Title: Built-In Mechanism
Dec. 1st, 2010 04:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Title: Built-In Mechanism
Author: Hannah Orlove
Fandom: House, MD
Pairing: None
Rating: G
Notes: Companion piece to Left of West. Thanks to
phinnia and
emblem for discussion. Title comes from the R.E.M. song “Hope.”
House learned German at the same time he learned English, and in the same way. He didn’t think about it, how he heard one on the base and he heard the other everywhere else. The first words he learned he used in both, languages switching back and forth; his mother thought it was remarkable, but it annoyed his father he wouldn’t just ask for the milk, but wanted milch instead. He didn’t think about living on the base, either, not until his parents started to pack up the kitchen and they explained to him that they’d be leaving for home in a little while. That, he didn’t understand, because he’d lived in the second-story bedroom for as long as he could remember and as far as he was concerned, that was wire-fenced patch of land where his father flew a flugzeug.
A couple of weeks before they left his mother pointed out the building where he’d been born, and he looked at the huge white block and remembered that the other word for it was krankenhaus.
What he remembered most about Germany were a handful of impressions and images: running around and falling and opening his eyes to see a pair of boots, his mother holding him up to wave at his father as he walked up the path, dragging a stick through a puddle and watching the clouds ripple.
What he didn’t remember, but knew he saw, was how ordinary everyone was there. He didn’t spend all his time on the base – his mother took him with her when she went out if she couldn’t find someone to watch him, which turned out to be most of the time – and he knows that when she did, there wasn’t anyone that looked strange or different. Just ordinary people all around.
-
Home turned out to be Virginia. Not for long, though: they were off again by next winter. He’d thought about breaking his habit of asking for spielsachen and buchen when nobody knew what he wanted but decided to keep it up. The other kids left him alone when he used Deutsch which was what he wanted because it let him play by himself, even if he was over at their house. His father didn’t like to see him spending so much time alone, and explained that to him. Greg didn’t know how to argue back that he liked being lonesome and had more fun when he could make up the whole game himself. So he went to his room and stayed quiet for a while.
In Georgia, he met a girl who liked to flip rocks over to look for bugs, and together they hunted for snails in her mom’s garden. Their mothers became friends, and they didn’t like the idea of a little girl spending time digging around in the dirt for worms. But his mother let them go on because she liked to see Greg playing with someone so much.
He wondered what she would do the first night he spent lying awake in Arizona, thinking how hard it’d be for her to find another girl to play with – she’d complained about that a lot when they’d started hunting together – and the next day caught a toad and thought of her. His mother yelled at him to take it back outside. After he explained the difference between reptiles and amphibians, they went to read together.
There was a handyman on the base that his father called a diyo, and Greg always liked looking at how the sunlight glanced off the man’s plating when he took off his shirt.
-
Even though it was close to Deutschland, what people said in Holland didn’t sound exactly the same. He wasn’t on a base, though: this time it was with his mother’s relatives, and before he went his parents explained that it’d be Greg going alone, just for a few months, and even though they didn’t say why he knew enough to figure it out already. He didn’t need to see something to know it was there.
There wasn’t anyone his age around he could talk to, in English or otherwise, and he liked that just fine. It was the first time he’d lived off a base in an owned house and the novelty of it staying strong those four months. He explored it top to bottom, and spent one afternoon on the kitchen floor underneath the heavy wooden table listening to the radio mumble out long vowels while his grandmother baked, like he knew regular kids did. Or at least, very close to what he knew they were supposed to do. His grandfather took him out to museums and memorials, where they saw old paintings or wing-leather books from the camps, or to parks that were a lot more like fairy-tale forests than the scraggly lawns with a few trees back home, where he was lucky enough to see a lynx when they stayed late into the evening. Greg tried to ration his books and read them slowly but ran out in the first month, so they all went to the shops and library to try to find ones in English.
The July second Independence Day celebration was the highlight of the summer, all the fireworks and flags, just like back home but two days early. No one came to visit until he got picked up at the end of August.
-
There was a school on the base in Egypt, the first one he’d ever attended. He was used to his mother, typically in a kitchen that looked the same no matter where they were, giving him lessons, and if they were lucky, maybe take him off-base to learn music somewhere else. There wasn’t a good way to pack a piano into a suitcase, she’d joked once, and that had gotten him so angry in some way he hadn’t understood he’d locked himself up in his room for the rest of the night. Sitting in a classroom with a bunch of kids his own age wasn’t something he was used to. They just couldn’t take the hint he didn’t want to talk to them during recess or that if he was already talking to the one other kid who also found the math way too easy he didn’t want to talk to anyone else.
The few days everyone’s father was gone, everyone kept to themselves, very quiet and almost peaceful; when most of the fathers came back, there was fanfare like Greg had never seen.
When his friend had to leave for Korea, he hugged Greg and said he’d miss him and that he could have his bike if he wanted. He taught himself to ride it and used it to get to the far side of the base and try to find African birds nesting in the hangers, and off the base to try to find tombs. He didn’t find any, but one of his dad’s friends who happened to be on-base got him a book on how to do it properly for a birthday gift.
He biked around town a couple of times. Even though he couldn’t read the newspapers, he could read the people, who told him plenty.
-
When he got back home, to Maryland, he stayed in schools and had more fun playing with the classroom’s turtles than listening to the droning. In an ideal world, the teacher would have picked up on that, talked to the principal, and then gotten him into a higher grade because he was bored. Actually, she told his dad he wasn’t behaving or paying attention at a parent-teacher conference, which led to an increased number of lectures on proper conduct and behavior and threats about the future. It was kind of strange how the longer the colonel went on the easier it was to tune him out, and just start nodding when he was wrapping things up.
In South Carolina, there weren’t any turtles but a lot of books on the shelves in the back, and this time the teacher was nice enough to let him read when he was done with his work. He still got into fights – some people just didn’t learn any other way. The other kid’s baby-cat claws ripped a piece off the side of his nose, but Greg got back with a well-aimed punch that left him with a black eye. They were both suspended for two weeks and he got to catch up on his homework while weathering both his parents’ disapproval. It was worth it in the end: nobody messed with him when he got back, or bothered him about being too tall or too smart or for enjoying being alone.
For a change, his father took him off-base in Kentucky for a House family reunion that summer, and everyone smiled at the chance to meet the infamous Greg for the first time. He held himself back from smiling, trying to understand why he felt so alienated from people he was supposed to like.
-
Euskadi’s devil dowry didn’t exactly rhyme, but it was the phrase everyone used when they talked about the tiny country, even on the base, even his mother. It wasn’t a clean history of independence, not like Holland had – just being given it from France was different from a bargain made with fascists who wanted a loyal foothold in the region – but the Basques were proud of it. It might not be clean or good or even terribly moral, but it was theirs, and they couldn’t change it so they might as well make their bed comfortable.
Greg finally understood that his first summer there, when he confronted his dad – not his father, he knew that now – with what he’d figured out. There’s no way you can say those things and be my son were the last words he heard from the man until September. He spent most of that summer swimming with kids whose skin never wrinkled and could hold their breath for over a quarter of an hour that let him tag along when they helped their parents catch their namesake and country’s national dish. The notes he got under the door he ripped up without reading. At the end of the summer, he could feel the effort spent in keeping things going the way they had less than six months ago.
His mother told him the same things as his dad, but in more words and more carefully, trying to protect him from what he’d figured out he’d known already. He didn’t listen to either of them; everybody lied when they got the chance. After all, not many people got the opportunity to live out a fairy tale. Pretending and playing always made things better, and there was no reason for Greg or his dad to stop now.
-
There was one museum a friend took him to in Iwakuni, where he learned about the great woman poets who wrote about cranes and love notes to their husbands with their own ink. There was a manga about one who worked as a superhero in Tokyo – or maybe she was a secretary, he couldn’t really tell – that Greg didn’t understand at first but gobbled down anyway; American comics that were always a month late at best never had such great chase scenes. Even though he could probably trade the late comics for current manga the way he traded for weird candies – barter, the universal language understood by teenagers everywhere – he read them at the newsstand where all the adults were too polite to tell the too-tall too-pale gaijin to buzz off because this wasn’t a library. What pocket change he had to spend wasn’t going to something he’d have to hide from his dad or get rid of in a couple of years anyway. The number of things he’d been forced to leave behind at new moves had gotten smaller as he’d learned the tricks of his family’s trade. Some things were easier to grasp and accept, or at least deal with, than others. Of course, that all depended on the person.
Everyone in Japan knew who they were, where their position was in society, and why. At least, that’s what he’d thought until he went rock climbing and found someone who hadn’t gotten the memo. It’d be romanticizing the revelation if he ever said he knew exactly what he wanted to do with his life as soon as he saw the buraku command the respect he’d earned, rather than what he’d been given, but it’d also be true. If it hadn’t been, then it wouldn’t have been a revelation.
-
Guam was full of tourists too lazy to get passports and movie crews desperate to get the feel of exotic locales without leaving the country. House made himself tolerable to the rest of the guys on base only to the degree they didn’t hiss at him to get away if he tagged along when they scraped together a ride to somewhere else on the island. They made jokes about riding in the trunk to a movie theater and then peeking out over fences to see the star in her latest period piece, jokes that kept evolving and no one else understood. Military was its own language with special lingo that was tricky to learn if you hadn’t grown up with it; what it meant to be a brat was something everyone in the car ride knew intimately, born rather than married into the term, and to complicate matters just that much more none of them spoke the exact same dialect. Even if he’d hung out with one guy in Egypt and had known a couple others over in Virginia and Maryland, they hadn’t followed along with him to Euskadi and Japan, and he hadn’t gone over to the USSR and Panama.
California was a little better: out on the edge of the continent rather than a faraway island annexed before the Second World War ended, he knew he didn’t have to board a plane to get to college, or anywhere else, if he didn’t want to. He’d promised himself he’d settle down somewhere when he was old enough and not have to move ever again unless he wanted to, which he wouldn’t. He knew were strange and different people all over the world, and that he didn’t need to keep on moving around if he wanted to meet them someday.
Author: Hannah Orlove
Fandom: House, MD
Pairing: None
Rating: G
Notes: Companion piece to Left of West. Thanks to
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
House learned German at the same time he learned English, and in the same way. He didn’t think about it, how he heard one on the base and he heard the other everywhere else. The first words he learned he used in both, languages switching back and forth; his mother thought it was remarkable, but it annoyed his father he wouldn’t just ask for the milk, but wanted milch instead. He didn’t think about living on the base, either, not until his parents started to pack up the kitchen and they explained to him that they’d be leaving for home in a little while. That, he didn’t understand, because he’d lived in the second-story bedroom for as long as he could remember and as far as he was concerned, that was wire-fenced patch of land where his father flew a flugzeug.
A couple of weeks before they left his mother pointed out the building where he’d been born, and he looked at the huge white block and remembered that the other word for it was krankenhaus.
What he remembered most about Germany were a handful of impressions and images: running around and falling and opening his eyes to see a pair of boots, his mother holding him up to wave at his father as he walked up the path, dragging a stick through a puddle and watching the clouds ripple.
What he didn’t remember, but knew he saw, was how ordinary everyone was there. He didn’t spend all his time on the base – his mother took him with her when she went out if she couldn’t find someone to watch him, which turned out to be most of the time – and he knows that when she did, there wasn’t anyone that looked strange or different. Just ordinary people all around.
-
Home turned out to be Virginia. Not for long, though: they were off again by next winter. He’d thought about breaking his habit of asking for spielsachen and buchen when nobody knew what he wanted but decided to keep it up. The other kids left him alone when he used Deutsch which was what he wanted because it let him play by himself, even if he was over at their house. His father didn’t like to see him spending so much time alone, and explained that to him. Greg didn’t know how to argue back that he liked being lonesome and had more fun when he could make up the whole game himself. So he went to his room and stayed quiet for a while.
In Georgia, he met a girl who liked to flip rocks over to look for bugs, and together they hunted for snails in her mom’s garden. Their mothers became friends, and they didn’t like the idea of a little girl spending time digging around in the dirt for worms. But his mother let them go on because she liked to see Greg playing with someone so much.
He wondered what she would do the first night he spent lying awake in Arizona, thinking how hard it’d be for her to find another girl to play with – she’d complained about that a lot when they’d started hunting together – and the next day caught a toad and thought of her. His mother yelled at him to take it back outside. After he explained the difference between reptiles and amphibians, they went to read together.
There was a handyman on the base that his father called a diyo, and Greg always liked looking at how the sunlight glanced off the man’s plating when he took off his shirt.
-
Even though it was close to Deutschland, what people said in Holland didn’t sound exactly the same. He wasn’t on a base, though: this time it was with his mother’s relatives, and before he went his parents explained that it’d be Greg going alone, just for a few months, and even though they didn’t say why he knew enough to figure it out already. He didn’t need to see something to know it was there.
There wasn’t anyone his age around he could talk to, in English or otherwise, and he liked that just fine. It was the first time he’d lived off a base in an owned house and the novelty of it staying strong those four months. He explored it top to bottom, and spent one afternoon on the kitchen floor underneath the heavy wooden table listening to the radio mumble out long vowels while his grandmother baked, like he knew regular kids did. Or at least, very close to what he knew they were supposed to do. His grandfather took him out to museums and memorials, where they saw old paintings or wing-leather books from the camps, or to parks that were a lot more like fairy-tale forests than the scraggly lawns with a few trees back home, where he was lucky enough to see a lynx when they stayed late into the evening. Greg tried to ration his books and read them slowly but ran out in the first month, so they all went to the shops and library to try to find ones in English.
The July second Independence Day celebration was the highlight of the summer, all the fireworks and flags, just like back home but two days early. No one came to visit until he got picked up at the end of August.
-
There was a school on the base in Egypt, the first one he’d ever attended. He was used to his mother, typically in a kitchen that looked the same no matter where they were, giving him lessons, and if they were lucky, maybe take him off-base to learn music somewhere else. There wasn’t a good way to pack a piano into a suitcase, she’d joked once, and that had gotten him so angry in some way he hadn’t understood he’d locked himself up in his room for the rest of the night. Sitting in a classroom with a bunch of kids his own age wasn’t something he was used to. They just couldn’t take the hint he didn’t want to talk to them during recess or that if he was already talking to the one other kid who also found the math way too easy he didn’t want to talk to anyone else.
The few days everyone’s father was gone, everyone kept to themselves, very quiet and almost peaceful; when most of the fathers came back, there was fanfare like Greg had never seen.
When his friend had to leave for Korea, he hugged Greg and said he’d miss him and that he could have his bike if he wanted. He taught himself to ride it and used it to get to the far side of the base and try to find African birds nesting in the hangers, and off the base to try to find tombs. He didn’t find any, but one of his dad’s friends who happened to be on-base got him a book on how to do it properly for a birthday gift.
He biked around town a couple of times. Even though he couldn’t read the newspapers, he could read the people, who told him plenty.
-
When he got back home, to Maryland, he stayed in schools and had more fun playing with the classroom’s turtles than listening to the droning. In an ideal world, the teacher would have picked up on that, talked to the principal, and then gotten him into a higher grade because he was bored. Actually, she told his dad he wasn’t behaving or paying attention at a parent-teacher conference, which led to an increased number of lectures on proper conduct and behavior and threats about the future. It was kind of strange how the longer the colonel went on the easier it was to tune him out, and just start nodding when he was wrapping things up.
In South Carolina, there weren’t any turtles but a lot of books on the shelves in the back, and this time the teacher was nice enough to let him read when he was done with his work. He still got into fights – some people just didn’t learn any other way. The other kid’s baby-cat claws ripped a piece off the side of his nose, but Greg got back with a well-aimed punch that left him with a black eye. They were both suspended for two weeks and he got to catch up on his homework while weathering both his parents’ disapproval. It was worth it in the end: nobody messed with him when he got back, or bothered him about being too tall or too smart or for enjoying being alone.
For a change, his father took him off-base in Kentucky for a House family reunion that summer, and everyone smiled at the chance to meet the infamous Greg for the first time. He held himself back from smiling, trying to understand why he felt so alienated from people he was supposed to like.
-
Euskadi’s devil dowry didn’t exactly rhyme, but it was the phrase everyone used when they talked about the tiny country, even on the base, even his mother. It wasn’t a clean history of independence, not like Holland had – just being given it from France was different from a bargain made with fascists who wanted a loyal foothold in the region – but the Basques were proud of it. It might not be clean or good or even terribly moral, but it was theirs, and they couldn’t change it so they might as well make their bed comfortable.
Greg finally understood that his first summer there, when he confronted his dad – not his father, he knew that now – with what he’d figured out. There’s no way you can say those things and be my son were the last words he heard from the man until September. He spent most of that summer swimming with kids whose skin never wrinkled and could hold their breath for over a quarter of an hour that let him tag along when they helped their parents catch their namesake and country’s national dish. The notes he got under the door he ripped up without reading. At the end of the summer, he could feel the effort spent in keeping things going the way they had less than six months ago.
His mother told him the same things as his dad, but in more words and more carefully, trying to protect him from what he’d figured out he’d known already. He didn’t listen to either of them; everybody lied when they got the chance. After all, not many people got the opportunity to live out a fairy tale. Pretending and playing always made things better, and there was no reason for Greg or his dad to stop now.
-
There was one museum a friend took him to in Iwakuni, where he learned about the great woman poets who wrote about cranes and love notes to their husbands with their own ink. There was a manga about one who worked as a superhero in Tokyo – or maybe she was a secretary, he couldn’t really tell – that Greg didn’t understand at first but gobbled down anyway; American comics that were always a month late at best never had such great chase scenes. Even though he could probably trade the late comics for current manga the way he traded for weird candies – barter, the universal language understood by teenagers everywhere – he read them at the newsstand where all the adults were too polite to tell the too-tall too-pale gaijin to buzz off because this wasn’t a library. What pocket change he had to spend wasn’t going to something he’d have to hide from his dad or get rid of in a couple of years anyway. The number of things he’d been forced to leave behind at new moves had gotten smaller as he’d learned the tricks of his family’s trade. Some things were easier to grasp and accept, or at least deal with, than others. Of course, that all depended on the person.
Everyone in Japan knew who they were, where their position was in society, and why. At least, that’s what he’d thought until he went rock climbing and found someone who hadn’t gotten the memo. It’d be romanticizing the revelation if he ever said he knew exactly what he wanted to do with his life as soon as he saw the buraku command the respect he’d earned, rather than what he’d been given, but it’d also be true. If it hadn’t been, then it wouldn’t have been a revelation.
-
Guam was full of tourists too lazy to get passports and movie crews desperate to get the feel of exotic locales without leaving the country. House made himself tolerable to the rest of the guys on base only to the degree they didn’t hiss at him to get away if he tagged along when they scraped together a ride to somewhere else on the island. They made jokes about riding in the trunk to a movie theater and then peeking out over fences to see the star in her latest period piece, jokes that kept evolving and no one else understood. Military was its own language with special lingo that was tricky to learn if you hadn’t grown up with it; what it meant to be a brat was something everyone in the car ride knew intimately, born rather than married into the term, and to complicate matters just that much more none of them spoke the exact same dialect. Even if he’d hung out with one guy in Egypt and had known a couple others over in Virginia and Maryland, they hadn’t followed along with him to Euskadi and Japan, and he hadn’t gone over to the USSR and Panama.
California was a little better: out on the edge of the continent rather than a faraway island annexed before the Second World War ended, he knew he didn’t have to board a plane to get to college, or anywhere else, if he didn’t want to. He’d promised himself he’d settle down somewhere when he was old enough and not have to move ever again unless he wanted to, which he wouldn’t. He knew were strange and different people all over the world, and that he didn’t need to keep on moving around if he wanted to meet them someday.