Bedford Michaels was born an outsider. Uncertain of himself, he’d learned to cling to anonymity on the fringes, cloaked by the indifference of a society that had limited peripheral vision. Free to observe, and comment in his own headspace without engagement, he left no mark, no breadcrumbs to betray his existence. He was safe until, that is, he acknowledged his loneliness.
It was not loneliness from lack of love, or company. It was a feeling, not a thought, from somewhere deep inside. A loneliness perhaps born of being on what people called “the spectrum”. The neurons in his brain seemed to fire randomly, free associating across synapses, making arbitrary connections between thoughts and words. It made his train of thought hard for others to follow. It made it hard for him too, sometimes a thought would flash and be gone before he could catch it. Whatever it was, he marched to a different drumbeat.
Bedford wasn’t functionally impaired but, when relating to others, he made a point of checking that what he saw, or heard, was what everyone else saw or heard. Because of it he’d been regarded as a difficult child. Not angry, not violent or moody, but unintentionally disruptive by being frustratingly obtuse and unpredictable. First his parents, and then his schoolteachers, became irritated by the need to explain to him what, to everyone else, was obvious and therefore should’ve been to him. Actions had consequences that he couldn’t always see. He was made to feel stupid. It was as if life itself was a painting by numbers, of a picture to which he didn’t have the key.
Childhood friendships were snuffed by exclusion, except when his inclusion provided opportunity for hilarity at his expense, because of his misunderstanding, or some malapropism. Truth be told, he learned to play up to being the joker in the pack, even seemed to enjoy being the butt of a joke.
Later, as an employee, his somewhat skewed way of analysing problems, of asking questions that nobody else had thought of, that challenged assumptions, occasionally bore fruit. His quest for clarity was mistaken for intellectual rigour and, for a time, he was rewarded with congratulation and advancement. Eventually, though, even this wore thin as bosses and co-workers, under pressures of their own, would want him to just stop faffing about and get on with it.
Once he had admitted to himself “I am lonely”, he free-fell into a void. An insatiable hunger to conform overwhelmed him. He had to do something fundamental to assert control on his life, beyond having his cup handles face the same way, or repeatedly rearranging his sock drawer.
Church didn’t help. Counselling didn’t help. Responses to “I am lonely” only elicited practical suggestions to join things, to sign up to dating websites, to volunteer. It eventually dawned on him that since the root of his loneliness was hard wired, it wasn’t fixable except by some radical intervention in his brain. He began to research.
Replete with charlatans and medical snake oil salesmen, Google offered little but, eventually, Bedford found a German clinic whose results offered a way of modifying his brain’s function with implanted electrical stimulation. Science-based trials seemed to offer a treatment more targeted at what ailed him than, say, ECT had been for depression and psychosis in some. Once the electrodes were placed, and supervised testing without side effects carried out, unlike ECT it would be under his control, something Bedford would do to, and for, himself at home.
It was a successful operation, his clinic tests had been encouraging, but it was months later that he plucked up the courage to start. Even so he sat for a full hour in front of his dressing table mirror, staring into his reflected eyes, silently questioning, fingering the control switch, hovering between what had been and what would be.
Decided, finally, he said to his old self “If you do this, you will be dead to me” and, smiling, pressed the switch.