Ch. 12
Sunday
4.
Rooting around in House's nearly empty fridge, he'd come across a container of Chinese take-out that had to be months old. Taped to it was a Post-It note saying "Dim Sum, Class of '05. Do NOT discard!!" Wilson had smiled as he tossed it into the garbage, thinking of all the food containers of his whose plaintive Post-It notes House had ignored. Payback was indeed sweet.
The postcard he found that night was tucked into a DVD of "Vertigo" that he'd left behind during the month he lived with House. "Call off Lady," it said. "I like my mess." Wilson smiled. Too late. His former cleaning lady was scheduled to come tomorrow morning, and House would return to a neat apartment, like it or not.
Wilson calculated that House was halfway home by now, breaking his trip somewhere between Maine and New Jersey. Pulling the bedroom shade down that night, Wilson could see the nearly full moon high over Princeton. He imagined House looking up at that same moon, at that same instant, from some hotel window. It was a strange kind of personal geometry: Wilson's gaze going from Princeton up to the moon, then deflecting down to House, wherever he was, like a telephone signal bouncing off a satellite, while House was maybe doing the same thing back at him. It was oddly comforting.
Sunday
2.
Jack fished the printout from the police station out of his pocket and tossed it into Fergus's oil barrel fire. There were hardly words to describe the way he was feeling.
Most people judged by appearances and saw what they expected to see. Experiments on vision and perception—he dragged this fact from the recesses of what remained of his memory—had proven that: let someone in a perfect gorilla costume wander into the middle of a basketball game, and no one would report seeing it—simply because they didn't expect to see a gorilla at a basketball game. Looking at him, the cops, the clinic doctor had seen only what they expected to see, as had Officer Robinson, and everyone else. A bum. A homeless person. A crazy. A drug addict.
Up until this moment, he'd been completely convinced they were wrong. Bums didn't have perfect teeth. Homeless people didn't drive motorcycles. Crazy people didn't didn't know about diaphoresis and hypovolemic shock.
But maybe they did. The police printout was irrefutable evidence that, although he'd been "lost" four days now, no one—no wife, no lover, no child, no boss or colleague, no relative, no neighbor—had reported him absent. No one had missed him. No one had initiated a city-wide search for him. No one had alerted authorities, called the local press, or put up posters on telephone poles. No one wished to find him. No one cared that he was, or was not, still alive.
And if that wasn't the definition of homeless, he didn't know what was.
Hell, even Fergus and Estelle had each other.
Later that night, having refused Estelle's offer of 'dinner' he lay down on the cardboard mat, his physical agony compounded by the punishment of a four-mile walk, the days of detox, of being unable to eat, by the unshakeable cold that had gotten into the marrow of his bones. He watched the nearly full moon rise over the Boston skyline, its reflection shimmering on the inviting black surface of the Charles River, with a new question uppermost in his mind: whether there was any real point in going on.
Monday
1.
By morning, as so often happened around the time of full moon in early fall, there would be frost, and he would awaken with his hair in frozen points, his leg on fire, and a dream-fueled conviction that, all evidence to the contrary, he was not alone in the world.
And he had a plan to prove it.
