I can’t remember how I got here, but it feels like I’m in a TV series. Maybe you know the one. A plane crashes near an uncharted island in the middle of an unspecified ocean. The survivors confront various challenges, including their own sordid pasts. One of the challenges is another group that lives on the island. This isn’t a group of natives or cannibals; it’s a group of white people, which means they’re all sociopaths or total dickheads. They do horrible things to the crash survivors. For example, in one episode, they kidnap this guy and torture him by performing a surgical procedure on him. They implant a pacemaker that contains a charge of C-4 explosive. It monitors his heart rate. If it goes above 140 beats per minute, it sounds a warning. If it goes above 150 beats per minute, the pacemaker detonates and the guy’s chest explodes.
The reason I mention the TV series is that I feel a lot like the guy who has a pacemaker implanted in his chest. I can’t remember how I got here. I wake up and find myself in an antiseptic room, bright lights, porcelain walls. Beside me is a rolling table covered in white cloth, and on the cloth, surgical instruments in a precise arrangement. I can’t move my arms. They’ve been strapped to my sides. A white sheet covers my body and has been drawn all the way to my chin. Behind my head, double doors swing open and footsteps approach. Upside down eyes gaze at me over a surgical mask. I see raised hands in latex gloves.
The woman calls my name and asks how I’m feeling. I tell her I’m feeling fine but would feel a lot better if she let me go. She says the anaesthetist will be here shortly.
When the anaesthetist arrives, I realize that they really mean to operate on me. I protest. I tell them I have rights, you know. They can’t operate without my consent.
The woman laughs. Consent? she says. Why would we want your consent? We’re terrorists.
But what are you going to do?
The surgeon motions to a nurse who steps from the shadows and pulls the sheet up from my feet and rolls it towards my chin. The air is cold against my bare flesh. The anaesthetist comes forward with an enormous needle and inserts it into my exposed crotch. Within a couple minutes, everything is numb down there and I don’t notice the cold air anymore.
The surgeon calls for a scalpel and the nurse sets it expertly into her palm.
But what are you going to do?
As the surgeon sets to work, she explains that she’ll be inserting a special device into my penis. It’s a clever invention that the terrorists have been working on. They wire it directly into my central nervous system, not into my cerebral cortex, not straight into my consciousness, but lower down into the primitive part of my brain. Once the device is activated, whenever I see something, like a nice ass or long legs or—you get the idea—a signal will set off a balloon mechanism that causes the penis to expand and stiffen. The surgeon chuckles and says: who thinks of such things? The problem is: I won’t be able to help myself. I’ll go out into crowded places where there are lots of asses and legs—you get the idea—and it will happen right there in public. My penis will grow and get stiff. What the terrorists are aiming for is maximum humiliation.
When the surgeon is done describing the dastardly plan, I scream and thrash against my restraints. The anaesthetist places a mask over my face and turns on the gas. I go somewhere deeper than sleep, somewhere without dreams or memory.
When I wake up, the world doesn’t seem drastically different. I feel a minor throbbing. There are bandages covering my crotch. But I’m not so badly off. They feed me three meals a day. They give me painkillers whenever I need them. And they clean me and change my bandages at least once a day to be sure the incision doesn’t get infected. I can watch TV or read a book and the sheets smell fresh.
After a week, I’m wearing street clothes again and can walk with only the hint of a stoop to guard my groin. A nurse summons me to a special consulting room where the surgeon waits for me. She isn’t wearing her mask today and smiles at me with teeth as white as her overcoat. Sitting beside her in an overcoat just as white is a man I’ve never seen before. He is stern and remote.
The nurse waves in two hulking orderlies who strap me to a chair. They attach electrodes to my head and to my chest and to my groin. They swivel the chair to face a screen and then, after they’ve lowered the lights in the room, they project a succession of images onto the screen. With each image, I hear the scratch of needles on graph paper. The images are run-of-the-mill. You can get them in any magazine on the top shelf of a convenience store. I can see what they’re doing. They’re trying to figure out if their surgery was successful. They’re trying to see if their sexy images will trigger the device to make my penis expand and stiffen. I’m heroic in the way I resist my captors. When the lights come up, nothing has changed between my legs. The man frowns at the surgeon then rises and stomps from the room.
The surgeon isn’t smiling anymore. It should’ve worked, she says. I did everything exactly how it shows in the manual.
The surgeon leaves and I sit alone, strapped to my chair. The lights go out. Someone draws a hood over my head while someone else binds my wrists and ankles with zip ties. Big arms pick me up like a sack of potatoes and drag me through halls and up stairs and through more halls. For half an hour, I bounce around in the back of a van until it skids to a halt and the same big arms pull me out the back and hurl me down a hill.
Another half hour passes before a family with young children discovers me while hunting for a lost ball. They pull off my hood so my head doesn’t roast in the heat. But they don’t cut the zip ties; I might be dangerous. I don’t get my freedom until the police arrive.
There’s the usual debriefing and I help the police in whatever way I can. They offer free counselling. They say I’ve suffered a horrible trauma and will need help readjusting to normal life. To be honest, I don’t see the point. My captors treated me well enough. The worst of it was the boredom waiting for the incision to heal. Boredom isn’t exactly a traumatic thing. The answer to boredom isn’t therapy; it’s doing stuff.
I make a point of keeping busy, restoring my old routines, holding the boredom at bay. I go back to work. I do grocery shopping. I take the car in for a tune up. On Saturday, I eat lunch at an outdoor café where I have soup and an open-faced sandwich and a pint of my favourite.
While I’m enjoying the last of my lager, a friend approaches on the sidewalk and hanging off his arm is a woman I’ve never seen before. When he sees me, his eyes light up and he stops, drawing the woman around to face me over the railing that marks the café’s boundary. He’s all: how are you? I heard all about it. Such a dreadful thing to be kidnapped like that. But you’re none the worse for wear. He says other things too, but I don’t hear any of it. I’m staring at this woman I’ve never seen before. I’m staring at her boobs. And I’m staring at her calves. And I’m staring at her lips. My imagination has never been so inventive. The fantasies cascade over one another. Meanwhile, my old self, the self before the kidnapping, the self that believed in citified ways and liberal thinking, that believed a good man shouldn’t objectify a woman, that old self is locked in a death cage wrestling match with the new self, the self of surgical implants and wires that burrow into my primitive brain. My two selves have their hands wrapped around each other’s throats. They’ve thrown each other into the mud and are kicking each other in the stomach.
My primitive brain wins the fight, and once it raises its dirty fists, a switch trips, a motor whirs, and my penis grows to the size of a prize zucchini at a fall fair. I feel it under the table straining against the inseam of my pants.
My friend calls my name. The tone of annoyance suggests that he’s been calling my name repeatedly. He’s been introducing the woman hanging off his arm. But I haven’t heard any of it. He expects me to stand, to shake the woman’s hand, maybe give her a hug or a kiss on the cheek. But how can I? Everyone will see the outward sign of my mind’s inward workings. They’ll know what kind of thoughts I have. My humiliation will be complete.
It will be an admission of defeat at the hands of the terrorists.