The Lemon Jell-O Syndrome

by Man Martin

  With his good leg, he nudged the coffee table to the ceiling hole and, after considering alternative ways to get up, undid his splint and knelt on the table with the knee of his bad leg, pushing himself up on his good foot. After a monstrous expense of pain and effort, he discovered he was too low; standing tottering on one leg, he could barely touch the hole’s rim. He’d never be able to get his hands over the joist.

  Lowering to his starting position, he lost his balance and put his weight on his broken ankle. His scream was so loud he was sure the neighbors would hear him after all and come to investigate. He waited, panting, in front of the shimmering couch for someone to knock. He passed out for a little and in his imagination heard someone ring the doorbell and call his name.

  When he came to, the postrain world was silver and glass. He heard the telephone ring and then Mary’s voice saying to pick up. Yes, he needed to pick up.

  How much time had passed? A blue puddle on the hill mirrored the sky above the dripping trees. “Get me a glass of that,” he asked Miranda.

  “What is that ticking sound?” Miranda asked. “Do you hear it? Something soft and ticking?”

  “Good Lord,” said Knolton, “it’s his tongue! He’s so dried out, his tongue is tapping against his teeth like a stick!”

  Meanwhile, he had to make another effort.

  The upended table waved and rippled behind blue and red flashes like a reflection in a puddle. Bracing against the tabletop, he bent until his hands were under the rim, then, supporting himself on his right foot and putting as much weight on his left as he could bear, he began to lift. His arms were too sore and shaking to budge it. Why had he wanted to lift it? To get to the ceiling. In any case, he didn’t have the strength or willpower to try standing.

  “Listen!” Miranda said. “There’s someone in the room with us.”

  A bellow, a strange hoarse noise, so unexpected that at first no one in the room knew where it came from.

  “Who is it?” Knolton asked.

  Another weird bellow, and Miranda said, “It’s Bone.”

  Bone did not blame them for their confusion; had it not been for his chest’s soreness after making it, he might have thought the bellow belonged to someone else, too.

  Bone could see perfectly through the dancing lights, too, the white ceiling, gaping at him where he’d fallen through. The ceiling was made of special ice, he remembered, and he regretted not having a chip of it to suck on. But there were also water pipes under the floor. He bellowed again. The dryness had a voice of its own. He told it to be quiet so he could locate the rushing water under the floor.

  S, s

  From the Semitic shin (s), “tooth,” the original letter looking a good deal more fang-like than its modern incarnation. The Greek sigma (∑) was a sideways shin, but the earliest incarnation was a backward Z. The Romans gave us our current S, perhaps because the serpentine shape matched S’s hisses and fizzes better than the jagged incisors of the original shin. S is the only letter to become a US president: the S in Harry S Truman does not stand for anything; his middle name is only an initial.

  space: The interval between things. (See time.)

  spork: An appropriate portmanteau of spoon and fork for an object that itself is a portmanteau. Hearing the word for the first time, one knows precisely what it will be, and that it will be made of white plastic.

  Bone dreamed of lifting hands, straps across his chest, sirens, a straw in his mouth, sips of water. In his dream, alternating dark and bright rooms moved above him, and between rooms, wheels squeaked below him like a grocery cart. There were no voices, but he knew things were being done for him and that he was being discussed by concerned people.

  He did not wake up but slipped smoothly from the stiff, clean sheets of a dream bed into an actual bed with stiff, clean sheets at Northside Hospital.

  “Would you like an ice chip?” a woman asked.

  Bone nodded. Yes, an ice chip would be lovely.

  The nurse tucked an ice chip between his lips, fluorescent light gleaming on the silver cross lying nearly horizontal on her bosom, and Bone sucked: a superlative ice chip, possibly the best ice chip Bone had ever had in his life.

  “My name is Rachel,” the nurse said. Her vivid lipstick contrasted with her skin like ketchup on a white plate. “Do you have any pain?”

  Bone shook his head. No, no pain. But then he changed his mind and nodded, yes, there was some pain after all.

  Rachel held up a chart of cartoon faces progressing from a smiley face on the left to a face with a deep frown and rolling tears on the right. “Can you point to which one you are?”

  Bone nearly pointed to the middle, neutral face with its perfect straight-line mouth but then pointed to the second face from the right, next to the crying face that represented the most intense pain of all. His ankle and hand throbbed, now that he thought of it, and his head hurt like someone had jammed a bucket of rocks into his skull. The hand he pointed with was wrapped in gauze.

  “They set your bone,” Rachel said. “Fractured ankle. And they sewed up your hand. Four stitches. You are one lucky camper. Can you do some talking for me?”

  “Yes,” Bone said, and at first didn’t recognize his own voice, so thin and weak it was.

  The sheet exposed his right foot, which was in a cast. A plastic tube led from his arm to a bag hanging on a metal pole. A tube from his other arm led to a hollow plastic socket. A watercolor of a stone cottage and vague red flowers hung next to a door helpfully left ajar to disclose a bathroom. The other wall was a curtain. Bone twisted his neck and saw that the headrest of his bed was a regular cockpit of dials and nozzles.

  “I wish we could give you more for the pain,” Rachel said, “but there’s only so much we can shoot you up with until you get your fluids back. I’ll go tell the doctor you’re up. Do you want another ice chip?”

  A long while later, or else a very short while—hard to tell—Mary came.

  “Hi,” she said. She stood in the door, wearing a smile where the teeth come into play but the eyes have no part. For a moment, Bone feared she was less beautiful than he’d remembered, or even that he was not grateful to see her—but this doubt lasted only the space between one quavering breath and the next. She gave Bone’s forehead a sisterly kiss. “You really had me worried.”

  “I had me worried, too,” Bone admitted.

  Before she could stop herself, her jaw dropped in shock at his weak and squeaky voice. Recovering, she held up a canvas tote. “I brought you some things.” Announcing each treasure with a drawn-out “aaand,” she arranged the contents on his bedcover, half in the shadow cast by his right leg’s mountain range: pens, pads, Post-Its, and the final gift, his annotated copy of Fowler, which Bone picked up but set down at once to subdue his foolish hand’s thankful trembling.

  “Someone got new play-pretties,” Rachel said, coming into the room. “Time to take your blood, honey. You don’t got much to spare, but them vampires downstairs don’t live on potato chips, you know.” She pushed a purple-capped tube into the socket, and blood burbled into it. “Who’s your friend?” When Rachel had filled the tube without getting a reply, she said, “Looks like someone’s got a secret.” She gave Bone a hard glance. “I don’t mind secrets, but she could at least bring you something more interesting than—” She tilted her nose at the books and papers in his lap. “What, Mommy’s making sure you do your homework? Next time bring him something worth getting, or sneak in a corned-beef sandwich or something, something I’d have to take away from him.” Rachel filled two more tubes and put them on her tray. “They’ll be testing your sugars and whatnot, see how your levels are coming, and Dr. Quick will check on you. She’s not as big a dumbass as some of the others, but if she don’t show up pretty soon, you let me know, and I’ll light a fire under her.”

  A woman in the doorway said, “So I’m not a dumbass. Thanks.”

  “I said not as much as the others,” Rachel corrected, giving Bone a quick, unsmiling
wink before exiting with her blood samples: an exchange intended for his therapeutic entertainment—the hardworking, tough-talking but kindhearted doctor and her sassy, no-nonsense nurse swapping one-liners and comebacks like a medical sitcom, guest starring Bone himself as the quirky patient with a strange diagnosis.

  Dr. Quick looked over notes on a blue clipboard and gave Bone the rundown: that dying of thirst was no joke, that his hand had been stitched and didn’t show any sign of infection, that he had a lateral malleolus fracture—there is no ankle bone, per se, any more than there is an Eskimo language—that would take ten to twelve weeks to heal, that they were monitoring his electrolytes as he rehydrated, and that they needed to rule out kidney damage. Bone listened, giddy to have landed in this lemony-smelling hospital with its nice, bright sheets and blue bowls of ice chips, the weight of books between his legs, Mary at his bedside, listening to a trained medical professional whose only job was to help him get well.

  “So what I want to know is what happened? What’d you do?”

  “Attic,” Bone replied in his strange weak voice. “Fell through.”

  “And after that—you couldn’t move?”

  “Doors. I can’t.”

  Dr. Quick cocked an eyebrow.

  “He’s got a neurological condition,” Mary supplied. “Sometimes when he comes to a door, he can’t go through.”

  Taking frequent breaks to gather breath, Bone related his strange saga, and where he left off Mary picked up, supplying a scrap or two to round out the epilogue. It was she who’d discovered him.

  “Good Lord,” Dr. Quick said. “No one was around?” She looked at Mary, who looked down at the annotated Fowler. “Have you seen someone about this?”

  Mary said, “Dr. Limongello.”

  “Oh. Well, he’s wonderful,” Dr. Quick admitted. “He has you on dopamine?”

  “There’s no medication,” Mary said.

  “What?”

  “Dr. Limongello says when Bone gets stuck at a door to square dance,” Mary explained.

  The novelty of the approach dumbfounded the doctor.

  “Self.” Bone turned his palms up. Lord, talking was hard. Where was a damn ice chip when you needed one? “Dislodging.”

  “What?” Dr. Quick’s face looked as if she’d strolled through an unforeseen cobweb. “Well, we’ll be getting in touch with Dr. Limongello for you right away.”

  “Can’t. Leipzig.”

  “Leipzig?”

  “Conference.”

  “Leipzig?” Dr. Quick repeated. “Are you saying Dr. Limongello’s in Leipzig?”

  Bone nodded. “Couple weeks.”

  “Well, we’ll get in touch with him anyway. Meanwhile, you rest and get better.” As she was leaving, Dr. Quick turned and repeated, “Leipzig?”

  It transpired that Bone owed his life to Mary’s favorite handbag, the tan one with the leather strap. Mary had discovered it was missing, half believing that Bone had deliberately hidden it, but she’d resolved to put it out of her mind and be the bigger person. The missing handbag, however, as missing handbags will, engorged on personal grievance, ballooned to fill her mind completely; this was a handbag of a sort no longer manufactured, uniquely suiting her in style and function, holding not only keys, wallet, and makeup but pleasant associations too deep for words. A one-of-a-kind handbag, in short, and Mary’s life was materially diminished by its lack.

  She went to get her property, and when Bone didn’t answer the doorbell, she left a note on yellow paper stuck to the door. Later, she called and left a message. At this point, she concluded he was maliciously holding the handbag hostage. The following afternoon, Bone having acknowledged neither phone call nor note, Mary returned, determined to give him a piece of her mind, and not a stinting piece, either, but a great big granny-slice, and this time, by God, she wouldn’t leave without her handbag on her shoulder. Then she saw, stuck to the door where it’d been for twenty-four hours, like a tot unknowingly relaying news of a traffic fatality, the sunny yellow flag of notepaper.

  In confirmation of a terrifying and rapidly forming hypothesis, Mary ran to the mailbox, finding it aglut with uncollected junk mail. She ran back down the driveway, afflicted by that slow, aqueous locomotion that afflicts one in dreams. She’d never have forgiven herself, or Bone, either, if he’d committed suicide. But of course, he hadn’t.

  She kept Bone company during his supper of spongy meatloaf and pallid broccoli, then explained meekly that she had to get home to Cash. Bone replied in his weak voice that it was quite all right and not to give it another thought. Promising a visit tomorrow, she kissed his forehead and left him, truth to tell, glad of her absence because by this time he was monstrously tired and wanted only to sleep.

  In his dream, he was crawling through the attic, his ankle already broken but conveniently set in a cast. The wound in his hand was likewise stitched and dressed. Sometimes Miranda Richter and Knolton were with him, sometimes Mary, sometimes Rachel the nurse. Sometimes he was by himself. Almost eagerly, he crawled on hands and knees from joist to joist, heart pounding, through an attic transformed into a labyrinth of twisting corridors and unexpected alcoves. He came to a familiar spot and pushed back dusty and fluffy insulation between the joists, knowing something bad was about to happen but with an overriding sensation of swooning impatience to get it over with. Sitting carefully, he rested his feet on the Sheetrock.

  This was when he woke. The Jamaican nurse who came at night said, “You were having a bad dream.” In the blade of light coming through the door, her face was an oval moon. But the only thing that made it a bad dream was the frustration that it ended just before the bad thing happened.

  Next morning, Rachel said, “Okay, chief, doctor wants you to walk today. You don’t have to go far, but you can’t just lay there.” He tried not to think of the woozy purple horror of his calf, on which his unsuspecting eye had fallen when she’d pulled back the covers. Note to self: Don’t look at that again. With her help, he got out of bed and worked crutches under his armpits. His foot puffed instantly into a basketball of agony, but with Rachel bringing the IV stand alongside like a portable sapling, he jerked his way to the door and back. He dropped onto the mattress, huffing and shaking as if he’d spent the day scaling crevasses. His foot felt ready to pop like a grape in a vise, but Rachel seemed satisfied. “We’ll try again after lunch, and you’ll go a little further each time. You’ll see.”

  Charlotte visited and brought the Journal and a slab of lemon pound cake in aluminum foil. “You’re in the paper,” she said, pointing at the story as if his printed name made him more real, which, in a sense, Bone felt it did. Among things you can count on to relodge a self at risk of dislodgement are solicitude of others, temporary fame, and extreme physical pain. Bone was blessed with all three. “You were Action News, too,” she said, patting the arm without the IV as Bone happily ate fingersful of lemon pound cake. “You’re famous!”

  “That’s more like it!” Rachel said approvingly when she saw the yellow cake. “That other woman just brought books.” She put the blood-pressure cuff on Bone’s arm and, spotting the newspaper, said, “Say, look who’s in the paper,” coolly contemptuous but absorbed nevertheless, silently skimming as the cuff whirred and bulged around his biceps, then, with an abrupt click and slow hiss, released.

  After lunch, Dr. Quick looked in, and Rachel took Bone on another walk: first stop the restroom, where she gave him a translucent plastic bottle. “Think you can manage this for me, chief?” His face in the mirror was tomato-red from exertion, but sure enough, after filling the bottle, he walked on his own right through the door of his room and as far down the hall as the nurse’s station before turning back. Instead of a basketball, his foot only felt like a soccer ball. On his return trip, he conserved his breath, but outward bound gamely huffed greetings to hospital staff and fellow patients.

  His voice wasn’t his own yet—it was still high and reedy—but modal verbs, pronouns, and prepositions came back
along with his health, and now he spoke in full sentences, which he’d been unable to do the day before. He walked in a three-part rhythm: hop forward on his good foot, swing his crutches up as Rachel dragged the IV pole abreast, and pause to rest: hop, swing, rest—hop, swing, rest. “Hello! Hello! Nice day!” Waving his fingers as much as he dared, dripping with bonhomie to beat the band, but his voice still a tinny trickle, like water through a long, galvanized pipe. Two custodians interrupted their Spanish discussion of soccer, smiled, and glanced sympathetically at his soccer-ball foot. In spite of the agony of walking, Bone felt gloriously happy, as if he’d been reborn.

  Mary and Cash visited, and Mary told him she’d cleaned the house; she didn’t mention what she’d found in the box outside his office but couldn’t help asking about the torn couch cushions. Bone said he didn’t remember doing anything to the couch cushions, but Mary’s eyebrows made a tilde and a circumflex (˜˘) suggesting she thought he was too embarrassed to tell the whole story. The truth was, though, he really couldn’t remember.

  “Were you able to scrub the Chaucer off?” he asked, a joke between them.

  “No,” she said. “Still there. The one place, the one place,” shaking a finger at him, “I expected to get some privacy from your damn projects.” But she wasn’t complaining, really; it was a joke complaint. She was ribbing him.

  “I was studying that passage,” he explained, a prompt to continue her routine about the Chaucer he’d written on the shower wall. “Sister Eglentyne.” The mock argument was as comfortable as a terrycloth robe fresh from the dryer.