His Heart Was Ticking
David Halliwell
His heart was ticking. He knew it. He felt it. He could feel it inside, the aortas and channels turned to metal rods, churning to the beat, blood turning to oil as it rushed through the circuitous paths of springs and brass coils before passing as blood back through his body.
It had been five years since he last heard his heart beat. A lawn chair. Dandelion seeds in the air. Crackle of ice in a glass, whisper of condensation sliding down its side. The flutter of book pages in the wind. Four years, three-hundred-sixty-four days, ten hours, forty-five seconds since he had heard the first soft tick of measured motion. Lawn chair overturned. Ice melted. Place in book — lost.
Informed, ignoramus white lab coats and overdrawn, overpriced insurance voice boxes could not tell him what he needed to know. Was it a time piece, or a time bomb?
The scratching pencil across the couch couldn’t say. It made sense though to him: after all, is the heart so different from a clock? Both machine and organ — slaves, kowtowing every second in blind sacrifice to time. But the clock does not mark the beat, does not hear the rush of word and oil and flesh that roars through its valves in every second. The pencil scratches against the paper. The clock measures but does not mark time.
Wood rasps in grooves as a panel slides open. The ticking echoes in the confessional space. What if it is a time bomb, Father? After all, is the heart so different from a bomb? The copper-coated veins wire a complex, combustible core. And some of the cords fray, and some are cut (whether in self-preservation or destruction can I say?) and now the dangerous mixture agitates, it stirs, it boils. It explodes. The prayer book pages turn. But the bomb explodes once into peace, while the heart finds even in the ashes of its dust the tinder to tick again toward fire.
He keeps his fingernails long. He will find out. Every time he gets further in before he blacks out. He could have sworn he saw oil in that last gush of blood, tasted the copper in his mouth. Sitting in cabs and waiting in lines he picks at it. He has to know what it is. Telegraph machine, nuclear reactor, or potato battery. He has to know. The skin peels, his fingernails snap.
He’s getting closer.
The ticking is getting louder.
Ice picks and snow shovels and butter knives are all strewn about, bent and broken. No metal could show him his heart. And it that moment he cries. He has to cry. And the tears wash his wounds, and they are not only his tears, but they all belong to him. And outside in the city he hears the sirens and the rap and waltz and the screams and the ragtime and the sighs and he feels the thrill of fear. He hears the ticking. The scratches of the pencil and the shuffling of the prayer book are heard. Words and oil and flesh screaming as red blood cells move emotion through osmosis.
Outside in the city he hears the music.
And underneath it all is the metronome, churning to the beat.
