what kind of man is that?
His subconscious can handily obscure a certain type of details, if they're packaged the right way.
A restraining order, filed here and five states away? Sure, but at some painfully anonymous urgent care mid-itinerary where he can bust in without even bothering to hang the handicapped placard and stagger to her bedfront so all the nurse practictioners who heard the vein-popping "I'M HER HUSBAND" (he can define himself but not her because maybe it sounds less crazy if you don't claim to possess another human being but instead prostrate yourself unto them so solemnly sworn in a way that defies the sleazy elision of everybody lying and crying and dying) can blink and tense their calves beneath their scrubs and watch warily while he peers into her shifting eyes and wades behind the curtain of jaw-setting anger to find her subtle vulnerabilities, the dark and resigned place where she knows that he knows everything, there's never been a thing that's mattered that he hasn't known, only hasn't done--
In a time and a place like that, one can find a twisted sort of enjoyment in the rhythm of the nightmare. A special vial of denial to ever-so-slowly dispense, one rather subcutaneous to actual awareness. Something very nearly guilt-free.
Dreams don't matter. Empty calories.
Jail is easy, quarantined, almost irrelevant in an ancient patient history. Death's administrative taxes, levied on into the river of the afterlife, are not so trivially flouted.
This time, the dream logic establishes that in the major regional hospital into which he must process to find her, he must furnish his license at the security booth, where it must be fed into a scanner that cross-references a database of convicted sexual predators and also people who are legally DEAD so that no matter how brokenly he bangs his cane against the plexiglas no sympathetic believers will ever come to gawk at the freak who thinks he can solve a tumor with his fingertips based on the way his prints used to mesh with hers when they lay shoulder to shoulder and side to side--
Cuddy, House once thought, has always been a problem of the how, not the why. Not of the heart, but the head. A logistical hurdle.
(Wilson, despite the divorces, is not logistical. Never once, until the c-word.)
He has the information - all of it, universally, stuck into his subatomic modules. She gatekeeps nothing. She feeds it to him.
She's not his conscience. She's just his raw nerve.
Cuddy is the only one who ever makes him want to ignore the truth without substitution, bend the walls instead of the rules to take some impossible shortcut, exert his frustration in a manner completely incongruous to absolutely any logic waking or dreaming.
(Why else would he have said please?)
Medical malpractice? That's a genius doctor taking a long shot because he really is just bluntly disinterested in covering his lab-coated ass if the damages are unavoidable.
Drug addiction? That's a victim of muscle death and parental abuse taking the predictable path because a cocktail of traumas that stiff really does just break you.
Workplace harassment? That's just immaturity. Unfortunately, the hospital check printer is merely a machine and everybody who ever wanted to quit eventually came back.
It's just not those things that drive people area codes away.
Vehicular assault while stone-cold sober? What kind of man is that?
There is no rationale for driving a car through a bay window. Accounting for all the bodies that weren't in proximity does no more than make it okay.
What could it possibly accomplish?
Fifty-three-year-old male presents with delusional yearning as a new symptom of the preexisting condition that is being deaf and blind and mute to the mores of humanity, completely unable to solve the puzzle even divorced of all his senses.
"You want her so bad it makes you look stupid," says Wilson, except that he'd never say that now.
When is a symptom not a symptom? Why, when it's a cause, of course.