TOUCH INSENSITIVE

I’m losing my touch.

No, it’s no joke. It started with my feet. I used to be so ticklish that I would laugh when tickling my own feet. But now, you could run a knitting needle through them and I wouldn’t flinch.

It’s been a gradual process of numbness travelling through my body. The pins and needles are the first sign. Irritating and constant, I almost feel relieved when they stop - if it wasn’t for the cold hard reality that the irritation stopping was the prelude to a lack of any feeling in that area.

When my private parts started to tingle with sharp sensations, I knew my love life was over. Truth is, it had been over for a long time. “Lack of interest” was the closing argument before she left. Called me “Numb-nuts” as she slammed the front door behind her. That was cruel – so I believe. After the pins and needles left my head, I lost any sense of empathy or thought sensitivity, so whatever she called me later on over the phone, didn’t matter. I literally just didn’t care.

Watching sad movies, comedy sketches, and horror flicks on the many streaming services I subscribe to, registered zero on my care-factor scale. It was like I had received a cerebral lobotomy to go with my total lack of feeling. Emotional responding stopped getting triggered.

My hands were unaffected for a while. The last bastion of physical sensation could still feel the computer keys and mouse beneath my deft touches. But even being able to type didn’t help with the numerous emails back and forth with the now titled “Ex” girlfriend. She wanted answers that I couldn’t give a shit about. Answers to why I never touched her, why I wasn’t responsive to her touch, blah blah blasé. Initially, I would write back that I didn’t have the answers. The doctors didn’t have the answers. The psychiatrists didn’t have the answers. Of course, that was not enough for her, so she pressed on looking for some form of sagacity, but my growing lack of total sensitivity in all departments, eventually told her to ask someone that cares. The emails stopped arriving after that. Maybe she found her answer after all. It was a good thing, I think. Because by the time of my final reply to her, the pins and needles had quickly rushed from wrist to fingertips, then total numbness took over. Typing felt like I was touching air, so I avoided the exercise and replaced it with speech to text. However, that bird had flown. My inbox lay dormant.

Without the sensation of resistance, I kept scratching my face in response to phantom itches. I even tore my nose lining while picking it. I don’t know why I was picking my nose. It wasn’t like I could feel anything. It was just habit, I guess. Brushing my teeth became a chore. I couldn’t feel the toothbrush in my hands, and I also couldn’t feel the pressure on my gums. It was the blood I spat out that alerted me to my gums being assaulted. It didn’t matter, anyway. I didn’t care.

Caution went out the window. Pain was non-existent. Danger was just a word proven by my careless act of crossing a busy road travelled by speeding vehicles. It didn’t hurt when I was struck head on. I wasn’t scared when I flew high into the air. I wasn’t worried when my face was soaked with blood. Of course, the paramedics thought I had been paralysed, because every time they prodded or poked at me asking “Can you feel that?” I sincerely answered with a “No.”

Recuperation in hospital took three months. A broken collar bone, several cracked ribs, and an ankle that ended facing the other way when I hit the ground after my brief flight caused by the car’s bumper, kept me immobile. I tried to explain that I didn’t need any of the opioid pain killer medicine they freely shot me up with, but they either didn’t believe me or they thought my brain had been damaged in the accident. It didn’t matter. I couldn’t even feel the effects of the medication, anyway. Life was like a dream. A waking sensation of floating through time with no goals, no destination, and no purpose. What little logic sense remained in my thought process, knew enough to realise my life was directionless.

Nothing motivated me and nothing inspired me. I was a conscious, thinking, breathing, walking vegetable tolerant to all kinds of physical discomfort – including heat and extreme cold. I would test this ability by holding one hand in a bucket of ice for hours on end and hovering my other hand over open flame until my eyes said stop. These insensitive acts of self-flagellation had me banned from the hospital’s kitchen and confined to the floor of my ward. It still didn’t stop me from experimenting by jabbing surgical needles into my scrotum. When the nurses discovered my new fetish, they removed all sharp and potentially harmful objects from my room. Don’t get me wrong. I hadn’t gotten a taste for the macabre, I just wanted to know if I had any thresholds left that may provide a path back to normality.

After being discharged from hospital and undergoing several more months of physical therapy to learn to walk again, I began to show signs of progress. I had to learn to watch my every step, scrutinise what I held within my senseless grasp, and generally use my eyes as my temperature gauge against overstepping the many marks that a full sense of touch and mental cognizance provides.

That was the thing that surprised and confused me. I had lost all emotional and physical perception of compassion for life and the people in it, but it didn’t stop me from learning new things. So, Dr. Hendricks – one in a line of head shrinks I was recommended to – suggested that I pursue a new line of work, and that by developing a new skill, the possibility of the billions of neurons taking a vacation in my body, might be re-awoken; thereby, creating a path for some form of touch sensation to return.

Being an Army psychiatrist, Dr. Hendricks enthusiastically encouraged me to sign up. I was in my mid-twenties. I thought, what could I possibly gain from a life in the Army? To my utter surprise, I picked up a set of new skills of great value to my regiment. Unable to break me at boot camp, my instructors recommended me for sniper training – a practice I more than excelled at. Undisturbed breathing, steady hand, and a lack of objectivity in my targets, achieved an award of top marksman during my three deployments to Afghanistan. But that war eventually ended for my side. So, the Army saw fit to train me in drone warfare and I was redeployed to a collection of shipping containers in the desert, piloting human-less drones the size of small aircraft thousands of miles away. Our military keeps a constant number of drones flying over selected hotspots of world conflict locations, while searching for authorized targets to drop heavy destructive ordnance onto unsuspecting enemies of the state, so it’s easy to slot into the sporty leather-bound chair to relieve the previous eight-hour joystick pilot. These drones can fly for up to thirty-four hours, ready at a moment’s notice to destroy or kill whatever is in the designated target zone. It takes three pilots working three rotations of eight hours in the container’s cockpit to fly one of these large birds. Heaven help the pilot taking over from someone who has recently eaten spicy food. I hear it’s a most unpleasant experience because you’re locked inside an air-conditioned tin can waiting for the recycled air to clear. But I don’t have to worry about that. My sense of smell went the same way as everything else. I can’t even smell my own farts. That’s probably a good thing, as I like spicy food. Well, I used to – when I could taste. Now, everything tastes the same. Bland.

After many missions and blurred passages of time, piloting unmanned aircraft has become second nature. I have been responsible for the death and destruction of many targeted individuals, their known meeting places, and their communication facilities. My kill rate is the highest in the military. I’ve been awarded medals for combat missions I playfully control with a joystick while wearing a virtual reality helmet with a heads-up display that makes Star Wars technology look like it belongs in the Stone Age.

War for those not directly involved, has evolved into an armchair witnessed event streamed to the inquisitive masses online. I didn’t have to be suffering from numbness for it not to affect me. YouTube and other social media outlets do the same to the general populace, numbing them to the harsh realities of life. Like it was a game, or something made up to entertain their vacuous lust for excitement. I sometimes wonder if the military issues kill orders just to solicit more likes on the public video channels, feeding the hunger for reality-based combat with a diet of destruction and death.

Then, it happened. I woke up one morning with an overwhelming sense of guilt. Dr. Hendricks had been correct in his prognosis. However, he hadn’t prepared me for the mental anguish and incessant feeling of deep shame that overwhelmed me - born from the many people that had died at the end of my unfeeling fingertips. In my new reality, the labels of murderer, monster, and malingerer from truth, were slapped across my back like a Kick Me schoolyard prank. My eyes had witnessed the destruction but failed to gauge the impact it had on everyday lives of the relatives of the victims. There has been a high-level cost to my low-level decision-making. YouTube freely and widely broadcasts leaked video of that perspective to not only me, but also to an entire planet of digital voyeurs. It seems that during my high-altitude soaring, my visual gauge was connected to only the world surrounding my physical being and not to the consequence of my conduct. My eyes could help me put one foot in front of the other and tell me when I had pressed the joystick trigger, but they failed to see the legacy that my deeds distantly stamped on people’s lives. To combat the guilt, I checked myself into a psych evaluation with Dr. Hendricks using the premise of diminished responsibility. I knew I was guilty of heinous crimes against humanity, but in my defence, I was coerced by my superiors into thinking that life outside container twenty-three in the middle of nowhere was all collateral. Even in the midst of regret, a part of my numbed senses sought absolution to go again.

To my surprise, Dr. Hendricks cleared me to fly – which was a contradiction in terms, as I was a pilot that never left the ground. In his patient notes, he highlighted the fact that certain senses of mine were returning to normal, and that diminished responsibility was something far above my pay grade and solely reserved for high-ranking officers and politicians. I was following orders and executing my duty. There was no level of official guilt to be attached to that. He even recommended me for the distinguished flying cross. Another contradiction.

So, here I am. Back in container twenty-three, piloting a drone on its final mission of the day – target classified. That is, the target is classified solely to me. You see, I volunteered for this special mission. A team of foreign subversives on our home soil was discovered to be planning a catastrophic event, so rather than risk boots on the ground, it was determined that collateral damage was far less risky than valuable personnel. The way of modern warfare - when you have the ordnance to spend.

This mission needed the most precise pilot to guide a missile straight through the middle of the structure, eliminating all within. What the brass didn’t know was that I had spent months collating fake information that I clandestinely passed on to PSYOPS, who then passed it up the chain of command to my superiors, who put the call out for volunteers. As I was the top performing drone pilot, I gambled that it would be me selected to carry out the mission. Why give the guilt to anyone else, anyway. Let me be the heavenly herald reigning fire from above, and that is what I’m about to do with an index finger surprisingly displaying signs of tingling feelings of touch. Oh, what irony for feelings to return at my moment of redemption. Perhaps – as Dr. Hendricks once mentioned – this had all been psychosomatic, due to the multitude of failed relationships, culminating in the one I could not provide answers to. A kind of PRSD – Post Relationship Stress Disorder.

For the first time since becoming a drone pilot, I can feel the cross pattern etched into the little red metal switch that I just pressed. How strange it is to feel again. How powerful an emotion that fires up a chain of linked sensations, in turn, switching on related emotions throughout my body and brain. Laughter has once again returned to my conscious thought. Not at the joy of feeling my fingers or the smell of spicy food, but at the finality of it all.

Watching through my heads-up display helmet broadcasting the target image from the onboard missile camera, I can’t help but exhale a huge sigh of relief, as the big black fast-enlarging characters spelling the number Twenty-three, fill my eyesight – my gauge. A smile creeps across my face. My head tilts upwards - my mind imagining what today’s sky must be like outside this rectangular metal box. What colour will it shine upon impact? One thing’s for certain, it will always return to blue. A constant in an ever-changing world. There’s solace in that belief.

Recognising that my suffering is about to be finally over, I revel at the thought of my approaching end, welcoming it with arms outstretched, deliriously happy. Oh, the ecstasy of it all. Here it comes, here it comes, here it…