this house of desire is built foursquare

Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital, fall of 2007: its diagnostics department, a decadent cult of personality. Those generic enough to be easily manipulated by the department head's mental-acrobatic schemes are swiftly eliminated. Those crafty and singular enough to warp his wake in return are elevated to the end of the evaluation.

The Dean of Medicine weighs in. The oncology department head gives his unexpectedly testy, oppositional consult. The hopefuls answer not just to House but also to his buttressing debtors.

All are free to exemplify themselves throughout the gauntlet of the estimation. All are free, fully-formed, to rise through the static-crackling air.

Some are so powerful that they have to be excluded. Some aspire eventually to rise to the level of House himself.

Not a fellow. Not a colleague. A peer. A partner.

The parts of the hospital that actually do manage to operate efficiently without his interference.

If House believes that a partner should challenge you, then an outside observer might not be remiss in converting the order of terms to establish the alternate proposition that anyone who challenges House is someone he considers a partner.

They say he is difficult. Obstinate. Obsessive. Greedy.

But it's certainly not the greed they speak of in the Bible. One does not acquire such stimulating partners in the mere pursuit of more wealth and more bitches.

Maybe it's not so much as that he has to possess anything he touches, but rather that the flickers of enmity are so rare and special that he'd feel himself a fool ever to let go by the scantest inch.

That's challenges, subtly, habitual, lifetime. He could never and would never accept as his equal someone who ignorantly disagrees with him. In other words, the inverse is plainly true here: that anyone not designated as your partner should not challenge you, because really, who gave them the right?

(Contrapositive, for completeness: anyone who does not so motivate you so should not be your partner.)

In living an independent, self-improving life, one must be inspired to betterment by the people one voluntarily surrounds oneself with. It's in the hierarchy of needs somewhere, and also within the food pyramid stacked on a slithering chain.

If House bares his teeth at Amber and Cuddy, but whimpers at the thought of displeasing Wilson, then House has found his lofty target, his fair share of gumption and his guiding-star goal. House has found something that defies him to get careless and break it.

(Also, he abhors to disappoint Cuddy. He feels distinctly frustrated, later on, at the apprehension of any absent approval from Amber.)

If Amber sing-songs Wilson but looks up to Lisa, and hopes to turn House by the carapace beneath her heel, then Amber is balanced in all heavenly things. She has both outlets and inlets for emotion. Her strength will see her pushing herself forward and pulling others up.

If Lisa courts James while juggling shock collars and waiting for Amber to deify up and overrule her, then Lisa has met all her earthly needs. Three-way insecure oneupsmanship will always leave someone reliable - she thinks, she hopes, she prays.

And if Wilson stands at the lowly top of the tower, exactly flummoxed between giving and receiving, then he will always have somewhere sincere to fall, as he inevitably does. Somewhere, someone will need him. Someone, crucially, who has previously agreed to it as the terminal blow.

Some people plug in their polycules with hinges and multiamorous rules, about who needs what and who loves who and who's entirely disinterested. They say, here's two by two, one of us wants to have a baby, and altogether maybe makes three. They acknowledge the intimately logistical reality of blending and seaming four separate lives. They struggle, perhaps, to romanticize it.

(Somehow they manage to do it without clinic hours and custody agreements. Maybe they want each other that much less. Somehow it is not so difficult to interextricate.)

This, here, the throbbing nervous organ of the entire hospital; it's not four lives, though. It's one. Think of Cuddy's worries to establish herself and permit stability as the scaffold for her undecided home. Think of her manifest dissatisfaction with actual respectability. Think of her desire to stop dissembling and be subsumed.

These are people who stick their tricky hooks in each other. These are people who act and agonize. These are people who can't pick a side and say you're mine, all mine, all mine!

These are agile bodies, every day, performing mutual CPR and purifying each other's blood. These are the bypass machines lined up four in a row, hopelessly invested in the ill health of the body. These are the heels on the floor, the fingers in the fists, the keepers of another system's temperature.

The Escher painting. The infinite dependent logic. The stairs that lead upward only to bow to themselves, to find a confounded excelsior.

Exclusively, they meet to discuss each other. Evidently, their main motivation is not to get away.

These are four individuals built from a construction set wherein each uses as their model the chalk-outline intersection of all the others' parts.

Noble noses. Active eyebrows. Dark-horse features. True-blue eyes.

They look like beautiful people, but oh, they're so much the messier underneath.

What the problem looks like, when Amber actualizes it, is that they cannot possibly go on like this forever.

Someone will get jealous. Someone will balk and freeze.

But being that they all have found no brighter star than in each other, it stands and falls to reason that losing out is the greater jealousy.

They should, by rights, burn up and torch each other. They should decide that they're altogether too strange for it to work.

But that would mean giving themselves up. That would mean razing the foundation.