  THE RETURN OF THE MAN

  IN THE PURPLE HAT

  Two hours and seventeen minutes into his forty-third year, Charlie Waterfield realized he was lost. He was standing at the corner of Euclid and Barton in downtown Toronto. He could have walked home if he’d wanted to. He probably should have. What prevented him from doing so was the painful realization that he was lost inside the one thing it is impossible to escape: his own life.

  This was his second birthday since the separation, the first he’d spent on his own, and he really thought he’d be happy by now. His kids had made him dinner but they were spending the night with their mom. Wanda, the woman he was seeing and possibly in love with, had taken him to his favourite theatre and bought him drinks at his favourite bar. And yet all of these expressions of affection hadn’t been enough to make him happy. And he knew that they should have been. He knew he was in no mood to share anything: not a bed, not secrets, and certainly not an Uber. So when the four-door sedan stopped in front him and Charlie saw that there was already someone in the back, he became angry.

  Charlie checked his phone, which confirmed that the black Nissan Rouge was the car he’d requested and that he’d accidently hit ‘Pool’ when ordering it. Charlie looked over his shoulder, up at the window of Wanda’s bedroom. The light on her bedside table was still on. He regretted not accepting her offer to spend the night.

  When Charlie looked back at the Nissan, he couldn’t help noticing that the man in the back seat wore a large hat. The most striking thing about it was its colour, an alarmingly bright purple that seemed to drift into the air like smoke. The brim was extremely wide, so large that he must have taken the hat off before climbing in and then made a conscious decision to put it back on. The hat’s colour and size combined to create the impression of an entirely separate passenger, as if the back seat already held two people and Charlie would be the third.

  This was not how Charlie Waterfield wanted to start his forty-third year. The idea that this car would take him to his apartment and not to the house he still considered home made him very sad. The wind was cold. He’d forgotten his gloves, and his hands were freezing. Shivering, Charlie opened the back door of the car: as it turns out, he was making one of the most important decisions of his life because he was cold and tired and just wanted to get to bed. Which is, of course, how all of life’s most important decisions are made.

  The man in the purple hat smiled broadly and shuffled to the left, making room for Charlie to sit down. As the car pulled away from the curb, Charlie couldn’t stop looking at the hat, which the man under it interpreted as a desire to talk.

  ‘Strange time to be going home.’ The brim of his hat wobbled as he spoke, marking his speech like hand gestures.

  ‘Hmmm?’ Charlie, against his better judgment, continued staring at the hat.

  ‘Most people, you’d have to assume, are already home or have decided to stay where they are. And here you are, trudging home at this ungodly hour on this cold night.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Makes one wonder why.’

  ‘Why what?’ Charlie took care to overenunciate his words. He did this to compensate for the man in the purple hat’s English accent, which made his own seem provincial.

  ‘Why didn’t you stay where you were?’

  Charlie found the strength to look down at his knees. Several moments passed. Unable to resist the pull of the hat, Charlie looked back up at it. The man in the purple hat was still looking at him.

  ‘Do you mind?’ the man in the purple hat said as he pointed to Charlie’s chest. It was at this moment that two very strange things happened. The first was that Charlie knew, without a doubt, that the man in the purple hat was suggesting that Charlie allow him to listen to his heart. The second was that Charlie knew, also without a doubt, that he was going to let him do it.

  Charlie unbuttoned his jacket, although he kept the buttons on his shirt done up. The man pushed his purple hat toward the back of his head, so it sat above his forehead in a way that seemed to rebuke gravity. Lowering his head, he pressed his right ear flush against Charlie’s chest.

  ‘Do you hear that? Something slogging around in there. A hopeful sound. But you know, hope can be a very dangerous thing.’

  ‘Slogging?’

  ‘Thank you.’ The man in the purple hat sat up and pulled his hat back into position. The movement drew Charlie’s attention. He discovered that, once again, he was unable to look away from it.

  ‘Have you ever heard of a city named Metaphoria?’ asked the man in the purple hat.

  ‘No.’

  ‘That’s because it doesn’t exist, at least not like this city or others like it do. The city of Metaphoria is like Brigadoon, or Avalon, or Echo Beach. It is the sort of place that most people think is a fiction, a fairy tale. Let me assure you, Metaphoria is no fiction. It is a very real place. A city with buildings and streets and citizens. But it is a city very few people ever get the opportunity to visit.’

  Charlie immediately stopped staring at the purple hat and looked down at his knees again. He had determined the man in the purple hat to be off balance. Charlie shifted his body to the right, pointing his knees and torso as far away from the man in the purple hat as possible and looked out the window. This is when he saw the large white snowflakes falling from the sky. Charlie found it very difficult not to take the fact that it was snowing, in April, on his birthday, personally.

  ‘Metaphoria is a place you simply appear. One moment you’re living your life to the best of your abilities, and the next, poof, you find yourself on the streets of Metaphoria. What brought you there? It’s simple: everyone there has something they can’t get over: a belief or love or antiqued self-image. Perhaps a painful memory they can’t stop defining themselves by.

  ‘Does any of this sound familiar to you, Charlie?’

  ‘Yes.’ Charlie was surprised by the sound of his voice. He hadn’t realized he was speaking until he heard it. He looked at the man in the purple hat, although his knees and torso continued to point at the door of the car.

  ‘Metaphoria is a city that isn’t based on realism. The organizing principle in Metaphoria is metaphor. It is a city specifically designed to trigger epiphanies. And that’s a very important word to remember, Charlie. Epiphany! Because that’s the only way out of Metaphoria. Six buses, four trains, and eighteen flights leave
Metaphoria each and every day – but all of them arrive at the same bus depot, train station, or airport they departed from. There is only one way to leave Metaphoria, and that is to go out on the same puff of purple smoke and smell of cedar you came in on. In Metaphoria, this is known as a … poof!’

  ‘Poof?’ For the first time Charlie looked the man in the eyes and not the hat.

  ‘Poof!’

  ‘Poof.’

  ‘And the only way to trigger a poof is to have an epiphany. As a recently divorced man – wait, let me correct myself … because that’s the whole point of all of this, isn’t it? Because you’re not recently divorced, are you, Charlie? You haven’t been a husband for two years? Yes? That’s long enough to figure out that it isn’t the bite that kills you but the venom.’

  ‘Are we talking about snakes?’

  ‘You’re spending all this time and energy and effort resenting the snake for biting you. That’s the last thing you should be doing. Charlie, you have spent seven hundred and thirty days focusing on the fact that you’ve been bitten and not on the venom coursing through your veins!’

  ‘How did you know I was recently divorced?’

  ‘Two years is not recent.’

  ‘We were together for twenty years.’

  ‘Living in Metaphoria gets tricky, though, because nobody has just one problem. Everyone has multiple problems. And Metaphoria manifests all of them. To be in Metaphoria is to see all your problems at once, manifested at the same time, like ivy at the height of summer.

  ‘There will be times when all of Metaphoria seems dead set against you, Charlie. As if the entire city has been specifically constructed to poke you in the places you wish not to be poked. You just have to trust that it’s all for your own good.’

  Charlie turned his body to face the man in the purple hat. The man opened his eyes wider than Charlie thought possible and tipped the brim of his hat backward, causing it to rub against the roof of the car.

  ‘Don’t worry about panicking. Everybody panics.’

  Charlie could smell burning cedar. He felt woozy. He rested his forearms on the tops of his legs. He looked down at the floor of the car. And then there was so much purple smoke that Charlie couldn’t see anything else.

  Poof!

  2

  THE EPIPHANY DETECTIVE AGENCY

  For several moments Charlie couldn’t see anything but purple smoke, and when it started to clear, Shirley Miller plunged a knife into his chest. The blade was serrated. The handle was pearl. She pushed it deeper. Using both hands and all of her strength, Shirley sawed downward. She cut through bone and muscle. This caused Charlie to scream, loudly. He didn’t move his arms or legs or any other part of his body. He couldn’t. The only part of Charlie that wasn’t as wooden as the chair underneath him was his vocal cords. All he could do was scream as Shirley cut an eight-inch incision in his chest.

  She pulled out the knife, flicking a drop of blood into the air. The drop hung motionless for a fraction of a second. It changed shape, from a drop to a heart, then it fell. The heart-shaped drop left a heart-shaped stain on the hardwood.

  ‘This might hurt a bit, Charlie.’

  Reaching through the incision, Shirley grabbed Charlie’s heart. She tightened her grip and ripped Charlie’s heart out of his chest. When she uncurled her fingers, Charlie’s heart sat in the middle of Shirley’s open palm. It was at this moment that Charlie began to panic. His panic was triggered not just by the fact that Shirley had stabbed him in the chest, or that his heart currently beat on her open palm, although these were contributing factors. What really panicked Charlie was that he recognized Shirley from university. They had dated for a year and half.

  ‘Oh, Charlie. Did you never learn to take care of this thing?’

  Charlie’s heart did not look great. The pulmonary veins were swollen and purple. A long scar ran from the base of his aorta all the way across to the left ventricle. Smaller scars criss-crossed his right auricle. The superior vena cava leaned to the left at a strange angle. Although his heart beat in a steady rhythm, it seemed to do so with great reluctance. It had been years since Charlie had treated his heart with care and respect. This was because he had a long list of grievances about his heart. He didn’t like that his heart made him so vulnerable. He didn’t like how slow it was to heal. Even now, two years after he was legally divorced, Charlie’s heart continued to gush out sadness early in the morning and late at night.

  However, the thing Charlie disliked the most about his heart was that it could be so disloyal. He had not wanted to fall out of love with his wife. She had not wanted to fall out of love with him. And yet both of these things had happened, causing Charlie to spend his days hoping that the situation would change, that their love would return. The fact that it never did seemed like a betrayal to him. And now here it was falling in love with Wanda. Charlie had grown to believe his heart was not to be trusted.

  He had spent the last two years, if not longer, living as if his heart weren’t part of him. He had ignored everything his heart had suggested. He had not allowed it to contribute to any decisions he made. But as he watched his heart wearily beat on Shirley’s open palm, Charlie’s only desire was to get it back inside him.

  ‘It’s been a while since I’ve been this close to your heart,’ she said.

  ‘Although, if I remember correctly, this isn’t the first time you ripped it out.’

  As Charlie said this, his heart beat just a little bit faster. Shirley noticed, but she was kind enough not to mention it. She gave Charlie’s heart a tender squeeze. She was one of those tall blond women with wide shoulders whose confidence and straight-ahead manner protect a sincere sentimentality. As she looked down at Charlie’s heart, she found it certifiably ugly and in such an advanced state of disrepair she wondered if it could ever be fixed. However, she also saw something noble in its determination to continue beating, which caused her own heart to beat just a little bit stronger and a little bit faster. Her long fingers treated Charlie’s heart with delicate care as she wrapped it in a blue linen cloth and put it into her purse.

  Charlie could see his heart beating inside Shirley’s purse. From that same purse, Shirley took out a bomb. The bomb looked homemade. Seven sticks of dynamite were duct-taped together and connected to a digital clock with a single green wire. Shirley pressed a red button and the bomb started ticking. She pushed the bomb through the incision in Charlie’s chest. It sat right where Charlie’s heart should have been. Taking a needle and a spool of fishing line from her purse, Shirley began stitching up Charlie’s incision. She worked carefully. Her fingers made small, precise movements. She was trying to leave as small a scar as possible. It saddened Shirley to know that no matter how hard she tried or how carefully she worked, there would be a scar. Which, as we all know, is the way these things work.

  ‘Your heart weighs much more than the bomb.’

  ‘Does that mean something?’

  ‘This is Metaphoria, Charlie. Everything means something. What are you carrying in there?’

  ‘Sadness?’

  ‘Sadness weighs less than that.’

  ‘How do you know I’m carrying anything in there?’

  ‘Everybody’s carrying something in their heart. One of the few benefits of living in Metaphoria is that you finally get to see what it is.’

  ‘What’s in yours?’

  ‘For me it’s not what’s in it so much as the size.’

  ‘Your heart’s too small?’

  ‘It’s too big, Charlie. My heart loves too much. This motivates me to do horrible things in order to keep that love. Case in point: what I’ve just done to you.’

  Shirley tied a knot in the fishing line. Leaning close to his chest, she bit off the thread. It was at this moment that Charlie’s panic returned. His eyes grew wide. His breathing turned rapid and, feeling dizzy, Charlie became convinced that he was going to pass out.

  ‘It’s okay. It’s okay.’

  ‘I’m just … It’s
…’

  ‘Everybody panics when they arrive. Just breathe. Concentrate on breathing. Remember, there is a way home.’

  ‘That’s right. Right. I just … to get home … I have to have an epiphany?’

  ‘You have to have a certain kind of epiphany. But you’re right, that’s how we get home.’

  ‘There are different types of epiphanies?’

  ‘It helps if you think about it in the form of a question.’ Straddling his lap, Shirley put both of her hands on his face and looked into his eyes. ‘Think of your epiphany as the answer to a question. Find that answer, trigger your epiphany, and there you go, poof, sailing home on the same gust of purple smoke and smell of burning cedar you came in on.’

  ‘What’s the question?’

  ‘What’s the purpose of the human heart?’

  ‘It’s not to push blood through the body?’

  ‘Not around here.’

  ‘To emote?’

  ‘You’re going to have to be more specific than that. Because the thing is, there isn’t one answer to that question. That’s why it’s such a great question! Every citizen of Metaphoria has their own answer. The purpose of the human heart is different for everybody who has one. Answer that question, for real, for you, and you’ll trigger your poof.’

  Shirley looked down at her blouse and found a small red stain. This was one of her favourite shirts and she was angry at herself for having been so careless. She attempted to get rid of the stain using a handkerchief and spit. Her motions were vigorous. She forgot that Charlie was even in the room, much less that his heart was beating in her purse. Finally, she gave up trying to remove the stain, looked up, and was startled to see that she was still straddling his lap.

  She looked around the room. Following her lead, Charlie did the same. He appeared to be in some sort of office, behind a wooden desk, sitting in a wooden chair. The office was neither luxurious nor busy.

  ‘As far as arrivals go, Charlie, you’ve done pretty well for yourself. You have arrived in Metaphoria as the sole detective of the Epiphany Detective Agency. Why am I here? Well, I suspect that the metaphoric implications will soon be revealed to us. Presently, I am in need of your services.