Thursday
7.
Foreman
stopped writing, dropped the black marker into his lab coat pocket
and turned from the whiteboard, looking quizzically at the three
doctors seated around the conference table. His handwriting was
nothing like House's idiosyncratic printing. It was ridiculously
neat for a doctor's, anally neat, thought Wilson as he watched
Foreman running the DDX.
"Short-term memory loss, headache, tremors, loss of appetite, elevated white count," prompted Foreman, disturbed by the silence from the others.
Chase looked at Cameron and shrugged. "Why are we doing this?" he asked. "We weren't supposed to take any patients this week. Just catch up on paperwork."
"Besides," added Cameron, "it seems like this is really your baliwick—neurology, I mean."
"Come on, peop—" Foreman stopped himself, evidently realizing he was sounding too much like House. "Come on, guys. It's not a clot or an aneurysm. There's nothing to explain the white cell count. I'm out of ideas," he concluded.
"No sign of tumors?" asked Wilson, finishing off the sandwich he'd brought up to the conference room.
"Head scans are all clean."
"Then, why am I here again?" Wilson asked. He knew the answer—surrogate father—but wanted to hear it from Foreman's own lips.
Foreman looked uncomfortable. "Just thought, you know, the more people to bounce
ideas off of, the better."
"Sorry I can't help. And I've got patients of my own, so…" He rose to his feet, picked up his plate, and headed out of the room, passing by the waste basket as he went. He'd automatically ordered a double portion of fries with the sandwich, forgetting there was no one to steal them from him. He dumped them into the trash.
Thursday
8.
The
man couldn't keep his mouth from watering, even though the bread
was certainly stale and probably moldy.
How could she be feeding it to the ducks, for Chrissake, when there were people dying of hunger? People like him, for example. Although he wasn't exactly hungry. He'd heard pregnant women describe a state of being simultaneously ravenous and nauseated. That about described the way he felt at this moment. He also felt that in just a few more minutes he might actually—impossible though it seemed-- rise up off the park bench where he lay curled up on his side, and go snatch the bag of Wonderbread from the tiny tot's grimy hand. Too bad her mother had an eagle eye on her child, and that her maternal radar had somehow picked up on the close attention he was paying to the little urchin's every move. He was just working up the strength to try to stand, when the mother grasped her child firmly by the arm, announced in a brook-no-argument voice that it was time to go home, and marched her off in the opposite direction, casting one backward glance at the hobo on the bench.
And no, she did not toss the bag of stale bread into the nearest trash receptacle as she went. Vile, detestable woman.
The man lay back down with a sigh. The only thing he'd had all day—the little bit of cream and sugar, the four glasses of water—had come right up again twenty minutes later, as he sat in the bus shelter staring blankly at the list of clues and symptoms he'd written on the glass walls, willing his useless and uncooperative brain to assemble them into some logical pattern. The public vomiting had scattered the handful of bus patrons waiting with him, elicited disgusted stares and comments, and the man had felt compelled to find somewhere else to lie down. It wasn't as if he was getting anywhere with his clever plan anyway. Like some car with a dead battery, his brain simply refused to respond.
Lying on the park bench, he told himself he should eat. He knew he should make a plan for somewhere to spend the night. But at the moment, he couldn't think. His head hurt, his leg hurt, and frankly he was out of ideas.
Gradually he became aware of a presence just behind his head. A man stood watching him, one hand resting on the handle of a shopping cart full of empty beer and soda cans, the other holding a bottle in a brown paper bag. He didn't know how long the stranger had been watching him, but he gave the man a baleful glare and closed his eyes. Go away.
"I hope you ain't thinking of staying there," said the stranger. The man opened his eyes again. The stranger, a great, shaggy St. Bernard of a man, pulled a bottle of Allen's Coffee Brandy out of the paper bag and took a drink. Behind him, an equally large, somewhat less shaggy, woman appeared, clutching a plastic garbage bag. The
two gave him sympathetic smiles, a bit lacking in teeth, and the woman checked a cheap wristwatch.
"In exactly thirty-five minutes," she said, "the cops are going to do a sweep of the park and kick your ass out of here, along with anyone else committing the highly criminal act of sleeping in public. And who can blame them, eh Fergus?"
"That's right, Estelle," Fergus said, replacing the bottle in the bag. "Today, sleeping in public. Tomorrow"—he made a grand gesture with his arm—"Osama Bin Laden will be raping our wives and daughters."