I think your train is leaving.
"Do the math" I heard him give out with once from the cab of his backhoe for no apparent reason. He was backfilling a grave in Milford Memorial. "You gonna make babies, you've gotta make some room; it's Biblical."
Or once, leaning on a shovel, waiting for the priest to finish: "Copulation, population, inspiration, expiration. It's all arithmetic-addition, multiplication, subtraction and long division. That's all we're doing here, just the math. Bottom line, we're buried a thousand per acre, or burned into two quarts of ashes, give or take."
- Thomas Lynch, Bodies in Motion and at Rest
"Arithmetic"
House/Cameron
Mortality and metaphor: The whole is not always greater than the sum of its parts.
She still cries when they die, just a little, enough to blur her vision and make her turn away, scrub at her face with her sleeve, when someone catches her. When House catches her. They don't die much, House is good at his job, she has to give him that. But once in a while, like it's a requirement, a patient will die (whether they know why or not) and she will quietly, quietly break down in a dark corner somewhere.
It's just life, she knows that. Life, and death, and all of this is as it should be. She should be moving on, not smearing her makeup and trying hard not to remember which suit the undertakers slid onto her husband's body for the viewing.
She'll just breathe slowly for a bit, and she'll be fine. Just a few seconds of her fingernails biting into the cover of a new patient's history. The perfume she bought last week on sale smells like lilies, like funeral flowers, she just noticed, just now. On her neck and her wrists and her breasts, all the places no one touches now, the smell of funerals and cloying sympathy and half-heard consolations. She's throwing out the bottle as soon as she gets home tonight.
"Dr. Cameron," House calls from the doorway. "A word, if you will." He limps quickly back to his desk without bothering to look at her.
Somehow, she knows what he's going to say. He'll always bring it up, always. She's given up trying to forget.
"You're invited to services," he says slowly and deliberately, "for Victoria Anderson, on the 17th of July." He holds up the card he'd been reading from, one of the few pieces of mail he opened himself, folded white paper and formal black letterpress words of restrained, dispassionate grief.
A lump forms somewhere in her throat.
"They must have been touched by your concern," and he says the word like it's a slur. "Did you hold her hand? Tell her that everything would be fine? Tell her that there's something bigger than all of us, that there's a place for her after death?" Still holding up the card, spinning his chair back and forth. "Did you wheel her bed to the chapel? What was it? What, exactly, makes someone invite the doctor who essentially helped kill their daughter to the funeral?" He shakes out three Vicodin, dry swallows two and drops the third back into the bottle.
She picks the insult that's easiest to fight off. "I'm not religious, you know that." She pauses, maybe for effect, maybe just to catch her breath. "I haven't been to church since my husband died," she says, more to get an answer out of him than to confess any sin of her own. I stopped going to church after the infarction, she wants him to say. Or maybe something vague: a nod, or a look, or a joke she could interpret into sympathy and humanity. Into a connection, however tenuous and weak-willed.
"I never went to church," he says instead. "Or synagogue, for that matter. I was raised by pagans, we celebrated the solstice in the woods, naked. Let's go back to the part where you cry bravely in the conference room and I ignore you, okay?" He scrunches his face up into practiced false concern and slips his headphones on.
It's an average day: her hair swept back like it always is, her lab coat ironed, his face a mess of emotions he swears he's never felt. This is the part where she walks away slowly and makes a pot of coffee with every inch of self-control she's capable of, hands not shaking and eyes wide open. Her ribs hurting like they always do. Average, average day: they did this yesterday, they'll do it tomorrow, the day after that. She'd have thought her heart would be broken by now.
She used to think that she could help him. Maybe, she used to think, maybe she'd find out what's really wrong with him and then (with that knowledge firmly in hand) she could truthfully tell him that she's sorry, that he shouldn't blame himself for everything that's gone wrong, that it'd be okay to smile once in a while. She used to think she could absolve him of whatever sins he thought he'd committed, that she could save him. All the heavens and hereafters that they don't believe in anymore, she'd tell him that it's no use carrying them around like dead weight.
She watches him through the glass wall: his head down, hair mussed, eyes closed. Fingers tapping slowly on his desk. She does her very best to not think about him anymore.
Their lives are both spoken of in past tense, their respective romances and his mobility and her naivity stretching out behind them. All the things they'd been, the things they used to do, and there's not much room left for the present. Currently he has puzzles and Wilson and television, and she doesn't have the heart to feel sorry for him because really, she doesn't have anything better. She's got her job, a few friends from college, books and makeup and blind dates that go nowhere, a stupid fucked-up relationship with her boss that goes nowhere.
She's got herself, going nowhere.
x
It's sunny now, rained earlier in the day: water's collected in puddles outside the church, shallow and still with mosquitos buzzing over them, and by the time she sits down in the pew she has three bites on her arms. She's a stranger in a crowd of family and friends, awkward but well-meaning. They smile distantly at her and she sits with her legs crossed at the ankle. Everything smells like rotting lilies.
The priest makes his speech, and really it's always the same one: this was a good person, a person not soon to be forgotten. They were born, they lived, they loved; they slept, awoke, slept again, did not wake up; were waked, were prayed over, are fondly remembered, will be buried, will be prayed over again. Ashes to ashes, 1978 to 2005, present to past tense, forever and ever amen.
She stands around outside afterwards, collecting herself, folding and unfolding her handkerchief. The sun filters down through trees heavy with leaves. She doesn't cry, not for Victoria or anyone else. She hopes that crying over everything can be another one of those things that exists only as history.
x
She's never really believed that one and one make one. She's not that much of a romantic. One and one make two, that's just simple arithmetic. Two halves that never quite fit, that aren't supposed to fit: his hands are so much bigger than hers, her eyes are so much wider. She's got her coping mechanisms, he's got his. She emotes and he closes up. It's just a matter of incompatibility.
She knows that she loses parts of herself everytime someone dies. She knows that he's not anywhere near whole. They're made up of subtractions and divisions, and these few things that are left (this hospital, these patients, these dead patients, this endless patience for something that will never start), these things don't add up to anything at all.
And that's their history, really: they are what they've already done, this is all what's already been said, they tried or she tried and it's over, anyway, either way, she's done and he never started; coming on to moving on, past to present tense. She's tired of being defined by dead things. She'll go out with Chase and Foreman tonight, get drunk on vodka-cranberries and expensive imported beer, she'll let Chase drive her home, let him feel needed for once. And that, that'll be their wake. Tomorrow she'll do her best to not even think of House anymore.
Forever and ever, amen.
Or once, leaning on a shovel, waiting for the priest to finish: "Copulation, population, inspiration, expiration. It's all arithmetic-addition, multiplication, subtraction and long division. That's all we're doing here, just the math. Bottom line, we're buried a thousand per acre, or burned into two quarts of ashes, give or take."
- Thomas Lynch, Bodies in Motion and at Rest
"Arithmetic"
House/Cameron
Mortality and metaphor: The whole is not always greater than the sum of its parts.
She still cries when they die, just a little, enough to blur her vision and make her turn away, scrub at her face with her sleeve, when someone catches her. When House catches her. They don't die much, House is good at his job, she has to give him that. But once in a while, like it's a requirement, a patient will die (whether they know why or not) and she will quietly, quietly break down in a dark corner somewhere.
It's just life, she knows that. Life, and death, and all of this is as it should be. She should be moving on, not smearing her makeup and trying hard not to remember which suit the undertakers slid onto her husband's body for the viewing.
She'll just breathe slowly for a bit, and she'll be fine. Just a few seconds of her fingernails biting into the cover of a new patient's history. The perfume she bought last week on sale smells like lilies, like funeral flowers, she just noticed, just now. On her neck and her wrists and her breasts, all the places no one touches now, the smell of funerals and cloying sympathy and half-heard consolations. She's throwing out the bottle as soon as she gets home tonight.
"Dr. Cameron," House calls from the doorway. "A word, if you will." He limps quickly back to his desk without bothering to look at her.
Somehow, she knows what he's going to say. He'll always bring it up, always. She's given up trying to forget.
"You're invited to services," he says slowly and deliberately, "for Victoria Anderson, on the 17th of July." He holds up the card he'd been reading from, one of the few pieces of mail he opened himself, folded white paper and formal black letterpress words of restrained, dispassionate grief.
A lump forms somewhere in her throat.
"They must have been touched by your concern," and he says the word like it's a slur. "Did you hold her hand? Tell her that everything would be fine? Tell her that there's something bigger than all of us, that there's a place for her after death?" Still holding up the card, spinning his chair back and forth. "Did you wheel her bed to the chapel? What was it? What, exactly, makes someone invite the doctor who essentially helped kill their daughter to the funeral?" He shakes out three Vicodin, dry swallows two and drops the third back into the bottle.
She picks the insult that's easiest to fight off. "I'm not religious, you know that." She pauses, maybe for effect, maybe just to catch her breath. "I haven't been to church since my husband died," she says, more to get an answer out of him than to confess any sin of her own. I stopped going to church after the infarction, she wants him to say. Or maybe something vague: a nod, or a look, or a joke she could interpret into sympathy and humanity. Into a connection, however tenuous and weak-willed.
"I never went to church," he says instead. "Or synagogue, for that matter. I was raised by pagans, we celebrated the solstice in the woods, naked. Let's go back to the part where you cry bravely in the conference room and I ignore you, okay?" He scrunches his face up into practiced false concern and slips his headphones on.
It's an average day: her hair swept back like it always is, her lab coat ironed, his face a mess of emotions he swears he's never felt. This is the part where she walks away slowly and makes a pot of coffee with every inch of self-control she's capable of, hands not shaking and eyes wide open. Her ribs hurting like they always do. Average, average day: they did this yesterday, they'll do it tomorrow, the day after that. She'd have thought her heart would be broken by now.
She used to think that she could help him. Maybe, she used to think, maybe she'd find out what's really wrong with him and then (with that knowledge firmly in hand) she could truthfully tell him that she's sorry, that he shouldn't blame himself for everything that's gone wrong, that it'd be okay to smile once in a while. She used to think she could absolve him of whatever sins he thought he'd committed, that she could save him. All the heavens and hereafters that they don't believe in anymore, she'd tell him that it's no use carrying them around like dead weight.
She watches him through the glass wall: his head down, hair mussed, eyes closed. Fingers tapping slowly on his desk. She does her very best to not think about him anymore.
Their lives are both spoken of in past tense, their respective romances and his mobility and her naivity stretching out behind them. All the things they'd been, the things they used to do, and there's not much room left for the present. Currently he has puzzles and Wilson and television, and she doesn't have the heart to feel sorry for him because really, she doesn't have anything better. She's got her job, a few friends from college, books and makeup and blind dates that go nowhere, a stupid fucked-up relationship with her boss that goes nowhere.
She's got herself, going nowhere.
x
It's sunny now, rained earlier in the day: water's collected in puddles outside the church, shallow and still with mosquitos buzzing over them, and by the time she sits down in the pew she has three bites on her arms. She's a stranger in a crowd of family and friends, awkward but well-meaning. They smile distantly at her and she sits with her legs crossed at the ankle. Everything smells like rotting lilies.
The priest makes his speech, and really it's always the same one: this was a good person, a person not soon to be forgotten. They were born, they lived, they loved; they slept, awoke, slept again, did not wake up; were waked, were prayed over, are fondly remembered, will be buried, will be prayed over again. Ashes to ashes, 1978 to 2005, present to past tense, forever and ever amen.
She stands around outside afterwards, collecting herself, folding and unfolding her handkerchief. The sun filters down through trees heavy with leaves. She doesn't cry, not for Victoria or anyone else. She hopes that crying over everything can be another one of those things that exists only as history.
x
She's never really believed that one and one make one. She's not that much of a romantic. One and one make two, that's just simple arithmetic. Two halves that never quite fit, that aren't supposed to fit: his hands are so much bigger than hers, her eyes are so much wider. She's got her coping mechanisms, he's got his. She emotes and he closes up. It's just a matter of incompatibility.
She knows that she loses parts of herself everytime someone dies. She knows that he's not anywhere near whole. They're made up of subtractions and divisions, and these few things that are left (this hospital, these patients, these dead patients, this endless patience for something that will never start), these things don't add up to anything at all.
And that's their history, really: they are what they've already done, this is all what's already been said, they tried or she tried and it's over, anyway, either way, she's done and he never started; coming on to moving on, past to present tense. She's tired of being defined by dead things. She'll go out with Chase and Foreman tonight, get drunk on vodka-cranberries and expensive imported beer, she'll let Chase drive her home, let him feel needed for once. And that, that'll be their wake. Tomorrow she'll do her best to not even think of House anymore.
Forever and ever, amen.