‘Charlie, do you know what this means?’ Wanda ended the embrace. She held both of his hands tightly. Charlie looked her in the eyes. He saw them shift focus.
‘No. Not yet.’
‘You feel that?’
‘Please? Not yet.’
‘You’re no longer emotionally unavailable to me, Charlie! And yet I still love you! I can feel it, from right in my heart, that I still love you!’
‘Please don’t leave me.’
‘I think I love you even more than I did this morning!’
Charlie hugged Wanda. He did this so he could stop seeing how her eyes were focused on something very far away. Charlie closed his eyes so he wouldn’t see the purple smoke, but there wasn’t anything he could do about the smell of burning cedar…
Poof!
30
THE PURPOSE
Leaving the keys in the ignition and the door open, Charlie abandoned his car and walked inside the Prison of Optional Incarceration Necessary to Terminate or Lower Excessive Shame and Self-Reproach. The sound of his shoes echoed down the empty hallways. Charlie did not slacken this pace until he came to the cell he’d formerly occupied. The door opened for him. It slammed closed as he stepped inside. The cot creaked as he sat down.
Leaning forward, Charlie put his forearms on his legs. He bowed his head. Although he tried staring at something invisible on the floor in front of him, his eyes wouldn’t stop focusing on the small stains in the concrete. Charlie looked to his left. He noticed a prisoner with a long white beard in the cell directly across from his. The prisoner’s cell was decorated with fresh flowers and thick books and charts of the sea. It was clear that he’d been in there a long time and that he planned on being in there for decades to come.
‘There’s always hope, right?’ the prisoner said.
‘Hope is a useless thing.’
‘Oh, you don’t believe that.’ The Ghost of Charlie’s Capacity to Love materialized in Charlie’s cell. He no longer wore the orange chains. He looked much happier. He floated to the cot and sat down beside him.
‘I don’t have much time,’ the Ghost of Charlie’s Capacity to Love said. This was true. The Ghost had become very transparent and his transparency increased with every second that passed.
‘So let me ask you this, Charlie: are you guilty?’
‘Of what?’
‘Of fucking up your marriage.’
Charlie shut his eyes. He concentrated on the last days of his marriage. Without being filtered by the vast amount of hope that had built up in his heart, Charlie saw all the things that he had done wrong. He saw the arguments that could have easily been avoided, the things he fought for that he didn’t really want, the housework he didn’t do, and the concessions he didn’t make.
‘There was someone to blame. And that someone is me.’ Charlie’s eyes remained closed.
‘What are you going to do about it?’
Charlie opened his eyes and discovered he could see something very far away. He refocused his gaze. He realized that what he was seeing was the back seat of a Nissan Rouge, very late at night. It was at this point that he began smelling burning cedar. His cell filled up with purple smoke. Charlie searched his heart. Inside it he found the power to forgive himself.
And he realized that this had been its purpose all along.
Poof!
THE HEART’S MORSE CODE
Andrew Kaufman lives and writes in Toronto. He is the author of international bestseller All My Friends Are Super-heroes, The Waterproof Bible, ReLit Award–winner The Tiny Wife, and Born Weird, which was named a Best Book of the Year by the Globe and Mail and was shortlisted for the Leacock Award for humour.
The author wishes to thank Mom, Dad, Liz, Marlo, Carl, Michele, Zach, Andy, Phoenix, Frida, and the ultimate kick-assedness of Alana Wilcox.
Typeset in Walbaum.
Printed at the Coach House on bpNichol Lane in Toronto, Ontario, on Zephyr Antique Laid paper, which was manufactured, acid-free, in Saint-Jérôme, Quebec, from second-growth forests. This book was printed with vegetable-based ink on a 1973 Heidelberg KORD offset litho press. Its pages were folded on a Baumfolder, gathered by hand, bound on a Sulby Auto-Minabinda, and trimmed on a Polar single-knife cutter.
Edited and designed by Alana Wilcox
Cover by Ingrid Paulson
Author photo by Karri North
Coach House Books
80 bpNichol Lane
Toronto ON M5S 3J4
Canada
416 979 2217
800 367 6360
[email protected]
www.chbooks.com
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