The Fear of Morse Code

♦ Thomas Beard ♦

“.. / .- -- / .-- .... .- - / .. / .- –”

• Exodus, 3:14

1

Andy was lying on the floor of a Whole Foods when the message first came, although he did not understand what it was at first. 

It was hard to tell where the light ended and the ceiling began. From Andy’s perspective, there was only light. The beige linoleum bled away, becoming radiant. The Whole Foods had a lightsaber ceiling, made purely from hard light, like the weapons of an ancient starfaring civilization.

But as Andy continued to look, the light changed. It dimmed and bled away, once again becoming confined to its thin rectangles.

The thin rectangles blinked.

“Sir?” Somebody said. “Can you get off the floor please?”
Andy looked right. Apparently, a flying black apron with the white words Whole Foods proudly written upon them. On further inspection, the apron was actually attached to a person - a thin white man with a round and dour face. Andy gave him a withering stare.

“Shouldn’t you ask if I’m okay?” He said.

The man looked him up and down. He said, “You look fine to me.”
“You miserable bastard! I could be having a medical emergency. I have a rare heart condition, you know. Constant risk of a heart attack.”
“Are you having a heart attack?”
“No! God, I’m fine, you skinless worm. But that isn’t the point.”
“Please get off the floor, sir.”
“Why?” Andy threw his hands up indignantly. From his position on the floor, it looked like he was waving meaty pasta above his head. “Do you have any rules against laying on the floor?”
The man said nothing, but frowned at him.

“I thought so.” Andy laid his arms back across the floor. “Why don’t you name one reason why I can’t be on the floor.”
Before the man could respond, a shopper pushed by them both. She stepped over Andy, and the other man fell aside. She moved along and continued shopping, muttering in her wake.

“You’re disturbing the other shoppers.” The employee said. “That’s one reason.”
Andy sighed. “Would you mind leaving me alone? I could get a very important message at any moment. I can’t miss it.”
“You know what, sir? I’ll leave you alone. I’ll go get my manager, and while I’m doing that I’ll leave you alone. How do you like that?”
“Sounds good to me.” Andy would have shrugged, but he was not in a very good position for shrugging. 

The employee grumbled and left him alone. Andy turned his gaze back to the ceiling, where the lights had all switched back on. They were quite undisturbed for a while, but soon enough they started to blink again, but not all at once. They went in an alternating pattern of blinking off and then sucking in breath, and lighting up again, like this: Blink. Blink. Breathe. Blink. 

Andy stared quietly upwards, and watched the entire parade quite silently. He slowly realized that he was receiving a message in Morse Code, and a powerful knot of fear and nausea started to build up in his stomach, because this was not the first such message that he had ever received. 

2

The reason that Andy was even at Whole Foods in the first place was writing. He had come there to work on his novel, a novel he had been writing  for six years, a novel that he was very close to finishing.

Andy had just turned thirty.

He wrote at Whole Foods because he refused to enter his apartment, and he abhorred writers who wrote at cafes. He snidely called them Starbucks Writers, and saw them as a disgrace to the field. To him, it was very clear that the only place any serious writer worked was a Whole Foods. 

3

One second Andy was on the floor, and the next he was speaking to his mother.

“How’s your book going, honey?” She asked. Andy’s mother was a blonde woman who kept her hair in a headband. She spoke in a slightly shrill voice and smiled constantly. 

“It’s going well,” Andy said. “I’m almost done with it.”
“Oh, that’s wonderful. What are you going to call it?”
“The Fear of Morse Code,” he said, spreading out his hands to create the image of the words appearing on a billboard. His mother looked confused.

“How can anybody be scared of Morse Code?”

Andy was pretty familiar with the sensation himself, but before he could respond his mother went away, and his old girlfriend appeared.

“It must be so frustrating,” she said, “working on it for six years and still not being done with it.”
“It’s fine.” Andy said. His girlfriend was raven-haired and wore a no-nonsense expression. Her eyes were green, and had a habit of staring at people for too long. “I don’t really care how long it takes,” Andy continued, “I just want to make sure that it’s perfect.”
He reached over, to try and plant a kiss on her lips. But she was gone, and Andy realized that he was kissing a computer screen. The screen was wet and covered with his spit.

He saw people on the screen, and jolted back. The people were dressed well, and so was Andy. They had apparently not noticed his loving of the computer screen. 

One of the people said, “Now, could you please tell us why you want to attend Harvard University?”
Andy nodded. He had prepared for this question. He started by saying, “When I was six, I had my first heart attack. I was swimming in my grandmother’s pool one minute, the next I was sinking and going black, and then I was in the hospital. I was diagnosed with Arrhythmogenic Cardiomyopathy, an incredibly rare condition that affects the heart. The doctors didn’t expect me to live to eighteen, but I guess I didn’t want to believe them, because I did. 

“I put everything I had into school, because that’s what people with a future do. And I wanted a future. More than anything. And that’s why I want to attend Harvard University. It’s where people go to create the best possible futures for themselves.”
The people inside the computer nodded, and the computer screen flashed off. Andy was quite disturbed. It was not supposed to do that.

But he didn’t have to worry. In a moment the computer screen flashed back on again, and then back off.

It went like this: Blink. Blink. Breathe. Blink. 

4

The first such message Andy received was during one of his first classes at Harvard. The class seemed to be about the Prisoner’s Dilemma. 

“The setup is,” his professor said, “that two prisoners are both arrested for the same crime, but put in separate cells. The police visit each of them individually, and tell them that if they don’t confess, they’ll be in jail for three years.

The professor was pacing in front of a massive projection on the wall, which displayed, quite simply, a graphic of two prisoners locked in separate cells. The graphic saw them from a bird’s eye view, curled up in the corners of their respective prisons.

“But,” the professor continued, “if one of them chooses to confess, and the other does not, then the one who confessed gets no time, and the other gets ten years. If they both confess, they both get fifteen years.

“The trouble is, it’s impossible to know what the other person is thinking. So there’s no guaranteed way to avoid doing hard time.”

Andy was not looking at the professor. He was staring at the two prisoners from a bird’s eye view, locked in their cells. It was impossible to know what they were thinking. 

As Andy looked at the projection, it blinked. Somehow, Andy was already familiar with the pattern that it blinked in. 

5

For the next two years that Andy studied at Harvard University, he received at least one such message a week. If not that, then definitely five times a month. 

On the night that he was expelled from Harvard, he received one. He was walking through the cold, still wearing his Harvard hoodie, because it was the only one that he hadn’t packed away, even though he supposed he was the last person in the world who should have been wearing one. As he walked, he passed a lamp post that existed on the edge of the Harvard campus. It was an old fashioned one where the light was shaped like a circle.

It blinked at him.

It had been a gentle expulsion. It had only happened because of his grades. During his final semester, Andy received Fs in all of his classes, except for one class, called Analysis of the Novel Form. In that class, he had an A+. 

He walked very slowly, but even though he did, he eventually left  campus, and found his way to the bridge that ran over the Charles River. It was a sturdy bridge, partially made of red bricks, but it had no color in the dark. What had color was the Charles, which was silvery and wet underneath the moonlight. Beyond that, Andy saw the entire skyline of Cambridge, jump started and lit with electricity, stuffed full of soft light. From that view, MIT looked so small. He couldn’t even see Harvard anymore. The world of high academia was gone. 

Andy stepped on the bridge, looking at the city lovingly, but without any love. He sucked in a deep breath, readying himself for what would happen. His hands and arms were shaking. His stomach was in knots. He could cry easily, but could not breathe easily.

All the lights of Cambridge went out.

Andy was quite familiar with the fear of Morse Code. It was called scopophobia - the fear of being watched. Because receiving a message implied that somebody was sending one, and Andy was consumed by the thought of who that sender might be. He abhorred the idea of being seen. It made him feel like a Starbucks writer. If he was being watched, then no action was his own any longer. Now he was a performer, and being constantly judged.

When the lights went out, Andy was in total darkness as though he were inside a cave. The only lights not gone were the stars, which flared brilliantly now that the light pollution of Cambridge had suddenly disappeared. Andy could not help but stare up at them. They were every hue from white to purple and he looked at them for so long that he could see nothing else. His breathing slowed, and the knot in his stomach came undone. He smiled at the stars.

And then all the stars went out. And then back on. Like this: Blink. Blink. Breathe. Blink.

6

As Andy laid on the Whole Foods store, he relived one of his final conversations with his old girlfriend. Also, the only one of those he’d ever had.

This was the conversation where he told her about the messages.

“I can’t really describe it,” was how he described it. “Like a message in Morse Code, where a light goes on and off again and again.”
“And you think somebody is watching you.”
Andy wheeled around. “Yes!”

She obviously looked worried, biting her lip nervously. 

“Have you talked to anyone else about this?” She asked him. She was sitting on her bed. The two of them did not share an apartment, or a bed, and never would.

“No, of course not.” Andy said. “They’ll think I’m crazy.”
“Why are you telling me?”
“Because it terrifies me, and I need to tell somebody, or I think I’ll go crazy.”

“Why does it scare you?”
“I don’t know!” Andy screamed. “Because if I’m seeing it, it means that I’m being seen, while I walk, while I eat, while I write-”
“Oh.” She said, “It’s a writing thing.”

He looked at her. “No! It’s not a writing thing! It’s a thing! It’s just a thing!” 

His ex girlfriend sighed. She stood up and said, “I’m sick of this,” and went towards the door.

Andy stopped. “Wait,” he said, “that’s not… that’s not what she said.”
She turned around, standing on the edge of the doorway. “It’s what she wanted to say.”

And then she left.

7

Andy suddenly realized that he was not lying down. The floor was still to his back, but he was standing up. It was very clear now. The floor was a wall. The ceiling, with its lights still blinking in its same familiar rhythmic pattern, was another wall.

Andy stepped away from the wall on the floor. He entered instantly into a jungle of lopsided shelves, so tall that he could not see beyond them. The store seemed to be empty except for him. Even the employee who had told him to get off the floor was gone, off to find his threatening manager, and even his footsteps disappeared.

Andy did not care about him anymore. He didn’t even look behind him to check if the man was there. The lights held all of his attention now. They were blinking much quicker, and the pattern that they spelled out, when translated into Morse Code, might look something like this: 

.. / .- -- / .-- .... .- - / .. / .- --

The lights blinked so hard that they shuddered, like complaining windows in a storm. If Andy looked hard enough, they seemed to jump out of the wall, and then fall back into their slots. Andy stopped walking. He reached out and touched one of the lights. He pressed into it gently, and the light fell back. It still flickered, but it also opened, like a door, and Andy walked into the dark place beyond.

8

Andy walked silently for a very long time. He was not aware of direction, or place, and only barely aware of motion. He was only aware of footsteps, and unaware that they were his. So he did not perceive any change when he started to walk up, rather than forward, or walk to the side instead of to the front. The pressure in his head certainly did not change, and his blood flowed normally. 

But then he stopped walking, and the world stopped being dark. Andy appeared to be on a balcony, and he was looking through the Whole Foods wall, or ceiling, depending on your opinion. He was looking down at himself, who was still lying on the floor. But this man’s eyes were closed.

There were a variety of people standing around him, and red lights boring in from the windows outside. The people around him all wore jackets with a snake curling around a staff on the back, the symbol of a man who had been killed for saving another man’s life. The dour-faced Whole Foods employee that had encouraged Andy to leave the floor was now panicking intensely. His beloved manager was screaming at him for letting a customer die of a heart attack without even calling 911 until it was too late. Andy couldn’t help but smile. 

Looking down at his own body, curled up on the floor, reminded Andy of looking at a prisoner from a bird’s eye view, a prisoner who was deciding whether or not to confess. 

Andy wondered briefly why he liked the Prisoner’s Dilemma so much. He thought it might be because he liked the idea of gambling with the years of your life. Andy was already so familiar with the idea. The stakes were high, but low, and it felt like a prize he could win.

Andy was not able to finish watching the EMTs carry out his body, because by then he was already gone.

9

The EMTs did not find Andy’s book. Nobody found Andy’s book, but eventually a homeless man did. He shambled into the cafe area with the gait of someone who carried their whole lives on their backs, like hermit crabs and their small homes. He sat down at the table closest to him and found a fat white manuscript sitting in front of him. In the past the man had been a librarian, so he leafed through the pages eagerly. 

The thing was very recently finished, edited, revised, and all. Andy had even put a title page on the top, which proclaimed that the brand new, final title was this:

The Confession.