The Lemon Jell-O Syndrome

by Man Martin

  “Like the alphabet,” Bone suggested.

  “Yes,” Limongello said. “Like the alphabet. Sometimes A’s a letter and sometimes a blood type. Might be a grade on a paper or stand for ‘adultery.’ So we got to be careful before sticking any new messages in the brain. Even a harmless-looking message, if it winds up in the wrong part of the brain—well, blooey.” Limongello’s hands opened and spread, simulating a cloud of smoke and debris. “The brain’s an intricate mechanism. There are some tests I want to do.” He put away the rubber brain and produced a pad and pen. “I need your address and phone number so I can visit you at home. We can dispense with office visits from now on.”

  Bone began writing and asked if Limongello couldn’t get this information from the receptionist, but the doctor said this way was simpler. Bone asked about insurance, but Limongello said, “Don’t worry about it. Like I said, your case really interests me. This may be the key to something major. Say I’m doing it pro bono. It won’t cost you a thing. Besides, you already bought me lunch. And the fish sandwich was delicious.”

  “What do we do if it happens again?” Mary wanted to know. “The doorway thing.”

  “He might try dancing.”

  “What?”

  “Music messages travel entirely different pathways in the brain. There’s been plenty of research to show this. For example, chronic stutterers can communicate clearly when they sing. If this happens again, let’s see if we can’t throw your ol’ brain a curveball. Try dancing through the door instead of walking.”

  “Dancing.”

  “Yes, Professor King. Do you dance?” Limongello struck a playful pose of doing the marimba. “Rumba? Charleston? Cha-cha-cha?”

  “I can square dance,” Bone mumbled numbly.

  “Well, there you go,” Limongello said, his attempt to lift Bone’s mood as effective as a knock-knock joke at a funeral.

  “Anyway,” Bone said, “I don’t expect it will happen again.”

  “Maybe not,” said Limongello. “We’ll hope. But next time you get stuck at a door—if there is a next time—see if you can’t just do-si-do on through.”

  “Good Lord, what a quack!” Bone said in the musty dusk of the parking deck, shaking his head and fumbling his keys from his pocket. “Can you believe his prescription? Dance?”

  Mary stood and considered, elbow resting on the hatchback roof, a cube of daylight pouring between the concrete pylons illuminating half her face and the downy hairs of her forearm like fiber optics. It was one of those times she was so heart-stoppingly beautiful, it made something catch in Bone’s throat.

  “Well, I don’t know,” Mary said. “I think he made a lot of sense.”

  “Really? I think he was a whack job.” Overstating it, but Bone would have said anything to keep her standing the way she was.

  “Well, we can get a second opinion if you want.” An impatient look crossed Mary’s face. Bone beeped the unlock button, and she exited the cube of light into the passenger seat. Bone decided not to get a second opinion. After all, the condition was so bizarre, shouldn’t the diagnosis and treatment be equally bizarre?

  E, e

  From the flag-shaped Semitic he (e), “praise” or “jubilation.” (See hallelujah. Haleil, “praise,” and ya, “Yahweh.”) If the sequence of the Semitic alphabet reflects the progress of Bronze Age civilization, mankind domesticated animals (A), built shelter (B), obtained weapons (C), and then acquired a door for the shelter (D) before getting around to expressing gratitude to a higher power.

  English: From anglisc, after the Angles, the Germanic tribe who invaded Britain in the fifth century, from Angeln, a fishhook-shaped peninsula on the Baltic Sea.

  euphemism: From the Greek eu- “good,” a positive or socially acceptable synonym for a negative or socially unacceptable concept. No one, for example, asking directions to the restroom is looking for a place to rest, nor is the salient feature of a bathroom the bath. What a touching faith in language euphemism shows, as if reality is altered by calling it something soap-scented and white.

  excruciating: Extreme agony. From the Latin ex, “out of,” and crux, “cross.” Literally, the pain of crucifixion.

  The appointment with Dr. Limongello having hogged the morning and eaten up the bigger slice of afternoon, only a leftover scrap of time remained, so Bone went to work early. Miranda Richter, in the office next to his, looked up to say hello when he passed, then cocked her head and narrowed her eyes. “Is something the matter?”

  Of course, something was the matter. Any number of things were very much the matter. And also of course, Bone lied. “No, I’m fine.”

  “You don’t sound like yourself.” Miranda’s girlish face frowned: Shirley Temple playing an oncologist. “Is it, Mary?” A half-beat pause in the banal question, an unexpected comma falling before the nominative “Mary,” a silence so brief only the sharpest sharpened razor could have sliced between, but packed with icy implication. Bone stopped short as if someone had jerked an unseen leash tied to his collar.

  “No, no.” Another lie. “What makes you ask?”

  “Oh, nothing. Just came into my head.” Her voice resumed its accustomed melody, steering clear of the precipice of consequential topics. “You want some Red Zinger?”

  Bone took an armchair catty-corner from her desk His perceptions came in disconnected blots—tea bag plopping in a white mug, steam gurgling from a teapot, Miranda passing a clean spoon—“Well, almost clean,” she amended, retrieving it and picking at a speck of annealed organic matter—a fat, tummy-shaped bowl of sugar packets shoved in his direction. “I ought to use honey or something, but I can’t help it. I just love the taste of sugar!” Giggling the way she did every time she confessed this weakness.

  “What made you ask if it was Mary?” Bone persisted.

  “Why?” Absorbed in examining her sugar-packet inventory. “Is anything wrong?”

  “No, nothing. I’m just curious why you mentioned her.”

  “Well, you know people. How people talk.” Miranda put the mug in his hand, taking the opportunity to search his eyes. Her long, graceful fingers briefly touched his.

  “What people?”

  “Oh, people here. You know.” She waved, indicating unseen tongues swarming overhead. “The truth is, I’ve been worried about you two since the start.” Her voice dropped, and her hand was on his again. “I don’t know if you ever knew this, but the rumor back when you got engaged was that Gordon was seeing Mary—” before Bone could interrupt to say he already knew this, Miranda finished with, “—up until the wedding.” Bone did not know that. “Oh, dear! Oh, my goodness!” With a fat wad of white paper napkins, Miranda daubed the scalding Red Zinger that had spilled onto his crotch, not absorbing it but dispersing it into a broader, fainter, and hopefully less noticeable stain. “I shouldn’t have mentioned it. It was years ago. I don’t even think it’s true.”

  “Seeing her,” Bone said—how could Bone ever speak the word “seeing” again without an inward shudder at its new and horrid connotation?—“up to the wedding. Who said?”

  Miranda stared, weighing whether to speak. It occurred to Bone, not for the first time, how attractive Miranda was, even with her chipped nails and ridiculous pageboy haircut that looked as if it had dropped on her head from the ceiling. Once, he’d nearly asked her out. But the chance had passed. “It was Dr. Gordon. We were planning your wedding shower, and he said his present was not seeing her on the big day so she wouldn’t be late for her own wedding.”

  Blood pounded in Bone’s ears. He sat still, concentrating on holding his teeth together so they wouldn’t chatter. Heavy silence hung in the air. It was Miranda who spoke. “I don’t think anyone took it seriously. He was just being an asshole, trying to be funny. That doesn’t mean I like Gordon.” Bone did not like him, either. “Watch out for Gordon,” Miranda said, raising her mug for a sip. “He was talking to Loundsberry in the copy room, and when I came in, they acted like I’d caught them at something. I
don’t know what he’s planning, but I got the feeling it has to do with the English Department. The look he gave me. Gordon’s up to something, and if the excrement juxtaposes the oscillator, Loundsberry won’t stick up for us. Illegitimi non carborundum.” The last was a joke between them, an ersatz Latin aphorism, “Don’t let the bastards grind you down.”

  “Yes,” Bone said, gulping the last of his tea and rising. “I have to get to class.”

  “Toodle-oo,” she said, her customary farewell. A silly phrase, but Miranda Richter was the sort of person who would have disappointed you if she said anything but “toodle-oo.”

  Teaching Survey Literature that evening did nothing to lift Bone’s spirits. As a child, imagining being a college professor, Bone had envisioned a somber lecture hall with a blackboard bearing indelible ghosts of bygone notes, tall, wavy-glassed windows, the threshold troughed by generations of students. Instead, he taught in a cinder-block dungeon of buzzing fluorescence and white tile floors. An advertisement-covered bulletin board cajoled the viewer to apply for credit cards and cell-phone plans. A smeary dry-erase board stood vigil over all.

  During class Bone heard himself make here an insight, there an observation, his voice flattened and false-sounding, as if broadcast from inside an aquarium. Afterward he wanted nothing more than the familiar ache of home, but before he could flee, Belinda bushwhacked him: eager-to-please, willing-to-learn Belinda, bovine-bosomed Belinda. What madness had once led him to date this loathsome spaniel?

  Not really dated. He’d happened to see her at a bar. Later, she’d told him about a band she was “into,” and he’d gone along. On another occasion, at a poetry reading, he’d taken her hand at an especially fraught passage. All perfectly innocent.

  Well, not entirely innocent. Have we mentioned that Bone was a married man? And that he hadn’t happened to run into her; he’d chosen the time and location because he’d heard Belinda talk about it? And that when he’d held her hand, he’d been secretly hoping for much more? Much, much more?

  Was that why Bone was jealous of Mary, because in his heart he’d given Mary cause to be jealous of him? What was it that really galled him: that Mary might be committing adultery or that, unlike Bone, she might be committing it competently?

  “I finished Madame Bovary?” Belinda said. “And it was great? But maybe it was too perfect? Like maybe the great novels are great because of their mistakes, not in spite of them?” An opinion easily gleaned from any book on Flaubert, which, no doubt, is exactly where Belinda had gleaned it, the better to impress Bone with her startling originality. “Are you teaching Advanced Grammar next semester?” So unused was Bone to an actual question from this quarter that she had to repeat it before he said he was. “Because I was talking to Dr. Gordon? And I was telling him how much I liked your class? And that I wanted to take you next semester?” She stared, expressionless as a dry-erase board. “And he said something that kind of made me think you weren’t going to be here.”

  Dr. Gordon again. The fact that Belinda’s last statement hadn’t come out as a question oddly alarmed Bone and made his heart beat a little faster. “When did you talk to Dr. Gordon?” Bone wiped the dry-erase board. He could talk to her only when he didn’t have to look at her.

  “I work in his office.”

  Mary’s old job.

  “What did he say exactly?”

  “I don’t remember exactly.” She could recite verbatim opinions cribbed from experts, but this she could not remember.

  “Well, I’m definitely teaching fall semester,” Bone assured her.

  “Well, that’s good? Because you’re, like, my favorite teacher?”

  He shaped his mouth into a checkmark-smile and gave it to her. “I appreciate it.” Belinda was back to talking in questions, meaning crisis averted, back to normal. Only things weren’t back to normal. Miranda had said Gordon was “up to something”; did this something have to do with what Belinda had heard? Then there was the matter of Gordon’s seeing Mary up until the wedding. What a new and dreadful weight had been forever lashed to that innocent gerund. Once, during their engagement, after keeping Bone waiting an hour and a half at Macy’s to register for china, Mary had arrived breathless and uncharacteristically full of apologies: she’d been leaving her townhouse, she explained, when an old friend had bumped into her.

  Had she just come from seeing Dr. Gordon?

  Perhaps it was these thoughts that triggered it, but whatever it was, Bone had another bout of his condition at the door of the English building. Bone thought about moving but could not. So much for the immobility episodes not recurring. Now what? Okay, Wonderful Double-Doc Lemon Jell-O has a plan; let’s put ’er into action.

  A square-dance caller in Bone’s head said, “Take your partner by the hand.” Bone reached, and sure enough, he could move as long as it was a dance step. “Bow to your partner, bow to your side.” Bone did. “Take your partner and swing her around.” With that combination of stomping and skipping, which square-dance enthusiasts will say is the very essence of the form, Bone swung around to find himself face to face with an astonished Dr. Loundsberry. Though he had not yet crossed the threshold, Bone’s arms, embracing his invisible partner, fell. His left knee, raised in a high step, also fell, bringing him to rest in a slightly tilted posture that he instantly corrected. Neither he nor Loundsberry found voice for a moment.

  A book on positive thinking had once advised Loundsberry that if someone didn’t have a smile, you should give him one of yours. He’d fought lifelong to put this dictum into action, stretching his lips in an affable grin but never managing to sustain it more than two seconds before drooping into his natural expression of a fugitive harkening to the distant baying of dogs. Then remembering his resolution, he’d pull his lips back for another go at a two-second smile. On this occasion, however, Loundsberry was too surprised even to give Bone one of his fleeting smiles but just looked taken aback and mildly horrified.

  “Professor King,” he said at length.

  “It’s a condition,” Bone said. Loundsberry’s face registered he’d surmised something along those lines. Thus, the full explanation of Bone’s episodic door problem, that the dance Loundsberry had witnessed was not the malady but the treatment thereof, prescribed by a “wonderful” neurologist, poured forth in a rush, a flood of linked and compound clauses, before Bone could plug in a stopper. Throughout Bone’s unburdening, Dr. Loundsberry rose on his toes and lowered to the flats of his feet in a dance of his own, a dance of pensive reflection. “It’s really nothing to worry about,” Bone assured him.

  “Ah,” Dr. Loundsberry said, remembering to pull back his lips to show his yellowing teeth. “Ah. Well.” The smile lasted two seconds before falling back.

  With a shudder of apprehension so powerful it shook his knees, Bone walked to his car.

  F, f

  The Ancient Greek alphabet wrenched down the cap of the Semitic waw (f), “peg,” to resemble our own F, calling the result digamma. The Greeks dropped the letter, but not before the Etruscans picked it up and passed it to Latin, where its sound changed from /w/ to /f/. Greek had another version of waw as well: upsilon (Y), ancestor of U, V, W, and Y.

  factoid: An unlovely neologism from the Latin fact and the Greek -oid, a bastard compounded by universal misuse as “a minor fact.” Logically, the word does not mean “fact” but something that resembles one. An asteroid is not a “small star” but merely resembles it, and a humanoid resembles a human; it is not a dwarf. Genuine factoids include such generally accepted nonsense as domestic violence’s rising during Super Bowls (it decreases), Eskimos having two hundred words for snow (Eskimo per se is not a language, but the Aleut and Inuit have about the same number of words for snow as English), and during the equinox its being uniquely possible to balance an egg on end (it is always possible to balance an egg on end; it merely takes repeated attempts). Add to the examples of factoid above the mistaken definition of factoid as “a minor fact.”

  faith
ful: Full of faith, trustworthy. From the Late Latin fidere, “to trust.” Hence, confidence, fiancé, fidelity. From the Proto Indo-European root bhidh, “believe.”

  false: Untrue. From the Latin fallere, “to deceive,” whence also fail, fall, fault.

  The next morning Bone found Limongello on the front stoop. There was a heavy fog, and Bone indistinctly made out a green sedan, fuzzy-looking in the mist, parked in the driveway. Limongello held a large black valise, a cartoonist’s version of a doctor’s medical kit.

  “What a great coffee cup,” Limongello said. “‘I are a grammar teacher.’ Ha-ha. Love it.” The cup was a gift from Mary, and Bone had always secretly disliked the weak joke, but Limongello’s appreciation made him smile in spite of himself. “I hope I’m not interrupting?”

  The neurologist followed Bone to the back room, set his case on the desk, and surveyed the bookcase Bone had been assembling, nodding thoughtfully like Sir Arthur Evans amid the ruins of Knossos. Here a bracket joined another at an appointed angle, there a baseboard ran perpendicular to a side brace, everywhere lay Styrofoam curlicues and plastic bags of silver screws. Bone had been trying to follow the instructions for putting it together, but with only glimmers of comprehension. For openers came the aptly titled “exploded drawing”: the bookshelf perfectly arranged but detached and floating apart from itself like an expanding universe, Allen screws caroming off into the margins. The written directions, evidently translated by an idiot clerk from demotic Tagalog, were a veritable masterwork of language poetry, with such delectable rhetorical disjunctions as “Turn screw pieces for tighten. If more untighten wanted, turn other way. Over and over!”

  “Any more episodes?” Limongello asked. Bone described the outbreak at the English building, and the doctor clucked his tongue in concern. “I brought some things along to show you,” Limongello said. “Let’s try and see if we can’t isolate this problem of yours.”