Chapter 8

"The Man in the Baseball Hat"

HE WAS UP EARLY, WAS JAMES EVAN WILSON.

HE DIDN'T TURN ON THE LIGHTS, BUT BLUNDERED AWKWARDLY IN THE DARK, FEELING AROUND FOR THE OLD CLOTHING HE'D DUG OUT LAST NIGHT. THERE WAS A RAGGED SWEATSHIRT HE'D PULLED OUT OF THE TINY CLOSET. ITS FRAYED COLLAR WAS THREADBARE AND THERE WERE HOLES UNDER BOTH ARMS. HE FOUND A BASEBALL CAP OF DUBIOUS DESCRIPTION, SO HE PUT IT ON AND PULLED IT DOWN ON HIS FOREHEAD AND PEERED AT HIS DARKENED REFLECTION IN THE BATHROOM MIRROR. ALL HE COULD SEE WAS A FAINT OUTLINE OF SCRUFFY CHEEKS AND HAIR SPIKES BENEATH THE SCOOP, AND DEEP-SET DARK EYES THAT PEERED BACK OWLISHLY.

HE FOUND A FADED DENIM JACKET WITH WORN CORDUROY CUFFS AND COLLAR, AND AN OLD PAIR OF JEANS ON THE SAME HANGER. BOTH ITEMS HAD BELONGED TO SOMEONE WHO'D LEFT THEM THERE AND FORGOTTEN ABOUT THEM. BUT THAT WAS ANOTHER CLOSET IN ANOTHER APARTMENT A LONG TIME AGO. THE JEANS WERE TOO LONG AND TOO WIDE, BUT HE COULD ROLL UP THE CUFFS AND USE A BELT. HIS HIKING SHOES WERE ON THE SHELF IN THEIR ORIGINAL BOX; SELDOM USED, BUT THEY WOULD DO. THEY WERE HEAVY ENOUGH THAT IF THE MOUNTAIN KICKED HIM IN THE ASS, HE COULD KICK IT BACK. WHEN HE PUT EVERYTHING ON AND GOT IT ADJUSTED, HE FELT LIKE A REDNECK FROM BEAVER SPRINGS, PENNSYLVANIA.

It wasn't a 'mountain' in the true sense of the word. Locals called it "Hunchback Hill". It was a big pile of dirt and rock and prickly vegetation with a narrow trail chinked into the side of it. People came from all over to fight their way up through the briars and underbrush and rocky outcroppings to make it to the top. Sometimes they got beat up by the mountain, but they took the challenge anyway. And peed in the underbrush and took 'selfies' and bragged of their prowess.

Today James Wilson had a pressing need to see for himself if Hunchback Hill was still worth its nasty reputation. He left his pocket change on the kitchen table. Wouldn't need it among the nettles, briars and narrow escarpments. He was purposefully unshaven and his face would look like part of the under-growth. Even his best friend wouldn't know him.

Then again, his "best friend" wasn't able to climb a mountain … and even if he was, he was not around to do so. His "best friend" had simply melted into the undertow of life, and the apartment he'd called 'home' for fifteen years had gone empty all the way to the paint on the walls. The last time James had driven past the place; there were Venetian blinds and lace curtains at the windows.

It took him awhile to get everything together. When he put on the raunchy old outfit, he found it to be surprisingly comfortable, although nothing would be missed if he decided to trash it all at adventure's end.

He had an article to write today, James Wilson did.

Papers to evaluate and a couple of patients to see … all previously scheduled for this morning. However, he'd been in no mood to concentrate on such things. He'd had a dream last night that took him back to difficult times, and when he woke this morning, it niggled at his memory in the manner of a cat niggling at the loose end of anything that dangled in the wind …

He cancelled today's appointments politely, left phone messages like the professional he was. He had to get away. Had to!

He was in just the right mood to tackle Hunchback Hill, however, even if it beat the hell out of him and he came home so bruised that his butt would be dragging his tracks shut. Tonight he would get himself hammered; bleary eyed drunk. Wasted. The remnants of the disturbing dream would recede back into his bleary conscience and life would go on the next morning. At least that was the plan.

It was breaking daylight when he stepped out his front door and locked it behind him. He descended the dark flight of stairs to street level and proceeded down the street to his car. He got in and started it up. He had to wait until the defroster cleared the windshield of a thin layer of ice crystals.

He should really look for another apartment. This one had no off-street parking, and it was like living in a broom closet. It was also beyond 'downtown'. Sometimes he had to park as far as a block away, and he didn't like that. Things were different now, and he often wished they weren't.

James put his heavy paper cup of strong black coffee in the space for it on the Volvo's console and decided against having breakfast. You didn't start up the side of Hunchback Hill with a lump of heavy food in your belly unless you intended to barf it all into the bushes about a third of the way up.

The cup teetered in the holder because the holder hadn't been designed for cups that big. Even though it wore a thin plastic lid, he monitored his driving so there weren't any sharp turns or quick stops to topple it into his lap or onto the passenger seat.

He drove through slower moving traffic and finally left the city behind to head for the wide open spaces where he could see the mountain through the morning fog about five miles ahead. Up there he could shout and curse and carry on like a madman and no one would see or hear or give a damn.

There was a big picnic area at the bottom of the trail, and of course at this time of year it was deserted. Winter hadn't given up yet and it was too early and too nippy for the Spandex crowd to be out challenging the trail and showing off their smooth, muscular bodies. He got out of the car, grabbed his coffee, pinged the door locks and looked around. Out on the highway, traffic zoomed past, in a hurry; disinterested and oblivious.

*Well, here goes …*

James started up the narrow trail with coffee in hand, sipping at it from time to time. He was still below the narrowest part of the trail where he would need both hands just to pull himself along through the closely spaced vegetation around him. He set a steady pace and put his weight into the climb. The trail wasn't particularly steep right away, but it maintained a steady uphill slant filled with loose stones and hidden hazards and buried roots to trap the boot of a careless climber and send him tumbling off the trail into tangled underbrush. He'd made this hike a few times before as a younger man, and it usually took about two hours. Now, after ten years and twenty additional pounds, he figured he should maybe add another hour to the climb.

James Wilson was full of unresolved anger. The dream last night had proved that. He'd seen House's car hit the wall all over again in minute detail, including the sight of Gregory House standing, dust-covered, in front of him on the sidewalk with a look of smugness on his face and a dark splotch of blood on the leg of his jeans. That was the last time they'd seen each other. It was coming up on a year ago.

Now Cuddy was gone, Hadley was gone, and Taub and Chase were restless as hell. Even Foreman talked of getting out and moving on. James was the only one left at PPTH with no immediate plans. Many of those remaining on general staff had regarded him as though he had the plague while he walked around for six weeks with a plaster cast on his arm, and lips that remained sealed to all inquiry.

Wilson felt put-upon, used and betrayed, and he'd felt that way for a long time. Feelings of deep guilt he could not fathom also pulled at his conscience. He had never understood the grievous sins he had committed to deserve them. He'd always tried his best to help, but things came apart anyway.

His dilemma couldn't be alleviated in a satisfactory manner because its source was nowhere around to enable him to get the burden off his chest. He did not know what to do about it. It was like trying to talk to a shadow. He knew his lousy state of mind was taking over his life. His injured arm still ached intermittently, and the ache always brought House to mind, even when his thoughts were in an entirely different place. Sometimes he caught himself rubbing at the hairline scar the same way House was always rubbing at his disfigured thigh. It was a constant reminder of what he had lost.

What they both had lost.

*Where did you go, you bastard? Don't you know how much I miss you?*

Thick undergrowth along the narrowing path was stiff and sharp and brittle from the harshness of last winter. Briars as long as cats' claws yanked at the material of the jacket and jeans. Small dead branches snapped loudly at his passage, like pops of a small hand gun in the morning stillness. A few times tiny needle-like thorns pierced the worn denim and bit into his legs. He set his jaw and kept climbing, sucking at his coffee, which was beginning to cool.

A black cloud of winter birds took wing before him like a school of herring in the ocean, rising noisily from the barren trees, startled into flight at the intrusion. Their wing beats exploded in the air, bursting through the silence. Daylight was almost upon them now, and they were vocal. The winter chill usually granted privacy to wild creatures, and these were voicing their displeasure at the disturbance.

Wilson looked skyward to the shadowy cloud of beating wings; listening to their angry voices as they quickly disappeared in the distance.

*I know exactly how you feel …*

To left and right he was surrounded by sharp dry twigs that raked his face, pulled at his hat brim and reached annoying tendrils down the neck of the shirt and jacket. He brushed them aside, but they seemed to multiply exponentially as he moved upward. Intermingled with tough winter branches were the smaller, brittle brown spikes of the conifers. Clinging; awaiting new green shoots to emerge and send them cascading to the ground. They picked at the corners of his mouth and poked into his ears like eager dog-tongue. They trailed stiff clumps of dead needles across his shoulders and dropped them like rain behind him.

He brushed the nuisance aside as he continued upward, losing concentration at odd moments and stumbling clumsily on the trail when he wasn't paying enough attention to his footing. He spilled coffee on his hand twice before he jolted to a stop and backed against a tree trunk to finish it, thereby freeing both hands to battle overhanging tree branches. He flung the last dregs into the thicket, crumbled the cup and shoved it deep into the big jacket pocket. He turned back to the trail and tramped along, both elbows thrust forward like a battering ram.

James felt like a human dreadnaught in a comical assault on Mother Nature … as it were … and Ol' Ma Nature was sure-as-hell winning.

He stopped to reconnoiter halfway up, curling an arm around a slender sapling and leaning outward to look back the way he had come. He was panting; muscles in full burn. He was not used to this. One thing positive about it though: his senses were set to gathering stamina to continue; not doing more mental gymnastics with the ghost of Gregory House.

The trail unfolded behind him. He could see out over the rim of rocks and limbs and tangled vegetation. The highway that had loomed so close when he began the climb now looked more like Match Box cars on a tiny, barren race track. Not even the sounds of their engines penetrated up here. He looked out over trees and fields and the harsh, bare landscape below, thinking with a sigh that it closely resembled the bleak, sparse places in his heart.

It was then he began to realize that what he'd been feeling all along was not only guilt and anger. It was a compilation of weariness, despair and loneliness, and amounted to a terrible sense of loss he had felt before, and the incalculable lapse of communication with the only other human spirit compatible with his own … and the stubborn image of the man was intruding on his thoughts again …

For all this time he had blamed Gregory House for everything, and House's lack of social skills even more-so when it came to matters of the heart. House's inability to express feelings without choking up, or speak candidly about his physical limitations in less than a mocking manner, stifled their ability to work anything out together in a sane manner. House's failed relationships with Stacy and Cuddy, and his guilt over the death of Amber, made him sullen and unresponsive.

*But he didn't cause Amber's death, and I didn't see it until it was too late … My God! Did he know that?*

Wilson's vision clouded suddenly. He tightened his arm around the trunk of the tree and lifted his eyes to the sky as his mind turned outward. All his thoughts tumbled about in disorderly confusion.

He missed Amber, who might have been his soulmate, or even wife number four. But he missed House with mixed emotions he did not understand and did not know if he could afford to think about …

The sad old Dodge had been dragged from the scene of the … you wouldn't dare call it an 'accident' … to some unknown location. It was like the earth just opened up and swallowed both car and owner …

Cuddy retreated in the aftermath. She had expected House to come back and plead for forgiveness and resume their relationship. Actually, she wanted to break him; turn him away with harsh recriminations. Let him fall on his own sword. But it didn't happen. Instead of facing her, he'd just disappeared into a galaxy far far away.

She hated to be upstaged, so she closed things down and left town. When he resurfaced, he would look her up. She thought. That didn't happen either.

It was widely speculated that she was holed up with Rachel at her sister's place.

Wilson heard somewhere that she was on staff at a hospital in Newark, but he was disinclined to check and find out for sure. No one he talked to had heard from her. Her smashed house was not being repaired, but sat empty and abandoned and cocooned with industrial plastic.

The era of The Department of Diagnostic Medicine at Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital came to an abrupt end. It did not steal away quietly: it crumbled like Wall Street in 1929 and disappeared almost overnight. A heavy black cloud descended over the fourth floor and extinguished everything daring and innovative and exciting that had once presided there. The team of promising young doctors was stalled and in limbo and without a leader. Painful unanswered questions remained.

Funding dried up. The genius Director of Diagnostics thumped a cane along the hallways no more. All the promising young doctors resigned their positions for greener pastures, or returned to their varied specialties and merged into the medical staff of PPTH.

James Wilson immersed himself in patient care and withdrew from the position of Department Head. He also spent prodigious amounts of time in the free clinic and took on private patients.

Today, however, he'd been determined to take himself and his miserable state of mind to the top of Hunchback Hill where he could kick some rocks over the side just to hear them bounce and echo off each other on the way down. He could shout some cuss words into the rarefied air where no other human being could hear, and where the trees and the remaining rocks kept their own counsel.

But a strange thing happened. On the way up the path, James Wilson had had an enlightening moment. He was no longer angry or resentful or guilty.

Just lonely. But not for 'Wife Number Four'.

Another fifteen minutes of hard climbing brought him to the summit of that ill-formed, humpy back sedimentary elevation. There was an interesting jumble of trees up there; the leaf-shedding kind and the pines. The trees flanked an immense weather-worn, cracked and pitted, gray slab of rock that looked like some long-ago alien ship had dropped on the top of the mountain.

James Wilson removed the baseball hat and raked his fingers through tangled, wet-sweated hair. He placed the hat on the surface beside him and sat Indian-style, looking out over the lay of the land, letting his gaze wander to encompass the vast area where he'd spent most of his adult life. He propped his elbows on upthrust knees and clasped both hands upon them. He lowered his head onto the backs of his hands and closed his eyes.

His heartrate was returning to normal.

Tears escaped slowly from between closed eyelids.

He did nothing to wipe them away.

After an hour Wilson unfolded himself from the human knot he had tied himself into. He had found no solutions to his ongoing dilemma, but he'd discovered a strange enlightenment that lifted the gray clouds away from the mystery that had lived so long in his soul.

Finally he stood up and looked around, realizing he'd too long prayed to an indifferent God.

The answer was not with God, but with himself.

He reached down to the rock and picked up the old baseball cap. Whacked off the pine needles against his hand.

Wilson gathered himself, set the hat back into place on his head, and began the ascent from Hunchback Hill. Sometimes an indifferent God … like humanity itself … just didn't give a shit.

Sometimes the difficult decisions were left behind and in limbo, so a man could figure out things on his own.

It was full daylight now. The sun was high in the sky. It must be noon or maybe later. It was breezy and there was a nip in the air at ground level. Not spring yet, but close.

Even his thoughts were now chilling out for some reason. Amber. House. One of them forever irretrievable; and the other? Who the hell knew? He hadn't felt like throwing rocks or curses over the edge of the mountain. What he felt was exhaustion. He felt like going home to the little, scoungy, ugly apartment and getting started on his second plan of the day:

Extraordinary pie-eyedness.

He would think of House's whereabouts later. Maybe much later.

He had already thought about Amber too much ... but no longer as "Wife Number Four".

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