Knots: Distance (7/12)
Part One (By Pitza)
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
Part Six
Wilson enters the lounge as quietly as possible. He’s trying to leave well enough alone, and if he can avoid talking to anybody, bonus. Nancy is finishing up charts from her shift. She ought to be home with her family by now. He supposes she’s getting double time and a half for working this overnight, so he doesn’t feel sorry for her.
“Merry Christmas, Dr. Wilson,” she says. “I’m glad you’re here.”
This can’t be good. “Busy shift?” he asks. “Or just the usual holiday business.”
“We had a bit of excitement earlier,” she tells him. “It probably could have been prevented, but the nurses’ station was unattended…”
Wilson heads for the coffee, pours a cup and dunks a whitish bell-shaped cookie sprinkled with shards of red sugar into it. “Go on,” he says with his mouth half full.
Nancy gives him the rundown and his hopes for an easy day fall to pieces.
“Simons died last night,” he announces as he walks into House’s office. House has his legs propped up on the desk. He looks up from whatever he’s reading, it’s too colorful to be a journal.
“Good morning to you, too,” House says. His brows close in and his forehead wrinkles. “Wait, Simons is the CMV guy? I thought his fever was coming down. He can’t die, just like that.”
Wilson shrugs. “Picked the wrong night to flat line. Cardiac arrest, skeleton staff, he was dead before the code team got to him.”
“Well, don’t beat yourself up about it,” House says. “One more casualty of the holiday season.”
“I have to let the family know.” Wilson turns his head away from House’s irritation and studies the floor. A minute or so passes in silence.
“Give them a little time,” House says quietly. He looks up at Wilson. Their eyes meet and hold steady. Wilson knows that they could be stay here, watching each other just like this, until one of them drops dead. House knows it, too.
Cuddy finds him after rounds. She walks with him and closes the door to his office behind them. It’s a bad sound. Wilson retreats to his desk and gestures that she should sit. He’s trying to remind her that he still works here.
“Alton Stewart is coming in from Philadelphia to cover for you starting tomorrow,” she says, still standing. “You’ll be on unpaid administrative leave for six weeks. I want your charts in my office before you go.”
“What’s going to happen after that?” Wilson loads several questions into one. He should ask more specifically, but the look on her face scares him. He’s almost positive he doesn’t want to hear the answers, but he’d be a fool not to ask. “Will I have a job to come back to?”
“That remains to be seen,” she says. “I have to do what’s in the best interest of this hospital.”
Wilson shivers.
His last patient of the day has chrondosarcoma and breakthrough pain; an admit from the emergency department. Despite her regular medication, despite a dose of a stronger narcotic in the ER, the woman is in agony. He has to work quickly and calmly. He has to get it right.
“I know you’ve heard this before, probably even today,” he says. “On a scale of one to ten…”
“The meds aren’t working, this is worse than being in labor.” She groans as she exhales. “Feels like knives. I wish I were dead.”
“OK,” he sits down on a stool near the bed. “Tell me about your holiday, did you have family come to visit?”
The woman seems to struggle for the first few minutes. She talks about the meal she prepared, how her daughter helped, and her father. Gradually, she settles in to an easier pattern. She relates details as they come to her. Wilson listens intently, and watches her posture. Every so often, he asks another question in a low, friendly voice. He keeps her talking.
“I made my husband do the dishes, since I put that damned bike together,” she says. They both laugh.
“How’s the pain now?” he asks.
“Better,” she says. “Does this mean I’m dying?”
“No,” he says. “This kind of pain is happens to a lot of patients. It can come at any stage of treatment, possibly due to plain, ordinary stress.”
“I feel better now. How’d you do that?”
If she were younger, he would tell her it was magic. “Distraction works for some patients, or the fentanyl may have taken a little longer than usual to kick in.”
“But I’ll have to stay tonight.”
“You’ll need to see a pain management specialist before you go home, but the nurses are pretty lax about visiting hours on holidays,” he smiles at her. “Tell somebody to bring you some leftovers.”
Wilson leaves the room. There must be some good left in him, somewhere.
He stops at House’s office again before leaving; he wants to say goodbye, but House isn’t there, and nobody has seen him. He considers leaving a note, but what would it say? None of the pithy, insincere phrases that cross his mind come close to what he really wants to tell House: I never wanted to hurt you.
Wilson makes a face as he realizes he said those same words to too many women at one time or another, but he’s almost sure he’s never meant them until right now.
He spends the first day of his suspension working around the house, keeping busy so he doesn’t go nuts. He does not leave the house, and by the end of the day, it looks like a grown-up lives there.
He spends the second day driving to nowhere; he likes to drive. The hum of the engine is louder than his thoughts as he speeds down Route 1 going south. It’s a long road, an old road, and there’s nothing much to see. Every so often he passes a strip mall. The parking lots are crowded with people who are probably waiting in line to return gifts that did not satisfy them. He thinks about his wives, and how easy it seemed for them to end an unsatisfying marriage. He’s really a lousy husband. He cares only about himself.
By the time he looks up, Wilson is in Maryland, almost to Baltimore.
He pulls off the road at a diner. His fingers unclench, and he pulls his hands away from the steering wheel. God, he’s stiff. He gets out of the car and stretches his arms into the air. He feels every muscle shifting and stretching. He fills his lungs with cool air that smells of traffic and wood smoke; he lets it out with a jumbled sound. He blinks, and blinks again, as if he thinks he’ll recognize the surroundings the next time he opens his eyes.
The flashing colors of a huge neon sign reflect in the damp pavement. Must have rained earlier. The Big Chief Diner looks like the sort of place his dad would have stopped on one of those family trips, the long summer drives with all three boys piled into the back of the station wagon on the way to visit Grandma. He has never been here, but it has the kind of basic familiarity that he needs. Warm light streams from the windows into the almost dark.
The interior is aqua blue and beige with vinyl booths and speckled tabletops. Caddies with little tubs of jam, glass bottles of ketchup, paper napkins in metal dispensers sit at the far end of each one. A case near the door has desserts, pies and cakes gleaming as the shelves rotate. All of it is perfect; this place has probably looked exactly the same since before he was born.
The waitresses, they’re all women, wear matching uniforms, the same blue as the upholstery. A man in a white shirt and a bland, dark tie waits near the door, at the cash register, and leads him to a booth that’s supposed to seat four.
He orders an open-faced turkey sandwich covered in gravy. There’s a lump of stuffing under the meat and a puddle of sweet cranberry sauce on the side, right next to the mashed potatoes.
Wilson silently thanks the road that brought him here. He can almost persuade himself that it’s 1962, that he pulled up in a giant Chevrolet rather than his sleek German driving machine, that his parents haven’t even met. That he has never hurt anybody, either by design or by accident.
“Everything all right, hon?” the waitress asks. She’s about 60. Her salt-and-pepper hair is pulled away from her face, and her face breaks into wrinkles as she smiles at him. The blue of the uniform flatters her. She’s probably somebody’s grandmother.
“Mmm, yes. It’s very good,” he says. “I didn’t realize how hungry I was.”
“Are you on your way home?” she asks. She’s just making conversation. The diner is close to empty.
“Home’s where you hang your hat, right?” He smiles and shrugs. “Though, I don’t have a hat.”
She laughs, because he made it sound like a joke. She fills his cup with coffee and reminds him to save room for dessert.
He starts to wonder when he became the kind of man who could destroy people he claimed to love, all without not realizing he was doing it.
At least he knows now, that’s got to count for something. His phone makes a sound that tells him there’s a new message.
Message received December 25 at 1:49 a.m. Hey, OK, I… I figured something out, and I was going to tell you. OK.
Two days ago? Hearing House’s voice is enough to send him spiraling back into doubt. He slept through the call, just like he slept through the page when Mr. Simons died. At this distance, there’s nothing he can do. After forty-eight hours, nothing really matters.
Over a slice of apple pie with ice cream, he decides to stay in Baltimore for the night. New Jersey can do without him.
Waking up in a real bed, with a soft pillow clinging to the side of his head, is almost a revelation. The last time he woke up in a bed, he was alone, even more alone than he is now. House was gone; House is still gone. It’s better that way, for both of them. If things had worked out differently that night, if he’d managed to kiss him in the yard instead of slipping. If what happened had been closer to the comfort he needed than the crime he committed… if. If…
He can get back in his car, keep driving south. Eventually, he will get to Florida. He can hire somebody to pack up his stuff and move it. Or he could have it all burned. Miami sounds like a good idea. He’s got a friend from med school at University of Miami Hospital, or he could get an HMO job, assuming he doesn’t lose his medical license. Cuddy will be glad to get rid of him, but she might prefer to have his head on a plate.
Assuming the worst, assuming he does lose his license, he can move to Miami and get a job teaching health to high school students. And then there will be a big expose in the newspaper about how a rapist who lost his medical license over prescription fraud is teaching in a Miami school. Everybody will know.
His thoughts move at light speed. He has to find a way to slow down. He has to be able to stop his head from running. He knows that he has to run before he can walk, walk before he can stand still. He has to stand still before he’ll be able to breathe.
He crosses to the dresser and grabs the vial. It’s nearly half empty. He sees the label: the date, and their names printed in tidy black letters.
Wilson is using Xanax as a crutch. It dulls the contrast between then and now. One more piece of ground he shares with House. He sets the vial back down. He wonders if House knows about his bloodless crime, the one that’s actually going to cost him.
He wonders what he’s going to do. Sure, he could keep driving; he could go anywhere, but sooner or later if he keeps running, he will collapse and nobody will be left to help him up.
He spends a couple of hours walking around the Baltimore Aquarium, which seems to be a popular destination for kids who are already bored with their Christmas gifts. A gang of them stands near the shark exhibit, comparing the Great Whites to their math teacher. Their words bounce between the glass tanks and dissipate into the high ceilings.
The shark moves around its tank, menacing but graceful. Wilson moves off to the side and examines the beast’s face. The shark opens its mouth, not too wide, but the kids giggle nervously. One of the girls shrieks.
His mind is blank for an instant, and then he knows something. His head is clear, and he knows; he did mean to hurt House. He intended every blow he laid down as punishment for the condescending silence. He tried to make House understand what he wanted, and when that didn’t work he took it, hurting House for what he didn’t feel, hurting himself for what he did.
House should have gone to the police. He wonders if he could turn himself in, if that would mean anything. There’s no evidence, but he’s guilty nonetheless.
He walks to the end of a pier and watches the dull gray water below him. Gulls squawk in the distance. House has always been an enigma. The things he says obscure the things he doesn’t say, ever.
“Why do you stay with me? I’m completely fucked up.” House said. Stacy had been gone for about two weeks. Wilson thought the worst was over, but he was wrong.
He pulled a napkin from a paper bag and handed it to House. “Right now, I’m staying because you’re on a pity bender. I want to be able to hold it over your head,” he said. “Usually I stick around because it’s cheaper than buying my own Scotch.” He raised his glass and glanced over at his friend’s pathetic face.
“Really?”
“No.” Wilson waited.
House leaned over to rest his head on the arm of the couch and closed his eyes. “It hurts, Jimmy. My whole body hurts. It all hurts.” His voice was flat, but he was speaking the truth.
“I know.”
The wind picks up, fluttering his coat, cooling his hot cheeks.
Maybe he can make it home by dark.
Part Eight
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
Part Six
Wilson enters the lounge as quietly as possible. He’s trying to leave well enough alone, and if he can avoid talking to anybody, bonus. Nancy is finishing up charts from her shift. She ought to be home with her family by now. He supposes she’s getting double time and a half for working this overnight, so he doesn’t feel sorry for her.
“Merry Christmas, Dr. Wilson,” she says. “I’m glad you’re here.”
This can’t be good. “Busy shift?” he asks. “Or just the usual holiday business.”
“We had a bit of excitement earlier,” she tells him. “It probably could have been prevented, but the nurses’ station was unattended…”
Wilson heads for the coffee, pours a cup and dunks a whitish bell-shaped cookie sprinkled with shards of red sugar into it. “Go on,” he says with his mouth half full.
Nancy gives him the rundown and his hopes for an easy day fall to pieces.
“Simons died last night,” he announces as he walks into House’s office. House has his legs propped up on the desk. He looks up from whatever he’s reading, it’s too colorful to be a journal.
“Good morning to you, too,” House says. His brows close in and his forehead wrinkles. “Wait, Simons is the CMV guy? I thought his fever was coming down. He can’t die, just like that.”
Wilson shrugs. “Picked the wrong night to flat line. Cardiac arrest, skeleton staff, he was dead before the code team got to him.”
“Well, don’t beat yourself up about it,” House says. “One more casualty of the holiday season.”
“I have to let the family know.” Wilson turns his head away from House’s irritation and studies the floor. A minute or so passes in silence.
“Give them a little time,” House says quietly. He looks up at Wilson. Their eyes meet and hold steady. Wilson knows that they could be stay here, watching each other just like this, until one of them drops dead. House knows it, too.
Cuddy finds him after rounds. She walks with him and closes the door to his office behind them. It’s a bad sound. Wilson retreats to his desk and gestures that she should sit. He’s trying to remind her that he still works here.
“Alton Stewart is coming in from Philadelphia to cover for you starting tomorrow,” she says, still standing. “You’ll be on unpaid administrative leave for six weeks. I want your charts in my office before you go.”
“What’s going to happen after that?” Wilson loads several questions into one. He should ask more specifically, but the look on her face scares him. He’s almost positive he doesn’t want to hear the answers, but he’d be a fool not to ask. “Will I have a job to come back to?”
“That remains to be seen,” she says. “I have to do what’s in the best interest of this hospital.”
Wilson shivers.
His last patient of the day has chrondosarcoma and breakthrough pain; an admit from the emergency department. Despite her regular medication, despite a dose of a stronger narcotic in the ER, the woman is in agony. He has to work quickly and calmly. He has to get it right.
“I know you’ve heard this before, probably even today,” he says. “On a scale of one to ten…”
“The meds aren’t working, this is worse than being in labor.” She groans as she exhales. “Feels like knives. I wish I were dead.”
“OK,” he sits down on a stool near the bed. “Tell me about your holiday, did you have family come to visit?”
The woman seems to struggle for the first few minutes. She talks about the meal she prepared, how her daughter helped, and her father. Gradually, she settles in to an easier pattern. She relates details as they come to her. Wilson listens intently, and watches her posture. Every so often, he asks another question in a low, friendly voice. He keeps her talking.
“I made my husband do the dishes, since I put that damned bike together,” she says. They both laugh.
“How’s the pain now?” he asks.
“Better,” she says. “Does this mean I’m dying?”
“No,” he says. “This kind of pain is happens to a lot of patients. It can come at any stage of treatment, possibly due to plain, ordinary stress.”
“I feel better now. How’d you do that?”
If she were younger, he would tell her it was magic. “Distraction works for some patients, or the fentanyl may have taken a little longer than usual to kick in.”
“But I’ll have to stay tonight.”
“You’ll need to see a pain management specialist before you go home, but the nurses are pretty lax about visiting hours on holidays,” he smiles at her. “Tell somebody to bring you some leftovers.”
Wilson leaves the room. There must be some good left in him, somewhere.
He stops at House’s office again before leaving; he wants to say goodbye, but House isn’t there, and nobody has seen him. He considers leaving a note, but what would it say? None of the pithy, insincere phrases that cross his mind come close to what he really wants to tell House: I never wanted to hurt you.
Wilson makes a face as he realizes he said those same words to too many women at one time or another, but he’s almost sure he’s never meant them until right now.
He spends the first day of his suspension working around the house, keeping busy so he doesn’t go nuts. He does not leave the house, and by the end of the day, it looks like a grown-up lives there.
He spends the second day driving to nowhere; he likes to drive. The hum of the engine is louder than his thoughts as he speeds down Route 1 going south. It’s a long road, an old road, and there’s nothing much to see. Every so often he passes a strip mall. The parking lots are crowded with people who are probably waiting in line to return gifts that did not satisfy them. He thinks about his wives, and how easy it seemed for them to end an unsatisfying marriage. He’s really a lousy husband. He cares only about himself.
By the time he looks up, Wilson is in Maryland, almost to Baltimore.
He pulls off the road at a diner. His fingers unclench, and he pulls his hands away from the steering wheel. God, he’s stiff. He gets out of the car and stretches his arms into the air. He feels every muscle shifting and stretching. He fills his lungs with cool air that smells of traffic and wood smoke; he lets it out with a jumbled sound. He blinks, and blinks again, as if he thinks he’ll recognize the surroundings the next time he opens his eyes.
The flashing colors of a huge neon sign reflect in the damp pavement. Must have rained earlier. The Big Chief Diner looks like the sort of place his dad would have stopped on one of those family trips, the long summer drives with all three boys piled into the back of the station wagon on the way to visit Grandma. He has never been here, but it has the kind of basic familiarity that he needs. Warm light streams from the windows into the almost dark.
The interior is aqua blue and beige with vinyl booths and speckled tabletops. Caddies with little tubs of jam, glass bottles of ketchup, paper napkins in metal dispensers sit at the far end of each one. A case near the door has desserts, pies and cakes gleaming as the shelves rotate. All of it is perfect; this place has probably looked exactly the same since before he was born.
The waitresses, they’re all women, wear matching uniforms, the same blue as the upholstery. A man in a white shirt and a bland, dark tie waits near the door, at the cash register, and leads him to a booth that’s supposed to seat four.
He orders an open-faced turkey sandwich covered in gravy. There’s a lump of stuffing under the meat and a puddle of sweet cranberry sauce on the side, right next to the mashed potatoes.
Wilson silently thanks the road that brought him here. He can almost persuade himself that it’s 1962, that he pulled up in a giant Chevrolet rather than his sleek German driving machine, that his parents haven’t even met. That he has never hurt anybody, either by design or by accident.
“Everything all right, hon?” the waitress asks. She’s about 60. Her salt-and-pepper hair is pulled away from her face, and her face breaks into wrinkles as she smiles at him. The blue of the uniform flatters her. She’s probably somebody’s grandmother.
“Mmm, yes. It’s very good,” he says. “I didn’t realize how hungry I was.”
“Are you on your way home?” she asks. She’s just making conversation. The diner is close to empty.
“Home’s where you hang your hat, right?” He smiles and shrugs. “Though, I don’t have a hat.”
She laughs, because he made it sound like a joke. She fills his cup with coffee and reminds him to save room for dessert.
He starts to wonder when he became the kind of man who could destroy people he claimed to love, all without not realizing he was doing it.
At least he knows now, that’s got to count for something. His phone makes a sound that tells him there’s a new message.
Message received December 25 at 1:49 a.m. Hey, OK, I… I figured something out, and I was going to tell you. OK.
Two days ago? Hearing House’s voice is enough to send him spiraling back into doubt. He slept through the call, just like he slept through the page when Mr. Simons died. At this distance, there’s nothing he can do. After forty-eight hours, nothing really matters.
Over a slice of apple pie with ice cream, he decides to stay in Baltimore for the night. New Jersey can do without him.
Waking up in a real bed, with a soft pillow clinging to the side of his head, is almost a revelation. The last time he woke up in a bed, he was alone, even more alone than he is now. House was gone; House is still gone. It’s better that way, for both of them. If things had worked out differently that night, if he’d managed to kiss him in the yard instead of slipping. If what happened had been closer to the comfort he needed than the crime he committed… if. If…
He can get back in his car, keep driving south. Eventually, he will get to Florida. He can hire somebody to pack up his stuff and move it. Or he could have it all burned. Miami sounds like a good idea. He’s got a friend from med school at University of Miami Hospital, or he could get an HMO job, assuming he doesn’t lose his medical license. Cuddy will be glad to get rid of him, but she might prefer to have his head on a plate.
Assuming the worst, assuming he does lose his license, he can move to Miami and get a job teaching health to high school students. And then there will be a big expose in the newspaper about how a rapist who lost his medical license over prescription fraud is teaching in a Miami school. Everybody will know.
His thoughts move at light speed. He has to find a way to slow down. He has to be able to stop his head from running. He knows that he has to run before he can walk, walk before he can stand still. He has to stand still before he’ll be able to breathe.
He crosses to the dresser and grabs the vial. It’s nearly half empty. He sees the label: the date, and their names printed in tidy black letters.
Wilson is using Xanax as a crutch. It dulls the contrast between then and now. One more piece of ground he shares with House. He sets the vial back down. He wonders if House knows about his bloodless crime, the one that’s actually going to cost him.
He wonders what he’s going to do. Sure, he could keep driving; he could go anywhere, but sooner or later if he keeps running, he will collapse and nobody will be left to help him up.
He spends a couple of hours walking around the Baltimore Aquarium, which seems to be a popular destination for kids who are already bored with their Christmas gifts. A gang of them stands near the shark exhibit, comparing the Great Whites to their math teacher. Their words bounce between the glass tanks and dissipate into the high ceilings.
The shark moves around its tank, menacing but graceful. Wilson moves off to the side and examines the beast’s face. The shark opens its mouth, not too wide, but the kids giggle nervously. One of the girls shrieks.
His mind is blank for an instant, and then he knows something. His head is clear, and he knows; he did mean to hurt House. He intended every blow he laid down as punishment for the condescending silence. He tried to make House understand what he wanted, and when that didn’t work he took it, hurting House for what he didn’t feel, hurting himself for what he did.
House should have gone to the police. He wonders if he could turn himself in, if that would mean anything. There’s no evidence, but he’s guilty nonetheless.
He walks to the end of a pier and watches the dull gray water below him. Gulls squawk in the distance. House has always been an enigma. The things he says obscure the things he doesn’t say, ever.
“Why do you stay with me? I’m completely fucked up.” House said. Stacy had been gone for about two weeks. Wilson thought the worst was over, but he was wrong.
He pulled a napkin from a paper bag and handed it to House. “Right now, I’m staying because you’re on a pity bender. I want to be able to hold it over your head,” he said. “Usually I stick around because it’s cheaper than buying my own Scotch.” He raised his glass and glanced over at his friend’s pathetic face.
“Really?”
“No.” Wilson waited.
House leaned over to rest his head on the arm of the couch and closed his eyes. “It hurts, Jimmy. My whole body hurts. It all hurts.” His voice was flat, but he was speaking the truth.
“I know.”
The wind picks up, fluttering his coat, cooling his hot cheeks.
Maybe he can make it home by dark.
Part Eight