The Ticking Heart Read online

  It was not the hardest punch the Cyclops had ever given him: Charlie rose upward, but not that far. As he fell back down, the Cyclops caught him. Holding Charlie by the lapels of his purple velvet jacket, the Cyclops walked to the edge of the Tachycardia Tower and dangled him over.

  ‘Wanda left me this morning. Did she tell you?’

  ‘I haven’t heard from her.’ Charlie resisted looking down. ‘I thought she was trying to fight the zombie clones of her old boyfriend.’

  ‘Are you surprised that she left me?’

  ‘Fuck you,’ Charlie Waterfield said.

  The Cyclops was not so impressed.

  ‘Fuck me?’ The Cyclops shook Charlie vigorously. These efforts had the opposite effect of what the Cyclops intended: the more the Cyclops shook Charlie, the more Charlie laughed.

  ‘What do you want me to say?’ Charlie asked. ‘I didn’t know you were with her when we met. Obviously, I either ignored or suppressed the signs that she was married. I will admit that. But doesn’t the fact that she slept with me say something? Doesn’t the fact that she fell in love with me say even more? Come on! Where’s your self-respect? Where’s your self-preservation? Where are your standards? Why do you want to be with a woman who doesn’t want to be with you?’

  ‘She does want to be with me.’

  ‘Not for the right reasons.’

  The Cyclops started shaking Charlie even harder. His body flopped around like he’d been deboned. His head bounced in unpredictable ways. His right shoe came off. Charlie and the Cyclops watched it fall. The ticking grew louder as the shoe got smaller. At the sixty-seventh floor, the shoe was so small they couldn’t see it anymore. The same was not true for the ticking, which remained loud in Charlie’s ears. Inspired by the poetics of the falling shoe, Charlie had an epiphany. He waited to smell burning cedar and see purple smoke. Neither of these things arrived, so he decided to share the epiphany with the Cyclops.

  ‘The failure isn’t when love ends. It’s refusing to accept that it’s gone.’

  ‘You’d like to believe that, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘I know it to be true.’

  ‘Wouldn’t that be nice if it were. It would make everything so easy.’

  ‘Accepting that love is gone is no easy task.’

  ‘That’s because you’re a coward. And that gives me comfort,’ the Cyclops said. ‘To know that you will never be brave enough to love Wanda Parks. Not fully. Not with passion. Every day you will have to live with this. Every day you will be forced to confront the truth that a woman as wonderful as Wanda Parks has fallen in love with you, but you are too fearful to love her back. You will pretend that you love her with all your heart, but your heart is cowardly. Eventually, you will begin to realize that that’s why she stays with you. That this is the real reason she fell in love with you in the first place, why she continues to love you: because you’re unavailable to her.’

  The Cyclops fell silent. He looked Charlie in the eyes as his grip began to loosen.

  ‘This is going to hurt you very much. And it still won’t be as much pain as the pain you’ve caused in me.’

  ‘What about your revenge? I’ll never learn that Wanda only loves me because I can’t commit to her emotionally if I’m dead!’

  ‘Oh, Mr. Waterfield. Have you really not figured out how this place works?’

  ‘Wait! Wait! Do you still love her?’

  The Cyclops stared at Charlie, or rather in Charlie’s direction. The Cyclops’s eye was focused on something invisible and far away. When the Cyclops did look back at Charlie, he had clearly forgotten all about him and was surprised to find someone dangling at the end of his fists. With great power and little care, the Cyclops tossed Charlie away.

  Charlie rose upward. He was three storeys above the roof of the Tachycardia Tower when the Unnamed Ghost appeared beside him.

  ‘Hey, asshole! Pay attention! What are you doing?’

  ‘I’m … What am I supposed to be doing?’

  ‘He’s got it, Charlie! That Cyclops has figured it out! You guys are stuck on the same thing! Why do you think he keeps showing up? And he’s done it! You’re missing a chance to free both of us!’

  The Unnamed Ghost disappeared. It was at this moment that Charlie realized his name: he was the Ghost of Charlie’s Capacity to Love. Charlie looked down as he continued going upward. He saw the Cyclops sit on the roof, put his chin in his hands, then rub his eyes. The Cyclops was crying. He issued a deep, forgiving laugh. It was unclear who the Cyclops was forgiving.

  ‘Charlie! It’s so easy! You should do it too.’

  ‘Do what? Do what?’ Charlie asked.

  But Charlie’s question arrived too late. Even though he continued rising upward at an alarming rate, so that he was now the highest object in all of Metaphoria, Charlie could see the purple smoke gathering around the Cyclops as he sat on the roof of the Tachycardia Tower …

  Poof!

  25

  NAKED AND TINY

  The purple smoke cleared as Charlie fell toward the roof of the Tachycardia Tower. The speed of his descent was rapid. Charlie took deep breaths. His palms started sweating. His heart beat faster, although Charlie couldn’t see that because he was so high above the Tachycardia Tower. His left shoe came off. His watch slipped from his wrist. His pants, jacket, and shirt fluttered away. Charlie looked down and saw something directly below him on the roof. It was his heart. His superior vena cava pointed up like a smokestack and Charlie fell through it.

  Sunlight shone through the walls of Charlie’s heart. The farther he fell, the less light there was. He landed on his tricuspid valve in near total darkness. He looked up at his right atrium, which was cavernous. Charlie experienced a serene calm, which stopped his shrinking, although he remained tiny. And then, suddenly, the tricuspid valve opened and Charlie fell into the total darkness of his right ventricle.

  The moment Charlie began to believe he would never stop falling, he landed in a thick, tarlike liquid. The impact didn’t produce a splash, although it did provoke the liquid to emit a bright orange light, like phosphorescence in the ocean. The glowing orange tar clung to his arms and legs, making it difficult to swim. He could not touch the bottom. Struggling, he swam to the ventricle wall and tried pulling himself out, but he couldn’t. There was nothing for his feet to step on. The walls of his ventricle were smooth and slippery, and Charlie sunk below the surface of the tar.

  As Charlie struggled to regain the surface, he swallowed some of the glowing orange tar. It tasted like Hope #108. He struggled to swim through the tar but soon became exhausted. Unable to resist, he sank to the bottom of his heart.

  As Charlie waited to run out of breath, he pieced together what had happened. His divorce, or rather his inability to get over it, had caused his heart to produce an overabundance of hope. This excess hope clogged his left ventricle, a dark, confined space. Add the stress of the divorce, and Charlie’s heart became a natural environment for the distillation of pure hope, which had coated the inside of his heart, making it impervious to love.

  Discovering this explained a lot to Charlie. It also left him with a decision: either he eliminate the hope of getting back together with his wife, or he drown in it. And even though Charlie understood the choice in these terms, it took him several moments before he decided to get rid of it.

  With the last of his strength, Charlie swam to the ventricle wall. He raised his bare foot. He kicked downward. Nothing happened. He did it again. He kicked three more times. On the fourth, a little bit of sunlight came in. The amount of sunlight, while small, weakened the pure hope just a little bit. Charlie continued kicking. His kicks became more effective. Soon the crack got larger. It grew in length and width. More light flooded into his ventricle. The crack became a hole and the hope streamed out of Charlie’s heart, carrying Charlie along with it.

  26

  THE EXACT LOCATION OF

  TWIGGY MILLER’S HEART

  Charlie Waterfield lay on his back on
the roof of the Tachycardia Tower. The sun burned away the sticky orange hope stuck to his body. Small pebbles dug into his skin, but Charlie remained perfectly still. He closed his eyes. When no purple smoke or smell of burning cedar arrived, Charlie sighed heavily, stood up, and brushed off the small stones that were stuck to his skin.

  ‘Always gotta be the hard way with you,’ Charlie said to himself.

  The first thing Charlie found was his watch. He strapped it on. He was naked except for the watch, which looked quite odd, but nobody else saw. Charlie closed his eyes. He took a deep breath. He let it out and looked down at his wrist.

  0 HR 17 MIN 28 SEC

  This did not seem like enough time. Charlie scrambled to collect his clothes and his heart. He dressed, stuffed his heart back into the breast pocket of his jacket, and ran to the elevator.

  The elevator doors opened as he approached them. It started descending as soon as Charlie was inside it. The button for the first floor was already lit. No one got on for a hundred floors. The doors opened, and Charlie stepped into the lobby. The shoulder-to-shoulder crowd of well-dressed, busy-looking people parted, forming an aisle that allowed Charlie to run to the payphones. As Charlie approached, the phone in the middle started ringing. Charlie, nearing the end of his first full day in Metaphoria, picked up the receiver without hesitation.

  ‘Shirley?’

  ‘Do you have Twiggy’s heart?’

  ‘How quickly can you get to my office?’

  ‘Fifteen minutes?’

  ‘You’ll have to do it in ten and you’re going to have to convince Twiggy to meet us there. He won’t come if I try to bring him.’

  ‘Not a problem.’

  Charlie ran out of the Tachycardia Tower and was trying to hail a cab when he noticed that his apple-red Corvette was parked at the curb, directly in front of him. The engine was running. The driver’s-side door was unlocked. The Cyclops’s ring was no longer chained behind it. Charlie put his heart in the passenger seat, fastened the seat belt around it, and pulled into northbound traffic. He drove very quickly. He caught every light. His car suddenly had lights and a siren. Traffic in front of him pulled over to let him pass. There was a parking spot in front of his building. Charlie collected his heart and ran up to the office of the Epiphany Detective Agency. Shirley and Twiggy were waiting.

  ‘You do not have much time.’ Shirley plucked Charlie’s heart from the breast pocket of his jacket. She put it in the middle of Charlie’s desk. Together, they watched it beat.

  ‘This isn’t Twiggy’s!’

  ‘It’s mine.’

  ‘You told me you had it!’

  ‘I can tell you where it is! It’s right there!’ Charlie pointed to Twiggy’s chest.

  Twiggy tried to bolt through the door of the Epiphany Detective Agency. He was very quick. The twigs of his right hand had already grasped the doorknob before Shirley had time to take off her gloves and snap her fingers, which froze Twiggy completely. She undid the buttons on Twiggy’s shirt. She put her ear to his chest. She closed her eyes and sighed out her disappointment.

  ‘I don’t hear it, Charlie.’

  ‘It’s encased in hope. A special industrial kind of hope. Hope #108. That’s what Twiggy was developing with Kitty. Together they found a way to make the heart impervious to love.’

  ‘Convince me.’

  ‘The Spero Machine? You know about that? It doesn’t tell people if their love is true. It was never designed to do that. It’s a hope-collection unit. Twiggy needs massive amounts of normal hope to make Hope #108. He used himself as a lab rat. Maybe Kitty too? I don’t know. But that’s why you were so sure Twiggy had lost his heart. It’s encased with Hope #108. He can no longer send or receive love. But it’s in there! His heart’s in there, Shirley!’

  ‘Is this true?’ Shirley asked Twiggy.

  ‘You can get it too. It’s a very simple procedure. It makes you stronger than love!’

  Shirley put her hand lightly against Twiggy’s cheek. Twiggy remained frozen. It was unclear whether he would have reciprocated this gesture or not. Shirley kept her eyes on the eyes of her husband.

  ‘You know who deserves to be treated better than this? I do.’ The expression on Shirley’s face wasn’t anger but a sort of wonder, as if she were astonished to discover that something she’d always thought difficult was in fact quite simple. ‘You don’t treat me very well. Maybe you’re a good person, but you’re not a good person to me. That’s what it’s for. Jesus, Twiggy – that's it! The purpose of the human heart isn’t to make me strong enough to keep loving you. It’s to prevent me from ever ending up with someone like you in the first place!’

  Shirley became still. She looked up at Charlie, but her eyes were focused on something very far away …

  Poof!

  27

  THE CONSEQUENCES OF

  THE C.O.W.A.R.D.

  The smell of burning cedar and the clouds of purple smoke cleared from Charlie Waterfield’s office, but the ticking in his ears remained. He looked at Twiggy, who in Shirley’s absence had come unfrozen. Twiggy patted down his hair. He straightened his tie and tucked his dress shirt into his dress pants. But nothing Twiggy did fixed his dishevelled appearance. He looked a mess because he was one. He opened the office door, but stopped when he was halfway out.

  ‘I wish I could feel sad about this,’ Twiggy said.

  ‘You don’t?’

  ‘I’ve just lost the love of my life.’

  ‘There are very few things harder.’

  ‘But I don’t feel anything about it! Nothing! Shirley was the greatest love I’ve ever known. And I don’t feel sad or destroyed or even upset! This absence of emotion is the worst feeling I’ve ever had!’

  Twiggy looked across the room at Charlie. His eyes didn’t focus on Charlie. They focused on something very far behind him …

  Poof!

  28

  00:00:17

  Charlie was alone in the office of the Epiphany Detective Agency. He closed his eyes. The ticking grew louder with each tick. He could not resist looking at his wristwatch. He had seventeen seconds left. He didn’t know what the purpose of the human heart was. He could repeat all the answers everyone else had given him, but he knew that none of them were true for him. In the absence of anything else, hoping that it might trigger inspiration, Charlie opened the only window in the Epiphany Detective Office and stuck out his head.

  ‘Love ends. I understand that now. Some loves last a short time and some a long time, but all love ends. Also, I now know that a love that ends doesn’t negate its authenticity. That there is no connection. A love that ends was still love. But still, surely love, like any other organic thing, can be tended. It can be nurtured and soothed and given what it needs to grow and thrive. So if it does have a tendency to vanish as mysteriously as it appears, surely there must be someone to blame. No? Am I just wrong about this? Who can explain this to me?’

  The people on the sidewalk and those looking out from the windows of all the buildings fell silent. Not a single person said a word. They waited for Charlie to answer his own question, this being a common thing in Metaphoria. Knowing it was now or never, Charlie closed his eyes. He had faith that his epiphany would come.

  It didn’t. The ticking in his ears got louder and louder and then the bomb in Charlie’s chest went like this:

  29

  HOW THINGS WORK AROUND HERE

  Charlie was just as surprised to wake up as he was to see Wanda. Seeing himself reflected in the lenses of Wanda’s glasses was disturbing: his shirt was torn open, his chest stitched together with imprecision and haste, his left eye was swollen shut, both of his lips were split, and three of his teeth were missing. Charlie was in very rough shape, but also extremely happy to still be alive. The absence of the ticking was so absolute he didn’t notice it. When he did, Charlie sat up quickly, causing the stitches in his chest to dig into his skin.

  ‘I’m alive?’

  ‘Of course you are, Charli
e.’

  ‘But the bomb? It went off … ’

  ‘That’s what bombs do.’

  ‘Why aren’t I dead?’

  ‘Oh, Charlie. Haven’t you figured out how things work here yet? They don’t let you die in Metaphoria. You just get beaten up until you finally figure it out.’

  ‘Is it back?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘My heart.’

  ‘Do you want me to check?’

  ‘Would you?’

  Wanda put her ear against Charlie’s chest. She heard it beating.

  ‘It’s in there.’ Wanda kept her ear pressed against Charlie’s chest. She listened to Charlie’s heart. She noticed that it beat in a series of long and short beats, which she recognized as Morse code. She listened carefully and discovered that Charlie’s heartbeat was repeating the same three-word sentence.

  ‘♥♥ … ♥♥♥♥ / ♥♥♥ / ♥♥♥♥ / ♥ …♥♥♥♥ / ♥♥♥ / ♥♥♥,’ Charlie’s heart beat, again and again, and Wanda couldn’t hold back her tears.

  ‘Did you defeat the zombies and save the world?’

  ‘I did. Will you stand up?’

  With some effort, Charlie stood. Wanda wrapped her arms around him. She felt the muscles on his back. She felt his chest push into hers. Charlie held her tightly. Several moments passed before he realized the significance of this. He turned his head and pressed it against her chest and listened to her heart. It beat a series of long and short beats. If Charlie had known Morse code, he would have known that her heart was spelling out I love you too.