Disclaimer: Don't sue. Like the Persians would say, I only do this for the profit of my own heart.
Where is my mind..? he hummed under his breath, reclining his head on the wall behind him, steadying himself for the multiplicity of voices he knew would immediatly burst in, like mad horses, to surround him, and spin him around, shower him with eager, disjointed answers that wanted to be the truth but couldn't, simply because he knew that he shouldn't trust himself. His head was a choral room. He was a conductor of voices. He was a king, with a retinue of sound. He was king of himself now he had desintegrated.
He wanted to get better. He was pathetically earnest about that. But he wouldn't let himself implode for the sake of function any longer. More than anything, he had always strived to live in truth. Now it was time to learn to juggle will and representation, truth and survival. There had to be a way. There had to be some solace that wasn't an illusion, that wasn't a distraction, that wasn't a concession. There had to be some solace in life that was real.
He was ashamed of his behaviour during the months leading up to his coronation. Every day he blushed at his weakness, at his failure to foresee what was coming his way before the voices were curtseying deeply and it was already too late. Mostly, he was distressed by his most human, panicked reaction to his own derailment. How readily, how hysterically he had deserted every single thing he believed in, to try and clutch desperately and lose himself in the human bondage! Lose himself, yes, lest he would lose it! That was exactly what had happened to him. And in the process he had hurt and manipulated himself, and others.
Therapy was slow and painful. Insight, far from spectacular. Each little piece of himself he managed to rescue, every memory or fact he learnt to make sense of felt as glacial and injured to him as epiphanies come. He had been terrified right out of his senses, that every gift nature had seemingly bestowed upon him was nothing but an accident at heart, a side effect of an inner disposition that was inherently diseased, unmaintainable, pointless. The lower he fell, the more he convinced himself salvation would come in the shape of a plaster. His non-mimetic heart and his cruel brains were driving him mad. They were incompatible with living. He would have to sacrifice meaning for a parachute, and come off them, straight into the arms of something... agreeable. His dean of medicine friend had easily met all the criteria, and he had ran for cover in her mouth.
She was dyametrically opposed to all the puzzles that had been the passion, the knife of his life; first of all because she had always made graceful, perfect sense to him, with her square intellect, her quick wit, her matronly curves and her quivering authority. For many years now they had remained implicitly loyal to each other. Through grinning banter, companiable silence and playful flirtation, her presence in his life had proven systematically reassuring. He cared about her, that was a fact. Actually, in many ways, he did see himself as her rightful firstborn, and, like any spoiled child, he could be sharply competitive, aggressive, vehement even, when it came to securing his priviledged spot at the nurturing breast. Also, like any scared child, he instinctively knew how to run to his mother when things seemed to be simply falling apart, and all he could make out around him was danger.
No-one saw anything remotely wrong when he started to unravel and his hint at an aedypus-complex started to develop into a crutch. Ironically, his very own best friend read the whole situation as a golden chance for good old House to build himself up, instead of as his very neurotic, last attempt at gambling with himself, looking to trade his every dream for whatever might be left of his sanity. He forgave the man, though, for Wilson's character was made out of postmodernity. In his book, whatever felt good was also the right thing, and it would just not be denied.
House smiled to himself, sadly, then he rolled his tired eyes. Who could have told him he was to be crawling back to the same social contract he had been kicking in the shins ever since his father's belt got used to drawing blood, in another lifetime..?
And, would he have believed them at all when that someone stated, perfectly matter-of-factly, how he was also going to be pleading for succor of all things? How he was so going to beg permission to limp back into himself and stay there, in the center of nothing, actively stirring lumps of cheap sugar back into his own life...?
Who could have told him he would finally grow weary of enduring, he who thought of himself as a pure martyr of the will!
The latest fruits of much therapeutical soul-searching: it was clear that his attachment to Lisa Cuddy was but a typical case of human bondage. Like a regular Philip Carey, he had banked on his domestic feelings for a good woman to help him turn the volume of the congenital screams down, perhaps, even, to lower them into a whisper. Of course, no real resolution was to ever be found there, but, being gently tied down by Sally must be enough for a man, after total freedom's revelation of itself as nothing but an act of pure, blunt destruction has thrown him into a state that could well be fatal. When the subject is too much, one has to make do with discourse, right? In the light of it all, he had danced to the beat of self-preservation, just because he had to.
He winced. He had not even understood he was not playing fair with Cuddy during those nerve-wracking months precceeding his enthronisation. All he knew then was that it was of paramount importance that she may see him, and let him in, that she may rock her hips against his own like she were rocking a baby; that she protect him. That she cover him in plasters and declare his sickness. That she convince him. And that she may attempt to hook him up to her clement feeding tubes. That was all that mattered, all that was on his mind as he abused her feminine feelings. It had all been about him. But in his defense, he suspected he had chosen her because, after all, she was pretty no-nonsense and just a bit callous, enough of a big girl and selfish enough to deal with, and survive, the injury he would no doubt end up inflicting upon her, without him having to shoulder the blame of having permanently soiled her.
This is how Gregory House had tried to undo his own damage, in a panic, by offering his extremities to the most immediate bondage that he could come up with. He had hoped that maybe then life would dare try and go on. Its distractions would kindly take away the obsession, replace it with mundane stability. He knew it would be forever reliant, and would only work by extinguishing the genuine, restless aspirations of his heart – but he would go ahead and do it. He really would comply if only that would set him straight.
The plaster. The plaster would see him through a valley of a life, remind him not to stray again, endow him with the one perspective through which he could be judge, point of reference, the beginning and ending of any question that might arise in the future. As he fought to retreat to the human factor, to the realms of the personal, he grieved against his second-nature need to trascend himself.
Maybe if I could stop chasing the truth, and find myself instead, I would just come to join the hoardes of people that populate the globe, revelling in their own small, petty circumstances, and actually bring myself to laugh through it. I could learn to accept life as it comes by accepting myself.
For that he would have to amputate the part of him that was more than just human, that much was a given; but, in return, he might allow himself to finally make peace with his most loathed antagonist: perfect, complacent egotism – a beast much less harmful than his own compulsive acts of aspiration, after all. When push came to shove, he thought he would be able to enforce any self-betrayal it took to survive, to cry, loud and clear, for mercy.
Everyday, utilitaristic perspective: there sure is abundant mercy to be found in it, even if it is deceitful. He had been so afraid of careening, that he had blindly focused on mercy. Even if it hurt him. His subconscious battled him, berated him. That is how Gregory House had come to choose life, inconsistent and subjective, fickle and banal as it might be.
But then, things just happened to be so – it just didn't work. After all, half of his plan had sensibly decided to retreat, to protect herself from him at the most critical moment, and he had ended up king of his poor abolished self regardless, fishing for extinguished prey with which to placate the hunger of his people, all the while more serene and collected than he would have ever given himself credit for.
His plight was fair.
The dilemma that now stood before him said he might just have to go down, because he patently couldn't bear to take refuge in existencial lies, but that he also wanted to live. His recuperation would have to pass through finding a truth that could offer him some solace, or it would not happen at all. If he couldn't find one such truth anywhere, eventually, he decided he would just lay his body down, limp on the parched-up earth, and let his memory of a woman named Amber take the first devouring bite at his heart. Hopefully, the other voices would quickly follow her lead, and feed, feast on him till there was nothing left.
Either way, this much was certain: through black wretchedness, he could only take heart in the fact he had done right by one single person: the same sweet, sweet person who - bless her - had once got him enough to accede to be sucked into the blackhole that he called his heart, to be dismembered by his love. He regarded the sound of her young, bell-like laughter as his greatest victory: he'd taken a fanatical degree of care to make sure it was preserved. Every single time he heard it, his chest filled with pride. For her to have taken his cue and broken the hold of his impish paws - for his impish paws to have remotely let her. The neglectful disdain he had persistently taught her to adopt for him, it sure slayed him. It slayed him. But it was nothing compared to the joy brought along by the sound of her laughter.
Before this whole kingdom of madness thing became truly unpostponable, when it was still merely half-done closing in on him, he had spent time making sure his attitude towards her would forward the cause of her happiness. This is because, she was days away from being married, and there had been a glitch, and her heart was not nearly made-up. A lot was at stake. He was fragile; Still he had listened to her woes and volunteered the kind of advice he would have never followed himself: to embrace this chance at happiness because happiness is a basic need of life, a rightful end in itself. Luckily his word was still law to her. She did not see through its unlikeliness. She mansely obeyed it.
He would have liked to be at her wedding, half nauseated, half moved as he was forced to mentally surrender the last part of her that was his to another. He was sure she had looked like an angel that day, that she had hardly noticed his absence, that she would have agreed with him on how his stubborn, deflating rejection of her had not really broken her heart – it had freed it instead, allowed it to make it to this tender moment. Her marriage had sealed his victory, a victory over himself: for her sake, all for her sake, always.
He almost chuckled when suddenly assaulted by a memory, and then it dawned on him, finally enlightened in the gloom of the madhouse, that he really did not like her: he loved her monstruously instead, yes, love can only be so violent when it has started with a certain disgust.
Both the disgust and the love seemed to stem from the fact that she truly was the perfect, uncongenial alien of idealistic literature, hardly ever materialised in life. There was so much courage, so much truth, so much isolation in her unfaltering gentility and kindness, that one could say she was living her life for reasons utterly uncomprehensible, and hence repellent, to the human logics of self-preservation. She was as pure as everything that is inevitable about life. And the inevitabilities of life are hardly likeable. Then, of course, there was also the marvellous terror of recognition, because mysterious and puzzling as she still appeared before him, his heart seemed to instinctively know hers. That only added to his scrupulous sense of wonder. She was a lot like himself. Essentially, so like him, that her company meant endlessly disturbing confirmation of the visionary poetic words "I am another".
She was meant for him now, in more ways than he cared to count. But he had figured out, early on, that so good a person couldn't also be too well-adjusted. That had made him instantly retain himself. She was interested in being right over being happy, and, by consistently putting her down, by discouraging her and routinely frustrating himself with his frigid resolution, he had always strived to prevent her from following down the same dark, torturous road he was on. He feared it might be in her nature too. He just couldn't do it to her.
Aided by the passing of years, he had plainly succeeded at leaving a large part of her out of his conscious mind, thus hoping to have been able to lessen the lovely, embarrassing burden of her. He was well resigned to these facts of life already: Allison Cameron was sweet, terrifying, forbidden fruit. But still, for this time, he closed his eyes shut and cheated, imagined her arriving at work in just a couple of days, not even a little excited about the prospect of running into him in the ER - or anywhere, for that matter - , only to receive the news of his latest fall from grace from the lips of a most gentlemanly James Wilson.
Would she need to take a seat afterwards? Or would she go through the remains of the day, seemingly unscathed? Would she wait to be safe in her car before letting her tears fall? Or had he just become a source of superficial conversation to her, over dinner, a couple of remarks addressed to her distracted husband, on how the old, sad, old mentor had clearly always had it coming..?
He hoped for her sake that the latter scenario was true. But still, for an instant, his heart craved the sight of her so badly; it was necessary, just like hallucinations of making bionic love to her had shown him the way to the truth, years before, and helped him rise over the prospect of madness – after he was shot in the neck for no other reason than his runway mouth.
She was not a nurse. She was a muse. He let out a groan and temporarily capitulated. He fantasised about her, perhaps heavily pregnant and glowing, finally visiting the ruined darkness of his castle-like asylum, smiling at him; holding him; humilliating him by seeing him like this.
After all, he was really not a hero. He was the fisher king of a hovering wasteland, in his choral room, entertained by his retinue of voices, very likely to end up executed by a roaring mob of the very same subjects who would then waste no time to drown their nihilistic selves into the spot where they had discorteously tossed his still open-eyed, severed head; that is, way, way out in the salt, shallow water.