Friday
2.
Jack dozed fitfully, assaulted, when he did drop off, by strange dreams and woken regularly by chills or dry heaves. Once he was roused by the sensation of something crawling over his feet, and he realized dully that it was a rat. He was too tired even to try to shift his legs and unable to fall back asleep, because of the increasing agony caused by the effects of the cold, seeping inexorably through the damp cardboard, on the muscles of his thigh. At one point, when he could no longer restrain the groans of pain, Fergus crept over beside him and asked him what he needed.
"There's some guys here do drugs." Fergus jerked his head toward a small cluster of people sleeping a few yards away. "Let's say, just pretend, that you are detoxing. Those guys could maybe sell you something. Or trade you, if you ain't got the cash."
"Cash is the least of my p-problems," rasped Jack through chattering teeth, with something close to a laugh. "I'm lying here, ready to k-kill someone, ready to pull my own skin off over my head, the craving is s-so strong. But a craving for what? I don't have a clue what I want or need. Do you know how strange that is? It's like p-pining away for love, without having any idea who you're in love w-with."
Friday
3.
Wilson
had always made a point of using the back elevators to and from the
fourth floor so that he would have an excuse to walk by House's
office to get to his own. In the morning, if House was in, and he got
a glimpse of the man, it somehow made his
day start off better—probably because the interaction just involved looking, not talking. No sarcasm, no complaints, no messing with him. Just the spectacle of House at work--or more often at play--something that had always made his heart lift for reasons he never closely examined.
On his way home that night, he walked by House's office again. The office, this time, was dark. But he looked inside anyway, and because it was dark he caught a glimpse of himself as he must have looked all day. The ghost of the reflection looking back at him, superimposed over the letters of House's name, showed hair sticking up in messy, unkempt…Housean tufts, his shirt badly wrinkled. No wonder Cuddy, seeing him arrive at work that morning, before he'd used the electric razor he kept in his desk drawer (a leftover from the days when he was sleeping at work) had looked at him with raised eyebrows and asked if he was channeling House. "We only need one doctor on the staff who looks like he slept under a bridge," she added with an arch smile.
He didn't even go through the formality of a mental debate over where to spend the night that night. When he got back to Baker Street, he decided to ditch the couch and sleep on the bed. It was simply far more comfortable. Pulling back the covers he found another postcard, on the pillow. This was a shot of a female bicyclist, from behind, wearing no more than a thong and a saucy expression as she looked over her shoulder at the photographer.
Saturday
"Shouldn't
you be home with your wife?"
ran
the scribbled inscription.
"Oh,
right, you don't have one.
Portland has great hookers,
btw.
Sweet 'dreams'.
And please don't get cum on my nice
clean sheets.
House."
1.
Early
next morning, just as dawn was beginning to lighten the rim of the
visible world, Jack got up to walk off a cramp. It took him a good
two minutes to push himself to his feet, and then he reeled as he
stood up. Hanging suspended from the wooden crutches he paused to let
the dizziness pass and took his pulse. His heart was racing and—he
pinched the back of his hand again—he was even more dehydrated. He
knew he risked serious complications if he kept losing fluids,
sweating and vomiting, and couldn't manage to keep anything down.
He paced over to one side of the abutment, and then kept on going, till he was on the footpath along the river. He was trying to summon the word, the medical word, that described those complications, but he couldn't. Like his name, it was hidden in the
fog that still permeated his brain.
He hadn't lost all memories. This part he found fascinating. The slate had not been wiped completely clean—just selective parts of it. He couldn't remember events, but he remembered the results of events. He remembered, for example, how to speak English, read, tie his shoelaces, make coffee—though he couldn't remember learning those things. So, though he had forgotten the experiences that molded him, he remained the sum of those experiences. Like the child once burned and twice shy, who has long ago forgotten the time he put his hand on the hot embers, he just knows not to go near the fire; it was part of him, instinct, who he was. Similarly although he must have had some medical training, he had no memory of it, or of any of his instructors, classes, or textbooks. But he had retained the facts that they must have taught him.
Still he felt like an empty vessel—or more precisely, one of those statues made by the lost wax process: the wax that the mold had formed around was gone—burned away in some fiery furnace—and all that remained was the sculpture that hardened around it. Hollow man, that's what he was.
Memory, he'd been learning, was a tricky thing. He'd given up trying to figure out who he was by the simplest route: trying to force his memory to retrieve the information. What memories did come to him always came unbidden. He would often have a flash of something from the past: a room, a shoe, a view out a window, a face, the dashboard of a car. These images were disjointed and so fleeting and fragmentary as to be useless.
But if he tried to pursue them, to fill them out, he would fail each time. The images would collapse under his probing, like a dribble castle that has dried in the sun and needs only the lightest touch to start the sand crumbling. By experimenting, Jack had found that if he was coy about it, if he didn't look directly at the memory, but off to the side, it would come sometimes of its own accord. It was like looking at a star in the night sky: if you looked straight at it, it would vanish into the blind spot of your retina. But if you looked slightly to the side of the star, you might see it.
For example, while he had been sitting in the clinic exam room yesterday, he noticed a blood pressure cuff on the counter. Seeing the cuff brought the word sphygmomanometer instantly to mind. But before he had walked into that room, if you had asked him the technical term for blood pressure cuff, he would have drawn a blank. Similarly, the word diaphoresis had come to him yesterday, without his consciously summoning it, when he stared at the sweat staining his T-shirt.
In the same way, if you asked someone to produce a synonym for outgoing they might draw a complete blank, but when shown the word gregarious they might know instantly what it meant. The whole process of trying to recapture lost memories was incredibly frustrating for Jack because he had almost no control over it—in fact, the harder he tried the less he learned.
He found, though, that pacing helped him think, to be in motion. It distracted his mind from the pain, and put him in a place where thoughts came to him without having to try. As he walked along Memorial Drive in the faint light, the blat of a solitary motorcycle, whose owner had removed all semblance of muffler, ripped the pre-dawn stillness. Jack watched the cyclist for a second, then paused in his pacing, his head cocked to the side, his eyes narrowed in thought. When the thought came to him, if he hadn't been in so much pain, he might have actually smiled.
The last clue, the one that had eluded him longest, had slipped into place. And it explained everything. He lowered himself, grunting, to his damp bed, pulled the blanket up, and fell into the first deep sleep he'd had in two days.
Saturday
2.
He
tried to get up that day, after the sun was fully up. He had much to
do. He needed to go to the police station right away. Estelle and
Fergus told him he was crazy, no way could he walk two miles in his
condition, and it turned out they were right. He got all of 25 yards
before his legs gave out and he collapsed onto the grass by the side
of the river. Estelle brought his cardboard mattress, his thin
blanket and told him to sleep. It was warm here. Here was a water
bottle. He needed to rest, get his strength back.
Estelle and Fergus then left to do their thing. Like everyone else under the bridge, Estelle and Fergus carefully stashed all their belongings—the shopping carts, the sleeping bags and clothes—under the bushes that grew around the base of the bridge, and went off to earn their living during daylight hours. As the breadwinner of the 'family,' Fergus collected empty bottles from roadsides and trash cans, redeeming them for a nickel apiece. As homemaker, Estelle scrounged dumpsters behind grocery stores and fast food restaurants for discarded food.
In their absence, Jack managed to sleep a bit, to keep down a few sips of water and some bites of stale bread. But all his hard-earned progress was nearly undone later, when Estelle returned from her shopping expedition and tried to tempt him to eat 'real food' for the first time. The sight and smell of old Big Macs and fries, the half-rotten store produce nearly brought up everything he'd managed to keep down. He stood up later that evening to relieve himself for the first time in days, but his relief that he was actually peeing again was mitigated by the fact that he had to take his belt in a full notch to keep his pants from sliding down his hips. As he watched the trickle of dark orange urine, the word finally came to him, the word his mind had been searching vainly for, the medical name for complications of severe dehydration.Hypovolemic shock.