I've got a terrible tongue and a temper for two

[levendis]

"Turncoats"
House gen. On infidelity and history.

Two roads diverged in a wood

House stumped into his department brandishing an uncapped dry-erase marker. "CAN'T STAY LONG," he shouted as he pushed Cameron, who was opening and closing her mouth like a fish, to the side.

"Stop being a dick and do your job," Foreman said.

"I have to go rake leaves with Liza Minelli," House said, then turned to the whiteboard.

"Shouldn't you be-"

"I HAVE TO DO MY DUTY AS AN AMERICAN!" House shouted cheerfully over Cameron. She stopped flapping on the downswing and kept her mouth clamped together in disapproval. "NOW YOU - " he stopped when he realized there was no longer any resistance to his speech. He resumed at a volume slightly closer to optimal indoors speaking level, "Now you have to learn how to do yours. Cameron has the patient information, and this is a gift from me to you." He lifted the marker to the board and drew a straight line up the center, then drew two lines splitting from the first.

"Y?" Chase said.

"I can't tell you, that'd be cheating," House replied. "And now, to flush the toxins from my body and soul." He stomped out, giving a little wave to Foreman.

"Y," Chase said again, pulling the gum from between his teeth in a long thin strand.

+

James Wilson, having recently finalized his third divorce, scanned the cafeteria for a fourth. House was missing, thank God, he'd slept too sparsely last night to argue this morning - and there she was, Anne Swanson. He liked nurses. He nonchalantly strolled to a table behind hers and sat down. Her head was bent over a book, hand idly stirring a bowl of soup. He picked up his sandwich and stared at her over the bread.

Sex had been on his mind more than usual lately. Maybe it was some strange ingredient in the danishes he'd recently replaced his breakfast yogurt with, maybe it was something in the air, but he was almost unbearably horny. It'd be a curse if he wasn't so relieved to not be dysfunctional.

He'd been experiencing casual interference in his evening routine, had surreptitiously purchased the latest Jenna Jameson opus. In his more honest moments (which, to be honest, were rare), he admitted that he was a stranger in his own sex life, his body removed from the equation as much as possible; he was easily distracted, nagged by the suspicion that there was another, more appealing fantasy lurking somewhere in his subconscious. During the first close-up finger fucking scene he heard House's voice, then turned the movie off as fast as his slippery hands would allow, stumbling into a cold shower with his khakis still tangled around his ankles.

At some point he'd realized he was infatuated with House. At some point shortly following that he'd slapped himself in the face as hard as he could then drank himself into a stupor. He was enormously relieved when House began to cut ties, to disappear into his own problems, leaving Wilson free to leave without explaining why.

He watched Swanson eat.

+

Tritter was pacing. "He's a junkie."

"He's in pain," Cuddy insisted. She wrung her hands. She wanted to go home. Her desk was cluttered with papers, paperclips, post-its, push pins, the wrapper from her breakfast granola bar, an old issue of Vanity Fair, prescription pads, dry-erase markers. She still wasn't pregnant. She'd cried, earlier, though her makeup didn't betray it; she felt as barren as the desk was fertile, the mess reproducing and sending out spores to the trash can, the couch, the pockets of her jacket, mocking her. A small desert in an expanding jungle. She hadn't slept much lately.

Tritter grinned wolfishly. Perhaps he'd seen the failed pregnancy test shoved beneath the crumpled tissues and yellow legal paper in the trash.

"He lies. He cheats. He steals. He degrades you. He is violent. He will not listen to anything anyone says to him, not his boss, not his best friend. He lies, and he does more than lie. He substitutes his drug-warped misery for reality."

He leaned his head over Cuddy's shoulder, she shuddered; "You are gaining nothing by covering for him," he said, then withdrew. He carefully pressed a piece of gum through the protective foil covering and held it between thumb and forefinger, spinning it slowly. "We all need help, sometimes," he said. "Even if we don't want it."

"I can't help you," she said, and gave him a hard look before returning to the layers of medical silt lining her desk.

+

"Y chromosome, maybe? The kid's dad could be impotent, the kid could be adopted and the parents are lying to save face."

"Death by embarrassment?" Chase mumbled incredulously. It was fifteen minutes past the time he usually had lunch. He'd compromised by eating a bag of barbecue-flavored potato chips he'd found under House's desk, lingering crumbs of which he brushed off his tie as he leaned forward and dropped the X-Y-Z volume of House's encyclopedia in front of Cameron. She flinched. "Maybe the kid ate contaminated yams."

"Picked up something in the local YMCA?" Cameron flipped X-Y-Z open to the middle and stared blankly at a picture of a Yorkshire terrier.

Foreman had already left to run tests. "I don't feel the need to rely on House's asshole arcana," he'd said before huffing off to the lab. Chase felt slightly abandoned.

"We should go look around their place," Cameron said.

"Yippie," Chase intoned. "Could we stop for lunch first, though?"

+

He didn't qualify for a glamorous rehab center; he was a doctor. He swung his motorcycle into the parking lot of a drab New Brutalist block of a building, contemplated the sky for a few moments before easing himself to the ground and limping to the door. Inside was cavernous. The acoustics were excellent, he remarked to himself as the squeaks of his sneakers and the thuds of his cane were amplified to Wagnerian levels. He coughed, rattling the windows.

A woman wearing a pale pink sweater with silver embroidery sweeping up and over her sagging breasts in the shape of a cat was currently eating one half of a bagel covered in cream cheese and jam, sitting on a metal folding chair. House cringed. "Hello!" she said. "My name is Marge." It was a damning statement, House reflected as she shoved her cheese-and-apricot scented hand at his chest; she said it with such finality, with such a sense of accomplishment. Her voice echoed through the hall.

"Yes," House said. "Please don't get my shirt sticky." She retrieved her hand and wiped it on a paper napkin. "You're early," she boomed, in that same newsreel voice. "You can wait in the chapel, if you like."

"Actually, I'm late for the 10:00 meeting." He smiled widely. "Before that, I was late for the 7:00. I'm thinking of leaving and coming back late for the 12:00."

"Well," she said. "Well, that's...I think it'd be for the best if you just sat yourself down in the chapel and waited for the next meeting."

He sat himself down in the chapel and waited for the next meeting.

We now see, St. Paul maintains, 'per speculum in aenigmate'

John watched idly as Mac Malone packed an AWOL bag. "You got cigarettes?" he asked. The canned turkey from dinner gurgled loudly through his digestive system.

"Yeah, some," shoving a can of fruit salad inside a pair of socks. He checked his reflection in the toe of his boots. "Remember, the last time you saw me I was talking about aliens."

"Talking 'bout aliens."

"Talking about aliens. Being abducted. Saviors from Mars, that sort of shit. Flying saucers." Mac hefted his bag, reaches in and retrieved a canteen full of cooking sherry, held his nose and gulped down half of it. "Flying fucking saucers."

"Flying Martians, right."

"Right."

"Taking me off this fucking island."

"Look - "

"Look nothing. Whatever you have to say, save it, House."

Wind began to pick up outside the tent. John took a letter from his wife from a pocket on the inside of his jacket, and re-read the first two sentences. Something in the jungle started howling.

+

He took the plane out around noon, Keyhole at the gun. Grass waved and rippled in the rush of wind from the propellers.

"Like the rest of us are having a grand old time, partying with the Japs," Key shouted down. "Who the fuck does he think he is."

"Uh huh," House grunted. He scanned the tangle of jungle below him, brown rivers eking over rocks. "You think Steve is really getting a shipment of bananas?"

"Fuck no," Key shouted.

Where the land hits beach hits water, that's where they found him. Maybe he really was fucking crazy, Mac, he hadn't bothered to not stick out like a goddamn lightbulb on the cost. House swore.

He took the plane back in and sets out on foot. The sand swarmed over his boots, tripping him up and sifting through the eyelets to gather between his toes. The sun shone down on the white sand, the blue water, his thinning hair. Mac's bag was propped up on a fallen tree, cans spilling from it. John lifted his rifle to his shoulder and approached.

"Hey Mac," he called out. "Come out, brother."

"I can't."

John still couldn't see him. He narrowed his eyes, scanned the trees, kept the rifle steady. "Come on out, brother."

Mac crawled out from behind the tree. "House, please - "

John nodded once then pulled the trigger.

Und du wartest, erwartest das Eine

Tritter was smiling.

"In another world," he said, and then paused. He removed the tired gum from his mouth and wrapped it in a quarter of a piece of facial tissue, dropping the resulting bundle into the trashcan. House cleared his throat. They stood as animals might.

"In another world," Tritter said, "you could have walked into my office an hour earlier. In another world, we might be brothers."

In the sarcastic delivery he thought becomed him, but which was now becoming, all things considered, slightly tired, House said, "In another world I'd crush you beneath my bike and all the citizens of God's green earth would applaud."

"That's certainly possible. But here, there is nowhere else to turn. I'll see you in court."

House left, sneering. Tritter steepled his hands and bowed his head.

+

"Yarn!" Cameron shouted.

"Yo-Yo!" Chase shouted back.

"Yanni's Greatest Hits!"

"You're kidding me," Chase poked his head above the sofa, dust clinging to his bangs.

"Thankfully, I am." Cameron bent over to inspect the patient's CD collection. Chase watched her. "He's got Yes, though."

Remember that time we fucked? Chase almost blurted out. He flipped his hair over his eyes to hide his consternation and busied himself with putting fruit into sterile plastic bags.


When they got back, Foreman had his feet up on the table, reading the New York Times. "Didn't find anything, huh."

+

Cuddy had managed to get the clutter under control, purchased several small bins and filing systems from Ikea and dumped into them the old, the less-old, the new, the on-going, the uninteresting, the completed, the abandoned, labeling as she went. She glared with red-rimmed eyes at a cardboard box entitled "HOUSE LEGAL RECORDS" that bulged and heaved like a living thing, papers pressing against the sides, pushing against the lid. She'd kicked her high heels off ten minutes earlier, was currently sprawled on the carpet, sweaty and winded. She peeled a red circular sticker off its backing (red in this particular system representing "Things to Throw into Oncoming Traffic at a Later Date") and rubbed it on to the box lid. She still wasn't pregnant.

Wilson poked his head around the door. "Need help?"

Paper begat paper. She found a pile of envelopes, price tags, and pencil shavings behind a potted plant. She was certain it hadn't been there before. "No thank you," she said. "How can I help you?" She stood up and straightened her blouse.

"Do you think this is going to work? House in rehab, I mean."

She studied his eyebrows as they knitted into a frown, submerging beneath hair which desperately needed a cut. A crumpled ball of clippings from medical journals rolled past her foot. "He'll do fine. And if he doesn't, we'll start this whole thing over. It's a new year, we don't need to go overboard and make a new House."

"I'm worried about him."

"He doesn't deserve it. You need to get new friends, Wilson, people who are worth getting upset over. You're smart, funny, nice. You fish and play golf. There's no reason for you to be limited to the company of a parasite."

"There's no reason for you to resort to sperm banks," and strange men jizzing into Dixie Cups, about which he refrained from reminding her.

"There is every reason to - "

"And I have every reason, too." He was tired of hearing the word 'reason'. "Every cause," he amended. "Maybe for the new year we should resolve to stop meddling, I guess."

"No new House?"

"We'll see." His eyebrows straightened out and laid flat over his eyes like Morse dashes. He leaned over with a grunt and picked up an index card balancing precariously on the edge of Cuddy's desk and handed it to her, smiling with pursed lips.

+

House didn't go back to work, turning his bike instead onto the Atlantic City Expressway. He parked as near the ocean as he could get, gimped his way past the casinos and onto the boardwalk. He took a pill and gingerly lowered himself down on the first clean bench he found, stared at the ocean breaking reluctantly over land, each wave retrieving an increment of continent.

"Strange days," he said aloud. He took another pill, leaned his head against the back of the bench. He'd walk on the beach, if he could, some sort of useless gesture people always made in movies, Antoine Doinel staring bewildered, but sand was a bitch on his leg. The remaining muscles tightened with the imagined pain. Sand filled his shoes anyway, drifting up to him in small gusts and catching in the creases of his clothing. He took another pill and slid his body down, spine curving into a comma, legs splayed out and his arms close to his chest. Light from the casino-city behind him turned the sky yellow and grey, turned the water black; he imagined he could hear the pre-recorded bells and clangs and coin-crash of the machines, the soft shuffle of cards, tips tucked into pockets, the last hundred dollars on riding on red. He imagined he felt the weight of his own bad luck pressing his shoulders down, down, down to the water.

A hand emerges from the water

His father speaks no language other than English, and that he uses only when neccessary. His father is not a poetic man, choosing instead to communicate precisely, in facts; to disappear for days at a time; to arrange and rearrange rows of photographs of airplanes, distant relatives, himself as a young soldier. He writes his wife, but not his son, though even those precious few sheets of paper contain little information, no confessions or intimacy, little more than unremarkable anecdotes and I miss you. He speaks in clockwork.

Neither of them know what John is doing in Egypt, what any American is doing in Egypt. Blythe has faith. Greg, who is thirteen and too old for fairy tales, has little faith in anything other than science, knows this is human frailty and fiction, and knows his father has chosen Egypt, has chosen flying and gunning down, does not in all likelihood miss either of them. Certainly does not miss them more than he misses his company when he's on leave.

Greg begins collecting the grains of sand at the bottom of each envelope, pouring them into a red and yellow enamel pill box that he keeps in the toe of his left dress shoe (the toe of the right is occupied by two five dollar bills and a page ripped from a friend's dad's Playboy, Miss December lounging on a fur rug, still and strange and burned into Greg's mind, the subject of internal reflection when he invariably jerks off into his plaid flannel sheets every night); he is saving it for something he is sure he will recognize when it arrives. Til then he waits, collects, catches glances of military-standard apologia, catches his mother eyeing up Milton "Keyhole" Denver from across the street who is married but notably unfaithful, and proud owner of a '56 Thunderbird and a thick head of reddish-brown hair and sympathetic eyes; he waits and chafes and thinks about Miss December.

+

He writes his father once, but does not expect a return, and does not receive one:

Dear John,
How long has it been? Nearly two years. Mother wants to know if you're coming home for her birthday, though I'm sure she'd never ask outright. She's still sentimental, she misses you. You should come if you can, for her. I'd appreciate it.
Is there anyone to kill in Japan, or do you just sit around and wait? Is it boring over there? Do you live with other men, or do you sleep alone? Do you visit whores? Ladyboys?


Greg at this point is convinced that everyone has a secret sexual fetish. His own is for coldness, for fucking in the refrigerated back room of Eddie's Fresh Food Market with the brunette checkout girl who works weekends, frost accumulating on them both.


Do you still fly, or have you been grounded? Are you a surveillance pilot? Are there plots you can see from your plane? Is it still the one you sent a picture of, or do you have a new model? I'm saving for a car, an old model, of course. I work washing dishes at Bingo's, it's not much but it's something.

Mother sends her regards.

Sincerely, your son,

Greg

+

One of the secrets he keeps, one of the many secrets he keeps, is that he's slowly drinking through his father's liquor cabinet, filling the empty bottles with water, rubbing alcohol, and food coloring. He figures that by the time he's found out, he'll be gone, moved to another state. He doesn't plan on staying here long.

He decants whiskey from the bottle poorly hidden beneath a rarely-used desk, into an old glass Coke bottle, hides it under his t-shirt as he stumbles to his bedroom while his mother reads her latest romance novel, damsels in peach taffeta gowns dancing with tall men who have sympathetic eyes, her reading glasses slipping to the end of her nose as she nods off into daydream, Greg slams his bedroom door and pulls down the blinds, leans against the wall panting, glass cool against his chest.

Smoke from a filched cigarette (from his aunt's purse, this time) fills the corners of his room like cobwebs, softening the abrupt intersection of wall to ceiling. He practices his silences. In another world he could be a ghost, speaking but not touching, moving as shadows move. Quiet as ash falling.

+

Blythe dresses in her best for lunch. Hair up, neckline down, a string of pearls and her new patent leather pumps. Sprinkle of perfume, the smell of oranges clinging to her collarbone like her dress clings to her hips. She steps lightly down the stairs.

Her son stares at her cooly over his crossword puzzle, with the binary logic of the young and newly-awakened; he thinks she is betraying John as John betrayed them, though with desire for intimacy rather than desire for distance. But he doesn't know, can't know, what it's like to be this lonely. He's just a boy. She gathers her purse and her wits and calmly leaves the house, locks the door, takes a bus to town and meets Keyhole in a coffee shop.

"Ahoy," he greets her, grinning widely, eyelids crinkling. "How's the day finding you?"

"Hasn't quite found me at all, yet," she demurs. "Key, darling," she slides her hand over to his, her foot to his wool-trousered leg. "That room at the inn still available?"

It is. She feels lightheaded in his car, she lets him gather her arm to his, escort her through the inn. The room is furnished in plywood and polyester, there's a watercolor of a fishing boat at sea above the bed. She sits down softly on the mattress. For a brief moment she feels impossibly old, tired, wrinkled, creaky, an anachronism: he slides her laddered stockings down to her ankles and she kicks them off along with her pumps; he kisses her hand and she acquiesces.

+

His reticence creates spaces, rooms around him when required. He knows how to shut his mother down, which words will cut the quickest, what implications of which infidelity will quiet her instantly. The air insulates. He retreats. He's been invited to Japan, he's got the letter in his jeans pocket, folded into fourths and softened by the sweat of his hands crumpling it up and smoothing it back out. He remembers traveling to Egypt, does not remember much of his father there: remembers instead the sand drifting insistently into doorways, remembers blistering sun and cold nights, remembers finding scorpions in his shoes. He doesn't expect to find any sanctuary in Japan. Still, still, he thinks. It's bound to be better than this. He takes the letter out again and copies down the return address.

There's a trick with a knife I've been learning to do

"It's not Y," Chase said triumphantly.

Foreman rolled his eyes. "You're still bothering with that shit?"

Chase wagged his finger at Foreman. "Now, now." Cameron stifled a giggle.

He taped a map onto the white board. "I had a talk with the patient," he said, with the air of someone afraid of missing the crucial element of a joke's set up. "He lives here." He drew a circle near the bottom of the map. "He's a bit of a recluse, but every week he goes to the bar on Saturday." He drew another circle higher up, on a street intersecting with the first. "And church on Sunday." He drew another circle, then connected them, drawing thick red lines along the white of city streets in the shape of a 'Y'. "There's mold in the church basement, contaminated peanuts in the bar." He paused before the punchline. "Both diagnoses are right."

"Oh," Foreman said. Cameron looked like she was about to applaud.

+

"You gave me up." House stared straight ahead, off the roof ledge and over greater Princeton.

"You gave yourself up."

"I did not - "

"If you think this had to happen this way, you're kidding yourself. You made a choice. For some - stupid - reason, you wanted this. Don't pretend you're a victim. You had your chances." Wilson swallowed thickly.

"I did what I thought was - " He ducked as Wilson came lurching towards him, eyes closed and lips puckered in a kiss.

Oh, Christ. Not now. House sighed and took a pill. Wilson looked horrified.

"I'm not - "

"Not what?" There was a few ways Wilson could spin this, House mused. He waited for the conversation to end. He'd hoped, a little selfishly, that Wilson would keep his goddamn mouth shut, would just cry himself to sleep and jerk off privately like everyone else, would not burden House with yet another awkward situation. This was in all respects an awfully shitty thing for Wilson to do at this moment in time.

"I'm not gay -" Wilson cringed and turned away. "I have a patient to-"

"Great, you're not a fag. I'm glad we got that out of the way, because that question had really kept me up at night, whether or not James Wilson was a full-fledged homo or just a confused metrosexual."

"Stop it, House, please." He looked wounded. Probably was. House prayed he wasn't the type to get off on confrontation, because jeez, how unpleasant would their relationship look in retrospect? He didn't want to think about it.

"You brought it up." House lurched upright and narrowed his eyes, rummaged in his pocket for a mint. "I really wish you hadn't. One of these days you've gotta learn that most people just don't want to know what you actually think about them."

+

House sat in his office and waited. He picked up the ragged dog ball and brushed his thumb and forefinger over the rough bits of fluff sticking up. He squeezed it lightly, and closed his eyes. His thoughts narrowed. Checked the clock, Tritter was bound to come back soon, he'd be ready - he'd be prepared. He'd shut that fucker down.

He'd wedge the tip of his cane into the carpet and swing himself, make a show of his pain and anguish. He'd say - he wasn't sure what he'd say. House arranged case files and letters on his desk like cards in a half-played game of Solitaire. He waited.