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Dancers - Chapter 6
by menme
Chapter 6 (The Dreams in Which)
Once a year, for ten long years, she held a seance, waiting for him to contact her. To speak, or write or morse-tap, the secret words they had agreed on before his death, and then she stopped. Ten years, she told them, was long enough to wait for any man. Thus The Man No Jail Could Hold remained forever trapped by death, never slipping the chains of that last dark prison...
She shut the book.
Loyalty.
What a concept to measure out in years as Houdini's wife had. As though love extended only so far and no further, ten years enough thank you, time to stop trying. Why stop at all if you loved? Why only once a year, why not a seance every day if you thought the one you loved was trying to communicate with you, screaming, trapped in a dark place...
Sounds in the hall snapped her back. Not him, he wouldn't be back for hours. She let the library book slip to the window seat and gazed out at the August afternoon. Screwy, her thoughts on a hot summer day trawling through New Year's Eve snow, but there it was. She'd suppressed the memory so successfully for months, never letting it raise its disturbing little head, but it had come back unbidden in the past weeks. That moment at the party, the second-long flash, standing with Georg, when the world had seemed to blink as though she passed through a bottleneck into some other space, something red and hot plowing across her chest, pain crushing her leg, biting to the bone - and once back from L.A. she had begun to read up on telepathy. Which led, by ways she was no longer sure of, to a trite library book about Houdini.
Ten years. The sun on her cheek through the glass felt as warm as though his hand cupped it. They had had only a single year so far, the date she had first rung his bell at midnight passing - in the hectic of her return from the west coast - without notice by either of them, or so she had thought, until he came in late from the hospital the next night with a bottle of champagne and chided her (with a sparkle in his eyes) for forgetting. ("Celebrating the first time we got our rocks off with one another," he'd commented later as they sat naked on the balcony, the deck chairs low enough to shield them from view, while she ran a toe across his abdomen. "Might that be odd?" "Don't see why," she'd replied.) One year and she was a different person. What would ten be like? Thirty? If Greg were to die tomorrow would she forget him in ten years, a flippant Mrs. Houdini smiling at reporters, saying What the hell. Could you forget someone you'd worked into the very weave of your soul?
Los Angeles had been exhilarating, brilliant dancers alive in the bodily world, reviving her love of what she did, but it had shown her how much she could miss him, the ache - once she'd settled in - centering on conversations with him over the phone or just the sound of his message if she'd been out (Sexy, was her roommate's proclamation upon hearing his voice on the machine). She hadn't thought it would be that strong. Experiences dulled when she couldn't share them with him, triumphs halved and miseries magnified because he wasn't there. And at night she would feel her fingers move on herself almost of their own accord. He had come to visit her on the fourth weekend, so held-back the first day as they went around town that it had thoroughly shocked her; hesitant, as though he thought something might have changed between them, until she went back to his hotel with him in the evening and, when the elevator doors closed behind them, almost crawled up him to kiss him, determined to ravage him if he wasn't going to ravage her. It seemed to break some tremendous wall of tension in him and he could hardly get the key card through the slot fast enough to get her in the room, their love-making so furious she felt she'd been swept away in a flood, drowned in warm water.
Another sound in the hall. The doorbell rang.
She wasn't expecting anyone. She checked the peephole - and caught her breath.
Block the door with your body. Instinct, once she opened the door a notch, to wedge into it facing the woman, as though protecting her home from some virulent attack, while her mind skittered down a million paths, wondering what it was about.
"What do you want?" she asked.
Stacy wore jeans and a cotton blouse, not the sophisticated bitch from the one other time she'd seen her (though the eyes still gleamed like dark skanky diamonds), yet somehow worse: the clothes made her younger. More of a rival.
"I'm sorry if I'm disturbing anything, Dani. I know Greg's at work and I wanted to talk to you."
"I don't think -"
Locks on a door across the hall rattled, a neighbor coming out, and not wanting to stand there like a fool while someone she knew stared at them, she opened the door wider, reluctantly, and let Stacy in, closing it after her. They stood looking at each other until the sounds in the hall faded.
"Just what is it you think we could possibly have to talk about?" she asked.
Stacy told her.
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He had begun to think about the future.
That in itself was wild; he'd stopped thinking in those terms after the infarction, all futures postponed indefinitely, and yet it was back - a sense of life, of being alive, sun and crowds and music. He could be a part of it again. Things went on, because of his tiny dancer. The fact that he would forever be popping pills of some kind, would always pop too many, the dilemma of his pain, which had always been an unbearable situation, its solution constantly postponed into that future unbearable to think of, possibly until he died, while he spent each day simply getting through each day - that was now just a fact of his life with her. Of what was starting to look like a real life. Those days that had hemorraghed into one another - with the pounding certainty of some day leaving him bloodless, unable to move - now flowed into one another instead, growing fuller. All his problems fading into the background, trivial against the thought that Dani would be there in that future, her body yes, but not just that - her smile, a teasing remark. Her way of looking at him that said he was the greatest thing in the world. They were living together for all intents and purposes (and how he loved those purposes). They would have knocked a hole in the wall between their apartments if they could have. He kept putting off suggesting they move in to some bigger place together. He wasn't sure why. Marriage - well, that had always been a scary concept. Who needed it when you were happy anyway? And children? (now there was a thought!) She had seemed so astonished at how he'd taken to Kevin, as though hating people meant he was a child-hater too ("Kids are okay," he'd told her, "if you catch them before they grow up. They're truth-sayers, little scientists. Their curiosity hasn't been anesthetized yet by the adult world.") That thought, the realization that he could have more than just a career and a girlfriend, that he might be on the brink of getting what others considered a life, left him giddy. And feeling stupid of course. It was a crock. What did it mean? Sometimes he almost knew how it might feel to go out the door in the morning with a mushy kiss still glistening on his cheek from his two-year old, but then some other thought would intrude, he would see himself refilling his Vicodin into child-proof bottles and it would bring him back to earth. Life like that would never be his. And yet the warmth remained, his body reacting to the thoughts even when he rejected them, so that he would start from a reverie, staring into space, finding that his mind had been repeating one word as though it were witness to a miracle, a little cry of wonder, love love love (though he never said it to her, always planning to, the word never seeming to fit through his throat).
And in the evenings, like now, when she wasn't dancing, and time stretched before them. She'd cooked something, it was in the oven. They moved around her kitchen in relative silence, their own kind of dance, while he poured himself a drink and she made a salad, one of her healthy specialties that appeared to consist of nothing except birdseed and walnut oil and which he hated. He smiled, watching her. She seemed tense and he moved behind her to massage her neck, stroking the back of his knuckles and then his lips across the hollow there, one of the sweet spots on her so beautiful he could never put it in words. She turned, still tense. Her eyes were dark.
"Greg, I need to ask you something."
He leaned against the counter. "Shoot."
A pause, strange. "Did you sleep with Stacy?"
He held her gaze. "You know I did, I told you -"
"I don't mean when she was working here. I mean, while I was in L.A. Did you?"
Probably the way a heart attack felt at first, clenched, the slow burn. "Dani, what is this about?"
"Stacy was here today -"
"Oh good god." He made it an explosion, just defuse it, but her eyes didn't change. "Stacy's a bitch, Dani -"
"She said the two of you had been going out regularly to dinner and then - when I was out of town - it happened, that you went back to her place. I told her to get out, but she was so sure of herself. Greg, I have to know the truth."
"The truth is that - yes - we've gone out to dinner a few times." The little confession altered nothing in her expression, the crushed line of her mouth. He felt cold now, scared. "I'm sorry. I should have told you."
"It all sounded so plausible - she said I'd probably noticed some change in your behavior and I did - you were so weird in L.A. -"
"Hello? Since when do you let people put suggestions in your mind like that, Dani? Who are you and what have you done with my intelligent girlfriend?" She was still staring, hardened; a brick wall would have looked softer. "You know perfectly well Stacy would say anything to drive a wedge between us -"
"No, I don't know that. Why would she? She left you. Now she suddenly wants back in? Maybe because you encouraged her by meeting her secretly for months?"
"I told you I was sorry about that. Would you just calm down?"
But she was calm. Calm and hard, her eyes like a concrete dam, holding back a world of tears but dry as stone, scorched. "You're so good, Greg," she murmured, and he felt confused, was this her believing him? "You're so good." (Oh no not belief). "But not good enough. Because you made one mistake." (Not a dam or a brick wall - the eyes of an executioner.) "You didn't answer my question. You didn't just come out and answer it."
Meet her gaze. "No, I did not sleep with Stacy! Not while you were in L.A. Not since I've known you. Okay?" His get-loud tactic, always a show-stopper because he had the voice for it, just blow `em out of the room.
It had no effect on her at all.
"I need the truth, Greg." She touched his hand on the counter and it sent a shock-wave through him. "I can take it. We'll - get through it together, somehow. I just don't want a lie hanging over our heads. Please. I'm just asking you for honesty. Total honesty."
And something clicked inside, as he gazed into her wide-open eyes; she was his A plus student, she really could take it, they'd take every hurdle together in that brave new future and it would start with him being honest. Click. "It was one time," he informed her (relief flooding through him, a weight from his chest). "You'd been gone for weeks and - well, I don't know why it happened. But it's not going to happen again."
Then he saw what a horrible mistake he'd made.
She'd fooled him.
Tricked him into revealing his cards with what he realized in retrospect was the best poker face he would ever see. The crap about honesty had been to get the truth out of him. She really hadn't been sure up to then. He might have gone on bluffing his way through to the end of a long life with her.
But now it was too late.
She was backing away from him, both hands over her mouth. Little sounds were coming out of her. He tried to approach her and the sounds became a screech: "Don't come near me!" Then they were both shrieking at once, words so inlaid he wasn't sure which were his, only that he had to make her see the one real truth, that sleeping with his ex hadn't meant anything; when he could hear himself he was yelling Nothing! Nothing! saying her name like a mantra while she batted his outstretched hand away.
" - if there was one thing that was always right, Greg, it was the sex! Always! I gave you everything - you couldn't have needed more -" (and she was right, the sex was everything, though he pretended otherwise to the world, playing it down with lewd jokes so no one would guess how much physical intimacy meant to him, she made it everything, and it shut him up). "But that's not what it was about, was it? Oh god, if it had been a hooker, I would understand. I know your physical needs. But this is about still being in love with her -"
"No!" If he could only make her see - what? "I'm not in love with Stacy. You've got to believe that. I knew before we were even finished that it wasn't going to happen again. It was like trying to...grab back the past for a night, I don't even know why I needed to, you were gone, I was unsure of you - I'm always unsure of you, Dani -" He meant it as a compliment, an acknowledgement of how easily she could do better than him, that she was a ten whereas he wasn't even on the same scale (that he had asked himself if she'd started thinking of the same future he had, and if she hadn't how scary was that?)
"Unsure of me?" She looked emptied. The dam broken, floodwater receded. "I was gone? Is that the way it is with you: out of sight, out of mind? Is it that simple? Oh god I can't look at you, I have to get out of here..."
It was like a punch in the stomach. She stopped in the living room to retrieve her knapsack and it gave him time to grab his cane from the chair and rush after her. He kept talking, because talking was his strength, that and sheer head-banging stubbornness, and he would use them both, not even trying to argue, just repeating words to her, key-note speech time, folks, please note the bullet points Mistake and Never again, but his audience wasn't listening, too busy rooting through their bags for their keys, wiping tears from their face, they would get up and leave any minute and he wouldn't have a second chance, audiences so fickle when you were speechless, fighting for your life -
Find one honest thing. "This is about you," he told her.
She stopped at the door and stared. "Me? You fucked your ex-girlfriend, Greg! You took your clothes off and then you took her clothes off and you stuck it in her!" She was hysterical again. He couldn't do anything right. "You've known since last spring how upset Stacy makes me and now you try to tell me it was about me? If you'd thought about me you would have stopped. Tell me, Greg, did you think about me? Just once? While you were taking your shoes off - " she was sobbing again now - "or stroking her hair? Did you think about me at all?"
He stared at the floor. "Apparently not." It was a statement of fact, nothing more. An admission of his shame.
She slapped him.
Hard. Staggered him where he had stood off-balance on his leg. And staggered his mind. He could only stare. Stare at her bent doubled over now, clutching her stomach, too breathless to even cry anymore, her mouth an O of pain.
"I didn't mean it that way," he choked out.
It scared him worse than her anger. He'd dished out enough crap during their year together and she had always taken it like a boxer. To see her doubled over now like that, her gasping sobs...it reminded him of something, a memory, instantly repressed again. You didn't forgive someone who hurt you that bad.
Her face was red in odd patterns, as though she was the one had been slapped hard everywhere - cheeks, forehead, mouth. She whirled, threw open the door - and he slammed it shut with his cane. "You're not going anywhere," he told her. It was the macho posturing he knew she had a weakness for, the last thing he could think of, a hand slapped down on a table Come over here. It didn't work. She tugged at the knob while he kept the cane firm across the door.
"Let me out!"
"I'm not letting you go off and brood on the wrong version of things. You're going to listen to me."
"Please just let me go, Greg."
And he talked again, loud, badgering, looking for more words, knowing it was too late for words, that there weren't any left, what could you say when you'd been the worst ass you'd ever been in your life? (I slept with my ex because I was thinking of proposing to you). She was saying something too, the same thing over and over, that he had to let her walk out the door, that she would come back when they were both calm, that he had to trust that; it was like a litany sobbed out below his own swelling voice, please Greg please, and he couldn't, didn't she see that, a physical impossibility; even if his brain had wanted to, he couldn't have moved his arm from the door if it meant watching her go off to make up her own mind without any more input from him, a mind so hurt it could only come back with a result of Auf Wiedersehen (and that would surely kill him). No, he had to fight for this. For her. Better to keep banging his head against that anger until she listened.
Talk. "I needed to find out something, Dani, and I did- that there's nothing there with Stacy anymore it was just bodies there's sex and then there's sex, right? -" (oh that tremor, her head leaning on the door, quiet again: she knew what he meant). "You have to believe me." You have to.
She gave up on the door and moved back to the middle of the room. He followed. She was repeating her litany again, earnest, almost calm now, and so intense. For a second he listened. "I'm asking you to do one thing, Greg." Her voice was numb; it sounded taped. "For once, I'm asking you to do something you don't want to do, just for my sake. I need time to think. Let me walk out that door and make my own decision about this." So intense.
"No! You're not leaving here till you accept what I'm saying -"
He should have seen it. The reason she'd maneuvered him to the middle of the room, out of reach of the sofa, any support.
She grabbed his cane - so unexpected that it twisted from his hand - and threw it across the room, leaving him high and dry, then she spun for the door.
Treating him like a dog. Fetch, boy.
With a lunge he knew he'd regret for days he thrust his right leg out (pain everywhere, bursting in his head) and cut between her and the door. He had his hands on her, but it was slippery time again - she feinted to the side, seeing her way blocked, a chased animal, and plunged back toward the bedroom. His fingers caught at her blouse and the flimsy crap tore at the shoulder, he hadn't meant that; it was like a parody of violence (but no, not violence) and for a second they were looking into each other's eyes, as though stung by the same thought - when did it get this crazy? - then she ran into the bedroom.
By the time he stomped after her, every step agony, she'd slammed the bathroom door. He heard a click.
"No! Tell me you did not lock yourself in the bathroom!"
He rattled the knob, started beating his fists on the door. He didn't know what he was shouting anymore. Noise, curses mostly, loud enough to wake the brain-dead neighbors: godammit and talk to me! He had to get in, not because he thought she might do something to herself, but because he had to see her face. He had to shake her (shake the awful fear inside him) and tell her to stop being stupid.
He'd break the door down.
The lock was a simple privacy set. One good kick would do it.
One good kick.
He turned, searching. The armchair. If he could drag it to the door, he could sit on the arm to take his weight and kick with his left leg. He got behind the chair and shoved, and suddenly the absurdity of it hit him. Like watching a video of yourself in one of those character-building seminars, shadows in an unexpected mirror, an angle you'd never noticed, illuminating: a cripple, a bumbling fool just this side of old, heaving at a chair.
All the impetus left him, swallowed up in hate of himself. Only his hands still moved, shaking. He sank into the seat and watched the bathroom.
When the dark came, he got up and turned on a lamp. He heard her move behind the door. He retrieved his cane and sat back down to wait.
Much later he caught a funny whiff from the kitchen, went and turned the oven off on something crisp and black, and sat back down to wait.
She came to him finally, lifting her shirt to brush her nipples against his chest, her lips on his, and he was so happy, she still loved him, then a sound woke him.
The bathroom door was open. He struggled into the living room, damning himself for falling asleep, and was in time to see the back of her slipping out the front door. He called her name. The clock on the wall said eleven-thirty; they'd played cat-and-mouse for four hours. He stood listening to her footsteps run down the stairs, then to the silence of the empty apartment, the tic-toc of time.
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Dark always turns into light, the optimist's cant, and here it was: the night became a morning. The sun came up. Shouldn't have. Breakfast was nothing, his stomach not up to it once he peeked at the black crusted thing in the oven, cold and glistening now, almost alien. Then it was up and out, off to work, where he wouldn't have to think. In the parking lot he heard someone behind him yell, "You're breaking up!" and he turned to stare at whoever had guessed this truth about them, but it was only a doctor talking to the dropped connection on his cell phone, which would have been comical if it didn't prove how scared shitless he was. He'd had his own battle with the phone, starting at six a.m., running his fingers over the buttons, telling himself he wouldn't and then calling her cell phone anyway, leaving messages. After he reached his office, he checked his Outgoing and found he'd called her fifteen times. Since six o'clock. He couldn't remember what he'd said, though he had the notion he hadn't spoken at all several times, just listened to her taped voice and then let the time run until it beeped off. The ducklings were in a dither about some case, their livers were failing, no, the patient's was, and he could guess where she'd gone. Cyndi was her best friend, and since he'd been to a party with Dani at her apartment he could probably find it again, or call the theater for the address, but what if he had Gay-Org on the line? (What if she'd gone to Gay-Org?)
"You have less than twenty-four hours to come up with something, House." And what did Foreman know about it? He realized they were talking about the case. "The wild thing about this is that he's exhibiting stiff-man syndrome -" No he wasn't.
"You'd think you at least could be politically correct," Cameron snapped at Foreman. "It's stiff-person syndrome."
Whenever he could think straight, he'd tried to dissect why he'd slept with Stacy. He'd have to put it in words for Dani at some point, thought-out words (if she ever gave him that chance), not the stammered excuses of the night before. It was like his reasons for keeping the photo, a grasp at the man he'd been with Stacy, the one who had never worried about revealing his entire self out of fear of driving her away (which was what he always feared with Dani, always hiding his worst side), but he'd found, there in bed with his ex, that that man was gone forever. The old feelings were an illusion. He was a burned child, who would never be completely himself with anyone again. To remember who he'd been or to forget - both hurt just the same. It had taken being in bed again with Stacy to understand that, but at least forgetting meant he could start over. The realization had left him free to choose what he really wanted, and that was Dani, the fear of plunging into a future, maybe even marriage, with her that had driven him to this one last stand suddenly gone; the image of Stacy and their love that had always been a bright shining thing in his head crumpling to ash and blowing away before he had even rolled off her.
Thinking of Stacy now left nothing: bile, a stone in his gut (oh if Dani could only look in his head and see that). He could never have conceived of himself wanting to hit a woman, but now he imagined himself going to Stacy's place and slapping her hard one time, the way Dani had slapped him -
"House? House?" A hand waved in his face. It was Wilson. The ducklings were gone. "Cameron came and asked for my help. She said you were practically comatose. You realize you have a patient dying, don't you?" Something else dying here, dude, give me a break. Wilson studied his face. "Did you and Dani have a fight or what?"
A good doctor knew his patient. "Do the words World War Three mean anything to you?" He shrugged. "She left late last night. I haven't heard from her since."
"What did you do this time?"
"Funny you should assume I did something wrong." He couldn't meet his eyes. "When Dani was in L.A." - shame caught at his throat - "I - slept with Stacy. Stacy paid her a visit yesterday and told her."
The silence made him look up. That kind of revelation would normally have given the good doctor a serious case of fish-mouth, but Wilson wasn't sputtering and stuttering his disbelief. Not the are-you-insane bug eyes, nor the why-am-I-surprised-at-this-shenanigan shrug. His only concession to shock was to sit down. His look said he was truly reassessing him, seeing for the first time that there was - in the end - no hope for him, just shaking his head softly, suddenly on the outside of the cage bars gazing in at that animal whose behavior actual humans would never penetrate. His lips were a thin grim line. "I guess this means Dani will leave you now."
Putting it in words. Dread cascaded through him. He felt feverish.
"Then help me, dammit!"
"Me? I'm not the one who couldn't keep his dick in his pants. I can't make it unhappen."
"You could talk to her. If she sees your number she might pick up." He grabbed a pen. His hands were shaking again. "This is her cell -"
"What do you expect me to say? Now you two kiss and make up...? Or maybe: hey, you know House, Dani, always jerking people around, but you gotta love him -"
"You're good with death." It froze him. "And that's what this is like. You're good at giving people hope, making them think they can go on when they can't. You'll think of something."
After a moment's hesitation, Wilson took the number. "Then let me handle it," he said. "Stay in the wings, for once, for chrissake."
He watched him walk off. Maybe the little guy would come through for him. Maybe not. Dark into light.
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"He's sitting across from you, isn't he?"
"No, Dani." She'd told him she was only returning the call because it was him. Her voice was so different it shocked him. Some lilt was gone. "You don't have to see him. I promise he won't follow me. Just tell me where I can meet you."
She finally named a cafe, all the way across town, and he cancelled his afternoon appointments, all of them serious cases that didn't bear being put off.
The cafe had wide windows shaded by willow oaks. As he stepped from his car, he spied Dani through the glass, sitting at a table, her hands around a coffee cup, straight-spined as always, with a dancer's perfection, yet looking tired. She hadn't seen him. He was abruptly reminded of a moment from months ago. The two of them had been left alone together in a restaurant while House went outside to shout into his phone at Chase, and he had asked her what she saw in him. Not drunk like at Christmas, or trying to put House down, just one guy wanting to know how the other guy did it, what was his secret, and she'd begun to talk about the sex, very open (almost as though he were a woman, he had realized). "Greg always gives me the feeling that he's so..." She had groped for words. "Well, `grateful' is the wrong word - so happy about what I make him feel, so...overjoyed, overwhelmed. It's like - okay, poetic time, sorry - like we're celebrating a miracle. My body is a church... Other times he just takes what he needs, like he's gone a little crazy, and that's okay too. You can't imagine how satisfying that is to a woman, either way. To know you can make a man lose himself like that... It's so - meaningful to him." She had smiled at him. "And not something you can fake." He remembered thinking it said more about what the sex meant for her than it did about House.
And then he was standing over the table. Her eyes were puffy. He had planned to open with" You're not going to leave him, are you?" but when he saw her face, it came out, "You're going to leave him, aren't you?" She didn't answer.
The waiter brought him coffee.
She told him a little about the evening and he could hear the voices, imagine the gestures that just skirted the edge of violence. He watched her face while she spoke, the full mouth and little upturned nose with its scattering of freckles. The attraction he always repressed for House's sake was just a law of nature no man could have fought. She really was stunning. Only today the eyes didn't fit. Red-rimmed, dead.
"I begged him to let me leave," she was saying. "And he just wouldn't. He actually thought he could browbeat me into forgiving him." At the next table laughter exploded. She clutched her cup. "I asked him to do that one thing, for my sake. To be mature, give me time to make a decision and then respect that decision. But he didn't. He chased me into the bathroom instead and sat at the door for hours. What does that say about how he sees me?"
"It says he's crazy about you. It means he was half-insane with the thought of losing you." She didn't reply. "Dani, you've - changed him so much. I know you know him better than all of us by now, but you don't know...what he was like before you came along. How bad it was. He was at the end of his rope. He was at the end of everybody's rope." The look she gave him seemed almost bored. He told himself he was imagining it. "We were all ready to shoot him just to put us out of his misery." He paused for effect. "He needs you. So badly."
"Stop right there, James, and look at what you're doing. What the two of you are doing. I'm the wronged one here, he slept with his ex-girlfriend, and with your help he is managing to make it about him. His needs. How miserable he will be when I leave him." He winced at the word when and saw her notice it. "It's always about him. And I've come to realize - it always will be. That would be my life if I stayed with him. Always his problems, the next crisis. I don't want that life. I want him to have thought about me and not gone home with Stacy. I want -" Tears had started in her eyes. "I want it to be about me, just sometimes. It's not too egotistic to want that, is it?"
She was so right it stunned him. He could feel himself winding down, at a loss for arguments in the face of her logic. In her eyes he saw a hardness he knew from terminal patients who had decided to forgo any more treatments, diamond-tough resolve, knowing he wouldn't change their mind, mixed with a kind of pity for him, because they had reached a place he couldn't understand.
"He loves you," he told her. The only argument left.
Her little shrug said a lot. "I know he does. Did you know, he's never said it? The words `I love you.' In an entire year. Oh, he's said `I need you.' Such a nice, all-purpose word. Covers a multitude of emotions, at least for him. I tried to trick him once into saying it, talking about how women need to hear certain things now and then even if men weren't big talkers, and you know what he came up with?" She took a breath and did a passable imitation of Greg House at his most ironic: "`You need me to tell you I'm nuts about you? If you haven't noticed that yourself, we should get your head checked.'"
It made him itch with embarrassment for his friend. How could someone so brilliant be so stupid? "He does love you," he repeated. "Ask anyone who watches him when he's with you." Realizing too late what it revealed about himself.
"Let me tell you a story," she said. "This happened months ago. He may have mentioned it to you, but I doubt it. We were driving home down Prospect and we saw a little girl dart out on her bike and get hit by a car. I was still in shock while he was pulling over and telling me to get his bag out of the trunk. When I got to him there, the girl was on her back just flailing and screaming - well, it turned out later she only had a broken leg and a bad concussion, but it looked horrible, the back of her head was swimming in this pool of blood. Her mother was screaming at the driver, which was scaring the girl even more, and Greg told me to try and calm the mom down. Of course he didn't say that, he sort of growled `Shut that bitch up!' I got the mother to quiet down, but the little girl was hysterical by then. Greg couldn't even touch her or get this blanket under her head that someone had brought, she kept twisting and hitting at him. Then he took out his wallet. You could just feel the crowd wondering what in the world a doctor could have in his wallet that would help this girl. Then he took out a quarter - and started doing magic tricks with it. You know, palming it and pulling it out of her ear, that kind of thing, keeping up this running monologue all the time like a stage magician. The crowd got deathly quiet. You just knew they thought he was insane. But the thing was - the girl calmed down. She wasn't laughing or anything, but she watched the coin and stopped grinding her head in all that blood and gravel and he was able to examine her with his other hand. I don't know, maybe she just thought he was crazy too. The point being - perhaps that's not so unusual for a doctor, to pull off something like that, but the fact is that he can be that way when he wants to be or has to be, but he doesn't. He chooses the path of browbeating and ranting. Last night, when he kept talking at me, yelling... He didn't even want to hear what I had to say if it wasn't what he wanted to hear."
"The pit-bull."
She glanced up, and nodded. "And maybe that works for him in his job. But not in relationships."
And that was that. They sat for a while longer, saying little. He could at least pay for her coffee. The waiter looked at her and gave him a dirty look, as though he figured he was the one making this beautiful woman unhappy. Before they rose to go she said another thing.
"You know, Greg is always telling me I let men walk on me. And maybe he's right. But he's done it to me a lot too, in his own way, and it just turns out that it's him it's going to stop with. I can't sacrifice my ego any longer for his." He nodded. "Would you tell him that for me, James? Would you try to make it clear to him?"
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He found House out on his office balcony, his thinking place. He was flicking one of his yo-yos, holding it out across the railing he leaned against. The ducklings had scattered at Wilson's gesture.
"It looks like she's going to leave you," he informed him. "She says she's coming back to the apartment this evening to tell you in person."
The doctor nodded. The yo-yo spun, up and down again, and as it reached the end of its string, he saw him slip the loop from his finger (the shock of the simple gesture stunning him) and the yo-yo just kept on going, while House leaned over the rail a little to watch it plummet into the depths. He shrugged and finally spoke. "A year. Think that might qualify as a personal best for me? Aside from Stacy, I mean?"
"Oh good god. You can't really be pretending this doesn't matter to you. You think you're not going to miss her?"
"She gives great head. I'll miss that -"
"Oh shut up!" It startled them both. House looked up and he saw how bad it really was. "All your bravado doesn't mean a thing. You're going to fall to pieces when she leaves." He saw him twinge at the word when, the same way he had done when Dani said it. "You just went too far. I don't know what goes on in your head. You know what Dani told me? That you never once said `I love you' to her." He watched some fleeting pain cross House's face. "She's doing this for her own self-respect. Can't you honor that with a little seriousness?"
"She's doing this because she failed." Failed? "She could have chosen to stay. Could still choose to stay, and if she doesn't - well, she's not any better than Stacy. Loyalty, I guess, is a scarce commodity."
"Is that a joke! What about your loyalty? What do you expect? You think there's someone out there who'll accept anything from you? That you can just completely be your own true - godawful - self and that some woman - especially one like Dani, with a whole slew of other options - will just knuckle under and take it? Maybe your imbecilic masochist, sure -"
The tension in House burst. He spun abruptly, shouting. "Yes - yes! Why not, goddamit it? What's the point of saying words like love if you don't accept a person the way they are, with everything that entails?" He could only stare. "The fact remains that Dani's giving up. On me. Has given up, if what you say is true." The energy seemed to leave him. "Whatever she felt for me, it just...wasn't strong enough."
Strong enough. He knew he was sputtering again. "Wasn't - ? Are you truly that relationship-challenged? People won't keep accepting the worst from you forever. No one would." Far down, in the chasm beyond the balcony, a bell rang on the Catholic school across the way, and children poured forth; their distant screams might have been laughter or pain. "It's almost like you do these things deliberately to test people."
And there it was. Understanding. Like a bell ringing, doors behind doors, slamming open. He did know what went on in the guy's head. "You do, don't you?" he said. House looked away, scared. "Maybe it's deliberate, maybe it's unconscious half the time. That's why you screwed Stacy, even if you don't know it yourself - it was some unconscious test of Dani. You're - you're looking for something. And it's something that doesn't exist." He was babbling to himself now, so overcome with insight that he pounded the rail with his palm. "You're not crass or unromantic like everyone thinks - you're the most romantic person there ever was! Because you - Gregory House - truly believe in unconditional love!"
It had become a harangue but he didn't care, House's numb look couldn't stop him he had it at last!
"Something every grown person in the world knows doesn't exist outside of fairy tales, and you - you've been beating yourself up all your life because you couldn't find it! Mommy and daddy were the first to let you down. Especially daddy - he just couldn't love you for what you were, right? Then it was Stacy - boy, she failed her test with flying colors, didn't she? Now you figure Dani's just not up to taking your crap. Not `strong' enough to love you the way you want to be loved. And you're right... Because, you know what - no one would be. Love isn't like that - it's not, hey, take whatever I dish out and it'll prove you love me. The other person has to get something. Love is always give and take."
"Then what are you still doing here?"
It knocked the breath out of him. For a moment they stood silent, the shouts from the playground rising to them, sounding tortured. No one, man or woman, could be so hard inside.
"I don't know," he finally murmured. "I don't know - leaving, I guess." At the door he turned. "Say hi to Dani for me tonight." Then a last dig, the need to hurt back. He could play that game. "Tell her she's doing the right thing."
---------------------------------------------------
He had changed so much in a year.
And there lay his old life, waiting for him. Like falling back into a pit. The need to turn on every electrical device, as he did now, the moment he walked in - lights, TV, radio - especially those that would talk to him, anything to banish the silence. He'd stood downstairs in the entrance to the apartment building and stared at the open elevator door so long that it had closed again, and then he'd climbed the stairs, so that he was sweating with pain by the time he reached the top. It hadn't made the apartment different.
Yes, his life. Waiting for him, like an old, very evil friend.
He waited for evening, for the sound of her. Wilson had said she would come. Stupid thoughts crossed his mind: he would work furiously for the few hours left and change the place, clean it to perfection, toss things out, all his porn videos, the juvenile guitars on the wall - impress her so much with his commitment to change that it would persuade her to stay. He got as far as placing some dishes in soapy water and then collapsed into a chair, exhausted by nothing. Dark came. The dread in his stomach made him almost sick. Like a patient must feel, he suddenly knew, waiting for a heart procedure he likely wouldn't survive.
Then the doorbell was ringing.
Couldn't be her, making him open the door as though she were already a stranger, but it was, and it was so much like the first time she'd rung his bell at midnight that he couldn't look at her, just a quick glance at the swollen face that attested to a night of crying, turn away. He gazed at a corner of the room, facing away from her, while she closed the door behind her and began.
"You - um - once told me not to bolt and so I'm not." Her voice sounded scratchy. "It's only right that I come here in person to tell you I'm leaving you."
Silence. He listened to her breathe.
"You know, Greg, in - in the beginning, when I first realized I had started to hang on your approval, that everything centered around you, I was frightened sometimes. It was like I had stepped one foot off over an abyss. I was dependent on someone else for my happiness. But then I saw you were holding me up and it was okay. But now... Now I see you weren't holding me up. You were just propping yourself up. And now I'm falling." A breath, small and resolute. "I've got to save myself."
Nothing to say to that.
"Last night was when I saw it. You just couldn't accept that my opinion might be different from yours. If sleeping with Stacy hadn't meant anything to you, then it just couldn't mean anything to me either. As though I didn't exist outside of you." (Of course she didn't, or he didn't outside of her, were those the words he needed, the ones he hadn't found?) "I had always known you used me for your needs, Greg, but I always thought we were equals, that somewhere in there you respected my thoughts. Because of Stacy I know now all you respected with me were your needs. Physical, emotional. What I needed didn't matter. And then -" the breath was a little sob - "then I asked you to do one thing for my sake, to let me walk out and decide for myself. And you wouldn't do that either. So damn...stubborn. I was just something for you to keep - pushing against. Not a person in my own right, who could make up my own mind."
So his stubbornness - chasing her, not about to give up, the relentlessness that meant how much he cared, hours at the bathroom door - that was what had done it. I didn't know, he thought. He thought, I'd give you anything, if I knew what was right.
The irony of it made him want to laugh or cry, and a little snort escaped his throat. He felt her go stiff beside him.
"I'm sure Wilson told you all this. There's one thing I didn't mention to him. When you - when I was in the bathroom and you were pounding on the door, I...had a vision. Nothing supernatural. Just a premonition, I guess you'd call it. I saw the future. In this vision I was lying on my deathbed. I'd spent my life with you, and I'd been happy and now I was dying, some room, everything was dark, and I was so scared. It hurt. And you - you were yelling at me. Telling me I couldn't die and leave you alone, because what would you do, you shouted at people in the shadows, how could they have let it happen, why didn't they do something. It was all about how horrible it was going to be for you, when what I needed was for you to take me in your arms, to help me through it with your strength. But you couldn't. And the me in the vision realized that I'd always deluded myself about being happy, that it had been a ruined, wasted life, chasing after little scraps of the real you that you would throw me now and then. Thinking that you were giving when all you'd ever done was take. And then I died. Knowing in the last second, with this horrible bitter sense, that I'd wasted my life on someone who had ... needed, but never really cared." She was crying, very softly, but he wouldn't look, no, the cluttered desk over there might walk off, keep your eyes on it. The fact that she'd talked for five minutes and he hadn't glanced her way once, that he didn't know what she had on, surely not the ripped blouse, whether her hair was messed up...it would make it easier to obliterate it all later, no last lingering looks please, stupid romantic crap anyway, and god no begging he could manage that at least -
"Are you going to look at me at all?" Her voice so strange.
He had to clear his throat. "Probably not." (Like a baby being strangled. Or an old man, no breath left).
He sensed her mouth open and close, more shock. Something else had just been proven.
And then she was talking about her apartment, she would find a new place, get friends to move her things out. His heart hurt. This was it then, the surgery could never have worked. Hadn't worked that time, New Year's, when he'd thought he could just cut her out of him, and how much harder now, when her roots had grown so deep, down to the aorta, he supposed. Her words were like little stabs of a scalpel, some talk about him not trying to contact her, all designed to make it very clear that once she walked out the door she would be dead to him forever. He couldn't concentrate.
"...and they can come by and get anything I've left. So we won't ever have to see each other again. It will be easier for both of us." The desk, that chair, the feel of his cane against his thigh, his hands clenched. Don't look. "I guess there's nothing left to say. Except - goodbye."
Silence so long he thought he'd gone deaf. Then she was turning to the door, and there had to be words, hadn't he had come up with something while he'd waited for this, sick with it all day, knowing it would come out and here it was, as he turned to her at last, but so loud, a violence, not the way he'd ever wanted it to be: an ugly cough, shouted, like blood and vomit, his deepest fluids.
"I - love - you!"
Time stopped (he could still do that). She leaned her head on the door. "Wilson told you to say that."
"So what! I mean it!"
When she turned her voice was a ghost's. "It's too late, Greg. It's not enough. It's all part of the same thing. Your needs. You love me and so how can I possibly leave you?" She held his gaze, all the dark shining tears spilling, and her voice broke. "You should have said it earlier, some time when you didn't have to."
No one could be that hard. So there was nothing to say that would prove to her it wasn't about his pain. Because it was. It filled up the world, inescapable. His mind fumbling through words, rejecting, don't do this I need you you can't leave me here alone in the dark. "What do you want me to do?" he asked.
"There isn't anything, Greg."
"Do you want me to get down on my knees?"
She gave him her just-stop-it look, tear-filled, already turning to the door. He tossed his cane aside.
He got down on his knees.
Begging after all. Like an open wound might beg to be healed, execution posture and she could hit him or kick him now if she wanted, it would be all right if it only meant she was touching him. Instead she was staring, horrified, both hands over her mouth; her look said she couldn't have been more repulsed if he'd laid a mangled animal at her feet (and hadn't he?), then a choked sound came out of her; she turned and ran, his hand snatching at air as the door slammed behind her.
---------------------------------------------
She couldn't see.
She was a blind woman, running down the stairs, slowing on the sidewalk to grope her way while streetlamps popped on in the dusk. Her tears crystallized the lights, too hard to look at. Faces loomed at her, staring at this woman sobbing as she stumbled by. She didn't care. She had to put distance between herself and the apartment or she would run back and take him in her arms, her hurt little boy, and tell him she forgave him.
Because she did.
She thought she'd cried enough tears, but there were years more in her, she knew now, she would be crying all her life, that future cut off since the moment she'd seen the truth. Oh, she really hadn't been sure, Stacy's smug grin might have been a lie, but then he'd admitted it. So simple for her to trick the trickster, and she'd seen in his face what was impossible for her to conceive: that he thought he was doing good by confessing; he was relieved to get it off his chest, no doubt about it, and then his "I'm sorry, it won't happen again," so overly simple, as though he'd gone shopping for her and brought home the wrong toilet paper. She'd started to die then.
A bad dream, from there on in. She was crouched on the floor of the bathroom, hugging her knees, listening to his rant that seemed to evaporate at some point, and then she was standing in Cyndi's door, after waking her up at midnight, the other dancer's eyes appraising her torn blouse with a knowing grimace, so that she had to explain through her sobs, No, he wasn't like that (thinking to herself, Why would he be, when he had such better ways of hurting her). Wilson's stricken look in the cafe, as in love with Greg House as she was, in his own way. You sent a puppy to run defense for you, she'd wished she could say to Greg then.
And then she was climbing the stairs to see him for the last time, sweat starting on her by the time she reached the top, not from exertion, but from nerves. It was the hardest thing she'd ever done. She'd thought of every possible tack he might take, as she sat on Cyndi's sofa through the night crying until she couldn't breathe: he would argue with her, be rational or irrational, he'd lose it entirely and try to lock her in, tie her to the bed, he'd be bitter-smooth as a snake while he told her to go on get out what did he care he had Stacy anyway. She'd imagined it all, but never that he would stand there and face away, not glancing at her once, saying nothing, letting her pummel him with her little speech until she turned to leave (quickly then before that explosion in her heart when he finally spoke the words could make her throw away her pride and stay).
Then he threw away his pride. Tossed all that dignity aside with his cane, and got down on his knees. No theatrical ploy. His face - oh his face. She'd never known, hadn't thought about that moment in a year, his hand slick with their lovemaking fumbling desperately to wrap her hair across her eyes before he came, a thing he'd never done again after the first time, the insanity of it clear now: that there was a face he had she was never supposed to see. A face he'd kept her blind to, hair still across her eyes all that time, but here it came, as he kneeled in front of her: his real face, and it had been so (oh but it would never affect her love for him) - so...ugly. Monstrous, because he was a child with a monstrous need, a need for more love than the entire world could ever give him.
And so she ran from that face, bolting, yes, from the truth that she loved him and forgave him and wanted to be with him, but couldn't. Because she was strong. So strong she had to lean now against a lamppost, wracked with sobs, startled by voices, a brush of her sleeve, two Hispanic boys, fifteen at best, with real concern in their eyes - You need some help miss? - (we all do) - but she only pushed away and ran.
--------------------------------------------
Never trust theories.
He had applied dream math - say three words, get everything in return - and it hadn't worked.
Something cold pressed his forehead - the floor. He dragged himself to his feet, ignoring the little scream inside, the drawn-out no. He couldn't see straight. Dusk played tricks with the lights he'd switched on earlier, dimming them until only certain spots in the room glowed like liquid: the sofa where she read her books, the bear-rug they'd lain on, seeming now to flow with riverfire. The phone; he would be waiting for a call the rest of his life, so best to yank the jack from the wall now, the quick burst of strength electrifying him, and that was the answer: just keep moving, cover the pain. That glass of scotch, two days old, shattered against the wall perfectly, and there were journals and reams of notes that spun and fluttered when tossed, almost like birds, so beautiful. Why stop there? The computer crashing on the floor scared him. He'd do it right, he decided, you could mirror the world ending by having a room end, so he found some music and slotted it in, something old, the words simple and entirely unbearable. The oaken barrister's cases were next Keep me searching for a heart of gold had to climb on a chair for that, use all his weight, but the first to tip over nicked a corner of the piano and filled the floor knee-deep in books, which was satisfying, better than a yo-yo off the balcony, this was really cool. And I'm gettin' old. The next bookcase almost jerked him with it, but he caught himself by hopping on his left leg. Time for the guitars. I wanna give. The first needed two swings against the piano, but the acoustic just exploded, split down the middle into daggers of wood with a whanging chord he could almost identify. Turning, he slipped in heaps of journals and landed on his back, laughing. I wanna live. What a joke. His hand could just reach the stereo cable and he jerked it from the wall. Silence. There was the real answer. Sometimes, when his dad had come for him, punishment immanent, he'd hidden under the bed, the closeness of musty springs a comfort, all quiet but for the approaching steps that always found him. Silence and dark. An answer.
It was an answer that called for careful contemplation.
If he loved even one thing in life (think of something) it might hold him back - pistachio ice-cream or the way raindrops ran down a windowpane. The smell of her skin. Yes, he loved that. Gone forever. Twisting on his side on the floor he doubled over at the thought, a tight comma of pain. So that was it.
Wade through books. In the kitchen, a little shocking in that it was still a room, he found another bottle of scotch and then plundered his stashes, from the backs of cabinets, the bottom of the flour bin, going to the bedroom for more - don't look at the bed - until he had enough. Thirty-seven. Wilson had switched him from 10 to 7.5-mg months ago, ignoring his quip that he would just up the ante, so they were all he had. It would do (and ban all thought of Wilson too, just another deserter in the foreign legion of psychos around him pretending to care). Two-hundred seventy milligrams of bitching hydrocodone. This was dream math that would work.
He headed back to the living room.
--------------------------------------------
All the corners looked alike. For a moment she panicked, thinking she'd come full circle back to the apartment (her mind could have played that trick), but she was farther than she realized. All that running, then walking, blind, stretching the line leading back to him taut, willing it to break. A bus-stop loomed ahead; that was the answer, get on a bus before the line could pull her back to him. She told herself not to think of what he might be doing and then thought it anyway. Had he gone into the kitchen and made himself a sandwich, pretending normalcy with all the strength in him? Or if she went back now, would she find him still on his knees, not having moved at all?
The thought emptied her and she leaned on the back wall of the bus shelter, blocked from the street's view. The place was deserted, no one to see her cry here. Probably meant a bus wouldn't be along for awhile. If not, she would keep walking, bolting. After a moment to ease her trembling, she went around to the front of the shelter to read the schedule and stopped in her tracks, staring.
In the middle of the street stood a piano.
------------------------------
He swept dust and shards of wood from the piano bench and sat down. Best place for it, a good place. The gleaming keys, that had always seemed like a woman's skin and never more so than now, grinned up at him. He set the scotch on the lid and poured a finger into the one unbroken glass he'd found, placed the bowl of pills beside it and scooped a handful. A memory of piano lessons invaded his thoughts, the grandmotherly teacher his mom had found for him, smelling ever so faintly but not unpleasantly of urine, who had placed gumdrops on the keys for him if he could name the notes. He reached out his hand -
----------
- and she watched her fingers deposit a pill on each key, starting at high F and moving down. Her fingers in front of her seemed too thick, with fresh scrapes and a bleeding cut on the thumb, and they moved against her will, but she could feel the smooth ivory and lift her other hand to run her knuckles along the grain of the woodwork, warm in the dusk, lit now for two seconds by a car's headlights passing, a horn blaring somewhere far off. Silence again. Her left fist counted out pills onto the keys like a farmer sowing seeds, or a rosary, until she had a line of thirty-seven, then she moved back to the top and started swallowing. The scotch after each pill tasted like -
-----------
- joy, as warm and sweet as sliding his cock into her, a sip only, to wash each one down and keep it down, it would add up anyway, the yellow lights already dancing at the corners of his eyes, ganglions going to sleep, so he took it slow, hands clammy by the time he got to the last two -
-----------
- but she got them down, thirty-six, thirty-seven, with a last languid swig straight from the bottle, and swung herself up from the bench. Something was missing, her legs had gone away, a gaping blank where the pain of her right leg had been, that hellish focus of her every waking second, and joy burst inside her oh she was higher than she'd ever been, she would fly, but when she looked down she saw pavement beneath her feet. Which was odd and then he -
--------
- fell, long-gone legs just buckling. He was under the bed again, sharp edges of books in his back (where had they come from?) and the steps had reached him, but they were turning away, oh thank jesus, the clump-clump of shoes growing slower and fainter as they receded, no punishment today, he would be spared that forever now. No one would ever find him. When he turned his head he found he lay upon a sea of torn notes and books, an infinite white ocean in the gray light of hulking shapes, over there a piano, dust still settling out of the air from some cataclysm. Then a bus pulled right into his apartment, which was just so cool, as big and fine as a whale, with a dire squeal of brakes, and hissed its doors open for him. He struggled to stand.
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- squeal of brakes. A rough hand propelled her sideways.
"Didn't you see the bus, lady! What were you doing standing in the middle of the road?" A man's face loomed near. She looked behind her. Where the piano had stood a bus waited, passengers descending and moving away, some gawking interest at their little scenario. It was there, she wanted to say. She thought she might crouch and look for wood debris below the bus, but she couldn't find her legs. The man's hand on her arm held her upright. "My legs are gone," she told him, ignoring his narrowing eyes. "My right leg should hurt and it doesn't."
"Miss, have you taken something?"
Taken something. Yes. A lot of somethings.
She looked again. No piano, no bus either, for it had pulled away. Only the guy accosting her, frightened now, and further down a tiny wizened man of perhaps eighty, who leaned on his cane and stared. She'd made the old guy miss his bus and she felt sorry for him. Then their eyes met and she came to. Her legs came back, everything awake with the realization.
She had to make him miss his bus.
"Greg - no!"
She broke from the man's fist on her arm and ran.
She couldn't have come that far, six, seven blocks back, wild breaths, no pacing just run. Then she was taking the stairs for the second time, flying up them, beating on the door screaming his name, fingers fumbling for the key in her pocket. She'd taken it off the chain earlier, planning to give it to him, thank-god forgotten. Inside, she thought she would faint - the wreckage like a scene from a war - her breaths little hot darts in her throat. Slowed by fear, she stepped around the piano.
He lay with his cheek in vomit. The white specks were half-dissolved pills. She was on her knees in them, turning him, then she was seeing the phone cord where it snaked away under junk, no time to excavate, she had her cell phone. A tinny voice asked her questions. Two men were beside her, the old guy and his twenty-something grandson from down the hall, she thought the grandson was called Joey, shouting something about getting his gramp's defibrillator and sprinting back out the wide-open door, but then his head lolled. His chest stopped moving. The last of her rationality drained from her. She screamed "Is he breathing!" at the old guy who stood feet away, how should he know, then she was pressing her lips down over his vomit-flecked mouth and blowing in, doing something wrong, she was sure. He'd given her a first-aid lesson once and they'd ended up on the couch naked laughing while she straddled his chest and pushed, that was it. You pushed a heart, shoved until it chose to beat for you again. She would do that. Strong hands yanked her away, ripped his shirt open. Beeps and a shock, then another.
She could hear her voice screaming No, her thoughts saying your heart doesn't stop, not yours it goes on and on.
--------------
...so I knew the two were a couple, you see them in the hall a lot, and then we're coming up and we hear this scream. The door's open, she's like screaming and oh man it looked like a rock band that really had it in for a hotel. Don't know how one person could pull those bookcases down and seeing those guitars wasted, that hurt, then Gramps is saying, Joey get the machine. The guy on the floor's the one who saved him when he had his heart attack in the hallway, got him the defibrillator and taught us how to work it and all, so he likes the guy. When I get back I have to drag the woman off him. I mean I've been around but I never seen anyone lose it like that. The whole time we're shocking him she's screaming - You Can't Die! - just kicking her hands and feet on the floor like a kid having a tantrum, except so hard she had to be hurting herself so you knew it was serious. Pretty unfair too, since I figure she's the reason the guy wanted to off himself in the first place. We're on the fourth shock by then. The paramedics only needed one for Gramps that time, so I'm thinking the guy's managed to flush himself down the toilet for good, you know?
---------------
Tha-dunk.
This is the sound of nails in a coffin. A soft hammering, they're closing a lid on him. The bus has left without him, but that's all right, this is more peaceful anyway, tha-dunks growing slower as the lid slides across his vision, blotting thought. Then tha-dunk they stop, and the bottom falls out of the coffin.
Falling fast down a hole, chasing rabbits, his very being shrivelling to just that pinpoint of light above. He can't imagine how he'll get back up the well (the tha-dunks were somehow important in that respect, he seems to remember), but he doesn't want to, the layers through which he plunges ever more comforting the darker and thicker they grow around him, sound gone now, so far down, but for a whir beyond the walls, a muffled scream.
He knows the voice.
She's crying.
I'm here, he'd like to say, at the bottom of this well. But she won't be comforted. I'm at peace. An image of her face comes, laughing at some joke he made. He wants her to laugh again.
He'll go back.
It will make her happy.
Without the tha-dunks to home in on there's no orientation, up and down all one, just that way when you jump off the dare bridge; he'd gone too deep then too, and had panicked just like this before kicking up with all his might through green silence toward the sun. Toward her face.
And with the thought he's propelled upward, tossed back into the stream of light and sound so harsh it's like pain.
Tha-dunk.
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"Got a pulse!" The room seems crowded to her, figures flitting by, near then far, more arriving all the time. They throw shadows across his face, his eyelids fluttering as they all crowd down the stairs, the tiny movement making her so happy, and she wants to reach out and touch his cheek, but she doesn't know where her fingers are. Then: blue light, a hall ending in glass, and she struggles to follow but they won't let her; she wants to be ready to crawl on top of him and breathe into him if they need her to, but they shut her out. They take him away behind the glass where she can't go, and how could she have helped when she can't feel her own fingers. A face bends near hers, Wilson, alarmed, who looks up and catches a signal from the doctor behind the glass, though she can't tell what, then dips back to her, his eyes magnified a hundred times, and then not, as she sinks away from him to the floor. A voice saying Dani, he's going to be all right.
Dani? Hello! I need help over here - she's in shock.
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"I wondered when this would happen," she told him.
Wilson turned, startled. "Lisa -" Beyond the glass a nurse checked the sleeping form of House. She wondered how such a tall man could be made so small by a hospital bed, so pale and insubstantial.
"I remember when I first met Dani at the Christmas party," she went on. Wilson turned back to the glass as though he didn't want to hear his boss reminisce. "House was keeping his eyes on her like he was afraid she would disappear in smoke any second, but he was off at the bar for a moment, and Brunner - the Brunner from ER, that the nurses get so dreamy over it's endangered the lives of several patients - came up to Dani with some line about how he was sure he'd met her before, but couldn't think where. She just gazed at this male god and said - as naturally as you please: `We've never met. I would remember.'" Wilson was watching her now. "It was a flirt that wasn't a flirt - she was just being honest - but she knew what she was doing too. Brunner lit up like a California forest fire. I thought right then, This woman's going to have House for breakfast."
"This wasn't her fault." She'd never heard James Wilson growl before. "House did something wrong."
"I'm sure he did."
"Dani was leaving him, but she was justified in doing so."
"I'm sure she was."
The nurse came out and nodded that the patient was doing fine. The shape beneath the sheets stirred, waking up, and a steel band around her heart loosened. Wilson went to the bed and she stood in the door to listen.
"Greg." His friend touched his arm.
House's eyes fluttered open and then closed again. "Can't be heaven when your face is the first thing I see." His throat was scratchy from the stomach pump they had used. "Oh no, I've gone to the bad place."
"You're in the hospital. Obviously recovering well."
Yes, he was still himself. She felt relief flood her. She wondered again, as she so often had, what it was about Greg House, a man whose actions had occasionally threatened the very existence of the hospital she ran, why behavior that should have been infuriating always left her calm, as though she drank strength from it. Why the rare approving look from him made her heart leap. A response in herself that she couldn't understand, though she'd looked at it from every direction except one.
Far down the hall shouts rose. Wilson had told her Dani was sleeping in his office after he'd given her a sedative. The screams came from there.
Wilson was already running past her. House's eyes were wide. "You don't get up," she told him and hurried toward the commotion.
Foreman was holding the slim dancer as she struggled. Dani was screaming obscenities. Papers from the desk had scattered. A lamp broke as they watched. Dani got her feet against the desk edge and shoved, strong enough - in spite of the difference in their size - to propel her and Foreman into the opposite wall. Chase stood by, not helping, worried - she realized with disgust - about touching his boss's girlfriend.
"None of you are real!" Dani's scream chilled her. Then Wilson had her in his arms, and she melted to a moaning heap. "He's dead, isn't he?"
"He's awake, Dani," Wilson told her. "I'll take you to him, but not like this." Over her head their eyes met. "I'm going to give you something else to calm you down."
She thrust him away and stood. "You're not going to touch me!" For a second she seemed ready to go psychotic again. She stood straight, trembling, fighting for air as though at the end of a hard dance. "You're not giving me something to take away reality." Resolve replaced the fear in her eyes, some momentous thing happening inside her. "You're going to take me to him. Now."
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Up toward the light, but instead of her face, it was Wilson, who said something comforting to him - the only bandwidth the good doctor operated on - and then went away. His throat felt as if they'd rammed the Holland Tunnel down it. Then Dani came in, with a look that scared him. Maybe he was dead after all, the afterlife just a constant rush of faces looking down at you in shock. Then she was in his arms. Crushing him so hard it hurt.
"I love you," he whispered, repeating it over and over.
"Greg, are they watching us?"
The question was so weird that he drew back to look in her eyes. Brown gaping holes leading down to terror. A chill brushed him.
"Don't look at them." She put her mouth to his ear. "They're not real."
More than a chill; he was suddenly freezing.
"Wilson tried to give me something," she whispered. "He knew I'd seen through their fake reality and he wanted to make me forget what I'd discovered."
"You're in shock, Dani. Stop this."
"No, Greg. Listen to me! Did you tell anyone what you did, how you did it?" He felt lost. He'd traumatized her, driven her over the edge to this, but he was too weak to deal with it now. He wanted to cry. She had her lips close to his ear again, conspiratorially. "Greg, since you woke up, have you told anyone about the piano?"
The piano.
Then she described to him, in detail, what he'd done. Explained about the pills, how he'd counted them out, thirty-seven, one on each white key. About a piano in the middle of a road. The little sips of scotch. Her eyes, when he forced himself to look, were still terrified but they held determination. "No one else could know that, could they?" she asked him. "I couldn't have heard it from anyone else." Her hand on his wrist tightened. "It was telepathy, Greg. I read your mind."
Colder and colder, as though layers were being peeled back from him. Differential diagnosis, find an explanation. "Stimulation of the temporal lobe," he mumbled. "Would make you see and hear things that weren't there." He was shaking, shaking his head and she stopped him with her hands on his cheeks.
"If telepathy's possible, then nothing we believe about the world is true, Greg. Nothing out there is real. Except us."
Her worst fear. When had she told him that? So she had had an epileptic hallucination, by chance just after she left the apartment, and it had frightened her, spooked her bad because she was labile that way, and it kept her spouting these insanities, that intense whisper saying something now about how they had to stay together, never leave each other's sight in case the last remnants of what was real blew away on them, in case they lost each other in the nothing, and he could only argue back. So she'd gone a little nuts, Wilson had given her something and she had reacted paradoxically to it. Logic would save the day. Coincidence explained everything, he told her, talking over her words that grew ever more frantic, his aching throat rasping across explanations. The very thought that he might try to kill himself would have been tumbling around her backbrain, he said, and the pills in a line on the piano keys - well, she knew him so well, her thoughts could have worked like his. He tried to remember if he'd once told her about the gumdrop teacher (no). Coincidence - wild improbable chance - explained it all, Dani (of course it did), even down to the number thirty-seven, my love my darling. A random number, so undeniably random, that she kept repeating as though it proved something. Dream math, nightmare math.
Yet she'd seen the piano, felt it beneath her fingers. "Until the bus came and it was gone," she finished.
The bus.
He reached up to touch his own cheeks and it felt like someone else's face, a plastic mask down which his tears ran. Through the glass he could see Wilson and Cuddy wearing expressions that said they would have killed their grandmothers to know what Dani was telling him. Their curiosity seemed suddenly menacing.
Dani crawled into the bed and they held each other, pressing close. A nurse came in to tell her she couldn't do that, but left again when she saw his look. "It was still happening when I got to the apartment," she told him after a while, "though I didn't realize it. There was a dark place. You were happy there." Stop now. Don't say it. "I know that you came back for my sake, Greg. You did something that you didn't want to do, just for me."
In the corners shadows merged. The nurse had turned the lights down. He had never known dark that frightened him as a child; the dark beneath sheets or beneath a bed was always a comfort, palpable. No, it was the far ends of the room now that disturbed him, the way they fell off into nothing. He held Dani and watched the dark, listened to his quiet desperate voice, the only thing in the world, saying, "You have temporal-lobe epilepsy."
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End of Chapter 6
Lyrics by Neil Young, Gary Jules
A/N: When I first started writing this series last April, this was going to be the end, in a slightly altered form (no, House didn't die). It seemed there could be no conflict after this, that they must have found their way to each other and that nothing would ever come between them again, so what to write about? I've realized since that a lot more happens, so please watch for 2-3 more chapters. The next one probably another long one (finished end of March?). Thank you to everyone for reading and reviewing.
Please post a comment on this story.
Legal Disclaimer: The authors published here make no claims on the ownership of Dr. Gregory House and the other fictional residents of Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital. Like the television show House (and quite possibly Dr. Wilson's pocket protector), they are the property of NBC/Universal, David Shore and undoubtedly other individuals of whom I am only peripherally aware. The fan fiction authors published here receive no monetary benefit from their work and intend no copyright infringement nor slight to the actual owners. We love the characters and we love the show, otherwise we wouldn't be here.
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