XII

What do we call a fantasy that becomes reality?

The man was happy. For the first time in a long while. He was filled with an almost childish joy. He wanted to play pranks, to tell jokes, to mock his team. In short, everything he used to do in the past but now with a new joviality behind his actions, a new taste for life. While in the past his restlessness was born from his impatience with the mediocrity of everyday life and his own misery, now, on the other hand, it came from a sense of true joy, of a inner happiness.

The man felt like a child and the beginning of his relationship with Cuddy was a time of discovery and enthusiasm. The man was not alone anymore, now there was Cuddy… and Rachel, the child Cuddy had adopted three years before.

The man didn't like children. There was something unpredictable in a child that you didn't find in an adult. Children bored him and at the same time he was suspicious of them, of their honesty and their curiosity. Why in hell they always ask him, when they looked at his leg, whatever had happened to him? And they were always demanding attention and getting into trouble, and they were selfish, and they were never quiet, and they never ever did what they were told to do… Unlike the majority of adults, the man never made the mistake of treating a child with indulgence, maybe because he himself was one also. Maybe that was the reason why children were fond of him. Rachel had liked him. And he, with some reluctance at the beginning, had ended up liking her too. After all, she was not any child, she was Cuddy's child, and, one day, she could be, eventually, if things went as expected, maybe be his own kid too. Furthermore, Rachel knew how to lie. More, she knew how to lie under pressure, which, the man had to admit, was no small feat for a three year old kid. From the moment he had discovered that fact he felt the kid had potential. To be his daughter? Daughter. There was something that he hadn't thought about before. It was strange. Him being a father. But the possibility existed. It was there, in his reach. A possibility that he never had the chance to fully explore or think about in a serious manner.

As time went by, things between the man and Cuddy were becoming difficult. Imperceptible in the beginning, but later difficulties were occurring with greater frequency, disagreements, disappointments, recriminations, demands. Sand was entering into the machinery and what seemed to be working just fine all of a sudden stopped because of trifles, of small nothings, it seemed to him. But they were not small to her. He did all he could to smooth some corners of his personality. He had said to her that he was willing to take a leap of faith. He actually used the word "faith". But it seemed that nothing was enough. When the man thought that he had at last crossed that invisible line that marked the moment when they were finally able to be at ease with each other, when she would accept his idiosyncrasies, his faults, his deficiencies, he would discovered that the line had only moved a bit further away and that he had, once again, to try to reach it. That line kept shifting away from him.

The man had told Cuddy that he loved her, he had told her that if he had to choose between being a great doctor and living without her or being a lousy doctor and staying with her, she would be his choice, always. With this declaration the man dropped everything that he held most dear, his gift as a doctor, everything that made him special in his own eyes, everything that he was. He was willing to relinquish everything that he once had been, everything that he was, for her. This is what she meant to him.

The man knew only how to live in two ways: either he gave it all or he didn't give anything. In relation to Cuddy, he had chosen to give it all and all is what he was willing to give. Here it was, his "act of faith", his point of no return, his strongest proclamation of his love, made on a rainy night.

But then the unhappy day came, that most unhappy of days. Then came the moment when everything shattered. The moment when she had told him... we know what she said. We have her words written in fire in our heart. And everything ended.

He had tried to explain the reason why he had taken the Vicodin pill, it didn't matter. She had answered with "pain happens when we care". What did she know about pain anyway? He had promised that he could do better; that he was able to do better, his words fell on deaf ears. She had said that no, he couldn't because he never was going to change, he was selfish and he would always be selfish. And then she left. And then he stood there looking at his empty doorway.

He saw himself sitting on his bathroom floor with a Vicodin pill in his hand. In the exact same position he had been months before, on the night Hannah died, when Cuddy appeared to help him choose and to bring light into his heart. She had saved him then and now she had destroyed him. It seemed fitting, somehow. Who else had the power? Only she could be both his saviour and his killer.

To say that the man's heart was broken would not have been correct. The man's heart was Hiroshima after the bomb. A no-man's land of ashes and dust, where nothing grew and nothing could grow ever again. A desert. A grey desert with no sun.

The poet says that a man dies a thousand times. This was the man's second death. He had put all his hopes, all his desire, all his resolution since he left Mayfield in Cuddy's hands. He had built a castle made of love and hope, with Cuddy at its foundation. He had showed her the most sacred part of his soul, she had rewarded him by shoving him into a hole and covering it with dirt up to the brim. A deep deep hole. To make sure he would never rise again.

When the man looked around him, at the walls of his bathroom, at the empty corridor, at the Vicodin in the palm of his hand, an indescribable pain filled his soul. It seemed to him that he had entered a time machine and had returned to the past. It seemed to him that nothing had happened between the night Hannah died and now. It was the same night. But nobody would come this time. He knew that nobody would come this time. He knew that he was alone. Completely alone.

He looked at the pill. To take or not to take? But was there really a choice? It had been a choice before, but now? If he didn't take the pill could he be able to endure life with a pain in his leg and an emptiness in his soul? And why did he need to subject himself to that? For her? To show her that she was wrong? That he was a better man than she thought he was? To say to her: "Hey, look, see what you lost. I can quit the meds whenever I want. You mattered so much or so little to me that our break up was a setback, yes, a certain sadness, perhaps, but, hey, life goes on, right? We see each other around and good luck." Not even he could lie that much. And, besides, it seemed obscene to pretend that he was not deadly wounded, obscene to him and to her also.

In order to not lose her he had taken the Vicodin. In order to be able to be with her, to be there for her in a difficult time, and withstand at the same time the pain, the prospect that she might die, he had taken a goddamn pill. And irony of all ironies, he had lost her all the same, with accusations of being afraid to suffer, of not caring enough, of not being able to bestow the attention she deserved, of not being beside her one hundred per cent, of not doing anything and everything he could, of not giving his all and more than his all, on top of everything else. It didn't matter now. She had stripped him of all his dreams of happiness, of all his hopes of a different life, of all his resolutions of change. What did it matter what she thought of him now, what did he care about showing her that he was superior?

But, what if he took the Vicodin pill? In that case at least, he would feel less pain in his leg. It was when the man was thinking this that he heard a warning coming from his inner voice: What about the hallucinations? What if the hallucinations come back? Oh, by God, let them come, let them all come. His father, Amber, Kutner, all the people he had failed, all the people he had deceived and manipulated, all the people he had hurt, all the people who had hurt him too, all the patients he hadn't been able to save and all the patients he had saved; his old team, his new team, the team that he would have in the future. Let them all come. He would welcome all with open arms. Tritter who wanted to put him in jail, Vogler who wanted to fired him, the other who had shot him, all the sons of a bitch that he had met in his life, all the idiots he had endured. All the living and all the dead. All! With the exception of one person. He invited all the manifestations of his psyche, all the multitude that lived inside of him to a great banquet of Vicodin and whisky. And that would be a night to remember.

He took the Vicodin. With an empty soul he put it in his mouth and swallowed it.

That night, the man had a dream. He dreamt that he was floating above the world. A being without substance, neither living nor dead. His body was stretched to the limit, as if it was made of rubber. So stretched it was almost transparent. He could see through it. He was a shadow, a ghost, a being on the verge of dissolution. He felt the vast emptiness of the sidereal space running through him. He was that emptiness himself. He had no existence, no past, present or future. He had no identity, no personality, no memories. He felt a terrible anguish, as if he was nothing or didn't belong to any place. He was floating through space but he didn't belong there. He saw the stars, the planets, but he was something apart, something from another plane of existence, a plane where nobody lived but him. He had no weight, no thickness, he was a two-dimensional being that for some reason had gotten lost and had drifted into this world. He walked through streets, through buildings, he looked into people's faces, but no one saw him, no one knew he was there, no one had any recollection that one day a person called Gregory House had existed.

He woke from the dream, sweating and still feeling the sensation of being incorporeal. He had looked at his hands to assure himself of their solidity, he had touched his arms to make sure he was real, that he was made of flesh and bone. Only the pain in his leg reminded him that he was alive, that he belonged, at least for now, to the world of the living. But not even that proof (nor the Vicodin he took afterwards) had assuaged the anguish and the loneliness the man was feeling in his heart. He couldn't seem to shake off the sensation that he was hollow. He had to do something.

The man limped to his living room and sat at the piano and started playing no matter what. He didn't search for any particular music, no song came to his mind, no improvisation. He just wanted to feel his fingers touching the keys and listen to the response of the piano. There was no melody in what he was playing. It was only sounds, without tone or meaning. Pure noise. Even music she had stolen from him.

He kept playing for a very long time; time enough for the anguish to pass. The morning arrived. The light of dawn, coming from the window, spilled into the room. The man stopped playing and thought. He thought that he had to move, he couldn't be standing still. Standing still meant death, he had to move, to do no matter what but just move, forward, backward, in any direction, the important thing was to move and keep moving. He had to get rid of her memory at all costs. He had to throw her away like someone discards an old jacket.

After he made this decision, he dressed in a hurry, picked the Vicodin bottle, his wallet and keys, closed the piano, grabbed the cane, limped out of the door, limped into his car, drove through the dull streets and checked into the best hotel in the city with the intention of only leaving when he felt like himself again.

To remove Cuddy from his heart the man did everything and experimented with everything. His imagination didn't fail him in that hour of need. Neither did the money. Imagination and money were a powerful combination all by themselves, throw into the mixture an iron drive, and what was powerful would become explosive. Hookers, drink, food walked in and out of his hotel room at a furious speed. The man indulged himself with various extravagances and eccentricities. He didn't hold himself back. He had the means, he had the will, he had no intention to stop.

He had told himself he was having fun, he had told that to the others, he had told Wilson that it was a matter of time, that things would return to normal, that he would go back to his old life. The man could say whatever he wanted. He was not having fun. It was not joy what he was feeling, he knew it, deep down inside he knew it. It was despair in disguise, sadness with a makeup. It was pain. It was emptiness.

He started the week with no intention of setting foot in the hospital. But he couldn't help having an epiphany on the balcony of his hotel room. A crazy idea that had proven right. A genius thought that only he could have had. A brilliant deduction that had saved his patient's life. The man hadn't been able to feel any enthusiasm or pride. Medicine had become a mechanical thing to him. The man's brain was a machine with two slots, in one the patient file went in, the diagnosis would come out through the other. The man could now finally aspire to the noble condition of being a robot. A mechanical person. A medical machine. It was what she had reduced him to. Hope, happiness, humanity, desire, music, curiosity, interest for medical cases, interest in finding the truth, everything had gone with the wind. It belonged to the past.

When the man returned to the hotel coming from the hospital and sat on his bed, he took a good look at the spoils of his recent activities that were scattered here and there – a champagne bottle on the floor, some woman's underwear hanging on the lamp, Vicodin pills on the sheets –, it was a sad depressing spectacle. And he felt that no matter how much he tried to move on he would never be able to leave the same place. He was a mouse in a training wheel. He was moving but not going anywhere. It was a kind of standing still but in motion. That hotel room was his soul: a dark space, filled with the remains of the day, useless things, used and abused, loose memories of meaningless events, garbage. He was stuck in there.

What do we call a fantasy that becomes reality?

A nightmare. We call it a nightmare.