Simplicity, James thought, is a wholly fictitious concept. Things that might be described as simple – an office memo, a child blowing bubbles, a single painted apple straddling a picture frame – are only fabrications of minimalism, a superficial mask that glosses over the turmoil and complexity beneath.
He touched the red mug purposefully, decisively, the buzz of alcohol numbing his brain pleasantly without hindering his inner monologue.
People, most of all, must never be described as simple creatures. They are multifaceted, intricate machines, the complete inner workings of which are never fully discovered even by them. And yet – he thought, as his index finger traced the rim of the mug – a person can often be boiled down to the indispensable elements, and relationships too (he parted his lips) – taken apart bit by bit until they are laid bare, only the threadlike strands of raw emotion remaining.
He sipped slowly, cheap liquor dancing along his deadened taste buds with the lingering traces of the day's required cup of coffee.
That was the problem with him. He had no emotion. It was not passion, surely, that bound him still to Julie, and she to him. Somehow the cotton-weave of false fidelity (and there at last is the simplicity of it, he thought) had refused to break: fraying, brittle, but never fracturing the ties that united emptiness with emptiness.
If there were only one thing, one axis about which the tumultuous world continued to turn, it would be Greg. This he knew without a doubt as he blinked blearily at the figures hovering near him in the dim office, their groggy shapelessness softening what seemed so sharp and unpleasant when he was sober. Gregory House, bending through life in his bitter way, was the makeshift life raft to which James clung without real hope of staying afloat (the dark, warm figure on his right touched his shoulder with an unsteady hand). It was difficult, their awkward need and longing, their propinquity as Greg's left hand snaked its way over his friend's loose tie. James, somewhere in his muddled mind, was struck by the sudden sobriety of the knowledge that this small touch, so simple in its appearance, might cause complications neither of them could conceive.
He kissed him anyway.