jump discontinuity

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Chapter 01: thursday night
Chapter 02: friday morning
Chapter 03: next saturday

---

The initial overtures process in rhythm just as you'd rehearsed for, glinting dryly with only the slightest twist of self-aware irony.

"So...tell me about yourself."

You take a deep breath, but not nearly so sternly and shakily as you might have three years ago. In fact, the correct adscription is swift.

"Two things define me: my astonishing command of situational knowledge and my rigorous commitment to detail in execution."

You cite yourself as a distinguished graduate of a private research university and a professional freelance violinist, moonlights. You indicate that your jagged job history is a feature, not a bug, as you take the opportunity to apply yourself assiduously wherever you can find a challenge fit for the grappling. You round out with your calculated interest in the position at hand.

The interviewer's eyes narrow. He regards you with a down-chin, up-brow gaze. You can hear the air acquainting itself with his teeth like the final, selfishly undesperate occupant of an elevator, breadth-first.

"No. Tell me about you."

The second layer is an address of your escapades in education, incorporating your own nontraditional path as an underlying motivation and culminating in the wistful-yet-incisive observation that your favorite thing to hear from a student, in any register or chorus, is "Can you help me?"

It's a little more personal. It's somewhat more current. It's substantially more true.

"Why are you here?"

You lean in.

"My last serious interview experience, they told me they'd give me the lowest salary, the least responsibilities, and the longest possible probation time. They told me I was the greatest risk, but also the candidate of greatest potential. They were ripping and tearing. I choked. I had an opportunity to be great, so they swore, and I blew it."

You've reeled out this same thread a dozen-odd times, always dispassionate, but not usually with this specific conclusion, even qualified. It burns a little on your palate.

The interviewer shakes his head again, more emphatically this time - almost like a twitch -, and leans forward, chin resting on the candy-cane curve of resined hardwood. It doesn't help your inkling of instability to realize that he wanted the whole history over again, not an isolated anecdote.

"You're not qualified."

Not nearly. Not remotely. Not a pre-dawn hour on 95.

"I wasn't qualified then." The deft reminder hands you the nerve to shrug, if subtly and self-consciously. "But you're interviewing me. I've found that I'm one of those people who just gets hired, once they get me in the room."

(Your last unserious interview was a fireside chat with an impotent principal. Your sample size is dizzyingly small.)

"Okay. Tell me about being a-" he pretends to flip up an imaginary top page on a clipboard, as if the resume lies buried beneath the cover letter professing all of these same keen-eyed platitudes, or else beneath itself, somehow laden "-substitute teacher."

It's the way he wrinkles his nose as he looks back up at you that threatens to take you out of it. The dangled intensity presently flinting glibly away is not just the bait, it's the line. You've gotta get hooked, or you're never gonna have any fun.

Fun? For sure. You skip straight to the good stuff. Forget filling your schedule and making a point to teach every subject, every level, every grade.

"I was a tech assistant. The kids went home for the summer. I bounced."

(Well. A little preamble.)

"I installed myself at the school with the shortest commute." You don't mention getting banned from your backyard building. "I ran coverage. I got names and faces. I got leverage."

Sort of a lie. Not important.

"I was the Elvis of PS-MS, except with only half the hair, height, and gyrations. Kids didn't just get excited to see a sub at the door, they got excited to see the sub."

He's watching you. You have to stay in it. You also have to stay out of it.

"One semester to run the building. One semester to let the curves of competence and curb appeal equalize." You draw them dancing in the air, of course. "But while they still loved me, I wasn't just a warm body supervising small-group testing. I was," you count, "a tutor, a technician, a chaperone, a sounding board, an aide, an interlocutor, an emotional support."

And all of that without any real certification or life experience. All of that without mentioning fresh teenagers with taupe middle parts forgetting your name and calling you their best friend.

Well, well, well. Maybe this is where the hook is going to catch.

His expression is mysteriously and un-principally blank. Maybe he's even disgusted at the unctuous humanity of it all. It really can't matter.

You uncross your legs, cross your arms instead. Lean in. He mirrors you, or already was.

"I love doing miscellaneous all-hands jobs where everybody thanks you for every little thing even though they really, really shouldn't."

The very corner of his mouth twitches - once, then twice. He leans back, bounces the cane.

Another nod from the chin.

"Go again."

You don't even hesitate.

"I've got a cocktail of mental disorders and no health insurance for therapy. I'm not in contact with anyone to whom I'm biologically related. I spend time almost exclusively around retired public school music teachers who just can't put down the horn. I live in an unheated apartment attic."

There's the blank expression again.

"I hate my father. I hate working for men who remind me of my father. I hate stupid principals. And I have chronic anhedonia, so I really don't care if anyone's nice to me anymore."

The next morning, Dr. Dial-a-Derangement has a flash of repartee with his supervisor, who reminds him that he already has four highly qualified and professional doctors in his department.

"Well, that's the problem - I feel outnumbered."

"Why should you need an assistant now, of all times? I'm sure you love playing mind games on candidates, but if you're that bored, there are plenty of residents at our own university who are actually studying medicine and actually want to network for you to skewer."

She trails off into an irresolute mutter, then flicks her eyes back to her insubordinate supplicant. "What's the hook?"

"DEI," he pronounces proudly. "This one's ethnically ambiguous and gender-ambiguous. Twofer."

She raises a tired brow (already, and it's at least comparatively early). "Not a hooker?"

He almost grins. "Not a chance."

---

"You're afraid of being mediocre."

Maybe that is the predictable conclusion to draw about someone who responds to "Any questions?" with confirmations about the dress code and working hours. Not ambitious enough. Not big-picture enough. Not abstract enough.

(But impressively confident about advancing toward those framing logistical concerns, no?)

"I won't deny that," replies Rose. "It's... I could qualify that in any number of ways. Everybody is. It's very easy to be, and it's hard not to. It's scary because it's possible. The median is the largest part of the bell curve. I try to keep my standards high. I love people, but I hate myself."

So maybe everything House says, declares, deduces sounds like an accusation, even when it isn't, necessarily. Rose, apparently, is a pile of heuristics a mile deep that interintuitively weigh the risks of taunting back - is it the fear, the vanity, or the mediocrity itself? Which tendon responds to the pain?

"I'm afraid I can't avoid being mediocre." A statement of correction, not an apology. "I'm trying to find a way to challenge myself that exempts me from that problem."

Boy, somebody really should tell them that they're not special. But it won't be the diagnostician of difference.

"I'll break you," says House, drawing in a breath. "You're not defensive enough. Actually, you're hardly even interesting. Why should I waste my time?"

Rose's brows travel aimlessly to and fro in blithe coordination as he finishes peeling the dead-or-alive skin from his lip with his teeth as a vice.

"I was lambasted, last time, for being all too earnest up until the point where I couldn't handle the heat. Misrepresenting myself, so I was accused. As if anybody asked the direct question, are you afraid, little yuppie, and do you genuinely consider yourself, in your heart of hearts, worth our time?"

Which, it should be noted, House still isn't asking. Instead, Rose seems to have struck at the hidden core: everybody has to choose how to sell themselves, and not every flourish is a falsehood. A smoldering ball of potential has no choice but to have infinite choices.

"You seem willing to consider everything about me because you don't care that it's unprofessional. You're not living," they gesture to the empyrean, "in the professional world. There is no sheen of illustriousness about you. Just like there isn't one about me."

Well, yes. But Rose Redacted is definitely not normal. A sheen of abnormality is what coats all truly great minds. Put another way, you don't often meet regular-smart people standing strange.

"I'm meeting you where you are at every step, so if you're not satisfied, you didn't ask enough questions. You're not flying me across the country. I've got no job to quit. You don't know me. I'm not going to cry."

"That a promise or a challenge?"

"It's an assertion. Best I can do."

"What's your price?"

"Two hundred dollars a day, silver tier IBX, and a SEPTA pass."

"You're cheap."

"I live in an attic."

"What about your axe?"

Rose shrugs with the resistance of an Elgarian four pattern. "What price mediocrity?"

"Okay then." Okay. "HR will want to set you up with an institutional email address."

"Good. Here's my big request: I'll fill out my tax forms with my legal name, and I don't deny that that's me, but I want my username and my badge to say Rose. If I can manage it, nobody will even remember that I ever had a last name."

House shakes his head. "Last name basis around here. My doctors are Foreman, Kutner, Taub, and Thirteen. Oh, don't worry, she's legal."

"I fail to see the problem. Especially since your former doctors both had two first names each."

"You did your research?"

"Some doctor-conductors have poorly-maintained websites that merge the practice, the practicum, and the rehearsal. Plenty of orchestras host out-of-date rosters and group photos. No job posting for a personal assistant ever looks real."

"Least of all this one."

One has to wonder if it ever was real - if it's being realized or becoming unreal, in this fleeting moment.

Rose swallows, rolls his neck. It's idiosyncratic, is what this is. He feels like a consummate actor, a connoisseur of attentions.

And so, he has to seal the deal: "One syllable. My own mononym. We'll be shored up against those nasty little twos."

The tiny, rueful smile coalesces again.

"Tell me about yourself."

"I have perfect pitch. When I see a note I hear it. When I hear a note I see it."

"Piano?"

"Classically trained."

"Jazz?"

"I dream in it."

"What about sex and drugs?"

"Nothing about them. When pressed, a vodka cranberry."

"No rebellion?"

"Other kinds. Now let me save some factoids for the next time you return to that question."

Nice work if you can get it, some say.

---

The patient, twenty-five-year-old female, presents with essential tremors and severe myoclonic dystonia of the neck and restless leg syndrome and syncope and fatigue and loss of appetite and chronic heartburn and, most critically, no health insurance, but what grips House even more than all of that miscellaneous lightweight garbage that can so easily be explained by poor diet and a Vitamin D deficiency, or else a particularly potent cocktail of childhood trauma-fueled anxiety and depression, is the way her eyes are trained down on her agile, fidgety hands like she dares them to start jumping and twitching into the atmosphere too.

She slumps on the table, all the appearance of real fatigue, and doesn't startle when House clicks shut the exam room door so much as reanimate from one shoulder to the other, standing from the waist up until the purposeful shudder casts its ultimate reverberation into the mastoid muscle and her left ear jerks down to meet her shoulder, once twice thrice.

House slaps the chart down on the counter without any real aggression. "Did your dog die, or are you just happy to see me?"

She doesn't react snappily to that either - no breathy laugh, no morose nod. "Sorry," she says instead. "I always seem to shut down when my neck starts going." At the mention, it goes again, another three-count round. "I think I'm faking it too, but eventually it, um...hurts. If I think about stopping it, it just happens again."

And again. And again. Jiggy-ticcing candor aside, the steady, vacant dark-eyed stare of slackened facial muscles in contrast gives nothing to suggest casual drug involvement - nor, of course, prescription, or the withdrawal therefrom. Her ankles are crossed. She's sitting up straight. Either it's a newfangled odorless downer that takes from the heart and gives to the muscles (transactions between big red tendons only, thank you very much), or one of the symptoms is preceding the other.

The badge mounted on the carabiner clipped to the front-right loop of her dark-wash jeans proclaims her a contractor of a local school district. A ring of house keys, car fob, and pony-bead friendship bracelet also feature. A black turtleneck peeks out from beneath an oversized short-sleeve floral button-up. Nails, trimmed neat and round and bare. Converse, appropriately beat-up and cracking at the trim creases. Not unemployed, but also not rich. Not just poor for kicks, but rarely sick.

And she still won't look at him.