Author's Note: Inspired by the House Season 5 episode "Social Contract," where we learn that Wilson's brother is schizophrenic and ran away from home at some point during college.
"Schizophrenia cannot be understood without understanding despair." - R.D. Lang, The Divided Self
"We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered." - Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
It is cold.
The cold exists where there is less existence; it is closer to stillness, emptiness. There are fewer atoms bouncing against each other, rushing, humming, shaking. There are no fleshy wind-up observers pressing against him, brushing past, filling the air around him with bits of their own breath and being. He stands apart, alone and intact, here, with enough space to remain safe from their intermingling of breath and essence and sight.
He shivers. It is so cold.
"Oh, man, it's fucking cold as balls out here!"
Daniel blinks but does not turn his head in the direction of the sound. It is followed by laughter: low voices, males. And then a female voice chimes in.
"Maybe you should think about getting a fucking real coat then, instead of that stupid windbreaker."
"This coat is the best coat in the world."
Daniel looks down at his own coat. It's long, beige and thin, with a nice big collar, just like one his father used to wear, sometimes even with an old-fashioned fedora, making him look just like a detective in a Hitchcock movie. Daniel found it in a lost-and-found bin near the front lobby of a museum. He hadn't gone there with any real plans; the building looked big and impressive. He thought it might hold important information inside it. He remembered that he used to get into places like that for free -- but, he supposed, he'd been little then. Little people got in for free -- they hadn't been around for very long. You got a period of grace. And then. And then, and then...
"This is the best coat in the world," he whispers, slowly, as if trying out the sounds and reflecting on the possible significance of the statement.
Atoms are buzzing around in the coat, jumping from it to his body. He can feel the dance that makes up heat. He closes his eyes; it's all right.
The group of people walk past him. The woman stares at him as she passes; she thinks it is all right because he does not react. For all she knows, he is unaware that she is looking.
But he is aware. He can feel her gaze, as sure as he might feel a shot from a bee bee gun. He feels the air around him grow colder, and suddenly the cold doesn't feel safe. It feels like being exposed. He is like a little, wormy caterpillar with its cocoon ripped apart, and he is wriggling and clenching his eyes shut, even though he isn't moving -- not at all. She is opening him and sucking him up. He is so carefully, delicately strung together -- a heavy gaze might collapse him like a house of cards, might scatter him like wisps of smoke.
"Don't let her know; don't let her have it," he thinks; he can't pick apart exactly what that means, but he feels it as an irresistible imperative, and his fists clench, his breath hitching.
He doesn't look up, but he is sure she is still staring -- he can see her without looking, like a nondescript figure in a dream that nonetheless is unmistakably someone. Who? Who is there? What do they want and what do they know?
A faceless figure is watching, just beyond his periphery, and he is a little boy, just like he's always been. His brother is throwing a baseball at him.
"Strike out! Yes!" his brother shouts, pumping his fist triumphantly and jogging toward the plate.
"No, come on, Jimmy, I wasn't ready!"
His brother grins indulgently at him and slows down midway to home base.
"Okay, Danny. One more time." It is spring and the air smells like wet earth. The sun is just beginning to set and baby frogs are chirping from all directions, while the night's first few fireflies flicker all around them, floating languidly. Little, dusky lights.
The woman and her friends are nowhere in sight.
There are tears in Daniel's eyes and he can't get rid of them. He knows it's because of those little boys; it's because they're dead, or else still just running around, playing in some backyard that doesn't exist anymore, if it ever did. He still has these memories, but he is sure that he, himself, never existed in the moments captured in them. They are a machine's fragments of data, and he is a ghost appearing and lingering within the machine, like trapped smoke. He rolls his head back against the wall behind him, feeling gravity like a cold, oppressive, giant hand, shoving him slowly and insistently. Trapped; his own hands strapped to a steering wheel of a car that drives itself. The tears are hot, the inside of his chest is hot, and the space behind his eyes. He bites his fist and his mouth is hot too. Hot and wet.
There is nothing in the world to do; Daniel knows this, and so he closes his hot eyes and pulls his detective dad coat tight around himself, the collar lightly chafing his chin and ears. His only purpose is to sit and see and feel and think -- to detect -- as the light drains away and then creeps back, as the air goes from cold to colder, and back to merely cold again. One of these days, it won't come back; the world will thaw and rainwater will run through the streets, and he will still be here.
"Still here, still here...."