Don't touch the drapes.
Don't touch the windowsills.
Don't touch the furniture.
Since the furniture was eternally slipcovered with clear, thick plastic, he didn't want to touch it anyway. It made the overstuffed sofa and armchairs look creepy, and his six-year-old mind was all too quick to imagine gooshy dead bodies and spiders hiding under a surface that was both sticky and slick at the same time.
Don't touch the curio cabinet.
Don't touch the mantel.
Are you sure your shoes are clean?
Sometimes he wondered why his mother didn't just tell him not to touch the carpet and be done with it. He imagined himself floating, hovering above the ugly avocado-green shag, moving slowly through the house like one of those German zeppelins he'd seen in the W - Z volume of his World Book encyclopedia.
His dad never came into the don't touch room. Most of the time he acted like it didn't even exist. The last time he'd even mentioned it had been a Bad Time, and his dad had yelled and thrown things. He'd gone in the don't touch room and picked up one of the porcelain Hummel figurines his mother used to collect; a shepherd with a crook and three little lambs. His dad had thrown it against the wall. The shattering sound it had made was terrible, and then it had gotten very quiet, and then his dad had left.
He had come back after a while; James wasn't really sure how long because he hadn't been counting. If you count the days then the numbers are really real and who knew what might happen?
James's little brother Jonathan wasn't allowed in the don't touch room at all -- he was way too young and might touch something.
James's older brother David didn't care, and James loved him for that. He also loved him because of the time he'd called him "Jamie" all day, and told him they were secretly descended from Scottish royalty and only pretending to be Jewish; that if they were in Edinburgh they'd be addressed as "laird", and all their minions would bow and scrape before them. James wasn't exactly sure what a minion was, or what it was they'd be scraping, but it sounded good coming from David. Of course, David had also told him on numerous occasions he was adopted, and that kept him off-balance.
Lately though, since David had been bar-mitzvahed, he didn't seem to have a lot of time for either of his younger brothers. Which is why when David suggests they go into the don't touch room without their mother, James is instantly suspicious.
David's got that funny look in his eyes, the one James has seen a few times before. David's eyes seem to get even bluer, the pupils expanding until they're like one of his mother's LP records, and James knows something funny's about to happen.
Sometimes it's funny ha-ha, like the time David had decided to use a few small Black Cat firecrackers for his science project model of Krakatoa. It still might have been okay, except that he'd also accidentally-on-purpose used too much baking soda. David had lit the fireworks fuses and given him that look right before he tipped the white powder into the volcano's crater. The resulting explosion and shower of sparks had been exciting enough, but when the fire department came ... that had been heaven, the tall, uniformed men with their heavy jackets and hoses, tromping through the kitchen. James had wanted to be a fireman for a long time after that, and hadn't been dissuaded until his older brother told him that sometimes firemen got burnt up in fires, and he didn't want to be all black and icky like a charred marshmallow, now did he? He didn't.
Sometimes, though, when David got these looks things happened that weren't funny.
There was the time his older brother had been playing a neighborhood game of touch football, James looking on from the sideline, full of envy at David's easy grace catching the ball and running. Fisher Bennett, a boy from down the street that neither of them knew very well, had become frustrated with trying to guard his brother and had finally let loose his anger in one cathartic shout.
"You're offsides every time, you cheating kike!"
James didn't understand at the time why everyone had suddenly gone silent, or why his brother's eyes had done that thing -- expanded into a sky-blue vacancy, seeming to suck everything into a vacuum.
He had watched as David had leaned forward and said in a friendly, surprisingly adult tone of voice to Fisher -- "You don't know the half of it," and then in one swift move, he'd kicked Fisher in the groin. Hard.
That had been bad-not-funny, because Fisher Bennett had spent a week in the hospital, and his parents had threatened to sue or have David arrested for assault. Neither had happened; the whole incident had been smoothed over somehow.
There had been other bad-not-funny times, like the day David had bashed in all the mailboxes on their street with his Louisville Slugger baseball bat, or the time his brother had found a dead cat on the pavement and had actually picked it up and put it on the front doorstep of their next-door neighbor Mrs. Tibbits. Mrs. Tibbits had screamed and cried when she'd seen it. It was her cat.
Still, even those events paled in comparison to the one Really-Not-Funny Time.
Sometimes when their mother seemed especially frazzled in the afternoons, she'd take what she called a "mommy pill". Sometimes she took one too many mommy pills and got really tired, and on those occasions she retreated to the bedroom to take a nap, leaving her sons to fend for themselves. "Just for a few minutes," she always said, but it was always more than a few minutes. Sometimes she'd still be asleep when their dad got home from work, and then it might turn into a Bad Time. You could never tell.
It had been one of those occasions that David had led his younger brother up to their slumbering mother's bedside.
"Look at her," David had said.
James had stared and scuffed his feet. This wasn't right. Their parents' bedroom was on almost the same forbidden level as the don't touch room.
"No, David," James had whispered. "We shouldn't be in here."
His older brother had stared at him. "C'mon, Jamie," he'd finally said. "You and me, we can do anything." And he'd reached out and skimmed his fingers across his mother's breast with a feather-light touch.
It had been then that James had started to cry, silently -- great raindrop tears rolling down his cheeks. His brother had turned to him, and through his tears James had seen those huge, empty blue eyes.
It was those same eyes now, urging him to enter the don't touch room. James was suspicious, but hesitated only a moment before acquiesing.
They sat on the slipcovered sofa, both boys swinging their legs against the smoothly cloying plastic. The room was half-hidden in shadow, as always; the curtains drawn against the late morning sunlight. The china mantel clock ticked away, and the carefully posed Hummel figurines in the curio cabinet had seemed to watch them with blank, painted India-ink eyes.
James felt an odd roaring in his ears, his perception becoming detached as he sat next to his brother. David leaned closer.
"You read those new books I got you from the library yet?"
The little boy shook his head; he hadn't yet opened the tall, thin volume of Hans Christian Andersen, or the Andre Norton novel. He was proud that his brother didn't get him little-kid books.
"What about the new slides for the microscope?"
And again the six-year-old said no with a gesture. He had harbored vague thoughts of becoming a doctor since learning that firemen could die in such horrible ways, and David had begun sending away for sample lab specimens for him to study.
The questions comforted James in a way he couldn't define. David was his big brother. He loved David, and David loved him. He believed this, and continued to believe it, even after David placed one hand over his little brother's mouth, and used the other to carefully unbutton the front of James's OshKosh B'Gosh overalls.
Thirty-one years later, Wilson stands in House's office, staring at the newly-delivered desk chair. It's covered in plastic.
House, coming up behind him (soundlessly, as usual) whispers in his ear, scaring the hell out of him. "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's new office furniture."
Wilson jumps and looks genuinely frightened for just a moment, an odd, lost expression on his face. He quickly schools his features back into calm, sedate Dr. Wilson, but House has noticed and files the information away in the mental attic section labeled Jimmy Wilson -- Puzzlebox, to be picked over later.
"I don't remember that being one of the Ten Commandments," Wilson says smoothly.
"It was on the third tablet -- the one Moses dropped," House counters. "Guy was a real butterfingers."
"Yeah, it's all in the touch," Wilson murmurs, and looks at House. "Lunch?"
"Lunch," House agrees. There's lots of time to solve his friend's puzzles. You just had to find the way the pieces fit together. Jimmy was right -- it was all in the touch.
fin