II

Outside, the city, full of people, noise, lights, music, voices, cars, movement, life. And death. There were no dead hours for the unstoppable organism that was the city. Stuck in a cacoon of darkness and silence, the man was thinking of what was going on outside of the prison walls. Bars, discos, strip-clubs and other such places, legal and illegal, were still open, full to the brim of people dancing, drinking, smoking, talking, laughing, singing, shouting, kissing, pushing each other... punching each other... falling, throwing up... A huge human mass that reppelled him and, at the same time, fascinated him.

The man knew every corner of the city. The respectable ones and the others. He had pride in that knowledge. Pride in the fact that he could go with the same ease through PPTH's corridors as through the darkest and most forgotten parts of the city. In the hospital as in his night walks, life in its many facets paraded before the man's eyes. Life had no secrets for him. Nor humanity. He had ceased to have any illusions about both of them long ago. "There is no unconditional love, only unconditional need."

Humanity was strange but in the end predictable. Almost always predictable. Sometimes surprises happened. A cheating husband confessing his sins to his wife, a father willing to die for his son, a daughter telling her mother that she was going to die... But those were exceptions. The majority of people lied to protect something, almost always themselves. It was better to live believing in lies, safer. The truth was cruel. After the truth was said things were never the same again. Like the time when the man had told his father that he was not really his father. That was one of those moments when he probably should have kept his mouth shut but the anger had spurred him to talk. He had wanted his father to know. He had wanted his father to know from that moment that there was nothing more that connected them. All strings were cut. He was only his mother's husband. Period. Genes matter. John House was not his father.

The man remembered the precise moment he had deduced that. A deduction that he immediately took as the unquestionable truth. He was twelve years old. Many years later he had gotten the confirmation with a DNA test. Between the discovery and the certainty, years had passed when the man had hated his father, an authoritarian marine that beat the crap out of him at the smallest sign of disobediency, at the first sign of rebelliousness. And there had been many and various. The man had made sure of it. After all it was a question of pride. If he was going to be punished in any case then it was better to be punished because of a big thing, a thing worthwhile, the man had thought. It had been a struggle of wills, a struggle that the man had lost as a child but it taught him to despise every authority, every rules except his own. And yet...

And yet, the man had never ceased to call John House "father". "Something had to change", wasn't it what a patient had told him once? But by what other name should he have called him? "The man who sleeps with my mother"? "The man that beats me as soon as I raise my head or arrive late to dinner"? Too long, too unpractical. "Father" he had been, "father" he will remain forever. And now that the man had reached an understanding with John House's memory, that maybe he even had forgiven him, there was less reason to change. Father. F-A-T-H-E-R. The man spelled mentally each letter to feel their weight. John House was his father. He had realized that during the funeral. What had he said during the eulogy? "Maybe if he'd been a better father I'd been a better son. But I am what I am because of him, for better or for worse." But that had not been all. "He loved doing what he did. He saw his work as some kind of sacred calling. More important than any relationship." A sacred calling. While remembering these words, the man recognised that the same thing could be said about him. He also saw what he did as a sacred call. Or he had seen it that way, he didn't know anymore. You still think of it as a sacred call or you wouldn't be stuck in here. Maybe... The man stopped thinking for a moment, crossed his arms above his belly and just listened to the silence.