Touch centers on former reporter Martin Bohm (Kiefer Sutherland) and his 11-year-old emotionally disturbed son, Jake (David Mazouz). Martin's wife died in the World Trade Center during the September 11 attacks, and he has been struggling to raise Jake since then, moving from job to job while tending to Jake's special needs. Jake has never spoken a word, but is fascinated by numbers and patterns relating to numbers, spending much of his days writing them down in notebooks, his touch-screen tablet and sometimes using objects (for instancekernels). He also shows a lot of interest in cell phones which Martin collects from the airport (where he works as a baggage handler) lost-and-found to give to Jake normally as a distraction when Jake is stressed out or acting out. Jake shows some surprising knowledge of cell phones in the first episode when he makes an entire box of phones set out in a circle all ring at once displaying a number. This is about the time Martin realizes that Jake is in fact communicating to him through the use of numbers. There are other instances of Jake using cell phones to 'help' him communicate with his father or someone else.