"doubt is good for the soul"
Title: The Cat That Walked By Himself
Fandom: House, MD
Characters: mostly House, occasional Wilson, some Cuddy, assorted ducklings
Rating: PG-13, or maybe T? (slight language)
A/N: Set around Mob Rules, with flashbacks. Title, epigram, and quote toward the end are all from the Rudyard Kipling's Just-So Stories
The Cat That Walked By Himself
“Then the woman laughed and said, You are the Cat who walks by himself, and all places are alike to you. You are neither a friend nor a servant… Go away and walk by yourself…” ~Rudyard Kipling, The Just-So Stories
“We practically have a barn in the basement,” Chase had told the mob patient’s brother. Not true, of course-Princeton Plainsboro had to special order that pig. Nevertheless, when Chase’s comment gets back to House (and eventually, everything gets back to House), the older doctor feels a flush of almost parental pride. The small blond one is learning the ways of snark and deception. Maybe he isn’t entirely a lost cause.
Cuddy is less pleased. “You’d better hope Mr. Smith-Arnello-whatever-got the joke, House, because I swear to God, if I get one call-one call!-from the Ethical Treatment of Animals people, I’m giving them your name.”
“I’m pretty sure mobsters don’t hang with the PETA crowd,” House replies, “but if anyone calls, send ‘em on over. We’ll have lunch: Reubens for all! I’ll get Wilson to come in his leather shoes. Cameron will wear her fur coat.”
Cameron, true to form, entirely misses the joke. “I don’t have a fur coat.”
“Ahh, my little Pat Nixon,” House coos. Cameron just looks confused: she can’t decide if that’s a compliment or an insult. “What do they teach kids in history classes these days?” he says despairingly to Cuddy, and decides to pretend that she’s rolling her eyes with him, not at him.
Actually, he feels PETA would be pretty disappointed by the Princeton-Plainsboro set-up: no barn, barely even a petting zoo. The PPTH livestock holdings are minor enough to be housed in a single basement room, the “Research Room,” according to the plaque on the door. So minor that House had worked in the hospital for years without knowing about it. Or, rather, he’d always known about the place in theory, being as he made a point of knowing everything. But he had hadn’t actually entered the Research Room until a year after the infarction. By then, Cuddy had found him a job. Wilson had carved room for diagnostics out of the oncology department office space. House had patients, fellows, reasons to get out of bed in the morning. Had everything except Stacy and a fully-functioning right leg.
During those first months back at work, House got into the habit of prowling around the hospital at night. He wandered around to kill time while he was on call or waiting for a test to come through, or just because it didn’t seem worthwhile to go back to his empty apartment for five hours. Walking was good exercise; he enjoyed blowing off the physical therapy regimen and then surprising his self-satisfied doctors by improving anyway. The PTs would cluster around his chart, beginning to doubt their own methods: “And you’re not participating in any other kind of rehabilitation, Mist-uh, Dr. House? No other regular treatment?”
“Nothing out of the ordinary,” House would respond, earnest, mystified. He felt not the least bit guilty for skewing their data: doubt is good for the soul. Besides, walking hurt. The hospital floors were thin laminate over unforgiving concrete: House felt every heavy step reverberate in his jaw. And that was good. He didn’t want to be fooled into thinking he was getting better.
The research wing was deserted at night: long, cold corridors over-bright and gleaming with sterile fluorescent light. House never had to worry about running into anyone. The few swing-shift technicians usually stayed in their labs; the sound of late-night radio call-in shows told him which rooms to avoid. One night, though, just as he reached the end of a long, bare hallway, the doors of the freight elevator rumbled open behind him, followed by the unmistakable squeak of gurney wheels. The idea of making small talk with a bored and lonely lab attendant suddenly seemed impossible; just the thought-how ‘bout them Yankees?-made House feel almost physically sick. He dodged around a corner and nearly tumbled down a half-flight of stairs and into a dead-end loading dock. The gurney rattled by, squeaking down the empty hallway. For lack of anything better to do, House popped the cap off his pills, swallowed two, and started to explore. As per government legislation, each door was labeled in English and Braille: Maintenance, Storage Room A, Storage Room B, Research Room, Equipment Room.
Although the lure of unnamed Equipment was strong, House opted for door number four. After all, a ‘Research Room’ in the research wing was a little too redundant to be nothing: House could spot a euphemism at fifty paces. Surprisingly, when he swiped his hospital key card, there was a faint metallic click, like a bullet dropping into a chamber. He looked approvingly at the card’s magnetized strip. Clearly there were advantages to being a department head...
The room was bigger than House would have thought possible from the outside. The door opened in the middle of one long wall, so he faced a wall of double cages, each one large enough to hold a good-sized desk and containing exactly one cat instead. Against the wall on one side of the door was an actual desk and a lab station. Each end of the oblong room was a large floor-to-ceiling cage: it looked like someone had used chain link fencing to block of the ends of the room. The left-hand cage held a dog, some sort of a retriever. The fencing on the cage to House’s right was clanking ominously, even though it seemed to be empty. Slowly, House let his gaze move upward. In horror movies, this is where the monster jumps out and gets you, he thought, when you’re buried deep in the hospital basement and no one knows where you are and you can’t run. Fortunately, there was no monster, just two rhesus monkeys, lurking at the very top of the enclosure.
Unfortunately, House did not like monkeys. He’d once been unwise enough to mention that fact to Wilson, who had then taunted him mercilessly. Stuffed Curious George dolls and little King Kong figurines had turned up in unlikely and inconvenient places for weeks, until House had exacted appropriate retribution. (Information from Wife No. 2-about Wilson’s habit of matching his boxers to the rest of his outfit-became the linchpin of said retribution, contributing to the downfall of that relationship. Something else for House to not feel guilty about.) It wasn’t that he was really afraid of monkeys, per se. But as any sane person would admit, lower primates are un-nerving. There’s something eerie about their wise-child eyes, the humanoid fingers that House could never really think of as paws. When he was eight, his family had been posted to Panama for a year. The base newspaper, a mimeographed Stars and Stripes knock-off, carried warnings about the spider monkeys that lived in the trees on base. Mothers in particular were advised against leaving infants alone-something about mashed banana baby food luring rabid monkeys through the windows. Somehow being published between badly reprinted American comic strips and coupons from the PX had made the warnings even more sinister. Stupid, but in House’s young memory, the irrational fear of rabid monkeys had mixed with the heat and the startlingly large insects and the badly dubbed Twilight Zone reruns that endlessly looped on Panamanian TV.
There had been dogs, too, House remembered, in Panama and on other bases. Dogs not unlike the scrawny, listless mutt that occupied the cage opposite the monkeys. If that’s what passes for large mammal testing at PPTH, he thought, then the future of American health care is in big trouble. The dog in the cage looked like…“Ranger?” House tried the sound of it. “No-Rover? Rifle? The dog we had in Germany,” he explained to the audience of cats. Counting out loud, he came up with the names of at least seven dogs he’d owned as a kid. Well, not so much owned as inherited: usually they came with the military housing, left behind by previous occupants along with dying houseplants and mismatched crockery. Everything prefabricated, government issue.
As a kid, House had always preferred books about animals to stories with human characters. Kim and Treasure Island were all well and good, but he’d rather have The Just-So Stories and Wind in the Willows, even when he was really too old for them. (An autobiographical detail that Wilson was never, ever going to learn.) In fiction as in life, Greg House was simply not all that interested in the lives and thoughts of other children. Consequently, he was a bit of an expert on the Boy-and-His-Dog genre and quickly adopted each new pet in turn. He remembered moving into a grubby little bungalow in Guam and finding a beagle/terrier mix and a letter from the children of the brevet lieutenant who has just been reassigned. This is our dog, the letter read, careful Palmer-style cursive on pulpy school notebook paper, a rudimentary grasp of punctuation. Her name is Brownie. She likes to eat potatoes. We can not bring her with us Dad says. But please send us a letter to say she is alright. Thank you very much sincerely Claire (8) and Bronwyn (6) Marshall. At the bottom of the page was an APO address on Okinawa. Within a week, House had the dog responding to her new name (Brownie was a dumb, girly name. Like Bronwyn). He didn’t answer the letter: no doubt the little girls had forgotten about Brownie as thoroughly as she had forgotten them. And if not…well, this would teach them a valuable lesson, Greg thought, using one of his father’s favorite phrases. Namely that getting attached to things would just make you more lonely in the end.
Six cats, two monkeys, a dog. So much for a world class teaching and research facility. Oh, but he’d missed the best part: turning back to the door, House noticed for the first time the smaller cages against the wall. Mice, white mice. How cliché could you get? White mice and…rabbits? Nah, too big…had to be…
“Chinchillas! Chinchillas!” House announced to Wilson the next day at lunch, slamming down his tray for emphasis.
“Gehzuntheit,” Wilson offered.
“Oh, very funny.” It took House a minute to navigate both cane and leg around the cafeteria table’s semi-detached benches, but he renewed his complaint once he was settled. “Cuddy says there’s no money in the budget to get furniture-my fellows will be sitting on the floor and filing in cardboard boxes-but she keeps a whole slew of chinchillas in the basement!”
Wilson had heard this argument before, albeit minus the chinchillas. “I don’t think Cuddy would have a problem shelling out for desks and filing cabinets. It was the work order for a chocolate fountain that put you over the edge. Anyway, God knows you have enough junk to furnish three departments…”
“God knows no such thing!” House growled. “And you’re missing the point. Chinchillas! Cuddy is providing shelter and three square a day for rodents?!” House snagged a french fry from his friend’s unguarded tray. “D’ya think this has anything to do with her penchant for dead-beat guys?”
“They’re used for audiology testing,” Wilson explained patiently. “Apparently their hearing range approximates that of humans, or...”-he swiped at House’s hand, missed, and lost another French fry-“some such.”
“Chinchillas.” House shook his head, chomping thoughtfully on the purloined fry. “I mean… Wilson. The mind? Boggles.”
That night House made his way back to the research division with the proper equipment. He’d crashed grand rounds to borrow one of Wilson’s pens and deliberately ‘forgotten’ to return it. Once safely inside the Research Room, he pulled off the pen cap and twisted its pocket clip until the sliver of metal tore loose. Within a minute he’d used it to pick the lock on one of the cat cages. Crap locks for a crap lab. “Meow, meow, meow, meow…” House chanted quietly, thinking the jingle might be soothing to feline ears. He cradled the orange cat to his chest, one hand on his cane, the other holding lock, pick, and pen. He closed the cage door with his head.
For fifteen minutes, House amused himself by watching the cat chase his yo-yo. Then he let it prowl around the Research Room while he rifled the desk and began to crack the code the researchers used to name their test subjects. He discovered the cabinet with the animal feed and tried to train the cat to roll over using bits of kibble. He determined that cats do not like monkey food, but monkeys do like cat food. And dogs will eat anything. He devised an experimental protocol to prove, once and for all, that cats are smarter than dogs. He composed a list of grant-dispensing organizations that might fund such an experiment and another list of journals that might publish the research. After three hours, House recaptured the cat and returned it to its cage. Carefully, carefully, he put the room back in order. Fortunately, the contents of the desk revealed that the Research Room was used by several distinct groups. If anybody noticed a change, it would likely be attributed to another set of scientists. House felt he’d grown lax during his recovery; he’d stopped noticing the little details that once registered without even thinking. Forcing himself to remember the placement of papers, the order of books on a shelf-it was good practice. And you never know when lock-picking will come in handy.
Later that week, House returned Wilson’s pen. His friend took it absently and went back to signing clinic charts. Only when it fell to the floor instead of clipping to his trusty pocket protector did Wilson take a closer look.
“Has Chase been chewing on pen caps again?” Wilson demanded, looking at the mangled pen.
“You should stop buying inferior writing implements,” House suggested. “I know ex-wives don’t come cheap, but you shouldn’t short-change yourself. And always buy American,” he added piously.
Wilson looked at House, the looked at the pen, then looked back at House, unable to suppress a slow smile. “You,” he pointed with the broken pen, “are an agent of destruction!”
Three weeks after he discovered the Research Room, House figured out the naming system. It would have taken much less time, but he had a paraneoplastic patient and a rare progressive aphasia that kept him busy for a while. The mice and the chinchillas were simply numbered-as befits boring animals, House thought; he hadn’t quite forgiven them for taking more than their fair share of hospital budget. The dog didn’t seem to have a name; he was just “the dog.” But the monkeys (Abel and Bubba) and the cats (Jupiter, Kitty, Lil, Mike, Nancy, and Olga) were named alphabetically. In the literature, they would be Monkey B or Feline Subject O, but the researchers-with more fellow-feeling than House generally attributed to researchers-had spun the designations into names. Over the next year, House would spring the cats for some exercise a few nights each week, patients permitting. They ate kibble, he ate Vicodin, a good time was had by all. Cats were a good size: not so small that they could easily escape, but not so large that he couldn’t handle them and still keep his balance. Also, they had the unsurpassed advantage of not being monkeys: House still steered clear of the primates.
Where once he had gone to the roof, now House went to the basement and, gradually, the cats became distinct beings. Nancy was the smartest: House got her to sit on command. Lil was fearless in regards to the yo-yo, which always terrified Mike. Olga was actually male, but either the researchers couldn’t come up with a gender-suitable name or they were just unobservant idiots-House could never make up his mind on that point. He made it a point not to actually meet any of the scientists. Kitty was the mean one (“Hooker get a little rough?” Cuddy had asked when House had shown up at work with a deep scratch over one eye. House just waggled his eyebrows: “Kitty knows I like it rough.”) Jupiter was his favorite-although House was beginning to feel it was wrong to have favorites. (Which was stupid, because they were just, you know, cats!) For one thing, Jupiter was lazy. He was content to snooze on House’s lap while the doctor read journals. For another, he was fat: the hot weight of a sleeping Jupiter was better than a heating pad, though not quite as good as drugs. Also, House’s inveterate snooping had revealed that Jupiter was the odd cat out. PPTH usually housed five research cats at once, replacing them when they died off with a new five. Jupiter was the last of a previous cadre, having outlived all of his research-mates. “You’re living on borrowed time, buddy,” House said every time he hefted Jupiter back into his cage. Because the best part about having pets who were really research subjects was that you could lock them up and the end of the night and leave them to the care of the scientists.
House did not dwell on the fates of Feline Subjects A through I, though he did ask about it once, obliquely, tempting Wilson into the diagnostics lounge for a coffee break. There was something odd about the Research Room and he couldn’t quite put his finger on it and Wilson, being an oncologist, was always good for pharma-gossip.
Wilson looked thoughtful. “I think they’re used to screen drug interference,” he said at last.
“So the, uh, let’s say, the chinchillas are not actually lab rats in the traditional sense?” House tried to look deeply, deeply uninterested.
“Well, they’re not used to develop drugs, if that’s what you mean. Most lab animals aren’t-or shouldn’t be. It’s a waste of time to develop a drug that cures AIDS in chimps; better to develop one specifically for humans and then make sure it doesn’t kill a chimp as a final step before human trials.”
House could sense Wilson getting ready to launch into a lecture; Cameron’s eyes were already developing that hero-worship sheen. He cut them off at the pass: “So, it’s more to see if the effect of drug B on a person who’s already taking drug A?”
“Yeah. Like to determine that you shouldn’t mix Vicodin and corticosteroids, for instance,” Wilson cast a glance at House, but the comment didn’t seem to have registered. House was doing that weird blue-stare-into-middle-distance thing that happened when something had just occurred to him.
“They’re very…quiet.” House said at last. “For chinchillas, that is.”
“What the hell are chinchillas supposed to sound like, anyway?” Foreman burst out. Enough time to sympathize with chinchillas when the people were taken care of. And besides, after working with House for six months, Foreman knew the man rarely talked about what you thought he was talking about.
“No vocal chords,” Chase added, almost to himself, in the silence that followed.
“I beg your pardon?” House said, with the sort of icy calm that Chase would come to recognize as a bad sign.
“Uhm,” Chase looked up from his crossword puzzle, pen still in his mouth, wearing the vaguely distracted expression of a fourth-grader who rarely got called on in class. “The, uh, the research animals? Sometimes-a lot of times, really-their vocal chords are cut. To keep them quiet.”
“Hmm…I know a few people who could do with a bit of that,” House said snidely, to cover the sudden chill sneaking up the back of his neck. He was definitely losing his touch: it had taken him a ridiculously long time to notice that other than the rattling of cages and the squeaking of the mice, the Research Room was too silent. Because the research wing was so empty, because it was the middle of the night, because he was so silent himself these days-talking all the time at work and very rarely outside of it-the quiet had seemed almost natural.
From then on, House spent less time in the Research Room. After all, his department was nearly two years old and beginning to make a name for itself. He had more patients and more consults. Keeping track of the various alliances and spats amongst his fellows was practically a full-time job. And then Cuddy got on her high horse about making up clinic hours…why, a man could hardly call his soul his own! He still thought about it, every now and then. When he did that autopsy on the kid’s cat…the boy, what’shisname, the naphthalene poisoning. And the lesbians with their dog. And Steve McQueen. Wouldn’t you know it: all those years he had avoided getting a pet, giving different excuses to different people-because he wasn’t home enough (Mom), because he couldn’t upgrade on an animal when he inevitably got tired of it (Wilson), because he wasn’t exactly up to taking it for walks (Cuddy)-and the thing he ends up with is practically a chinchilla! It had been the Research Room that provided the idea of infecting Steve McQueen to save Foreman. Because, at the end of the day, there was always a pecking order: who do you love most? who do you need more? Foreman was a patient, and patients out-ranked just about everything else, including rats. But it was just as well that Steve had lived to see another day: House had big plans for PPTH’s next Bring Your Child to Work Day.
House considers all of this after Cuddy heads off to fill out whatever paperwork is needed to discharge Mob Guy and dispose of the pig. He swallows his obligatory post-Cuddy Vicodin and plays with the childproof cap. It had probably been a year since he’d been to the Research Room, maybe more like two. Jupiter was long gone-the researchers had probably been through the alphabet twice since then. The dog may be gone, too. House feels like he should have given the damn dog a name; after all, he has plenty barely-used dog names left over from his childhood. He wonders if those mangy monkeys are still around. He wonders if his key card will still get him in. Foreman has wandered off somewhere, Chase is lying low until Cuddy leaves (Blondie is definitely getting smarter; must be something in the water). Cameron is seated at the conference table, still mulling over Pat Nixon.
House does what he always does when he wants to avoid making a decision: he hauls himself to his feet, grabs his cane, and heads for Wilson’s office. His friend is on the phone, so House drops into a chair and scans the stack of books by the window. Some well-meaning soul once donated a complete set of children’s classics to the Pediatric Oncology ward, not realizing that Peds needed more space, not more junk filling it. The books ended up stacked in Wilson’s office, and House always gets a kick out of seeing Regression Analysis of Remission Rates-Testicular Cancer shelved next to A Little Princess. “Don’t mind me,” he says loudly, having determined that it's an important phone call, “I’ll just amuse myself here at the Dead Kids’ Shelf.” Wilson rolled his eyes and turned away, trying to shield the phone with his body. House scans the shelves until he finds what he wants. It’s not the complete Just-So Stories, but it has all the best ones: ‘The Elephant’s Child,’ ‘The Cat That Walked by Himself,’ ‘How the Leopard Got His Spots.’
“Hear and attend and listen; for this befell and behappened and became and was, O my Best Beloved…” House reads until Wilson, only half-listening to his phone conversation, becomes unnerved at his visitor’s silence.
“What do you want?” Wilson hisses, covering the receiver with one hand.
House looks up, startled out of the story, and in the moment it takes him to recall what he came for, Wilson gets the full force of that freakishly blue gaze.
“I need to borrow a pen,” House says.
Wilson knows there’s more to it, and he also knows he’ll get only the information House feels like giving. Besides, he’s supposed to be on a conference call with the Mayo Clinic, so he just waves at the cup of pens on his desk. House picks through them with exaggerated care before selecting one. He gives Wilson a jaunty wave and heads back out the door. Halfway down the hall, once both Wilson and Cameron are out of sight, he stops to jigger the clip from the pen cap.
Fandom: House, MD
Characters: mostly House, occasional Wilson, some Cuddy, assorted ducklings
Rating: PG-13, or maybe T? (slight language)
A/N: Set around Mob Rules, with flashbacks. Title, epigram, and quote toward the end are all from the Rudyard Kipling's Just-So Stories
The Cat That Walked By Himself
“Then the woman laughed and said, You are the Cat who walks by himself, and all places are alike to you. You are neither a friend nor a servant… Go away and walk by yourself…” ~Rudyard Kipling, The Just-So Stories
“We practically have a barn in the basement,” Chase had told the mob patient’s brother. Not true, of course-Princeton Plainsboro had to special order that pig. Nevertheless, when Chase’s comment gets back to House (and eventually, everything gets back to House), the older doctor feels a flush of almost parental pride. The small blond one is learning the ways of snark and deception. Maybe he isn’t entirely a lost cause.
Cuddy is less pleased. “You’d better hope Mr. Smith-Arnello-whatever-got the joke, House, because I swear to God, if I get one call-one call!-from the Ethical Treatment of Animals people, I’m giving them your name.”
“I’m pretty sure mobsters don’t hang with the PETA crowd,” House replies, “but if anyone calls, send ‘em on over. We’ll have lunch: Reubens for all! I’ll get Wilson to come in his leather shoes. Cameron will wear her fur coat.”
Cameron, true to form, entirely misses the joke. “I don’t have a fur coat.”
“Ahh, my little Pat Nixon,” House coos. Cameron just looks confused: she can’t decide if that’s a compliment or an insult. “What do they teach kids in history classes these days?” he says despairingly to Cuddy, and decides to pretend that she’s rolling her eyes with him, not at him.
Actually, he feels PETA would be pretty disappointed by the Princeton-Plainsboro set-up: no barn, barely even a petting zoo. The PPTH livestock holdings are minor enough to be housed in a single basement room, the “Research Room,” according to the plaque on the door. So minor that House had worked in the hospital for years without knowing about it. Or, rather, he’d always known about the place in theory, being as he made a point of knowing everything. But he had hadn’t actually entered the Research Room until a year after the infarction. By then, Cuddy had found him a job. Wilson had carved room for diagnostics out of the oncology department office space. House had patients, fellows, reasons to get out of bed in the morning. Had everything except Stacy and a fully-functioning right leg.
During those first months back at work, House got into the habit of prowling around the hospital at night. He wandered around to kill time while he was on call or waiting for a test to come through, or just because it didn’t seem worthwhile to go back to his empty apartment for five hours. Walking was good exercise; he enjoyed blowing off the physical therapy regimen and then surprising his self-satisfied doctors by improving anyway. The PTs would cluster around his chart, beginning to doubt their own methods: “And you’re not participating in any other kind of rehabilitation, Mist-uh, Dr. House? No other regular treatment?”
“Nothing out of the ordinary,” House would respond, earnest, mystified. He felt not the least bit guilty for skewing their data: doubt is good for the soul. Besides, walking hurt. The hospital floors were thin laminate over unforgiving concrete: House felt every heavy step reverberate in his jaw. And that was good. He didn’t want to be fooled into thinking he was getting better.
The research wing was deserted at night: long, cold corridors over-bright and gleaming with sterile fluorescent light. House never had to worry about running into anyone. The few swing-shift technicians usually stayed in their labs; the sound of late-night radio call-in shows told him which rooms to avoid. One night, though, just as he reached the end of a long, bare hallway, the doors of the freight elevator rumbled open behind him, followed by the unmistakable squeak of gurney wheels. The idea of making small talk with a bored and lonely lab attendant suddenly seemed impossible; just the thought-how ‘bout them Yankees?-made House feel almost physically sick. He dodged around a corner and nearly tumbled down a half-flight of stairs and into a dead-end loading dock. The gurney rattled by, squeaking down the empty hallway. For lack of anything better to do, House popped the cap off his pills, swallowed two, and started to explore. As per government legislation, each door was labeled in English and Braille: Maintenance, Storage Room A, Storage Room B, Research Room, Equipment Room.
Although the lure of unnamed Equipment was strong, House opted for door number four. After all, a ‘Research Room’ in the research wing was a little too redundant to be nothing: House could spot a euphemism at fifty paces. Surprisingly, when he swiped his hospital key card, there was a faint metallic click, like a bullet dropping into a chamber. He looked approvingly at the card’s magnetized strip. Clearly there were advantages to being a department head...
The room was bigger than House would have thought possible from the outside. The door opened in the middle of one long wall, so he faced a wall of double cages, each one large enough to hold a good-sized desk and containing exactly one cat instead. Against the wall on one side of the door was an actual desk and a lab station. Each end of the oblong room was a large floor-to-ceiling cage: it looked like someone had used chain link fencing to block of the ends of the room. The left-hand cage held a dog, some sort of a retriever. The fencing on the cage to House’s right was clanking ominously, even though it seemed to be empty. Slowly, House let his gaze move upward. In horror movies, this is where the monster jumps out and gets you, he thought, when you’re buried deep in the hospital basement and no one knows where you are and you can’t run. Fortunately, there was no monster, just two rhesus monkeys, lurking at the very top of the enclosure.
Unfortunately, House did not like monkeys. He’d once been unwise enough to mention that fact to Wilson, who had then taunted him mercilessly. Stuffed Curious George dolls and little King Kong figurines had turned up in unlikely and inconvenient places for weeks, until House had exacted appropriate retribution. (Information from Wife No. 2-about Wilson’s habit of matching his boxers to the rest of his outfit-became the linchpin of said retribution, contributing to the downfall of that relationship. Something else for House to not feel guilty about.) It wasn’t that he was really afraid of monkeys, per se. But as any sane person would admit, lower primates are un-nerving. There’s something eerie about their wise-child eyes, the humanoid fingers that House could never really think of as paws. When he was eight, his family had been posted to Panama for a year. The base newspaper, a mimeographed Stars and Stripes knock-off, carried warnings about the spider monkeys that lived in the trees on base. Mothers in particular were advised against leaving infants alone-something about mashed banana baby food luring rabid monkeys through the windows. Somehow being published between badly reprinted American comic strips and coupons from the PX had made the warnings even more sinister. Stupid, but in House’s young memory, the irrational fear of rabid monkeys had mixed with the heat and the startlingly large insects and the badly dubbed Twilight Zone reruns that endlessly looped on Panamanian TV.
There had been dogs, too, House remembered, in Panama and on other bases. Dogs not unlike the scrawny, listless mutt that occupied the cage opposite the monkeys. If that’s what passes for large mammal testing at PPTH, he thought, then the future of American health care is in big trouble. The dog in the cage looked like…“Ranger?” House tried the sound of it. “No-Rover? Rifle? The dog we had in Germany,” he explained to the audience of cats. Counting out loud, he came up with the names of at least seven dogs he’d owned as a kid. Well, not so much owned as inherited: usually they came with the military housing, left behind by previous occupants along with dying houseplants and mismatched crockery. Everything prefabricated, government issue.
As a kid, House had always preferred books about animals to stories with human characters. Kim and Treasure Island were all well and good, but he’d rather have The Just-So Stories and Wind in the Willows, even when he was really too old for them. (An autobiographical detail that Wilson was never, ever going to learn.) In fiction as in life, Greg House was simply not all that interested in the lives and thoughts of other children. Consequently, he was a bit of an expert on the Boy-and-His-Dog genre and quickly adopted each new pet in turn. He remembered moving into a grubby little bungalow in Guam and finding a beagle/terrier mix and a letter from the children of the brevet lieutenant who has just been reassigned. This is our dog, the letter read, careful Palmer-style cursive on pulpy school notebook paper, a rudimentary grasp of punctuation. Her name is Brownie. She likes to eat potatoes. We can not bring her with us Dad says. But please send us a letter to say she is alright. Thank you very much sincerely Claire (8) and Bronwyn (6) Marshall. At the bottom of the page was an APO address on Okinawa. Within a week, House had the dog responding to her new name (Brownie was a dumb, girly name. Like Bronwyn). He didn’t answer the letter: no doubt the little girls had forgotten about Brownie as thoroughly as she had forgotten them. And if not…well, this would teach them a valuable lesson, Greg thought, using one of his father’s favorite phrases. Namely that getting attached to things would just make you more lonely in the end.
Six cats, two monkeys, a dog. So much for a world class teaching and research facility. Oh, but he’d missed the best part: turning back to the door, House noticed for the first time the smaller cages against the wall. Mice, white mice. How cliché could you get? White mice and…rabbits? Nah, too big…had to be…
“Chinchillas! Chinchillas!” House announced to Wilson the next day at lunch, slamming down his tray for emphasis.
“Gehzuntheit,” Wilson offered.
“Oh, very funny.” It took House a minute to navigate both cane and leg around the cafeteria table’s semi-detached benches, but he renewed his complaint once he was settled. “Cuddy says there’s no money in the budget to get furniture-my fellows will be sitting on the floor and filing in cardboard boxes-but she keeps a whole slew of chinchillas in the basement!”
Wilson had heard this argument before, albeit minus the chinchillas. “I don’t think Cuddy would have a problem shelling out for desks and filing cabinets. It was the work order for a chocolate fountain that put you over the edge. Anyway, God knows you have enough junk to furnish three departments…”
“God knows no such thing!” House growled. “And you’re missing the point. Chinchillas! Cuddy is providing shelter and three square a day for rodents?!” House snagged a french fry from his friend’s unguarded tray. “D’ya think this has anything to do with her penchant for dead-beat guys?”
“They’re used for audiology testing,” Wilson explained patiently. “Apparently their hearing range approximates that of humans, or...”-he swiped at House’s hand, missed, and lost another French fry-“some such.”
“Chinchillas.” House shook his head, chomping thoughtfully on the purloined fry. “I mean… Wilson. The mind? Boggles.”
That night House made his way back to the research division with the proper equipment. He’d crashed grand rounds to borrow one of Wilson’s pens and deliberately ‘forgotten’ to return it. Once safely inside the Research Room, he pulled off the pen cap and twisted its pocket clip until the sliver of metal tore loose. Within a minute he’d used it to pick the lock on one of the cat cages. Crap locks for a crap lab. “Meow, meow, meow, meow…” House chanted quietly, thinking the jingle might be soothing to feline ears. He cradled the orange cat to his chest, one hand on his cane, the other holding lock, pick, and pen. He closed the cage door with his head.
For fifteen minutes, House amused himself by watching the cat chase his yo-yo. Then he let it prowl around the Research Room while he rifled the desk and began to crack the code the researchers used to name their test subjects. He discovered the cabinet with the animal feed and tried to train the cat to roll over using bits of kibble. He determined that cats do not like monkey food, but monkeys do like cat food. And dogs will eat anything. He devised an experimental protocol to prove, once and for all, that cats are smarter than dogs. He composed a list of grant-dispensing organizations that might fund such an experiment and another list of journals that might publish the research. After three hours, House recaptured the cat and returned it to its cage. Carefully, carefully, he put the room back in order. Fortunately, the contents of the desk revealed that the Research Room was used by several distinct groups. If anybody noticed a change, it would likely be attributed to another set of scientists. House felt he’d grown lax during his recovery; he’d stopped noticing the little details that once registered without even thinking. Forcing himself to remember the placement of papers, the order of books on a shelf-it was good practice. And you never know when lock-picking will come in handy.
Later that week, House returned Wilson’s pen. His friend took it absently and went back to signing clinic charts. Only when it fell to the floor instead of clipping to his trusty pocket protector did Wilson take a closer look.
“Has Chase been chewing on pen caps again?” Wilson demanded, looking at the mangled pen.
“You should stop buying inferior writing implements,” House suggested. “I know ex-wives don’t come cheap, but you shouldn’t short-change yourself. And always buy American,” he added piously.
Wilson looked at House, the looked at the pen, then looked back at House, unable to suppress a slow smile. “You,” he pointed with the broken pen, “are an agent of destruction!”
Three weeks after he discovered the Research Room, House figured out the naming system. It would have taken much less time, but he had a paraneoplastic patient and a rare progressive aphasia that kept him busy for a while. The mice and the chinchillas were simply numbered-as befits boring animals, House thought; he hadn’t quite forgiven them for taking more than their fair share of hospital budget. The dog didn’t seem to have a name; he was just “the dog.” But the monkeys (Abel and Bubba) and the cats (Jupiter, Kitty, Lil, Mike, Nancy, and Olga) were named alphabetically. In the literature, they would be Monkey B or Feline Subject O, but the researchers-with more fellow-feeling than House generally attributed to researchers-had spun the designations into names. Over the next year, House would spring the cats for some exercise a few nights each week, patients permitting. They ate kibble, he ate Vicodin, a good time was had by all. Cats were a good size: not so small that they could easily escape, but not so large that he couldn’t handle them and still keep his balance. Also, they had the unsurpassed advantage of not being monkeys: House still steered clear of the primates.
Where once he had gone to the roof, now House went to the basement and, gradually, the cats became distinct beings. Nancy was the smartest: House got her to sit on command. Lil was fearless in regards to the yo-yo, which always terrified Mike. Olga was actually male, but either the researchers couldn’t come up with a gender-suitable name or they were just unobservant idiots-House could never make up his mind on that point. He made it a point not to actually meet any of the scientists. Kitty was the mean one (“Hooker get a little rough?” Cuddy had asked when House had shown up at work with a deep scratch over one eye. House just waggled his eyebrows: “Kitty knows I like it rough.”) Jupiter was his favorite-although House was beginning to feel it was wrong to have favorites. (Which was stupid, because they were just, you know, cats!) For one thing, Jupiter was lazy. He was content to snooze on House’s lap while the doctor read journals. For another, he was fat: the hot weight of a sleeping Jupiter was better than a heating pad, though not quite as good as drugs. Also, House’s inveterate snooping had revealed that Jupiter was the odd cat out. PPTH usually housed five research cats at once, replacing them when they died off with a new five. Jupiter was the last of a previous cadre, having outlived all of his research-mates. “You’re living on borrowed time, buddy,” House said every time he hefted Jupiter back into his cage. Because the best part about having pets who were really research subjects was that you could lock them up and the end of the night and leave them to the care of the scientists.
House did not dwell on the fates of Feline Subjects A through I, though he did ask about it once, obliquely, tempting Wilson into the diagnostics lounge for a coffee break. There was something odd about the Research Room and he couldn’t quite put his finger on it and Wilson, being an oncologist, was always good for pharma-gossip.
Wilson looked thoughtful. “I think they’re used to screen drug interference,” he said at last.
“So the, uh, let’s say, the chinchillas are not actually lab rats in the traditional sense?” House tried to look deeply, deeply uninterested.
“Well, they’re not used to develop drugs, if that’s what you mean. Most lab animals aren’t-or shouldn’t be. It’s a waste of time to develop a drug that cures AIDS in chimps; better to develop one specifically for humans and then make sure it doesn’t kill a chimp as a final step before human trials.”
House could sense Wilson getting ready to launch into a lecture; Cameron’s eyes were already developing that hero-worship sheen. He cut them off at the pass: “So, it’s more to see if the effect of drug B on a person who’s already taking drug A?”
“Yeah. Like to determine that you shouldn’t mix Vicodin and corticosteroids, for instance,” Wilson cast a glance at House, but the comment didn’t seem to have registered. House was doing that weird blue-stare-into-middle-distance thing that happened when something had just occurred to him.
“They’re very…quiet.” House said at last. “For chinchillas, that is.”
“What the hell are chinchillas supposed to sound like, anyway?” Foreman burst out. Enough time to sympathize with chinchillas when the people were taken care of. And besides, after working with House for six months, Foreman knew the man rarely talked about what you thought he was talking about.
“No vocal chords,” Chase added, almost to himself, in the silence that followed.
“I beg your pardon?” House said, with the sort of icy calm that Chase would come to recognize as a bad sign.
“Uhm,” Chase looked up from his crossword puzzle, pen still in his mouth, wearing the vaguely distracted expression of a fourth-grader who rarely got called on in class. “The, uh, the research animals? Sometimes-a lot of times, really-their vocal chords are cut. To keep them quiet.”
“Hmm…I know a few people who could do with a bit of that,” House said snidely, to cover the sudden chill sneaking up the back of his neck. He was definitely losing his touch: it had taken him a ridiculously long time to notice that other than the rattling of cages and the squeaking of the mice, the Research Room was too silent. Because the research wing was so empty, because it was the middle of the night, because he was so silent himself these days-talking all the time at work and very rarely outside of it-the quiet had seemed almost natural.
From then on, House spent less time in the Research Room. After all, his department was nearly two years old and beginning to make a name for itself. He had more patients and more consults. Keeping track of the various alliances and spats amongst his fellows was practically a full-time job. And then Cuddy got on her high horse about making up clinic hours…why, a man could hardly call his soul his own! He still thought about it, every now and then. When he did that autopsy on the kid’s cat…the boy, what’shisname, the naphthalene poisoning. And the lesbians with their dog. And Steve McQueen. Wouldn’t you know it: all those years he had avoided getting a pet, giving different excuses to different people-because he wasn’t home enough (Mom), because he couldn’t upgrade on an animal when he inevitably got tired of it (Wilson), because he wasn’t exactly up to taking it for walks (Cuddy)-and the thing he ends up with is practically a chinchilla! It had been the Research Room that provided the idea of infecting Steve McQueen to save Foreman. Because, at the end of the day, there was always a pecking order: who do you love most? who do you need more? Foreman was a patient, and patients out-ranked just about everything else, including rats. But it was just as well that Steve had lived to see another day: House had big plans for PPTH’s next Bring Your Child to Work Day.
House considers all of this after Cuddy heads off to fill out whatever paperwork is needed to discharge Mob Guy and dispose of the pig. He swallows his obligatory post-Cuddy Vicodin and plays with the childproof cap. It had probably been a year since he’d been to the Research Room, maybe more like two. Jupiter was long gone-the researchers had probably been through the alphabet twice since then. The dog may be gone, too. House feels like he should have given the damn dog a name; after all, he has plenty barely-used dog names left over from his childhood. He wonders if those mangy monkeys are still around. He wonders if his key card will still get him in. Foreman has wandered off somewhere, Chase is lying low until Cuddy leaves (Blondie is definitely getting smarter; must be something in the water). Cameron is seated at the conference table, still mulling over Pat Nixon.
House does what he always does when he wants to avoid making a decision: he hauls himself to his feet, grabs his cane, and heads for Wilson’s office. His friend is on the phone, so House drops into a chair and scans the stack of books by the window. Some well-meaning soul once donated a complete set of children’s classics to the Pediatric Oncology ward, not realizing that Peds needed more space, not more junk filling it. The books ended up stacked in Wilson’s office, and House always gets a kick out of seeing Regression Analysis of Remission Rates-Testicular Cancer shelved next to A Little Princess. “Don’t mind me,” he says loudly, having determined that it's an important phone call, “I’ll just amuse myself here at the Dead Kids’ Shelf.” Wilson rolled his eyes and turned away, trying to shield the phone with his body. House scans the shelves until he finds what he wants. It’s not the complete Just-So Stories, but it has all the best ones: ‘The Elephant’s Child,’ ‘The Cat That Walked by Himself,’ ‘How the Leopard Got His Spots.’
“Hear and attend and listen; for this befell and behappened and became and was, O my Best Beloved…” House reads until Wilson, only half-listening to his phone conversation, becomes unnerved at his visitor’s silence.
“What do you want?” Wilson hisses, covering the receiver with one hand.
House looks up, startled out of the story, and in the moment it takes him to recall what he came for, Wilson gets the full force of that freakishly blue gaze.
“I need to borrow a pen,” House says.
Wilson knows there’s more to it, and he also knows he’ll get only the information House feels like giving. Besides, he’s supposed to be on a conference call with the Mayo Clinic, so he just waves at the cup of pens on his desk. House picks through them with exaggerated care before selecting one. He gives Wilson a jaunty wave and heads back out the door. Halfway down the hall, once both Wilson and Cameron are out of sight, he stops to jigger the clip from the pen cap.