The Lemon Jell-O Syndrome

by Man Martin

  “Okay.”

  “The answer to which may be embarrassing, but I assure you there’s no judgment on my part.”

  “Okay.”

  “Remember 9/11? The planes burning and smoking where they’d hit, and then whoom! These two huge towers going straight down, like they’d fallen in an elevator shaft, one after the other. People screaming, huge clouds of dust and smoke.”

  “Yes.”

  “Shocking, wasn’t it? Horrible. Appalling. A nightmare come true, and yet,” Limongello placed a hand on Bone’s shoulder, “was there just a little part of you, and we’re not talking about the people, that part was so terrible, of course, but just the sight of those buildings going down, like something in a movie, was there a little tiny part that you never told anyone about and didn’t want to admit even to yourself, watching those two towers—whoosh! just disappear like that—that you thought, ‘This is so neat’?”

  Bone didn’t answer, but Limongello’s stare was so compassionate and at the same time so insistent that he finally admitted, “Yes, that’s right. I did feel that way. A little.”

  “And you weren’t alone. Millions of people, people who should have been so loaded with calcitonin and noradrenaline they were nothing but little red dials wavering between suicide and homicide, were secretly feeling good. Because at the same time, their bodies were loading them up on dopamine. Imagine that: millions and millions of people having precisely the wrong reaction to a terrible national tragedy, feeling good at the one time they should have been feeling their worst. No wonder everyone’s self is starting to dislodge.” Bone and Limongello were silent after that. “Let’s go,” Limongello said. Once he’d gotten his explanation out, the wind seemed to go out of him, too; his shoulders slumped, and his eyes became lusterless as a brown Crayola. “That’s all I brought you to see.”

  “So does this mean you know how to treat my condition?”

  “Like what do you expect?” Limongello asked, his tone suddenly guarded. Now they were on the staircase, spiraling down around the familiar tyrannosaur.

  “I don’t know. A medication?”

  “Goddamn it!” Limongello said loudly, then, remembering himself and looking up toward the fourth graders, more softly, “Goddamn it. Why is the first thing everyone turns to always a pill?” He took Bone’s elbow, and began walking again. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. It’s just—everybody these days always goes running to some chemical to fix them up. Feel like killing yourself? Let’s put a little sertacline hydrochloride in you and see if that doesn’t help. Balance his meds. All you hear about these days is balance his meds. Balance his meds, balance his meds,” he sang in grating make-believe glee, hands flopping as if jerked by wires overhead. “Kid got ants in the pants? Just needs a little methylphenidate, and he’ll be hunky-dory, end of story. Balance his meds.” Limongello pantomimed a puppet dance on the stairwell. “Can’t stop washing your hands? Stir some clomipramine in your coffee every morning, and you’ll be okey-dokey, artichokey. Balance your meds. Like we’re just bags of chemicals. Like human nature is a recipe that you can just add a drop more potassium and a smidge less sodium and turn out any way you want. Is that how you see yourself, Bone? A bag of chemicals? Is that all you want to be?”

  “No.”

  “Because if that’s what you want, I can hook you up. There’s plenty of neurologists out there just itching to give you a pill. I mean, if you want to turn your soul over, your very self, to some research chemist in Paducah, I won’t stand in your way.”

  “I don’t want that.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t want a pill.”

  “Good. Now, what I’m going to prescribe is slower and, frankly, less certain than medication. I’ll admit that. But I want you to try it for me.” Limongello stopped to wipe his forehead and with a trembling hand pulled a folded paper from his pocket and handed it to Bone. “I’ve written three tasks down, and I need you to do them. Two you’ll do daily, one weekly. The second one is going out of your way to compliment somebody.”

  Bone’s silence was more expressive of skepticism than words could have been.

  “Pretty much,” Limongello said resignedly, “what it amounts to is I want you to do good deeds. I know it sounds silly. But we’ve got to get your self back into gear with your limbic system. We’re attacking the first phase of the syndrome. We have to retrain your brain in the trick of empathy. When you pay a compliment, what’s going to happen? The other person is going to feel pleased but also maybe just a little embarrassed.”

  “I’m going to feel embarrassed, too,” Bone pointed out.

  “Exactly,” Limongello said. “And you’ll feel pleased, too, because it’s a pleasure giving other people pleasure. You’ll feel pleased and slightly foolish, which is exactly how the other person will feel at that moment. You’ll both feel the exact same way at the exact same time. And you’ll know you’re feeling the same way. That’s empathy. We’re employing a trick to get there, but it’s still empathy. Your condition’s root cause is a disjunction between how your hormones tell you to feel and a decent human response.”

  Bone followed the doctor’s gaze to the grinning tyrannosaur skull.

  “Maybe that’s all extinction is,” Limongello said. “Once your hormones betray you, make you feel good about things that are bad and vice versa, you’ve had it. You’ll seek out the bad and shun the good. Maybe that’s what really happened to our friend here; the asteroid was just a contributing factor. The dinosaurs had already dislodged from their selves. Maybe when it hit, and the sun went behind a big smudge of black smoke,” Limongello’s hands shaped the plume of a mushroom cloud, and in the back of his throat, he gargled the rumble of a distant impact, “the dinosaurs all thought, ‘Oh, cool!’” Limongello sighed. “Anyway, I’ll check in on you soon. Follow through with those three tasks, and if you have an episode—”

  “I’ll just square dance.”

  “And your wife, you feel pretty bad about that, don’t you?”

  “Of course.”

  “That’s good; you should feel bad. And you’re worried about work, and about your book?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you should be worried. But your condition. You’re worried about that, too, but there’s a little part of you, the Yang inside the Ying, that feels good about it. That thinks, ‘How cool to have such an interesting and maybe even important disease.’”

  “Yes, I’ll admit it does.”

  “I want you to try out this treatment. I want you to give it a real shot. I know it’s not much. It’s only a start, and I can’t tell you by any means it’s a cure. But the most important pledge in the Hippocratic Oath is do no harm. And I’m pretty sure, whether this does any good or not, at least it won’t hurt anyone, and I promise you, Bone,” Limongello said solemnly, “we’ll get to the bottom of this thing if it’s the last thing that I do. You trust me, don’t you?”

  “Absolutely,” Bone said.

  K, k

  From the Semitic kaph (k), “hand,” the original Egyptian hieroglyph having already lost several fingers. Since yodh (I), from which we get I, also means hand, and since J is derived from I, K makes three hands in a row, lined up between the fence of H (H) and the ox-goad of L (L).

  kiss: Defined by Freud, with characteristic Viennese suavity, as “the sexual use of the mucous membrane of the lips and mouth.” Directly traceable to the Old Norse koss but unmistakably similar to the Proto Indo-European kus. Ernest Crawley (The Mystic Rose, 1902) claims erotic kissing was unknown in ancient Egypt, a misconception easily debunked by lines carved in an Egyptian tomb two thousand years before Christ: “I kissed her open mouth and it made me drunker than wine.” Song of Solomon employs a similar metaphor, “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love is better than wine.” The comparison to intoxication is apropos; studies show that dopamine levels during kissing rival those caused by cocaine.

  Prescription for Bone King for Self Dislodgement
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  Prepared by Arthur Limongello, MD, MD

  Task One: Each morning, before getting dressed, clap your hands and say, “This is a good day!” Repeat no more than once daily.

  Task Two: Pay an unexpected compliment. Repeat at least twice daily.

  Task Three: Do another person an act of kindness when doing so seems inconvenient—when you have something more interesting, more important-seeming, or more enjoyable to do. Neither ask for nor refuse thanks. Repeat at least once weekly.

  Next morning, opportunity arose to perform Dr. Limongello’s third task, courtesy of an anonymous dog who, all unasked, had distributed the landlady’s trash with a liberal paw, strewing a glutinous largesse of sodden newspaper, chicken bones, and gummy eggshells up and down the street. Grateful dopamine throbbing warmly into his bloodstream, Bone all but clapped his hands and said, “This really is a good day,” before recalling Limongello’s admonition against doing this more than once a day. Instead, he pulled a white plastic bag from under the sink and went outside like a cheerful Charlie to gather up the archipelago of garbage.

  Bone’s willingness to carry out Limongello’s peculiar prescription perplexed even himself, but by now he’d gotten in the habit of following the double-doc’s dictums, however odd; moreover, following physicians’ orders is what twenty-first-century Americans do: Take this pill before eating, after eating, with water, without water. One pill, two pills, half a pill.

  Golden warmth spread along the horizon—how is it that moisture makes touching an ordinary piece of tissue paper so objectionable?—and prismatic dew hung heavy on the grass. He worked alone, sensing that this increased the potency of the chore’s curative properties.

  He was nearly finished when Charlotte caught him at it, coming down the driveway in her nightgown and fuzzy blue slippers, clasping her robe closed at the sternum with one hand. “Well, look at you! You are so thoughtful! Thank you!”

  “Well, you know,” Bone said. Limongello had said he must neither seek nor refuse gratitude. “You’re welcome.”

  “I saw you from the kitchen window and thought you were cleaning up your own garbage, and then I looked again, and it was mine!” She put her hand to her face in good-natured surprise and pleased embarrassment. “It’s the neighborhood dogs,” she said. “Someone should do something about them, but you can’t really blame them. They smelled something good in the garbage. Good-smelling to them, ha-ha.” She touched his arm at this witticism.

  “I guess no dog can resist the smell of chicken,” Bone said. A glorious summer day was opening before him like a flower, and he held a bag of freshly gathered garbage in his hand. Beneficence brimmed over onto Charlotte, the dew-laden grass, and the giddy neighborhood dogs whom no one could blame for loving chicken so.

  “What were you doing out there?” Mary asked over her coffee cup when he came in.

  “Picking up Charlotte’s garbage,” he said.

  Mary studied him with a hard-to-read expression but said nothing.

  Gassing up en route to Fulsome, Bone prepaid inside instead of at the pump, giving him a pretext to speak to the cashier. He saw at once she’d be a challenge: sullen, sallow, simultaneously slack-skinned and fat. To buy time, he loitered at the cooler making his root beer selection and then at the snack carousel, perusing the peanuts. Praising her smile was out of the question; she didn’t have one. Nor could he admire her eyes, resembling, as they did, twin pools of stagnant water. Nor, judging from her grooming, was hair a special point of pride. He couldn’t compliment her wardrobe because, apart from the official blue gas-station vest with its regulation grease stain just below the right shoulder, Bone saw only her blouse—graying white or fading beige?—which, for all he knew, was part of the uniform.

  In desperation, he blurted the only thing he could think of. “You have to be a special person to work here.” Waggling his eyebrows like Groucho Marx, he held up the root beer and hot nuts to show her the price. She regarded him suspiciously. “Putting up with all these customers,” he clarified weakly. The store was vacant save for the two of them. The skin across his forehead tightened. A greeting card on the counter rack displayed a tough-faced little boy of the sort you knew never ate his vegetables or washed behind his ears, offering a fistful of ragged wildflowers with the inscription “I like you.” Maybe buying it for Mary might count as Task Three, a compliment, or maybe Task Two, an act of kindness, but it couldn’t hurt either way, and complimenting the cashier wasn’t proving especially effective. “And forty dollars of regular on pump number seven.” He leaned back to make out the number of the fuel bay and give himself an excuse to avoid her eye.

  “Do you want a bag with that?” she asked. He shook his head, and to his surprise, she had broken into a smile. “You’re right about the customers,” she said. “I could tell you some stories.”

  “I bet. ”

  “You don’t have to be crazy to work here,” she quipped as he shouldered the door open, hot nuts and greeting card in one hand and root beer in the other, “but it helps.”

  “Ha-ha,” he said. Pumping gas, he began laughing for real. He felt like a secret agent exchanging coded messages behind enemy lines, oxytocin and dopamine bubbling through his veins like gangbusters; the cashier would relish the success of her bon mot all evening, and a glow would fill the gas station as if she were seeing it through a prism. In the window, she was still laughing. He was laughing, too. Was it wrong if they weren’t laughing for the same reason?

  In his car, he tore open the hot nuts with his teeth, twisted the cap off the root beer, and took a meditative dose of each. But what did Limongello’s therapy accomplish beyond a temporary mood elevation? Couldn’t he get the same result with any extraordinary or unexpected behavior? Didn’t college fraternities achieve the same effect by making pledges wear pajamas in public, or a beanie, or sing the school fight song whenever someone said hello? Wasn’t that what they were all trying to do—the kleptomaniacs, self-mutilators, alcoholics, sex addicts, compulsive gamblers—seeking some new sensation as a way of holding on to the self, preventing it from dislodging? Wouldn’t Limongello’s strange remedy lose effectiveness as it became routine?

  Bone arrived at Fulsome and opened the door to the familiar musty shadows of his office. Next door, there came a long rasping scri-i-i-tch as Miranda Richter stretched strapping tape over the lid of a cardboard box. Her silence dotted the air like an ellipsis compelling him to speak, as her speech would have compelled him to silence.

  “Miranda? My God, what’s happening?”

  “Bone,” she said, “can you help? Dope that I am, I put my Klaeber out of reach again.” Turning and bumping her knee on a drawer, she pointed to the bookshelves, once stuffed proudly with The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and fat Chaucer, now bare save for an outsized volume of ancient maps leaning on a shiny blue globe on the bottom shelf and the unobtainable Klaeber on the top, tauntingly peeping over the edge at them. On the floor sat two cardboard boxes, one with lips sealed in a prim line by strapping tape, the other gaping its lid-flaps like an obese baby bird awaiting a worm; the teapot and sugar bowl were already in its gullet.

  Bone climbed on a chair and brought down the Klaeber. “What’s going on?”

  “I’m leaving,” she said. Her voice was melodic as ever, but her smile was squeezed into a little bow. “This is the end for me. Toodle-oo.” Her slim hands went up. “Gordon says I’m not needed. No more Medieval Lit. No more Miranda Richter. It’s toodle-oo.”

  Couldn’t she teach Freshman English?

  “Too expensive. It’s cheaper to hire a grad student from Georgia State.” She tried a “Damn it” and made a go of kicking the wastebasket, but instead of knocking it over with a satisfying dead-center bang, her foot sideswiped and slammed into the file cabinet. She took off her shoe and fingered her toes for signs of breakage, defenseless in her unhappiness.

  What would she do?

  “I’ll find something. I’m young yet.” She was no more successful at sardon
ic laughter than trash-can kicking or cussing. “Truth to tell, I was getting tired of all that—” her voice cracked, “Chaucer anyway.” Her warm hand touched Bone’s. “Watch out for Loundsberry. Watch out for Dr. Gordon.” She patted his hand. “Illegitimi non carborundum.”

  “You’re a great teacher,” he said. His second compliment of the day.

  She only patted his hand and repeated, “Illegitimi non carborundum.”

  Poor Miranda. Bone was in a funk for the rest of the evening, but, if he had to be honest, in the center of that funk, there was also an unworthy spark of relief: right smack in the center of sympathizing Yin’s fattest, blackest bulge shone the white-hot pinpoint of self-interested Yang. (It wasn’t I! I still have a job! Monkey Fever passed me by!)

  He should have spared more time to console her, but what could he have done? He couldn’t get her job back. Frankly, she was probably better off, anyway. A tiny part of him began secretly making up its mind that she must’ve had it coming. Besides, did he even know Professor Richter that well? Was she really even a friend, or just a colleague? Moreover, he had—in the words of a hideously vivid French idiom—other cats to skin: his condition, his work on Words, and his marriage.

  But it solved one mystery at least. Bone spoke to Belinda about this after class.

  “I’m definitely back fall semester,” he told her. As usual, she’d lingered after everyone else, but sullenly, as if for him to prove something to her. She met his gaze without interest. “Miranda—Professor Richter, Loundsberry’s letting her go. It’s a terrible thing, really. What this department’s coming to. Still, I’ll be back. So you can take me fall semester.”