Richard Lovett: Phantom Sense

I’ve never understood how it could be stalking if all you’re trying to do is keep her safe. I just want to be a good father. Make up for all those years of being AWOL because CI-MEMS is a full-time job. You can’t be a father and CI-MEMS. That is, you can be one—that’s the same as for anyone else. You just wind up with big chunks of time when you have to choose between being AWOL from the Corps or from your family. And if you give your family more than a generic because-my-country-needs-me hint as to why, then you’re both in trouble.

Or that’s how it had been back before I became Staff Sgt. Kip McCorbin (Ret.). Before the (Ret.) bit, that is. Once that happened, it was just me… and the secrets.

Twenty years of missions. Twenty years of always being away. Chad, Ethosmalia, Kurdistan, the Altiplano Breakaway. Twenty years of never being able to explain. Then, when it ended and I finally could get my family back, it came at a price, like suddenly being blind. No, that’s not right. There are schools for the blind, a whole infrastructure for helping them learn to cope. As long as I had the Sense, I wouldn’t even mind being blind. Who needs eyes of their own when they have hundreds at their command? When you’ve been given a sense beyond eyes, beyond anything the norms have ever experienced?

Losing that is like losing your sense of touch. The world’s still there but you can no longer fully interact. Worse, in fact, because people at least know what a sense of touch is. Here, the only ones you can talk to are Corps psychs who only think they relate. How could someone understand what it would be like to lose the sense of touch if he’d never had it in the first place?

Twenty years of missions, and all the while Cora Ann was growing up. “Where’s Daddy?” had given way to “ what-ever, ” until, when they finally told me I was ready to re-enter the Sense-less world, Denise’s lawyer said it would be best if I just kept my distance. “She’s at a difficult age,” she said in one of her kinder comments. “The last thing she needs is you back in her life.”

Hell, they’re all difficult ages. Toddler, middle school, high school. Back when I had the Sense, I used it on furloughs to track her through her days, step by step. What father wouldn’t? Especially when the furloughs were so short, so few? Her first week at school, oh so brave, oh so frightened. Getting her navel pierced? Secretly, she thought, but I was there. First kiss? The guy was a total geek, but so was she. Back then, a solider-type was most emphatically not what she wanted. Back then, her rebellion took the form of geeks and peace rallies—my little radical, growing up in fits and starts when I wasn’t there, more and more often hiding from me when I was.

The damn psychs always had the same questions.

How do you feel about that?

What do you do when you feel that way?

I’ll tell you how I feel, what I do.

For three whole years, I panicked whenever someone walked up behind me, or when I rounded a corner and found something I didn’t know was there. It didn’t matter if it was a kid’s skateboard or another rehab patient on his own escorted walk. It was the not-knowing that mattered.

Three years of deconditioning until finally I convinced them I was again a norm. In CI-MEMS, that’s not a term of respect, but the psychs never picked that up. Three years of learning to live without, but never really succeeding because the absence is always, always there, like an itch you can’t scratch or an amputee’s phantom limb. The arm he thinks he can lift to grab that cup of coffee. The leg he tries to stand on when he gets out of bed, because a lifetime of conditioning tells him it’s there, only it isn’t. Because his nerves insist it’s still there even though its absence is the single, dominant factor of his life.

With a limb, you can explain all that. With a limb, you can get a prosthetic nearly as good as the original. But how could you explain losing the Sense, even if talking about it wasn’t a breach of everything you’d once sworn your life to protect?

That’s what I wanted to say during deconditioning. De-con, the Corps called it, complete with the stupid hyphen. Just one more big con, if you ask me: the illusion that when the missions were all over and done, you could go home and live a normal life. Total BS, something the psychs needed to believe so they could feel better about what they were doing. But I never said any of that because then they might never have let me out.

For three whole years, I tried to pretend I didn’t need anything but the senses I was born with. Didn’t feel that the lost one was still there but not, like the amputee wondering why the coffee cup won’t move when he reaches for it. Until eventually they gave me a pension and released me to the real world. Fifty-one years old, unsuitable for a job. Unsuitable for a family. Unsuitable for life.

The first thing I did was move to the Pacific Northwest. I’d spent a summer there and remembered the amazing, Mediterranean summers. Warm, dry, and pleasant. And miraculously insect-free. You could sleep all night with the windows open, no screen, and nary a gnat. Dine outdoors without flies in your food. A climate where nobody with the Sense would voluntarily go.

Then I saw Cora’s latest VidBook post.

I’m not supposed to be viewing her blog. She never let me in as a buddy, but you don’t spend as many years as I did on black ops and not know a bit about computers. Not to mention that she’d used her name and zip code as her password. CoraAnn78718. I’d cracked that even before the psychs released me to normal life.

I woke screaming.

I was blind, Senseless. The enemy was out there, and I didn’t know where. I didn’t know where anything was. Anything could be around the next corner. In the hallway, waiting to pounce, the moment I headed for the bathroom. How do people live like this? How could I live like this?

“I want it back!” I screamed into the night, my voice a raspy whine because I’d screamed this on so many nights since I no longer had to look like I was recovered. “Oh, God, I want it back! I want it back I want it back I want it back I want it BACK!!!”

It was worse than losing Denise. Worse than Cora. This had been part of me . A part that would never, ever be again. Even after three years with the psychs, there were times I wasn’t sure I could make it.

Jerret was afraid. So was I, for that matter. CI-MEMS was designed for urban warfare. Tight quarters, where the Sense gave you overwhelming advantage. Not to mention that the rest of the squad protected you like their very lives depended on it. Casualty rates on missions with CI-MEMS operators were one-third those of other ops—and we usually drew the more dangerous missions. It was a good incentive to keep the operator alive.

The first to be aware of danger, the last to face it, that was us. But not in this damn desert, where any sniper with a night scope could nail you from way beyond Sense range. It said something that they’d put two of us on this squad. Too much chance of losing one or the other, someone must have figured.

Jerret’s hand twitched, dislodging a member of my swarm that had gotten too close, tickling the hair on the back of his wrist. Sloppy on my part. I’d been concentrating on my fringes, hoping to catch some trace of a Ladenite sniper before he caught us.

Jerret knew what the insect had meant. “I’m okay,” he whispered. A human couldn’t have heard him from two feet away, but my bugs got it. Only he wasn’t okay. Heart rate, respiration, skin conductivity, breathing, pupils… all indicated fear. Not to mention deception. Jerret was scared to death. Right on the verge of losing it. Luckily, he didn’t ask me because he’d have caught me in the same lie. All these open spaces. We just weren’t designed for them.