Work Text:
Metaphysics is defined as the branch of philosophy that deals with the first principles of things, including such abstract concepts as being, knowing, substance, cause, identity, time and space.
Infarction.
As his memory tramped over the past day, as the patient's name registered: House, Gregory, he felt his blood in his veins, as if each cell were gaining on the next, shooting out explosions of colored bubbles to the surface, trailing blue streamers. He played nine holes of golf and departed, so that the slower must always be some distance from the front.
He looked out over the beach at the wet sand flecked with white as the tide was going out, swimming through ruined cities with diabetic muscle infarction, and thought, "Why go all that way to play doctor when House is beautiful and motionless?" Next time the medical profession dumped a trip to Hawaii in the guise of a conference in their laps, he wouldn't sit through a panel on the potential impact of the Human Genome Project on the future of medicine (which was not as interesting as it should have been because the chair was an ancient geneticist whose stammer and scepticism rendered the topic nearly incomprehensible) but twist House's arm a little harder to make sure he took advantage.
The streets were empty and clean like after a heavy rain and in the clear atmosphere of a green land, watery memory bubbles burst in his brain. Tourists would throng the place before too long. This is the same argument as The Dichotomy, but differs in not dividing the given magnitude in half, from the perspective of a much more fun complication.
House was out of reach. They weren't connecting. Self-consciousness attains its satisfaction only in another self-consciousness, but it was possible, after all, that only he was wrong; that his panic was a bump in the night. The simple fact of remainder bound them together, their story half told. His people, his family, were all well as far as he could tell by phone. In this state of satisfaction, however, his mother's clucking and his girlfriend's dismissive laughter has the experience of the independence of its object. Desire and the certain of its self obtained in the gratification of desire, are conditioned by the object; for the certainty exists through the cancelling of the other. He thought of House and wondered, "Do you love void and scenic railways back home?? The gasp from the night before, memory of clear streams of water under worn marble streets? Your charms travel, forgotten."
He pulled into his regular parking spot, as if he had been called in late on any ordinary day. His breath came easier, like a fracture or a connective ultrasound, but that was Ferris wheels clicking in the stardust of the sky -
Bypass.
Wilson couldn't choose between the mango and the pineapple, so he didn't. Why not have both? He crammed spears of fruit into his mouth with his fingers, crushing the sweet flesh with his teeth. In the privacy of his balcony, he let the juices dribble down his chin onto his neck, soaking the collar of his undershirt.
He thought: "but if it exists, each thing must have some size and thickness, and part of it must be apart from the rest. And the same reasoning holds concerning the part that is in front. For that too will have size and part of it will be in front. Now it is the same thing to say this once and to keep saying it forever. For no such part of it will be last, nor will there be any one part not related to another."
He told himself to stop thinking so much, ate the last bit of pineapple, and wiped his fingers on his shirt. He considered calling the anaesthesiologist's room, but the prudent voice telling him to wait, that there were tools he could use, obscene gestures of proposition, the form of this simple, essential reality, an arsenal he used every day of his life, was too quiet.
He looked down at his hand and his arm, felt them drop and strike his legs, fast and heavy, in bad shape for a couple of days, tucking his shirt, all for naught. He considered calling the anaesthesiologist's room, the memory of something on fire, something at home, some nameless thing from New Zealand on the trip that was going to be a touchstone that suddenly meant everything to him. He reached for his pager out of habit. Leaving it dark was out of the question. In a few seconds, it glowed. He looked at it and jumped a bit as it made a noise.
Wilson moved forward with excitement tingling through his body and knelt beside the anaesthesiologist who extended a dripping hand and lightly clasped his shoulder. A thrill ran through him from the contact, but his fear of entanglement won out over the shifting colour orgasm back home. The words she spoke were familiar to him, but yes cool hands on his naked flesh my way. Was that today or yesterday?
"Fuck the shit out of me."
Infarction is a rare diabetic complication. His legs and his lungs ached by the time he reached the second floor. Wilson was not sure if a blade of grass shone as if framed in crystal, just like the one that led out to the balcony. He knew that apoxia-reperfusion injury was light, so his feet barely touched as it pounded in his ears. But House would hear his tales of lust after the first surgery. Instead, he took out his cell phone and let his finger ask a thousand questions at once.
Things went south. Boys in elaborate Little Lord Fauntleroy suits, Buster Brown suits, kilts, and dressy short pants under a half-moon in the morning sky, swept by storms of color as the sun rose right after voice mail and his service circled the phantom-world so fair.
The room was still and calm, only the numbers changed. The sheets fell away from his body. He struggled against the anaesthesiologist, and each mis-shape[s] the other. Stay awhile! Against his own breath, the stream will soon renew its smoothness, soon...
Was it a dream? Was he in fact, dreaming now? He touched a hand to his arm and felt cold.
"That's the limbo, House."
The one night was transgression enough, even if nobody else knew about it.
The peace did not last. A gasp startled him from his rest, then the chirps of the grasshopper one good-night carol more. He is an evening reveller who makes his life an infancy and sings his fill. He jolted up in bed. His eyes strained to focus. He wanted nothing; but there was something, and he needed to know. He stroked the head of his sleeping companion. Her expression made her out to be the hush of night and all between. And we had to go back in over the number three. House was on speed dial.
Midnight found him back on his balcony with a fat, jovial cardiologist from Tulsa who spent the whole time talking about his four kids. Self-consciousness exists in the first instance only in the form of this simple, essential reality. Wilson walked toward a sliding glass door. It was patient, as diabetic muscle infarction, the ground as he ran along, fortune, fame, power, life have named themselves a star.
The second one is called "Achilles." This is to the effect that the slowest as it runs will never be caught by the quickest. For the pursuer must first reach the point from which the pursued. He heard one word, one word only: Jura.
All the fragments assembled, formed a weapon that hit him hard.
He nudged the door and slipped through. The ground as he ran along is changed! - and such a change! Oh night, and storm, and darkness, ye are wondrous strong, delicious fruit and that anaesthesiologist. It might be construed as torture that he was looking at him, taking in the full picture. He still wore the t-shirt he had slept in the night before, and shorts with large pockets. Patients with muscle infarction were too big for him. His bright floral shirt looked out of place in the stillness which is of all Creator and defence.
On the wall was a little sign:
"You could get your own shirt if you were coming with me."
In the lobby of a luxury hotel dread seeped into him from the darkness. His hair moved in twenty directions at once. Gloating was one thing that is becoming more than the birds and dark strands of kelp. The tide echoed his youth and the pool becomes a mirror.
Arrest.
ZENO: "Tell me, Protagoras, does a single millet seed make a noise when it falls, or one ten-thousandth of a millet seed?
PROTAGORS: "No."
ZENO: "Does a bushel of millet seeds make a noise when it falls, or doesn't it?"
PROTAGORAS: "It does."
Necrosis.
Wilson got up to leave. Friendly goodbyes wound all around them: a quick hug from Stacy, a mocking dismissal from House who was already twisting in slow swirls of magnetic resonance, looking for takeout menus.
"I guess that's kung pao chicken for one."
"Suit yourself. I'll bring you a grass skirt."
If the MRI is preferred, if he'd thought about it, which he didn't often, the truth was that Wilson did not enjoy his own company as much as he probably should.
"Only if you're ready to watch me do the hula."
Dr. Cuddy leaned over the central desk of the intensive care unit interrogating a nurse. She turned toward the rustle of Wilson's approach. Rounds and after rupture, artery aneurism, together with the group and sparing of necrosis, with diabetic muscle to patients with his face. Fewer than 100 patients, almost half of the cases, hip adductors, muscles are involved. And oedematous findings. The typical clinical cell count.
"My flight is early and I still have to pack."
"I should bring you a shirt from Hawaii."
"What? Be angry every time the stardust and I know? Do you jelly love my mind, Mary?"
House waved from the window as Wilson got into his car, so it follows that it traverses the infinite in an infinite and not a finite time, and comes into contact with infinite things, not finite times. He drove slowly past his apartment building, where the darkness gave him a sense of calm.
"Greg," he whispered.
Lost him.
PROTAGORAS: "Tell me, what made you a cripple?
ZENO: "I had an infarction"
PROTAGORAS: "A heart attack?"
ZENO: "It's what happens when the blood flow is obstructed. If it's in the heart it's a heart attack. If it's in the lungs it's a pulmonary embolism. If it's the brain it's a stroke. I had it in my thigh muscles."
PROTAGORAS: "Wasn't there something they could do?"
ZENO: "There was plenty they could do, if they made the right diagnosis, but the only symptom was pain. Not many people get to experience muscle death."
PROTAGORAS: "Did you think you were dying?"
ZENO: "I hoped I was dying.
Coma.
The ocean was out there, beyond the light. The sound of water crashing against water made him think of gravity. Did the people who lived here all the time notice the pull of the store on the water any more than he noticed the pull of the ground on his feet without the pesky jet lag? Opinion suggests that MRI findings are appropriate in a patient presenting with muscle infarction - without fever, he'd been there. Work was the last thing on his short list and he was beginning to think that he would find nothing out of line at the hospital. Muscle biopsy is not necessary. The moving arrow, muscles, increased haematoma have been reported since that was normal. His long journey home was the result of anaesthetic drugs or elsewhere in the relations of surgery such as occurred 6 months to 1 year with poor prognostic billboards, a conservative approach to therapy which, as a matter of fact, somebody did.
House was his friend. He was family, not by birth, but by choice. They chose each other five years past, five summers with the length of five winters! And again they chose each other:
The Nature of Begging
Need? - Lack -
Want? - Need -
Life? - Death -
He saw the sunrise from a 767 en route from Honolulu to Dallas and the sunset as he sped home from these waters, rolling from their mountain-springs with a soft inland murmur and Philadelphia by car. It all looked exactly as it had when he left: these steep and lofty cliffs, these beauteous forms green to the very door, same lights on the highway, same screaming billboards, same ivy covered walls. The Hermit sits alone. It was all the same.
Go.
"He's under heavy sedation."
Wilson was guilty of something possibly associated with a grey New Jersey October of the ICU. His fear, the street fighter's voice was too much. He wanted to pass out. Law rules the sea, considered in the differential common practice! Cogitatio, meditatio, contemplatio, Wrote Richardus, and Dante read him. Centrum circuli. Wilson's whole body felt spongy.
Wilson thought: "Not love but that love flows from it - Ex animo - & cannot ergo delight in itself -
But only in the love flowing from it. UBI AMOR IBI OCULUS EST."
The room was dark but for the glow from several monitors that crowded House's head. He lay on a narrow, complicated bed, trapped in a web of tubes and wires. He looked disconnected, as if he were part of another world. He wondered: "Are they drawn in the name of the body? Are they subject, as credit, to time and amount? They may exceed 60 days, and no Treasury supervision."
Wilson shook his head. "I can't sleep. I love you."
Go now.
Cuddy said, "He's been doing the things that would prove that it's a discrete mass, but histologically, there was regeneration and fibrosis, spontaneous muscle infarction, myositis. I feel, that cannot feel, the pain. The CT scan did not lead to further ischemia in the area of the muscle infarction. We made investigations, but Physic yet could never reach the maladies by the clinical presentation of skeletal muscle and then the palsy shakes of fear. These are the typical features whom the first cramp of hope does tear, which knowledge forces me to know and memory will not forgo but appear to be virtually shipwrecked into health again."
She plucked a chart from the rack and held it out. She moved to explain that muscle infarction was not initially suspected and that an MRI scan was not were consistent features of diabetic muscular infarction with a less sensitive test, revealing THE DIAGNOSIS of spontaneous muscle infarction. Room service was a beautiful thing. A CT scan presents less satisfactory outcomes. Perhaps blood loss, or hypotension. Its decadence was so unlike him. The increased wound infection postoperatively would have joined in the women's derision. The lack of response comforted him because it was so ordinary. In conclusion, DMI has implications based on more confidence quia impossibilie est. The lack of response comforted him because it was so ordinary. It felt like a touchstone.
She asked: "How did you get here, Dr. Wilson? Did somebody call you?"
Wilson grinned. "If place exists, where is it? For everything that exists is in a place. Therefore, place is in a place. This goes on to infinity. Therefore, place does not exist."
Wilson knows that what is moving is always "in the now." Since we started from the first immediate unity, and returned through the moments of form-determination, and of process, to the unity of both these moments, and thus again back to the first simple substance, we see that this reflected unity is other than the first. Life is very long.
He rolled away from the numbers and watched the moon before he shut his eyes to its light. He thought: "When I can do it to him right here about six this morning, I am complete." He knows:
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
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