It was at a medical convention, just outside New Orleans, a 'continuing education' seminar weekend designed to update physicians of procedural changes, new research data, and a bunch of somewhat pompous speakers from various Asian countries talking about overseas medical projects.
There was the young oncologist, so fresh out of medical school his hands were still soft. His thick hair fell into his face when he leaned down to look at his papers and he would brush it out impatiently, squinting his brown eyes at the podium and scribbling down every word that seemed like it might be important at some point. He would look down at the page, flustered, after the curt applause had died down, and realize that none of what he wrote down made sense.
On Friday night, through four speakers, a painful little domestic movie played, reminding him that he still had a sawed up mess sitting back at his apartment when this diversion ended. His ex-wife's voice, loud and shrill, would ring in his ears periodically, and he had to concentrate especially on the deep baritone of the Algerian immunologist boasting about his diverticulitis breakthroughs to block it out.
Then on Saturday morning, a large manila envelope arrived, addressed to his hotel room. God knows how it got there. There was a thick stack of legalities and a shipwreck inside, he knew, but this wasn't the weekend for it, and he wasn't sure whether there would ever be one.
Why had he, of all people, been assigned to go? He had already ploughed through 10 years of professionals talking and him deciphering what they meant. Sure the procedural changes were important, he knew, especially in his field, where standards of care were vital to a patient's life and comfort, but all of the middle-aged GPs chatting genially about their home practices and the vast amounts of products and pamphlets being thrust at him created a din in his head that was hard to shake out. I'm just not comfortable at the hospital yet, he told himself. Absorbing the medicine was one thing, becoming socially comfortable in that circle was another.
He found himself yanking at his collar, which was creating a constraining ring of sweat, by 4:15, and desperately craving a beer and some unstructured time. So he cut out during the Parkinson's seminar before dinner and pushed through the doors of the convention centre, with the intention of finding the closest bar and very possibly hooking up with the mid-twenties-looking redhead that he had spotted at coffee time and who he had caught saying the words 'go out tonight' in bits of overheard colleague conversation. If she didn't happen to be there, well then someone else would do. He wasn't feeling picky right now, in terms of his alcohol or his company.
He had always thought he was fairly tall, at least tall enough to make it to the change in the pattern on the kitchen wallpaper. His father would squint at, and then erase the meticulously straight lines whenever he saw them, muttering that he was 'marking up the house'.
Instead, he found himself staring blankly at the snow-white head of some old retiree, most likely sent to the convention as an honorary member of his hospital for donating some vast sum of money. He could see bits on either side of the man's head, but they both happened to be listening to the same person, and so it was difficult to see anything but the absurd arm gestures that the speaker, a surgeon from Ohio, was making to demonstrate her point about the visible difficulties that operating on a patient with Parkinson's disease presented. Even he, who had always considered himself a step outside public tact, realized the edge of rudeness in her motions, but was very interested in what she was going on about, and feeling frustrated by the unwanted piece of white space in front of him, decided to find a better seat.
A younger, well-dressed man was edging his way out, with difficulty, through a line of slightly irritated listeners with perched ball-ink pens in hand one row over, and Gregory House made a mental note to claim that space. Just before seating himself in the hollow plastic chair, he noticed a thick, bright envelope already had dibs. He must have forgotten it,and House couldn't help but be curious as he sat down, poking at the unglued closure. James E. Wilson, was the apparent addressee, and the return address was from the government, civil affairs specifically. It was titled 'Urgent.' What kind of paperwork couldn't wait? Funeral arrangements? A violent divorce?
He surreptitiously pulled out the stack of white papers, taken aback at the massive amount of writing, and legal stamping filling the front page. This claim made, by one James. E. Wilson, concerning his marital status with Julie Lyon, is that it is to be terminated. Apparently James Wilson was going through some tumultuous times, and even House had to concede that, while there was never a good time or place to have to deal with divorce paperwork, (not that he'd ever filled such paperwork out himself) that at least the conference wasn't particularly emotionally arresting, except for this afternoon's somewhat overzealous hand performance.
"It-it writhed… jerking and slithering like a python"…. Miss Ohio seemed to be approaching the level of play-by-play dramatic monologue, and her raised voice jerked House out of his little voyeur mission and back onto the stage in front of him. He slipped the slab of sheets back into their safe, domestic loading bay, not really feeling guilty for having dipped into someone else's private life, instead little questions began to turn in his head, as his wondered about this man and what circumstances had presented him with a cold, official stack of documents detailing the ripping apart of his marriage.
House straightened the pleats in his trousers, pulling his well-muscled hands into a clasp above his head in a very public display of boredom. The surgeon's voice was beginning to tremble ridiculously, and maybe it was out of sheer stagnation, but House wanted nothing more at that moment than to sit down with James E. Wilson and hand him his paperwork, and then ask some rather brusque, probing questions about why his life was falling apart. From quick half-glancing when the man got out of his seat, he looked a naive twenty-five, and this was what looked to be the remains like his first marriage, already in little rags. House was in his mid-thirties, and had never slipped any gold bands on fingers. Now that the cogs were spinning, now that he'd asked himself the question, House wanted the answer.