Uncomfortably Numb

We take so much for granted. I suppose we have to. We haven’t the time to be grateful for everything we have and all that we are. We’re a sad paradox and that inherent conflict of our existence shames us.

I am closely observing my hands in the autumnal light, turning them this way and that, and I am thinking of all the time I have wasted. All the things that I could have done, but didn’t bother to do. I put so many things off and in deferring, I said no to them ever happening. 

I place my hand on my face and I savour the moment. Tears threaten to wet my hand, but I bite down and I stop them from emerging. Self-pity has no place here. If I give in to that now then I am forever lost.

The doctor returns. I don’t know why she had to leave the office, other than to give me a moment to process the death sentence she pronounced upon me just a short while ago. She sits opposite me and smiles. I want to hate her for that smile, but I cannot. I want to hate something, but I understand that the only thing I could truly hate would be myself, and that is never going to end well.

I return the smile and an inexplicable sob breaks through my threadbare resolve.

I compose myself, “sorry, it’s a lot to take in.”

“I understand that,” she says.

No.

No she doesn’t. There is no way that she could. Her empathy is cognitive. It is a cold and careless empathy. She understands the theory, but she hides behind her desk and her professionalism. That’s as far as she will ever go. If she did not have those shields, she would step vulnerably into madness and that would be a needless waste.

But in the end, it’s all a waste.

“How long… before…” I raise my hands and wave them at her. 

It’s a ridiculous gesture, but neither of us laugh. There is something dark and brooding in the room that trumps my absurd hand movements and render them sadly absurd.

“Difficult to tell,” she says, but she gleans my intent and goes further. I’m thankful for that. “Weeks,” she says. 

“Not months?” I ask, as though I can barter for more time.

“If you’re lucky,” she tells me.

I laugh at that.

She looks nonplussed.

“Sorry,” I say, “it’s just you reminded me of my Mum just then. She’d say something like that if I asked for an ice cream or treat, and it always meant no. We both knew it. She just didn’t want to be the one saying no.”

The doctor nods.

The rest is a bit of a blur. There are appointments booked and there is talk of treatment when there is no viable treatment. Something is eating me from the inside and they will give me pills to make me more comfortable as I am consumed. That terrifies me. Being made comfortable whilst I’m being eaten alive. 

My belief in hell is restored.

I find myself thinking of setting up an Only Fans account. Surely there are enough sick monkeys out there who would pay to drool over my excruciating and unfortunate demise? The same voyeurs of suffering that watched the Christians trying to sell God to lions, the lowlifes who did their knitting whilst class war led to the rich and powerful losing their heads. Roll up! Roll up! Come see the pathetic man eaten to death! Bring a picnic! Make a day of it!

I have to stop these dark thoughts. I have to make the most of what I have left. I’m thinking this as I wash my hands in the bathroom. I feel everything and I attend to it in a way I never have before. The towel feels soft and comforting. The door handle is cool and solid. I draw a finger along the wall the way toddlers do, the difference being that my finger isn’t caked in chocolate. I chuckle at that. More of that please. More of all of this. Savouring the moment and delighting in the simple pleasures of life.

Five minutes later, I am sat in my favourite armchair and staring at my hands. This is where my war will be lost. This is when I will fold and then I will only be waiting for it all to come to an end.

I have a new form of MND.

Lucky me! I won the MND lottery!

Sounds like leprosy to me. It wouldn’t surprise me if it is leprosy. What profession would want to stick with calling it leprosy? I mean, they’ve had thousands of years to work out what Jesus did. Science versus religion and religion is still winning. So they rename it to end the embarrassment of never finding a cure.

I laugh out loud as I think about what I should do with my hands. I keep laughing as I think of my own version of the world is about to end, so what do you do?

 My hands are going to end, so I had best enjoy them whilst I can. I am going to lose all feeling in my fingers and my hands and when that happens I’ll be trapped inside the husk of a body that no longer works. 

My mind cannot deal with this eventuality. This is not supposed to happen, and so it is not happening. Instead of thoughts, my mind produces white noise. After a while, I realise that the white noise is a distortion. Inside I am screaming. 

I want to leave the comfort of my favourite chair and find all the people who have ever counted. I want to hold their hands. I want to touch their cheek. I want to close my eyes and use touch in place of sight. I want to connect with everyone with a physicality that I am going to lose. I am floating in a space that I can only linger in as long as I can hold on. As long as I can feel the connection of the hands that keep me in this life. When my hands go, I will drift away from everything I hold dear.

I consider cutting my hands off.

I really do. 

If I remove my hands then I experience a small victory. I have exerted control and done things my own way. That seems a better way to lose my hands than giving in to the covert enemy within. 

Will I have phantom feeling? I read about that one time. Amputees driven insane by an itch that they cannot scratch. I always took that with a big pinch of salt. Surely it was not true? Turns out I was as wrong as can be. Sometimes the joke is on us and there’s no escaping the punchline of our life.

I want to write a bucket list. First entry, writing a bucket list while I can still write. My appetite for this peters out all too quickly. There are no words. Not enough of them anyway. My hands are my hands and they have never needed words. Has anyone written a love letter to their own hands? 

Waggling my thumbs, I remember what it is that makes us who we are. These opposable appendages have defined the way that we are.

Man.

We manipulate and in so doing, we craft reality. Our hands are vestiges of our minds. We have become complex thanks to our ability to use the world around us and mould chaos into order.

I stop writing my bucket list because I begin to see it in a different context.

Never will I…

I want to cry now, but find that I am incapable of doing so.

Alcohol is a bad idea, but then it has always been a bad idea.

After a large nightcap, I go to bed. I join my hands in an approximation of prayer, resting my cheek on them. Against all odds, I drift off to sleep as I think disjointed thoughts about what tomorrow may bring.

When I awake, I know what it is that I will do. I don’t know whether I dreamt it. Somehow it feels like I was always destined for this day. My diagnosis is merely a catalyst bringing about what was always destined to be.

As my bread toasts and my tea brews, I make an appointment. I crave touch and I have a notion of how to go about sating that craving of mine. I barely register the toast as I absently wash it down with the tea. I rinse the plate and the mug and I pause for a moment on the threshold of my empty house. For the first time, I understand just how empty it is. How empty I am. We echo each other, this house and I, and we are both the worse for it.

I walk to my appointment. It is a three mile walk, but I have plenty of time. I feel the breeze on my skin and the sun warms me. Half way to my destination I encounter a dog. I think it’s a Labrador. I’ve never been one for pets. It is walking besides its owner on a slack lead without a care in the world. On a whim, I stop and pat it’s head. It flinches and growls at me.

“Teddy!” remonstrates the owner, “I’m sorry, he doesn’t like strangers petting him,” she explains.

“It’s OK,” I tell her, neither do I.

I smile, but I don’t feel like smiling. The dog has reminded me that touch is a something to be earned, not taken. We take that for granted too. Having that special someone who we can hold hands with, cuddle up to, hug. I tried to take something from that dog. Something I had no right to. I didn’t even ask nicely.

When did I get like this?

I am early for the appointment, so I walk around the block. As I circle around, I almost bottle it. I shouldn’t be here. I shouldn’t be doing this. It is wrong. I stop at the far end of the street.

“What am I doing?” I ask myself.

In response, I cry. I cry like I’ve never cried before. My head turned up to the heavens, I wail accusations and sob my heart out. When I am done, I wipe the snot and tears from my face and turn back to the anonymous terrace house. I knock at the door and I hear someone approaching. There’s no going back now. Perhaps there never was.

“Gill?” I say when the woman answers.

“Tim?” she says.

I nod a confirmation, and she lets me in.

She’s a dated, walking stereotype. A transparent negligee through which I can see lacy underwear. She totters along in heels that render her legs more shapely. She’s attractive, but she doesn’t do it for me. Not like that anyway. I wonder whether there was a time when she would have. I think there must have been, but not now.

I follow her upstairs and as we reach the landing I feel an overwhelming wave of sadness, for her, for me. For us.

In the bedroom, she sits and crosses her legs. I stand like a spare part as she tells me the prices for her usual services. I take out five twenty pound notes from my pocket and put them on her bedside table. She opens the draw and sweeps them in. That part of the transaction is done.

She begins undoing the bow on her negligee.

“No,” I say, shaking my head.

“You want me to keep it on?” she asks.

“Yes,” I tell her.

I sit next to her on the bed. I am all at sea. A school boy out of his depth and unable to articulate what he wants for his first ever time with a woman. I want everything. I want nothing. What I need is all too simple.

“Can I hold your hand?” I ask her.

She frowns. Now it is she who is awkward. 

I shrug, “it’s been a long time,” I say, “I miss the simple intimacy of being with someone. The things people take for granted. I don’t want much.”

“But you paid for full,” she tells me, and she sounds affronted.

“I wanted to pay you for your time,” I explain.

“OK,” she says, but she doesn’t sound convinced.

She holds her hand out and I take it. This isn’t the natural hand holding of lovers. Her hand doesn’t not feel like a hand. I could be in a shop touching a mannequin.

“Close your eyes,” I tell her.

She does. She seems shy now. I like that. I like that she went with it and gave me something freely.

“Do you remember when you were a teenager and you’d hold a boy’s hand?” I ask her.

She nods.

“I’m closing my eyes too,” I tell her, “it’s good to think back to those times isn’t it?”

“Better times,” she sighs.

“Let’s lay back on the bed,” I say to her.

“Like we were in the long grass of a field in the Summer?” she asks as we both lay back on the bed.

“There you go!” I say to her, “you’ve said it, and that’s exactly where we are. There was something magical about those times wasn’t there?”

“I miss them,” she says, and I can hear her tears in those words.

I turn towards her and leaning on her my elbow, I wipe the tears from her cheeks. 

She opens her eyes, “you’re a soppy get,” she laughs through her tears, “what kind of perv makes a prozzy cry like this!?”

I shrug, “a soppy one?”

She strokes my cheek, “thank you,” she says.

“For what?” I ask.

“I didn’t know I needed that,” she tells me, “you surprised me.”

I don’t know how it happens, but we kiss and for one wonderful moment, the kiss is all there is.

Afterwards, we lay on the bed and chat about the good times we had in our formative years. Neither of us mentions the bad times, even as they lurk in the wings and threaten to end the pretence. I’m there for longer than the allotted hour. Morning appointments are unusual. I leave before her next client calls. We hug goodbye before she opens the door. Holding each other, but really, we’re holding onto our past.

I use up the afternoon. I do not need it. The afternoon does not appreciate this and it lingers longer than it should. Eventually, the evening turns up and the sun wends its way home. 

In the dying light, I find myself on a doorstep that I have avoided passing for so, so long. I stand there for an age as though I have forgotten myself and what it was that I was about. I don’t knock on the door, but it opens all the same. 

In the open doorway is a man. He is small, too small, and he is shocked at my silent presence in his doorway. I marvel at this. He has been a presence in my life for every day of the last eight years. His shock diminishes him. He looks older. Haunted. He isn’t the force that I remember. 

I step into the dark hallway and he recedes from me. I herd him into the house and kick the door shut.

“You,” he whispers.

“Me,” I echo.

“But you…” he croaks, “you shouldn’t be here.”

“Neither should you,” I tell him, “why didn’t you move away? You stayed as a reminder of what you did. You never cared. You never showed remorse.”

“It was an accident!” he protests.

“You killed my son,” I growl.

He says something, but I’m not listening anymore. I’m looking at my hands and lamenting the loss of my feeling in them, and I’m grieving all over again because never will I… hold my son’s hand. The diagnosis brought all of it back and when I awoke this morning I knew what I must do. What I should have done a long time ago.

I look at my raised hands and then I see him beyond them. What happens then is a natural progression. I reach out and embrace the man who killed my son. My hands feel everything as they make contact with his neck and I squeeze the life out of him. I think he hits out at me, but I do not care. I see the life drain out of him, but I feel nothing. 

I feel nothing and then he feels nothing and it is done.

My hands are tingling with pins and needles as I leave the house of my son’s murderer. The doctor said I’d experience sensations such as this as the nerve endings succumbed to the disease within me. 

It doesn’t matter.

Nothing matters.

It hasn’t for the last eight years.

I died when this man took the only thing that ever mattered to me. The rest of it is irrelevant detail. I’m surprised it’s taken this long for it all to come to an end. My hands are the only thing I can feel now and I find myself looking forward to the day that they quit trying. They’ve served their purpose. There’s nothing left for them to do.

I sit on the kerb and I wait. 

I remember sitting like this as a kid.

I remember my little boy sitting on the kerb, grinning at me as the sun danced off his golden hair and his eyes lit up my world.

Things were good then.

But that was a lifetime ago. I died eight years ago, I was just too stubborn to know it, too ignorant to accept it.

Blue lights cascade through the night and herald the end of everything.