The Lemon Jell-O Syndrome

by Man Martin

  “I don’t decide when my condition strikes,” Bone said. “It hits when it hits.”

  “And what you said to Father Pepys. Jesus. Did you actually say Christians are cretins?”

  “No. No. It was the other way around. It was the other way around.”

  J, j

  Originally a variant style of I, J did not appear as a letter in its own right until sixth-century Spain, where it was pronounced as /h/, as in junto. English adoption was spotty and sporadic; Noah Webster’s Dictionary of the English Language (1806) included all twenty-six letters, but on the other side of the Atlantic, the J-less alphabet had prominent defenders for another fifty years.

  jealous: From the Middle English jelos, from the Latin zelus, from the Greek zelos, “zeal.”

  Jehovah: One of the variant pronunciations, along with Yahweh, of the tetragrammaton (יהוה‎), the ineffable name of God. Perhaps designedly, the word’s etymology is as obscure as its pronunciation, possibly derived from a Western Semitic root meaning “to bring into existence” but with equal likelihood coming from a southern Semitic root, “to destroy or bring low.” Many scholars argue it means simply “to be,” an explanation supported by God’s impatient retort when asked his name by Moses, “I am that I am… Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I am hath sent me unto you” (Exodus 3:14).

  Jupiter: The Roman god takes his name from the Greek god Zeus and the epithet “father,” as in “Father of the Gods.” Zeus and pater –› zeupater –› Jupiter.

  Monday morning, Mary brought Bone his coffee, signaling that the breach was healed again. Later, Limongello called. “There’s an exhibit at the Fernbank Museum I’d like to show you. Can you make it out?” Bone said he could, and just before he pressed the button to hang up, Limongello added, “And bring the questionnaire.”

  As Bone pulled into the parking lot, he saw the doctor, incongruously dressed in shorts and red polo shirt, leaning against his green sedan. Limongello greeted him with his usual carpal-crushing handshake. “You’re here. And you’ve got the questionnaire. I knew I could count on you.” Bone glimpsed inside the doctor’s car, the floorboard full of wadded clothes and empty Taco Veloz bags. “You like games, right? Want to play a little game today?”

  “Sure,” Bone said uncertainly.

  They walked up the circular drive, shimmering in the sunlight, to the museum. Fourth graders were being herded from a school bus by a pretty but no-nonsense-looking teacher who surveyed her students, the bus, and everything in the world with the sharp-eyed vigilance of a mother eagle.

  Limongello called it “The Compliment Game.” The rule was they had to take turns paying compliments to people. “Say anything you want,” Limongello explained, “as long as it’s flattering and true. I’ll go first.

  “How wonderful bringing your class here,” Limongello told the teacher as he and Bone mounted the steps. Limongello spread his arms as if she’d brought them not only to the museum but to Planet Earth. “Must be a lot of work arranging this. You must be a wonderful teacher.”

  The teacher, who, although she looked very much in control, must have often found it taxing being pretty, no-nonsense, and eagle-eyed all at the same time, said nothing but smiled, keeping her vigil and lifting her arms to make little summoning movements in the air with her fingers at the fourth graders.

  As they went into the main gallery, Limongello said, “I love this place. Look down.” The stone tiles were etched with sea creatures. “Fossil rock,” Limongello said. “The floor is tiled with it. Look, there’s a trilobite, and there’s an ammonite. There’s another. Oh, it’s fascinating.” Limongello put his hand on Bone’s shoulder. “I’ve got some thoughts about your condition, but first—” Limongello picked up something in Bone’s expression and asked, “Oh, no, is something wrong? Is something new wrong?”

  “Mary kissed Cash.” They passed through a swarm of fourth graders, or a swarm of fourth graders passed through them, and Bone lowered his voice. “She told me about it. We had a big talk the other night and straightened everything out.”

  “That’s good, right?”

  “It’s wonderful. Things have never been better between us. Only now,” Bone laughed, rubbing the back of his neck, “only now I’m not sure I believe that. I think maybe she might have lied about it just to get me off her back. It’s crazy as hell, but I feel like a wreck. And then I had another episode at the church.”

  “I understand,” Limongello said with a solemn sigh. “Your hypothalamus doesn’t know how to respond. If this is good news, that is to say, bad—Mary kissed the neighbor, but now you know about it—it needs to excrete oxytocin and dopamine, but if it’s bad news—that is to say, good—Mary did not kiss the neighbor but said she did—it needs to excrete noradrenaline, so your body’s excreting both at once, making you a basket case, like driving with your foot on the gas and the brakes at the same time.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Humph.” Limongello stared over Bone’s shoulder, contemplating this conundrum.

  “But you wanted to see my questionnaire,” Bone said.

  “Right, right,” Limongello said. The doctor patted his pockets. “You know, I left the house without any money. Do you mind getting the tickets? I’ll sit here and read this.” Limongello planted himself on a padded bench next to the wall. “And Bone, Bone.” Bone turned. “It’s your turn.” Limongello pointed the questionnaire like a baton at the man in the glass ticket booth.

  Trying to think of a compliment, Bone handed over his credit card. As he accepted the two cardboard slips, he said, “That’s some tie.”

  The ticket seller grinned and lifted it from his shirt. “Yeah, my wife gave it to me.” In truth, the tie was a masterpiece of tackiness; it looked as if it had been made from cut-up Hawaiian shirts. “It’s watered silk,” the ticket seller said, and he and Bone admired it again before Bone brought the tickets to Limongello, unaccountably giddy.

  “I did it,” Bone whispered, sitting beside Limongello and handing him a ticket.

  Limongello looked up and smiled, then returned to reading the survey, from time to time nodding, grinning, and quietly grunting. Bone, having nothing else to do, waited. The fourth graders and their teacher, who already had tickets, filed into the main gallery past another museum worker.

  “You probably wonder what all this has to do with getting through doors, don’t you?” Limongello murmured, not raising his eyes. Finding something interesting, he elbowed Bone’s solar plexus and pointed at one of the responses, as if Bone himself hadn’t written it. “You say here that you sometimes feel as if you were a character in a book,” Limongello said. “That’s very interesting.” He fixed Bone with a glittering eye. “Y told his wife he sometimes felt he was a character in a TV show.” Bone felt his eyes widen. “So you see we’re dealing with basically identical symptoms here. Well, let’s go in and take a look at this museum,” Limongello said, standing up.

  As they presented their tickets, Limongello told the lady at the turnstile, “You know, you just have a beautiful smile.” The lady with the beautiful smile beamed, and Limongello and Bone entered the main atrium, which featured a complete tyrannosaur skeleton next to a spiral staircase leading to the mezzanine. Limongello continued sotto voce, “You know, when your transmission falls out, it doesn’t do it all at once. There are signs, signals, if you know what to look for. A funny noise. Your car hesitates and surges. Next thing you know, wham!” He clapped. “Transmission’s on the asphalt, and you’re stuck on the highway gaping like a gaffed fish. Same thing with what we got here.

  “As I reconstruct it, this syndrome of yours has three phases. First, you see other people or even yourself as not being real, like you’re a character in a book or a TV show. This is accompanied by inappropriate emotional responses: feeling good when you have every reason to feel bad, and vice versa. I call this Psychological Dislodgement. In the second phase, the mind or soul, or whatever, the self, suffers intermittent loss of motor c
ontrol. Your self simply loses the power to command the body to do things. For example, you find yourself unable to get out of bed or walk through the door. I call this Neuro-Physical Dislodgement. Last comes Complete Radical Self Dislodgement. The self dislodges completely, and next thing you know, there is no next thing you know. The person who used to be you is dipping toast into a fried egg in another town somewhere with no memory of being you, and if the self that remembers being you exists at all, no one has any idea where it went or where to look for it.

  “Of course, each case has its own distinct flavor.” Limongello eyed Bone narrowly, seeming to make up his mind. “Yes, I suppose I can tell you,” he said judiciously. “One of the more disturbing features of dislodgement is it seems to be contagious. Oh, not like germs,” Limongello said, reading Bone’s incredulous expression. “Nevertheless, it travels from person to person. I’m not sure why this is. Maybe if you live with someone who’s dislodged, you start to dislodge yourself, or maybe if you view others as not quite real, that’s what they become. Not quite real.”

  Limongello took Bone’s elbow and spoke in confidential tones. “I’ve been making a careful study of Y’s wife, and I’m convinced she’s thoroughly dislodged as well, maybe more hopelessly than Y himself, but the syndrome is camouflaged by her particular symptoms. It seems years ago, she started saying, ‘okely-dokely,’ something she’d picked up from TV. Not especially funny, but she seemed to think it was and said it every chance she got. ‘Okely-dokely, okely-dokely.’ It was her thing. Also, she was very political and picked up catchphrases from commentators and people who think like she does, all about the economy, the war, or whatever, and when she met people with the opposite opinion, she got very impatient—but also kind of excited, right?—like having people to argue with is what makes having strong opinions worthwhile—and around people who think like her, she felt satisfied—but also kind of bored, because what’s the point if everyone thinks the same way?—and she had these certain jokes and punch lines she liked to use, and some funny voices she liked to imitate from TV or somewhere, I guess, until finally there is nothing else left. Her self is completely gone. Oh, she’s still walking and talking and functioning, no one suspects, but her self has been replaced by political rants, pet punch lines, and ‘okely-dokely.’ Her self is gone.”

  “Are you sure?” Bone said. “It sounds like—”

  “No,” Limongello said adamantly. “She’s gone. Dislodged. Pfft. It’s a not-uncommon manifestation of the syndrome.”

  Bone now recalled a number of people whose selves seemed buried under a slag pile of catchphrases and canned opinions.

  “Now,” Limongello said, “come upstairs. This is what I came to show you.” They climbed the spiral staircase, leaving the grinning tyrannosaur skull below and passing a fourth grader in a blue Cub Scout uniform already coming down. “I needed you to fill out the questionnaire before I said any more about Y because people are so suggestible. If you knew the symptoms I was looking for, you might imagine you had the same ones, but this questionnaire,” Limongello rattled the sheets in the air, “confirms we’re looking at the same thing here.”

  Limongello stopped at one of the glass display cases wrapping the mezzanine level. Pitted gray bones outlined a child-sized skeleton on dark felt: skull fragments, a lower jaw, four rainbow arcs of a rib cage, half a pelvis, an upper leg on one side, and a lower on the other.

  “There she is. Or at least a plaster model of her. Lucy. Three point six million years old. The great-great-great-grandma of us all.” Limongello leaned, nose nearly to the glass, as if inspecting his family photo album. “Just to think we ever came from anything that small.”

  A docent passed, giving a mildly curious look at two grown men visiting the science museum in the middle of the day. Limongello lifted his gaze from the glass and tugged Bone’s elbow. Putting a finger to his lips before Bone could speak, Limongello pointed at the docent’s back. The doctor’s wink was slow and deliberate as a shade being drawn over a window. Go say something nice to her.

  Bone went to her and asked where the restroom was, and when she told him, he added, “Those are some great shoes. Where did you get those?”

  The docent smiled and looked down, turning her ankle outward to see her own shoe in profile. “Thanks, I’ve had these things forever.”

  “They look really comfortable, but they’re still stylish.”

  “Thank you.”

  Because it had been his cover story for paying a compliment, Bone went to the restroom, shaking his head and smiling. It was cheating, two compliments in a row on clothing, and he hadn’t been strictly sincere either time. Still, the docent, who hadn’t spared a thought for her shoes for years, would think intermittently for the rest of the day what a satisfactory pair they were. And she’d happily think about them again that night when she took them off.

  “Mission accomplished,” Bone reported when he returned to Limongello’s side.

  “Good.” Limongello stood in front of a life-sized model of a human and chimpanzee holding hands. “You know, humans aren’t like other animals. Social animals, like ants, give their lives for a brother ant without a thought. The survival of one ant is the survival of all. And nonsocial animals, like sharks, eat each other soon as look at you, because with them, it’s every shark for himself. Then you have humans, the most social and most nonsocial at the same time.” They crossed the gallery and looked over the heads of the fourth graders at a mural featuring a lemur-like primate on the left, progressing through taller and more human-looking primates, and ending with a handsome bearded man on the right, totally nude, his right leg striding forward so as to conceal his genitalia. “The first phase of your condition is feeling bad when you should feel good, and vice versa. Or rather, feeling good in the middle of feeling bad.”

  “Yang and Yin,” Bone said.

  “How’s that?”

  “The Chinese symbol. Each side has a little bit of the opposite inside. When you’re feeling really good, there’s a little bit of sadness in it. Like Yang and Yin.”

  “Yang and Ying,” Limongello repeated. “Yes. That’s it exactly. Yang and Ying. If I ever get to the bottom of this thing, maybe I’ll call it the Ying-Yang Syndrome. I was going to call it the Limongello Syndrome, only then, everyone would call it Lemon Jell-O. Why would anyone have a name like Limongello?” The doctor laughed, shaking his head as if his name were a regrettable purchase at Costco. “Anyway, I think the root cause has to do with evolution. Say you’re a monkey, and the monkey the next tree over gets a whole bunch of bananas, a windfall. That’s good news for you, too, because at least indirectly you stand to benefit. His bananas are your bananas. So your hypothalamus shoots out a little boost of oxytocin and dopamine. But. If you feel too good, you may neglect your own self-interest. If he’s got a bunch of bananas, maybe you’re getting shortchanged, so you also get a shot of calcitonin and noradrenaline to make you a little anxious and keep you on your toes. There’s the Ying inside your Yang.

  “But now suppose monkey fever goes through and wipes out all the monkeys. Your friends and family are all dying of monkey fever, but not you. Not yet. Naturally the limbic system gives you plenty of calcitonin to make you feel bad, because if there’s monkey fever going around, you could be next. On the other hand, just because they’re sick doesn’t mean you are. You could be the one that lives! You could have natural immunity! And every new case of monkey fever means more bananas, better trees, and more potential mates for you. If you didn’t have a shot of dopamine to balance out the calcitonin, you’d be too overwhelmed to take advantage of this potential opportunity. Or even clear the hell out of the jungle before you got monkey fever, too. So your brain is geared to empathize with others and at the same time not empathize. Got it?”

  “Sure.”

  “But there’s more. As we evolved, somewhere around here, I think, excuse me,” making a gap between the fourth graders like Moses parting the Red Sea, Limongello ran his finger over th
e mural, stopping somewhere between the Australopithecus and modern man, “we acquired a new way to use the empathizing/not-empathizing thing. It’s not even essential to empathize with yourself. This has tremendous survival benefits. In your worst predicament—tsetse flies swarming over the hill, a monsoon knocking down all the banana trees—you’d get a little shot of dopamine and oxytocin in the middle of all that calcitonin and noradrenaline. And there’d be a little part of you that’d think, Cool. You have the necessary detachment to cope with the tsetse flies or the monsoon or whatever and not just be a basket case. Likewise, if things were good—loads of bananas, all the females in heat, watering hole full of water, whatever. You can’t afford at a time like that to overdose on dopamine. You’d be caught off guard when the next monsoon hit or monkey fever broke out. So your limbic system stirs some calcitonin in the mix so you don’t lose your edge. A little free-floating anxiety like you’re waiting for the other shoe to drop or maybe the nagging worry that there has to be more to life than a tree full of bananas and an attractive mate.

  “Flash forward about a million years. Excuse me,” he apologized for stepping on a fourth grader’s foot as he ran his finger across the mural to modern man. “The evolutionary trick of empathizing/not-empathizing began to backfire. Now we aren’t just worried about our personal monkey pack getting hit by monkey fever. We’re worried about all the people in Katrina, those people wiped out by the tsunami, those people in Japan wiped out by the other tsunami, and global warming, deforestation, and the rest of it. And on every street corner someone with a sign, ‘Will work for food.’ You can’t possibly empathize with all of it. It’d fry your brain circuits. Your limbic system’s busy twenty-four-seven damping calcitonin secretions and squirting out dopamine to keep you on an even keel. But at the same time, we’re surrounded by people with unbelievably good fortune. We’re not just sizing up our mate compared to the monkey in the next tree; we’re comparing her to Angelina Jolie. And not if our banana pile’s as big as the next monkey’s, we’re stacking ourselves up next to Warren Buffet. And on top of that, there’s just life; there’s just freaking life. It’s not that everything’s unreal; it’s that it’s too real. It’s just too dang real. It’s too much.” Limongello trained his patient, humorous, quizzical stare on Bone. “I’m going to ask you an extremely personal question.”