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readingrat3. Reading Music
House, entering the conference room, froze. The blinds were lowered, scarves and shawls were draped over the desk lamps, and scented candles on the conference table provided a flickering ambience. Some sort of New Age music, sitars and percussion, provided a backdrop against which a female voice droned, “Empty your minds and open yourselves to the Inner Eye.”
“What the fuck!”
A cup clattered onto a saucer. “You, sir,” said the voice indignantly, “have ruined the aura. I cannot concentrate if any Tom, Dick or Harry can march in here and cloud the Inner Eye.”
A spectre in flowing green robes rose before House, a stick-like apparition with frizzy brown locks and green eyes ridiculously magnified by the ugliest glasses he’d ever seen.
“Sir, I must ask you to leave at once. I can sense that you are not endowed with the Sight; there isn’t the hint of an aura about you. Oh, and please close the door behind you.” The spectre waved a dismissing hand at him.
“Who. Are. You?”
“Sybill Trelawney, Professor of Divination at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft … .”
“And Wizardry.” House took a deep breath.
“Oh, you know Hogwarts?” Myopic eyes peered up at him in approval. “Still, you definitely do not have the Sight, so I must ask you to leave my studio and return to your workplace. With a lot of hard work, it may still be possible to salvage this session.”
“This is my workplace. This is my office and my conference room.”
Trelawney took a step back. “Oh, indeed? Then you must be Dr House. I am so pleased to meet you.” She clasped her bony, ringed hands with delight. “Your young student shows a remarkable aptitude for the art of divination, an aptitude not granted to everyone. And such open-mindedness!”
Chase, seated on the other side of the conference table, gave House a sardonic grin. “The tea leaves say that my oppression shall end shortly and that great opportunities await me once I free myself from the fetters of slavery.”
“Nice!” House growled. “And what do they say about me?”
“Do close that door,” Trelawney repeated. “Let me see.”
She poured tea from a garish green and pink teapot into a cup, held it out to House and said, “Drink, please.”
“Not great at divining irony, is she?” Foreman remarked from the corner of the room where he was seated, ostensibly reading up on rare infections.
House glared at Trelawney, upon which she asked, “You don’t like tea? Never mind. It’s more difficult this way, but it can be done. It’s not a process that I would recommend for beginners, but for a seer of my experience and ability it is possible to read the leaves by proxy.” She drained the cup, swirled it around, drank it, and then decanted the dregs into the saucer. Peering down at the dregs, she tipped the saucer this way and that and mumbled mistily, “Dr House … let me see.”
After a suitably long pause she uttered in a dramatic whisper, “I see disaster: sickness, a long struggle, a gruesome death. Someone will die. Soon! I fear there will be a death soon in these halls.”
“This is a hospital,” Cameron said. “There are bound to be deaths in a hospital.”
Trelawney’s head jerked up. “I fear,” she said with markedly frosty accents, “that the Sight isn’t strong in you either, my dear. You take your tone from your master, and that, let me tell you, is a bad choice. You’d do much better to follow the example of this young man, if you want to cultivate the little aura that you have.”
“Never mind about deaths,” Chase interposed. “What I really need to know is who Markham will fire next. Can you tell me that?”
“Markham from Gastroenterology?” Foreman asked. “Have you got a pool going on that?”
“Sure,” Chase said. “And a pool on which of the surgery rotation students will be the first to faint or upchuck. But the Markham pool is the bigger one. So, Sybill, … ?”
“My dear boy,” Trelawney said with a fond smile. “You still have a lot to learn. Tea leaves can’t tell you anything about absent people. For that, you need a crystal ball. Now where have I got my travelling ball?”
House strode over to the closest window and pulled up the blinds in a few quick moves. Then he tore a scarf off the nearest desk lamp.
“Enough!” he yelled, knocking a few candles off the conference table with his cane.
Chase nearly tipped backwards off his chair in surprise, while Cameron jumped up to extinguish the fallen candles. One of the candles had fallen into the box of files for the archive, setting fire to it. Cameron hastily smothered the flames.
“House, you’ll set the place on fire!” she scolded as she pulled the top files out of the box to assess the damage.
House pulled a face at her. “This isn’t a ren fair. Get back to work, all of you.”
“There’s nothing to do until the test results come in,” Chase grumbled.
“What about those case files that you’re supposed to get ready for the archives?” House asked.
Chase rolled his eyes. “As if you care about those!”
“Get down to those or your liberation from bondage will be sooner than you thought,” House warned him. “And you,” he said, pointing a finger at Trelawney, who was huddled in a corner staring at him fearfully over the top of her glasses. “What are you doing here?”
“P-Professor Dumbledore …,” she stuttered.
“One floor up, tell the security guard that I sent you.”
“ … asked me to bring you these potion ingredients.” She dug around in a voluminous batik handbag, finally drawing out a package wrapped in brown paper. “Let me see.” Adjusting her glasses, she read the label dangling from the package. “Sopophorous beans.”
She laid the package on the table and rummaged in the bag once more, a frown of concentration on her face. In a faint, tired voice she said, “I’m always happy to oblige Professor Dumbledore, who is a wonderful man, a truly great-hearted man, but having to drop everything – my classes, my Divination workshop, my other obligations – to play messenger boy for that man Snape is a severe trial for me. His note asking me to bring him his potions ingredients was not polite, not polite at all!”
She put another package onto the table with a limp hand. “Root of mandrake. If I weren’t so worried about Professor Dumbledore’s health, I’d have refused, refused point-blank, because this is not what someone of my ancestry and credentials, not to mention talents, should have to put up with. Now where is that vial of salamander blood? I’m sure I packed it.”
Her rummaging became more frantic. “I don’t doubt that Potions has its justification as a subject on the curriculum of Hogwarts, but the way that man preens himself! Now I don’t wish to criticise Professor Dumbledore in any way, but I don’t see why Potions should be a mandatory subject while Divination is optional.”
“What is Potions?” Chase, who seemed to be the only one listening to Trelawney’s rant, asked.
“The preparation of tinctures, salves and elixirs that have mind or body altering properties. It’s a skill, but not – ah, there’s the vial! – not an art, like divination. Anyone with a minuscule amount of sense and the ability to read can prepare a potion – oh, no, it isn’t, that’s flobberworm mucus – but it requires true dedication and a certain Something to practice the art of divination, a something that Severus Snape does not possess!” She looked around with the air of someone expecting confirmation or applause.
“Finding anything in that bag of yours also requires a certain something,” House said. “A something that you don’t seem to possess.”
He grabbed the bag. As House raised the bag as high as his arms would reach, Trelawney, hanging on for dear life, was lifted an inch or two off the floor. There was a resounding rip, and then Trelawney was back on the ground, screeching like a banshee and clutching one half of her bag. Any number of objects tumbled out of the torn bag, including a round glass ball that landed on the table with a crack before rolling off it, a wand, a number of vials and packages, and a packet of tea that split open when it hit the table, the tea leaves drifting through the air like confetti. House dropped the half of the bag that remained in his grasp in order to examine the things on the table, while Trelawney crawled under it to retrieve the glass ball.
“Was that really necessary?” Foreman asked while Cameron helped Trelawney to gather her belongings.
“You tore my bag!” Trelawney sniffed. “I hope you’re satisfied!”
House, sorting through the packages and flasks, said carelessly, “I’m sure you can ‘magic’ it together again.”
“Well, yes, but it’s very upsetting, and it unsettles me to have to do mundane tasks that could well be avoided,” Trelawney said with a show of dignity. “You could at least apologise.”
“Oh, poop!” House said, sticking out his tongue.
Trelawney, muttering something about barbarians and people with no finer sensibilities, laid the bag halves on top of each other and picked up her wand.
“Reparo!" she said with a casual flick of her wrist, sniffing offendedly.
The two halves of the bag moved against each other as a silvery green thread fluttered in and out of the seam, tightening as it progressed. Cameron dropped the dish into which she’d been scooping tea leaves, undoing her work of the past three minutes. Chase tipped his chair forward and inched to its edge, his elbows propped onto the table, while Foreman rose from the corner where he’d been sitting all this while and stepped closer. House froze with a vial in each hand. In a minute the bag was in its original state.
The silence in the room could have been cut with a knife.
“There!” Trelawney said, oblivious to the stares of amazement and disbelief to which she was being subjected. “You’ve upset me so much that I chose the wrong colour for the thread. It should have been purple.” Her gaze, magnified through her lenses, was accusing. “It looks awful, doesn’t it?” she asked the stunned fellows in a faint voice.
“I … think it looks lovely,” Cameron said, picking up the bag and examining the seam. “The green thread gives it a special, uh, note.”
“Thank you, dear. Perhaps I was wrong about you; there’s hope for you yet.”
House placed the vials he was holding carefully on the table. “Okay, folks, we have a patient and we have work. Foreman, take these samples to the lab; Chase, start researching these names.” He gestured at the Treatment column on the whiteboard. “Cameron, take this woman and … . What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
Trelawney had taken an image out of one of the files from the archives box and was staring at it with delighted recognition. “That’s a heart, isn’t it?”
“Put it back!” House said.
“Oh, my goodness, that image is so clear! This is wonderful; so much better than reading entrails. Animal entrails will only get you so far, while this … . Oh, dear, not a happy heart.”
“No, Happy Hearts don’t end up in the Diagnostic Department,” House said, reaching out to take the image from her. “Really sick people – and those are the only kind that I treat – tend to be unhappy.”
Trelawney sidestepped with surprising agility and moved over to the window to examine the ultrasound image in the light, putting the table and the whiteboard between herself and House in the process. “See that line? It shows stress; and over here’s self-hatred. That poor woman: so young and yet so wounded!” After a pause: “That heart doesn’t look … good. This shadow – it shouldn’t be here!”
Cameron peered over Trelawney’s shoulder to where her finger traced over the scan. “No; the heart’s damaged.”
Trelawney looked up from the scan at Cameron, all delight wiped off her features. “She died, didn’t she, poor girl! That heart is so badly damaged. Oh you poor thing, having to watch your patients die like that!” She put a commiserating hand on Cameron’s arm.
Cameron glanced at the name on the scan. “Carli? No, she survived. She got a heart transplant. Do you have medical training?”
“Am I a healer? Oh no, no! Healing is a very respectable profession, to be sure, but as you may have noticed, I have special abilities, a gift, you might say. Reading one of your stunning – yes, I admit that this is truly stunning – inner portraits or whatever you call them, is no different from reading other augurs.” Trelawney gazed at the ultrasound image again. “In fact, this is easier, because the reading is direct. Mostly, we seers depend on indirect readings, like the tea leaves, the ball, tarot cards or even entrails, but the accuracy of such readings depends on how strongly the aura of the person or the event that’s to be read can influence the object that we read. Now, the ball or tarot cards are very open to influence, but that’s no comparison to reading the actual object’s heart or even … . I suppose you don’t have a picture of that young woman’s entrails, do you?”
“You mean, like her intestines?” Chase said, wrinkling his nose. “I don’t think so. We did an angio of her legs, though.”
“Legs? I don’t think so,” Trelawney said. She drifted back to the files and selected another one, pulling out a scan and holding it up to the light. This time her moan was ecstatic. “Oh my goodness, are these thoughts?”
She was looking at the scan of a brain.
“It’s a brain, yes,” House said. “As any sixth grader could tell you.”
“It’s art!” Trelawney breathed, but without her customary frail air. “He’s … . Do you have more of these?”
She dug through the file, pulling out more scans and holding them to the light. “Art! He’s seeing things, beautiful things. See those spots there? That’s rhapsody, the mind moving in higher spheres. … No, I’m wrong: he’s hearing them. It’s music, oh my goodness, it’s music!”
“Which of you,” asked House, looking around at his team, “is trying to screw with my head?”
Cameron looked confused, Chase did his, ‘Who, me???’ thing, while Foreman smiled superciliously.
“How are we supposed to be messing with you?” Cameron asked.
House tipped his head towards Trelawney, who was holding about ten scans fanned out in her hand and moving them against the light. “One of you told her about our musical savant,” he said, “and how we made him play the piano on his leg during the brain MRI.”
“Now if I could get them to move, I’d be able to see what he’s hearing,” Trelawney muttered. “Or, if I hung them up in the right order and walked along them?”
“And we’d mess with you because?” Foreman asked House.
House widened his eyes. “Because you can?” he surmised.
“And the torn bag?” Chase asked. “We did that, how exactly?”
“I don’t know – yet. But I’ll find out,” House said in ominous tones, grabbing the offending object and examining it.
“Yeah, because we knew you’d rip it,” Chase said in miffed tones.
Trelawney tapped his shoulder. “May I spellotape these to the window?” She waved the scans at him.
“Actually,” Chase said, “I’m more interested in Markham. Is he going to fire … ?”
“Never mind Markham!” Trelawney said briskly. “This is much more interesting.”
“We’ve got the scans on disc,” Chase offered in an attempt to humour her. “You can look at them on the computer.” He took the disc from the file and inserted it into the computer drive. “In a moment a window will open, and then you can scroll through the scans in one fluid motion like … like a film, you know?”
“What happened to HIPAA and patient confidentiality?” House groused, still turning the bag over and peering at the seam.
Everyone ignored him: Trelawney, watching the scans morph in front of her eyes, with coloured areas appearing, growing and shrinking again, was jiggling up and down on her chair squealing with delight, her thin fingers balled into fists.
“Oh, lovely!” she said with no hint of faintness or frailty in her voice. “Can we do that again?”
Chase obligingly surfed through the scans again and then a third time. “Here, you move the mouse like this,” he instructed, guiding her hand.
“Perhaps we should show these scans in the paediatric ward,” Cameron said as Trelawney zipped through the scans again and again with an air of religious devotion. “Keep the kids busy.”
“Kids have higher demands than this lady,” Foreman pointed out. “Coloured spots on a brain won’t interest them.”
“Where’s the rest?” Trelawney asked, swinging around in the chair.
“The rest?” Chase asked.
“That can’t be all; he’s in the middle of the tune when the pictures end,” Trelawney said.
“We stopped the MRI,” Foreman said shrugging. “We had all the images we needed.”
“You. Stopped. The. Music?” Trelawney asked, stiff with indignation.
“Not the music; we just stopped taking pictures of it,” Chase hastened to explain.
“But … why would you do that? The music is beautiful!”
“Because, my good woman, we don’t do scans in order to listen to music. We do it to diagnose the patient!” House shouted.
“Actually, we did stop the music,” Foreman said to no one in particular. “We did a right hemisphere lobotomy on Patrick.”
Trelawney’s face fell. “That means … I’ll never hear the rest of the tune? It’s so beautiful!” She hummed something under her breath as she turned back to the scan and ran through it again. And yet again, but this time her humming was louder. And again.
“Someone, pull the plug!” House ordered.
“I have to learn the tune off by heart,” Trelawney said. “La-laaa, la-la-la-la-la. Yes, that’s right.” Her voice was thin and reedy, the tune barely recognisable as such. “And down below there’s a ripple like water.” She mimicked a ripple with her hand as she leaned back and sang the tune again, this time louder and with more confidence.
“Very good; now how does it continue?” She peered at the screen, clumsily moving the mouse to scroll ahead through the MRI images.
Foreman looked ready to shoot himself, Cameron tried to hide a smile, Chase grinned openly. Only House looked intrigued.
“Sing that again!” he commanded.
“House!” Foreman said.
House waved a hand at him to shush him. “Sing that again. Please,” he added as an afterthought.
Trelawney stared up at him. “La-laaa, la-la-la-la-la?” she sang. “Like that?”
“Yes. Again!” House said impatiently. “The whole thing this time.”
Trelawney hummed and sang her way through roughly sixteen bars of music, and then stopped. “That’s all there is.”
“It’s enough,” House said. “Is this it?” He whistled the same sixteen bars.
“Yes, excellent!” Trelawney said, as though he was a precocious student. “Very well done!”
“Are we supposed to be impressed by your musical memory?” Foreman asked.
House ignored him. “Anyone recognise the tune?” he asked, looking around expectantly.
“House,” Foreman said with the air of someone practicing extreme forbearance, “even if we did recognise the tune, what would it prove? Only that this eccentric woman knows a tune that we also know, maybe from the radio, maybe from television.”
“I think it’s Beethoven,” House said, frowning.
“So? She can hum Beethoven,” Chase said. “So can I.” He whistled the opening bars of the Ode to Joy.
“No, that’s wrong. That’s not the tune that the young man is playing. Was playing.” Trelawney’s tone was accusatory.
House ignored both of them. “Piano sonata,” he said, tapping the tune on an imaginary piano. “But which one? Chase, get me the programme of Patrick’s last concert.”
“You’re wasting your time,” Foreman said. “And ours.”
Chase rolled his eyes, but moved to the computer. “What was his last name?”
“Obyedkov,” Cameron said, looking at the file.
Chase worked over Trelawney’s shoulder, pulling up a browser window. A few moments later he read aloud, “Mozart: Sonata No. 10 in C-major, Beethoven: Sonata No. 21, Brahms: Three Intermezzi.”
“You think it’s that one?” Cameron asked.
“Pretty sure it is. Chase!”
“Huh?” Chase asked.
“Do I have to spell it out? YouTube. Twenty-one is Waldstein, isn’t it?”
“Wald-what?” Cameron asked.
“Waldstein. Name of Beethoven’s patron. Beethoven dedicated the sonata to him. Let’s hear it.”
Chase pulled YouTube up on the browser and ran a search. “Yeah, it’s Waldstein. Any preference: Barenboim, Rubinstein or Brendel?” he asked.
“Brendel,” House decreed. Foreman rolled his eyes for the umpteenth time.
Pounding bass chords reverberated through the room.
“That … isn’t it,” Cameron said, while Foreman looked smug and Chase disappointed.
House leaned back and scratched his eyebrow. “Beethoven’s right though, and Waldstein rings a bell. … Try the third movement.”
Chase typed some more and then hit the play button. A second later a light, airy tune pearled from the speakers; House grinned triumphantly, Foreman lost his blasé look, and Cameron looked dumbfounded.
It was Trelawney’s reaction, however, that topped it all. She jumped up and down like a bouncy ball, clapping her hands ecstatically and squealing, “Yes! Yes, yes, yes, yes, yeeees! That’s it! Oh my goodness, you’ve found it!”
House leered at Foreman. “Wouldn’t you like a woman to scream that way for you?”
“How’d she do that?” Foreman asked.
House rose with a pained grimace. He took his bottle of Vicodin out and popped two pills, then he said, “That’s what we’re going to find out.”
He went to Trelawney, took the mouse out of her hand, and closed all the windows on the desktop. “Let’s go read some fresh pictures,” he said to her, taking her elbow and guiding her to the door. There, he jerked his head at Foreman. “Come, we’re going to Radiology. Let’s see how good she is at simultaneous translation. Chase, take the samples to the lab.”
“Why me?” Chase protested. “Why don’t I get to go to Radiology? I was the one who discovered her talents.”
“And that makes me suspicious,” House said, “which is why Foreman comes with me while you go to the lab. Cameron!” He pointed to the scans and files scattered around the room. “Tidy up the mess!”
Back to Chapter 2
