The first thing Luka saw when he woke up was a blinding white light.

For a second, he thought of Heaven. The concept of Heaven was another thing he learned from books and Sunday School. It is said that Heaven is the place where people go when they die, but when you did evil things in your life you wouldn't be going there. 

Luka remembered that suicide was a sin, and that was something Joe did. Then, would Joe be in Hell, where the evildoers were? he thought. If that was the case, and the light was from Heaven, then I can just  politely decline my spot here, or maybe ask if I could visit him there.

But the light began to attain the shape of an overhead lamp. Luka blinked, and he heard what sounded like a heart monitor. His vision began to clear completely. He was in a hospital room, all alone.

The room was small and simply furnished. Next to his bed was a simple bedside table, with a glass of water and a vase of flowers: tulips, in closer inspection. There was a TV across the bed, and there was a heart monitor. On the left of his bed was an empty chair. Outside, the sky was dark, save for the lights of the office buildings not far away.

I survived the fall, Luka finally realized. He closed his eyes tight and tried to remember what happened. He remembered being on top of a mausoleum. He remembered the rocks and deep cliff underneath him.

But most of all, he remembered Joe. The moment he remembered his former roommate, he felt phantom sensations of Joe's hand running up and down his torso, sneakily unbuttoning his pajama top. He could almost feel Joe's lips on his neck, and the warmth of his body.

And then, he remembered his coffin.

Just then, the door opened, stopping his reverie. A doctor with dark hair mixed with wisps of white and a gentle, fatherly smile walked into the room, a clipboard in his hand.

"Oh, so you're awake! How are you feeling?" the doctor asked him, sitting down on the chair. "Do you feel any pain on your back?" His tone of voice was friendly. Luka had only heard of such friendly people in television shows. 

Luka hesitated to answer. Did this man not know his condition?

"I...I'm fine, doctor," he replied.

The doctor nodded, and began to write on his clipboard. "According to this report, you are a suicide survivor," he said. He sighed and looked at Luka as if he was a little boy and had made a mess on the floor. "Were you really trying to do that to yourself?" he asked, sounding disappointed.

"No," Luka replied immediately. "I didn't try to commit suicide."

The doctor looked up from his clipboard. Luka then noticed the wrinkles on his forehead and the shadows under his eyes. He was probably in his thirties, yet he looked so worn out. The doctor's pen hovered over the paper.

"Er, sorry?" the doctor asked, giving a small laugh. "You jumped off a mausoleum roof towards sharp boulders. Is that not suicide?"

"I just wanted to know how it feels like to fall on something sharp," Luka answered honestly and bluntly, his face void of emotion.

"Why would you want to know how it feels like?" the doctor asked, shocked. "Don't you know what pain is?" He walked a few steps closer to him. Luka could smell a faint hint of caffeine on his coat.

Luka shook his head. About time the doctor would learn.

The doctor blinked, taken aback. "You...don't know what pain is?"

"I cannot feel pain, nor cold, nor hot," Luka said. "I can feel when someone touches me or when I fall down, but I am numb to everything else."

The doctor struggled to reply. He had heard of a case like this before, but he didn't think it was real...until now. "And so, you tell me that you jumped off the roof of a mausoleum to feel pain?"

Luka nodded. It was the truth.

"I...see," the doctor said slowly and unsurely, ticking off the box next to Psychological Therapy Needed.

"I'm not lying, you know," Luka inclined to add. "And I really didn't try to commit suicide."

"I know, buddy. Of course you didn't," the doctor echoed absentmindedly, adding more notes. Patient seems to have delusions.  Patient appears to be under great traumatic stress. 

"But I will be putting you to our hospital therapist's care from now on. Both your mental and physical well-being is our concern. Stay put, alright?" he began to walk away from the bed.

"You copied that," Luka suddenly piped up. The doctor stopped walking and turned to face the boy. "What was that?"

"What you said, about mental and physical well-being being your concern. That was right off the hospital brochure, right?"

The young doctor glanced at the side bed, and indeed there was a brochure of the hospital. "Yes, we are made to memorize it," he replied.

Luka tilted his head to his side,  as if confused. "Then if that whole thing about my mental and physical well-being is not directly from you, then what does that say about this hospital?" he dared to ask.

"I must speak with the therapist now," the doctor interjected, rushing out. What is this strange behavior the boy was exhibiting? And why is he so emotionless?

"I'll come back and tell you when everything's settled in. Go to sleep now," and with that, the doctor closed the door.

Luka sighed and laid back down, staring up at the ceiling.

The last thing he saw was Joe's face as sleep overtook his body.

"Come in," Dr. Whitman said as he heard a knock on the door. It was nearly nine in the evening, and he was wrapping up for the day.

"Dr. Whitman, have you heard of the latest suicide survivor?" a young doctor said as he entered the room, walking right up to Dr. Whitman's table.

"Yes, I've read his file," Dr. Whitman replied, followed by a sigh. "He's very young. I'm surprised he'd even try to do that." 

"I've just interviewed him, and I must say, sir, that this patient is...odd."

"Odd?" Dr. Whitman repeated. He gestured at the empty seat in front of his table for the young doctor to sit on.

"He claims that he did not commit suicide," the young doctor began, as he sat down on the empty chair. "He merely jumped because he..." the young doctor paused.

"He what?" Dr. Whitman said, leaning in closer.

The young doctor took a deep breath before replying. "He jumped off because he wanted to feel pain."

Confusion drifted over Whitman's face and mind. "He wanted to feel pain? What does he mean by that?"

The young doctor shrugged. "He said that he cannot feel hot or cold. I believe, sir, that we have our very first case of congenital insensitivity to pain."

Dr. Whitman couldn't help but gasp. Such a disorder actually existed? He had read about it before, but it was so rare that it was more likely that it doesn't actually exist. But to have a patient with that disorder in this hospital...

"You're sure?" Dr. Whitman asked.

"We'll have to test out if he really could not feel what he said he could not. If he really has this disorder, he'd most likely have fractured bones and torn limbs, especially from the fall."

"But did he really jump off just to feel pain? Or is there something else?" Dr. Whitman added.

"He did not mention much, sir," the young doctor replied truthfully. "I believe the job of finding out the story behind his actions will fall onto you."

"Indeed, it will," Dr. Whitman nodded, reclining back on his chair.

"Alright, Luka. I'm going to stick this very hot beaker against your arm. Take a deep breath now."

It had been a week since Luka was admitted to the hospital.  Now, he sat on a monobloc chair wearing a hospital gown as Dr. Whitman sat near him, holding his left arm. Standing behind him with clipboards in their hands were five other doctors, watching his every move.

"I won't feel anything, mister," Luka replied. When he first met this doctor, he had told him many times that he could not feel pain. For a whole day they put him through X-rays and scans, and found that he had a broken leg and a dislocated arm. The doctor had gingerly tried to move Luka's injured leg and elbow. The boy had only stared at him blankly.

Dr. Whitman was already holding the hot beaker with a thick glove, and the heat was already seeping through. The specialized beaker was half-filled with water that was boiled at 100 degrees Celsius; for sure, anyone would feel pain at that point.

"We will have to see," Dr. Whitman said to him. He took a deep breath and pushed the beaker against the skin of Luka's arm.

All eyes were immediately on Luka's reaction. Dr. Whitman knew that he could only do this for a few seconds, as it could immediately cause third degree burns.

In fact, within a few seconds Luka's skin was beginning to turn red.

And still, Luka was blank faced, staring right back at them with empty eyes.

After five seconds, Dr. Whitman immediately took away the beaker and placed it down on a small table next to him. Luka checked his arm; as expected, it had already reached a two degree burn. Dr. Whitman turned to the doctors near him.

"Please do first-aid on that arm right away, I will interview him later," he ordered one of them. Two of the young doctors, both young men, immediately went over to Luka's side and helped him get on a wheelchair.

Dr. Whitman watched as they wheeled him away. "Sir..." one of the doctors piped up; he was a young graduate, and in a few months would be able to work in surgery. "He had absolutely no reaction."

"Yes, he did not," Dr. Whitman agreed, running his hands through his disheveled grey beard.

"This is confirmation enough, sir," the young doctor added. "He officially has congenital insensitivity. Releasing this news could bring a lot of attention to our hospital."

Dr. Whitman turned to look at the young man, his eyes wide. "Is that all you see him as?" he asked him, his voice low, almost a whisper. "Do you look at that poor young boy and see only an attraction the hospital could benefit from? This boy could fall down stairs and break his back, and never even know it; and you think news about this would make more people go to our hospital?"

The young doctor slightly backed away, a flash of fear appearing in his eyes. "I-I'm sorry about what I said earlier, sir," he apologized quickly.

Dr. Whitman nodded, but his mind was still preoccupied. "We'll run another test before I begin to do psychological examination. I just need to know for sure that this boy could feel absolutely no pain. Get everything ready," he ordered.

"Yes, sir," the young doctor replied, before walking away and leaving his senior alone with his thoughts.

Two nurses, both men, helped strip Luka off his hospital gown until he was only wearing his clean white underwear, also given by the hospital. Though Luka could not feel any difference with his right leg nor with his arm, he knew that it was difficult to walk, and so he rested his weight against the nurses, keeping his eyes on his feet.

Their hands were rough; that he could feel. The last time he was touched like this was when he was on Joe's bed, laying down right next to him. He could still remember Joe's hand on his skin, how his fingers ran up and down his torso; how Luka had laid down, his pajama top already unbuttoned, letting his roommate feel him.

And oh, how Joe's hand moved down...down...

"Are you feeling uncomfortable, Luka?" one of the nurses said, looking up at him. This nurse looked young, probably no older than 24. He had hair the color of chocolate, and eyes of the same color. He had a strong jawline, and his hair was neat and formal, his uniform spotless. Luka decided then to call him Chocolate in his mind.

Luka blinked, and Joe's touch and breath were suddenly gone. He shook his head. "No...sir," he replied, adding the last word for good measure.

"Are you sure?" Chocolate asked again. Luka realized what he was looking at: there was something small poking up from his underwear.

"Might be the cold," the second nurse replied, the one to his left, half in jest. He was almost the complete opposite of Chocolate, other than he looked a few years younger than the former. His hair was black and curly. He reminded Luka of how Ancient Roman soldiers looked in the donated school books given to the orphanage, minus the armor. Luka decided to call him Curly.

"He couldn't feel coldness, don't you remember?" Chocolate snapped at him. He looked back at Luka. "Sorry if we were making you feel uncomfortable, you just needed help removing your clothes. Dr. Whitman wants you to have another test, you see."

Luka didn't care about that test. He kept looking down at that strange thing in his underwear. "What is that?" he asked.

Curly glanced at Chocolate. "Should we tell him?"

"Well, he's not a kid anymore," Chocolate replied. "Luka, I'll just say it straight, since calling it anything otherwise would be useless." He pointed at the bump in Luka's underwear. "That's called an erection. The slang word for it is 'boner'. You're getting me so far?"

"Erection," Luka repeated, testing that word. Chocolate nodded. "Boys get an erection when they think of something that arouses them sexually."

"In other words, it means that we might have accidentally been touching you in the wrong places to make you feel like someone's giving you foreplay," Curly added knowingly.

"Foreplay?" Luka asked.

"Basically it's when the girl touches you down there or all over your body so you would feel more aroused," Curly replied quickly. Chocolate shot him a warning look. "That might be too much, dude," he said to him in a low voice.

So that was what Joe was doing, Luka thought to himself. He wanted to have me right on his bed.

And instead, I fell asleep. Maybe if I had just stayed up and let him know that I liked what he was doing, he wouldn't have killed himself. He would have me instead.

Luka's reveries went unnoticed as the two nurses put him on a wheelchair and brought him down the empty hallway, bickering all throughout.

Dr. Whitman and the same young doctors watched almost nervously as Luka was slowly put down into a small metallic tub filled with ice cold water inside a small, bare room with white walls and no chairs, with a wide window looking out to the city. There were even big ice cubes inside the water, bobbing up and down as Luka's body was being lowered down by Chocolate and Curly.

"Now, Luka, tell us when the water begins to feel any different to you, okay?" Dr. Whitman called to him.

Luka was already inside the tub, holding a big chunk of ice. He stared at it blankly, as the freezing water lapped around his bare skin. The doctors, nurses, and Dr. Whitman couldn't help but be surprised and amazed. By this point any normal human being would be crying out from the stings the cold gave them.

"Thanks for the bath, doctor," Luka piped up after a while of silence, dropping the chunk of ice and reclining back. Chocolate looked back down at the stopwatch he held in his hand as he stood not far away. It was almost five minutes, and Luka was not reacting to the cold.

"It's, er, not exactly a bath, Luka," Dr. Whitman replied. "It's a freezing water test. It's to see if you really cannot feel coldness. You've been there for almost five minutes now, but as of yet you have no reaction."

"I really cannot feel anything different with the water," Luka explained matter-of-factly. "For me, it's just water. And I know this sounds odd to everyone, and I've grown up at the orphanage falling off my bed but not feeling anything. And that's just..." Luka's voice began to fade out. Keeping his head down, he pulled his knees to his chest.

"It's just what, Luka?" Dr. Whitman prodded on.

"It's just not fair," Luka finished, his voice soft. A shiver went down Dr. Whitman's spine when he saw the look in Luka's eyes.

His face gave no hint of what he truly felt inside, and his eyes were always so blank and lifeless. But now Dr. Whitman knew that there definitely was something more to this boy. Something he really wanted to know.

"I understand," Dr. Whitman replied. "The test is done. Bring him back to his room, please," he ordered.

He noticed Luka's body slightly shaking as the nurses enveloped him in a thick white towel and wheeled him out of the room. It was obvious that his body knew it was freezing cold, but Luka still remained indifferent, his mouth sealed shut.

"How are you feeling, Luka?" Dr. Whitman asked, hands folded on his desk. Across him sat Luka. It had been two days since the freezing water test. Luka's arm and leg were healing, and his eating habits were stable and normal. But one thing the nurses reported to him was that Luka barely spoke anymore. "Not that he was talkative before," one of them had said. "But now he doesn't even notice when we enter the room. He keeps looking out the window, often just leaving the TV set on without actually watching."

Luka looked around the office. "I'm okay," he replied.

"Luka, look at me," Dr. Whitman said. Luka met his gaze, and yet again his eyes were lifeless. They were dull, even with the sunlight streaming generously into the room.

"You know that you're a suicide survivor, don't you?" Dr. Whitman began. He raised an index finger. "No matter what you'd call it, in this world, what you tried to do is called suicide. Luckily, you survived, which is a rare case considering the height from which you fell from.

"However, you've been a patient of this hospital for almost two weeks, and we still cannot understand the reason why you tried to kill yourself," he finished.

"Death was never my aim, to be honest," Luka explained to him calmly. "I only meant to know what my roommate felt like when he jumped off the orphanage building."

"Your roommate?" Dr. Whitman asked.

Luka nodded. "Yes, his name was Joe. He was sixteen when he jumped. I was with him the night before. I was at his funeral when I came upon that mausoleum."

"To do something like that...just means that Joe was very important to you, wasn't he?"

Luka almost faltered. He knew that he was beginning to get personal with this stranger. But just talking about Joe brought back the memories of That Night. Something stirred in him, deep down inside.

"I dream of him every night,"  he began to confess. "I dream of his face, and I dream of his hands. He was touching me, the night when he decided to kill himself. Nobody wanted him in the orphanage. Joe loved people, but not many people loved him back. He knew that I could not feel pain, and he was always there when I 'hurt' myself, even if I couldn't feel the pain." He didn't know how all these words, these confessions, were suddenly now coming out of his mouth. All he knew was it all just felt too heavy. 

Luka stared down at his lap, his hands clasped together, almost as if he was praying. "He was always there..." he added softly.

"You loved him," Dr. Whitman concluded.

Luka looked up at him and nodded. "Yes, I think so," he replied. "I loved him. I love him still."

"And so you wanted to...to be with him again, which led you to that mausoleum roof," Dr. Whitman said slowly, as if calculating his words carefully.

"I wanted to feel what he felt," Luka said. "Pain is what makes us human. If we don't know how pain feels like, we wouldn't know when something's wrong. When something is too hot, it will hurt you. When something is too cold, it will hurt you. When something is too sharp, and when something is also too dull, either way it will hurt you. But I couldn't feel that. Because of that, I felt so...incomplete." 

Dr. Whitman's looked at Luka as he said all of this. For once, he could feel an emotion in his voice: despair. Loss. A lump began to grow in his throat. 

"Like you weren't human," Dr. Whitman finished for him, after a short silence.

"Yes," Luka agreed, nodding slowly. "It's like I'm not human." He stared down at his clasped hands. They shook slightly on his lap. 

"Luka...you're crying," Dr. Whitman observed.

Luka blinked in surprise, and touched his face. It was wet, as if a drop of water had rolled down his cheek.

"What's this?" he asked, rubbing off the wet streaks with the back of his good hand.

"Tears," Dr. Whitman said matter-of-factly. "It means you're hurting inside."

Luka paused. He stared at his hands that were wet from his face. There it was, Dr. Whitman thought to himself. He's beginning to realize it.

"I'm...what?" Luka said.

"You're hurting inside, Luka" Dr. Whitman said. "You feel pain inside. That makes you human."

"B-but," Luka tried to fight back, his voice beginning to shake. He quickly looked at his wounded arm and leg. "I didn't fall off anything. You didn't press anything on me that you said is supposed to make me feel different," he retorted, confusion in his once lifeless, dull eyes.

"Oh, Luka, you have hurt yourself," Dr. Whitman said, standing up. He walked over to Luka and gently placed his hand on Luka's chest. "You're hurting in here," he said, his voice calm and gentle as the wind.

"My heart..." Luka stared down at his chest. "My heart is hurting?"

"Yes," Dr. Whitman nodded, leaning back and folding his arms across his chest. "You're hurting over many, many things. You're depressed about Joe's death. You're depressed about not being able to feel hotness nor coldness nor the feeling of a knife cutting into your skin."

"I know what it feels like," Luka muttered. "What was that?" Dr. Whitman asked.

Luka looked up at the doctor, meeting his eyes again. "Joe cut himself almost every night. And I did too, because I wanted him to know that he was not alone." His voice was determined, but his usually lifeless eyes now had hints of sadness. The very memory of it hurt him, Dr. Whitman thought. 

Before Dr. Whitman could reply, Luka showed his good arm to him. Indeed, there were ten or more small cuts of varying sizes, from his wrist almost down to his elbow. They were fading, so much that Dr. Whitman never did notice them before. Such gruesome scars, he couldn't help but think to himself.

"I couldn't feel anything whenever I did this," Luka admitted, covering his wrist with his hand. "But I always thought that if Joe knew he wasn't alone in doing something like this, he'd feel a bit better. It was all I wanted."

"Luka, pain is not limited to being just a physical feeling," Dr. Whitman said. "Right now, you're heartbroken. Deep inside, you're very much broken."

Luka shook his head. "It's not enough," he retorted, his voice steady but strong. "I've hurt myself for Joe. I'd do the same again just so I'd know how he felt when he fell from that rooftop."

"Luka, Joe is dead!" Dr. Whitman argued back, almost shouting. The boy's stubborness was life threatening. "Hurting yourself will not bring him back to you!"

Luka stared coldly at Dr. Whitman, mouth taut. He then looked away, but Dr. Whitman could see he was fighting back words. "What else did you want to prove from this, Dr. Whitman?" Luka asked, staring straight ahead. Once again, his true emotions were unreadable. Once again, he had put on his mask.

"You already know that I can't feel hot nor cold. You already know that I can't tell that I've broken my arm and my leg. What else did you want to know?"

"I know enough," Dr. Whitman said.

Luka looked out the window, his hands turning to fists on his lap. "Can I go now?"

"Yes," Dr. Whitman said. "I'll call the nurses."