Chapter 36
"Wilson In Wonderland"
It was late when I finally got Greg settled for the night. I stayed by his side awhile, barely awake myself, until I could be sure he was comfortable and asleep. It didn't take very long. These bouts with fever and nausea, combined with the damned leg spasms, pretty much made mincemeat out of his strength and stamina. He was out like a light in less than ten minutes.
After that I could turn my attention to my own needs.
The sudden lack of physical activity turned my head to tomato soup for a few minutes. I sat there in the chair at the side of his bed and just allowed my body to melt into the seat and both arms to hang loose over the sides, fingers almost trailing on the floor.
I woke myself with a jolt, and sat upright in the chair. Oh man! I needed to grab some sleep while I had the chance. Sitting here watching this human puzzle while he imitated a buzz saw wasn't "cutting" it. Even my own jokes were boring me to death! I needed a shower, a shave, a shampoo and something suitable to sleep in. Sitting here like a bump on a log wasn't getting me anywhere, and the time, she was a-wasting!
I pushed out of the chair quietly … why was I being so quiet? Greg wouldn't wake up, even if I planted a firecracker under the bed! I looked down at him for a moment with a brother's love. With his head turned sideways on the pillow, his scruff looking like a pine forest, and his mouth wide open with sounds emanating from it that would put a power drill to shame, it would take a brother to love him! I smiled and shook my head and then bent down to snap off the light and left. I didn't even bother to close the door.
I shaved quickly while I was in the shower, hurried through the rest of it and pulled on a dilapidated pair of Greg's scrubs and one of his old tee shirts. Good enough. I was supposed to be sick, and I did indeed look the part. I straightened the pillows and blankets on the couch and flopped down, pulled a blanket over me. Good night world!
After that, my over-stimulated brain began to lead me along corridors and vistas that I had not visited in years. These dreams were not fantasies like the one I had enjoyed a few nights ago. These were Broadway dramatizations of events in my life that I had not invited into my conscious mind for as long as I could remember.
I wondered what the significance was, even as the dreamscapes began to unfold one-by-one. I could only return to such places in memory, for they did not exist anymore.
Suddenly I was again in college; those carefree days of my youth, when every word I read stayed fresh in my mind, and the realization that I was actually on my way to becoming a doctor, dominated every waking thought. It seemed as though they were now beginning to dominate my non-waking thoughts as well. I relaxed like a discarded rag doll, and let the images wash over me … taking me back …
We were in Joe Ferguson's dorm, sprawled on the floor of his room with study materials scattered all around us. There was Joe, the only light-complexioned one among us, with his yellow-blonde hair, blue eyes and a devastating smile that made all the girls look twice and gasp with appreciation. Joe paid them no attention. He wanted to be an orthopedist, and there was nothing on Earth he would allow to come between him and his goal.
There was me, the "pretty-boy" Jewish kid with the honey chestnut hair, dark eyes and heavy eyebrows crawling across my forehead like winter caterpillars. Unlike Joe, I could not ignore a pretty face or a tale of woe, and was often known as a bleeding heart and a pushover for the cute girls. I had to admit it. I was that!
Then there was Dick. My best bud. He was dark, thin-faced; horn-rimmed glasses obscuring otherwise beautiful eyes. They were his best feature. But he was not a handsome boy. He looked a lot like Jerry Orbach, the long-faced New Yorker who had starred on "The Law and Harry McGraw" a couple of years before.
Dick had a crippled right hand; fingers curled permanently against his palm and immovable. Only his thumb worked. But the handicap didn't slow him down. His hand and arm pained him often when the weather got cold or damp, but during those times he took prescription medications that were none of my business. Since he was going into the field of psychology anyhow, the use or non-use of a hand was little deterrent for his intended profession. It was as much a part of him as his nose or his big Adam's apple, and mostly a non-subject.
Ardais Verengi-Degas arrived sometime near the middle of our sophomore year. He, also, was Jewish, and four-or-so years older than the rest of us. He was born in Israel. Beautiful, contradictory Tel Aviv. He came to Canada rather than the USA because he wanted to avoid the silly American sub-culture and earn his psychology doctorate from prestigious McGill University. He just happened to secure lodgings in the same dormitory as the three of us, and ended up sharing a room with Joe when Joe's earlier roommate washed out.
Ardais, later nicknamed "Dais" by the rest of us, was almost six feet four inches tall. He was very dark, of complexion and hair and eyes, and carried long black hair such as none of us had seen since the sixties. His accent was such that the rest of us hung on every word he spoke, and his dignity and polite reserve impressed us no end. We were in awe of him from the first day.
Dais was quick to cut the wheat from the chaff. He knew immediately who all the bullshitters were … and who could be trusted and who could not. He could tell within a few minutes, which ones were sloughing through medical school on cheater's cards, and which ones were working their proverbial butts off to earn their MDs honorably. Nobody messed with Ardais Verengi-Degas, and if they did, he pounded them into the ground with one of his cold, calculating stares.
He stuck with Dick Dickinson and Joe Ferguson and me, and the four of us were a force to be reckoned with on the McGill University campus …
… until things changed a little bit and Ardais and Dick found out that they had been born to be together.
After that I lost track of Dick and Ardais for a few years. When Ardais received his doctorate and went home to Tel Aviv, it was no surprise that Dick went with him. Canada wasn't the only country in the world where a man could earn a degree in psychology, and Dick Richardson had a winning ticket: prodigious intelligence!
I knew they were back … and paired up for life … because Dick emailed me out of the blue. He'd found out where I was working while searching the web for my name.
The dream began to escalate in earnest when I saw myself joining the two of them in Lancaster for their Commitment Union. I'd been working at Princeton-Plainsboro for five or six years then. Soon after I started there, I'd come by this crazy best friend by the name of Gregory House … and my life had not been the same since. In my dream, Greg looked a lot younger. But then, so did I!
I invited him to accompany me to Lancaster, but he scoffed at the idea, saying it would be too much for his leg, and turned me down flat. I shrugged and went on the trip anyhow. I wondered if he was a homophobe …
My dream carried me through the unique commitment ceremony in a hazy glow of unreal images, a little like the edges of a vignette photograph. Dick and Ardais floated through their vows in a shimmering mirror of sideways reality, threaded with silver sparkles like sunlight glinting off the surface of a pond. I could see myself standing alone, watching; feeling like the only human being on an alien world, uncomfortable with the company in spite of myself, but happy for the two of them.
I joined them at the reception and threaded my way among their friends and families, still a little alienated and lost. The dreamscape took me along the fringes of the celebration, and there was no dialogue that I remembered. And when I left them, it was as though I'd been whisked away on a gust of wind, blown to the parking lot and away.
Soon I was in my old Chrysler Cordoba and headed home. The car overheated and left me set a couple miles on the Princeton side of Trenton. I called Greg from a phone booth and asked him to come get me.
He came for me in his own vintage car, an old New Yorker, not much better than the Cordoba, but in much better mechanical shape. All the way home, he bitched about how much his leg hurt … the infarction was only about a year old then … and how I'd really inconvenienced him. Hell! He wasn't even back to work full-time yet, and was still transitioning from crutches to cane. He had nothing better to do! Besides, he needed to get off his butt and blow away some of the lingering stink!
My dream took us directly to his place, and when we got there, my broke-down old car was sitting in the street in front of his second-story apartment house. Must have driven itself home! He hadn't moved to Baker Street yet. In the dream, this building's elevator didn't exist. He had no means to get up there on that leg. He sat down on the front stoop and began to cry. I was so embarrassed that I took pity on him, tossed his ass over my shoulder and carried him up to the second floor.
Huh? What?? Weird dream!
He bitched all the way up; squirmed around and almost threw us down twice. I was ready to throttle him.
I got us inside and dumped him onto the couch with no consideration for his leg. He landed with a grunt and glared up at me. The cumbersome black cane clunked onto the floor at his feet. I stared back and felt absolutely nothing. No compassion, no sympathy, and no guilt for what I might have done to hurt him further. What a damned inconsiderate fool! (Him? Or me?)
I stalked into the bathroom, shed my sport jacket, my tie and pulled my shirttail out of my pants. I rolled my sleeves to the elbows and washed my hands in the hottest water I could stand. Walked back to the living room and dropped into the big lounge chair he used to keep across from the piano. I propped my feet up on the stool and toed off both shoes, listening to them drop on the floor one at a time. Now what?
I stared at Greg. He stared at me. Impasse. All through this strange and quasi-accurate dream, still not a word was spoken. I wondered why, but my attention did not stay in one place long enough to give it more than a passing thought.
Did smells count in dreams? Did voices in the background count? I was suddenly, and peripherally, experiencing both. The constantly shifting diorama was changing yet again.
We floated ahead … out of the upstairs apartment on East Side Drive … then to the bungalow on Union … now away from there, and finally to the little town house on Baker Street. Greg's bad leg had never gotten any better. It got worse. Much worse.
I cringed with discomfort when time ratcheted further forward to the night I'd walked away from him as he sat weeping in pain on the floor of his office.
Time passed more quickly. Scenes fluctuated. Images wove in and out, and scenarios I'd witnessed, but ignored, passed by in accelerating succession:
Greg in a hospital bed, screaming in agony … doctors and attendants looking angry, wishing he'd just shut the hell up. Denying him the amount of medication he desperately needed to attain even minimal relief.
Greg in a wheelchair, still in agony, lashing out at those he loved and those he didn't. Losing his rationality and his trust, sending away the only woman he'd ever loved in tears of frustration. Almost did to same thing with me … his so-called best friend. To this day, I don't know what it was that kept me at his side during those terrible months.
Greg on crutches, losing his sense of balance; coming down too hard, too often, on the leg that could no longer support him. Fighting to regain his sense of independence and having to rely on his best friend. (Was I? Still? Sometimes I didn't know, and neither did he.) Waiting on him hand and foot because he had no strength to do for himself.
Greg detoxing like a common junkie because this same "best friend" got some idiotic idea that most of Greg's pain was in his head. If he got off the pills, surely there would be other ways to manage that terrible pain. ("My name is Dr. Gregory House. You can call me Greg. I do not have a pain management problem: I have a pain problem!")
Greg, at the end of his rope and unable to tolerate the unbearable pain any longer; visiting his boss in her office at night, pleading for a shot of morphine in his spine, just to enable him to get relief long enough to sleep and achieve some release … and receiving saline solution instead.
And then he fainted, dead away, on the floor of his office. My mind, in retrospect, saw him unconscious, floating in mists of painful haze with his minions gathered around him, unmoving, staring dumbly down. Unreal reality. I could finally assimilate the fact that the indestructible Gregory House was as vulnerable and as destructible as the rest of us. And as easily hurt. Why in hell hadn't I realized that before?
The moment I'd knelt by his side, the truth came slamming home. This was a human being. He was someone who was my friend, someone I loved. And he was hurt!
After all that time, and after all his suffering, I had finally done something about it.
My dream leveled out and the dream monster decided to let me float comfortably for awhile. I drifted upward, away from the Earth and into my sweet fantasy world of clouds and streams and fields of daisies and fragrant forests and cool glades.
The sensations of background voices and pleasant aromas drifted back, and involuntarily my head lifted in that direction. I had a sensation of my hair falling into my face. I lifted my hand and brushed it away.
"Everything all right?"
"Rough night. Made him take an extra Ativan. Shhh … let's let 'im sleep it off …"
Mmmm … smells like coffee cake …" … get some coffee. There's cake in the oven."
Thought I smelled coffee!"Jimmy's something, isn't he? So you heard about the poker game?"
"Wouldn't miss it for the world … gonna send you back to work broke …"
My dream world dissolved gradually. The voices were soft. A little conspiratorial.
The field of daisies was the last to fade, and the smell of small white flowers became the tantalizing aroma of fresh coffee and fresh baked coffee cake. I opened my eyes to hazy images of Greg's living room and the cracks across the ceiling. I reached up and rubbed my eyes, then threw back the blanket.
How long had I been asleep? Were those smells real? Yeah … they were. So had been those background voices. Cuddy was here. I looked around … searching for Greg and the wheelchair. I pushed up on the edge of the couch and squirmed upright.
What?I got to my feet, rubbed my eyes and wandered into the kitchen. They were there, both of them. Greg was in one of the kitchen chairs, cane across his lap, the IV standing like a sentinel at his side. But he was in good spirits … and no wheelchair!
"What'd I miss?" I asked.
They both looked up and regarded my disheveled state. Cuddy smiled. Greg turned in the chair and glowered at me with his trademark snark. "Just the usual," he grumbled. "Cuddy was trying to get into my pants again!"
I groaned and pulled out a chair to sit beside him. "And I haven't even had my first cup of coffee yet!" I moaned with just-waking-up fogginess and lowered my face into my hands.
They were entirely too happy about something. I hazarded a peek in Cuddy's direction when I heard her counter stool scrape back.
She was pouring me a cup of coffee. Oh … good morning sunshine!
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