The Lemon Jell-O Syndrome

by Man Martin

  If there’d been any doubt about seeing the specialist before, there was none now, though Bone still told himself he was keeping the appointment only to humor Mary. As humiliating and frightening as the episodes were at the time, afterward they seemed merely ludicrous. He couldn’t get through doors—who ever heard of a thing like that? His disorder was as impossible to take seriously as death by penguin stampede.

  That Sunday was tense and solemn. The obvious topic of discussion, neither of them cared to mention, so the day was spent in speaking little and avoiding eye contact generally; accordingly, Bone had ample time to speculate on his own about the cause of his condition. Perhaps his problem was not physical but—and this is preposterous, of course, but after all, who’s to say what is and isn’t possible?—verbal. And would this really be as far-fetched as it seemed? Many theorists claim consciousness isn’t a mere nebulous state of awareness granted in some degree even to earthworms and horseshoe crabs but the ability to verbalize. Others argue that our identities, our very selves, are constructed out of words. So Bone took a crack at viewing his predicament in light of the subject he taught: grammar.

  So what did he know about his condition? Both episodes had to do with crossing a threshold of some sort—stepping out of a tub, crossing into a room. Moreover, each was associated with Mary—spying on her, though he would never admit that, and getting ready to make love.

  To demonstrate how syntax could be at the root of his problems, Bone began by diagramming a very straightforward sentence, “Bone loves his wife.” The “sentence tree” style, that lopsided mobile of coat hangers and string, would not do; to really grasp a sentence at its core requires the old-fashioned and unfashionable Reed-Kellogg system.

  How elegant. Two short vertical lines separate the subject, “Bone,” from “wife,” the object of the verb “loves,” with the tender possessive pronoun “his” touching the sentence stem like a tentative remora so there’s no mistaking whose wife it is Bone loves.

  He took another simple example. “She loves him no longer.”

  Almost the same sentence, except for that telltale adverbial phrase drooping like a dead branch beneath the verb “loves.” The adverb “longer” almost offers hope, except that even in its most positive sense, this necessarily implies a termination, and finally you come to the terrible “no” crouching at the sentence’s base.

  Interestingly, in diagramming, an interrogative is put in the same subject-verb-complement order as a declarative statement. Thus, a question, such as, “Did you have sex with him?” supplies its own answer when diagrammed:

  The “him” hanging by its preposition seems evasive, ashamed to be caught in the main sentence stem, an uninvited neighbor slinking across the street at a crabwise angle. None of English’s polite, Norman-French-derived vocabulary, however, can express the idea without a preposition: “have sex with,” “make love to,” “have intercourse with,” et cetera. To form a clear, straightforward sentence, Bone had to resort to sturdy if vulgar Anglo-Saxon.

  There. Now “him” was properly the object of the verb-phrase “Did fuck,” as it should be, and not the wishy-washy object of the preposition.

  Having attended to these arbitrary examples, Bone was ready to consider his predicament in a syntactic light: “Bone walks across the threshold.”

  This, perhaps, revealed the source of his perplexity. The all-important verb “walks” has no object, no noun to receive its action. The only proper object of the verb might be the reflexive pronoun, “himself,” but if Bone walks himself, he is merely going in circles. “Walks” is intransitive, and yet transition is exactly what the meaning requires. To get where it’s going, the sentence has to detour from the stem and cross the narrow footbridge of a preposition only to arrive, where?

  Threshold.

  The determinate “the” that tells which threshold—the sentence is useless if it only claims that Bone crosses thresholds in general—is a driplet hanging from “threshold” itself. And “threshold”—what does it signify? A vacancy between two places—crossing a threshold necessarily means crossing into something, but that something is withheld, a ghostly implicature buried in the deep structure of the sentence.

  Who could blame him for his inability to navigate such syntax?

  Dr. Limongello’s office was in one of the medical buildings sprouting around Northside Hospital like mushrooms around a tree stump. When they arrived for Bone’s appointment—Mary had taken the day off—a receptionist gave them a clipboard, thick with forms to complete, instructing them to sit in the waiting area. If Wonderful Dr. Lemon Jell-O’s wonderfulness were measured by how many people he kept waiting, he was a wonderful doctor indeed.

  They waited. Bone perused the periodicals laid out for their delight: sailing magazines (Bone didn’t sail) and golf magazines (Bone didn’t golf) as morning melted into a puddle of noon and their stomachs began to growl. Mary went to the desk to ask if the doctor would see them soon or if they should go ahead and get some lunch.

  “There’s a cafeteria downstairs,” the receptionist offered.

  “If we go down and eat, will we lose our place?” Mary wanted to know. The receptionist didn’t answer that one, and so they went back to waiting.

  Finally, a nurse bade them follow in the wake of her swishing thighs, out of the waiting room to the final door of a door-lined corridor.

  “Wait in here,” the nurse instructed.

  “I can’t,” Bone muttered, heat rising in his face.

  “What?” the nurse asked, and then repeated, “Wait in here.”

  “I can’t,” Bone repeated more loudly than he’d intended. A curious patient down the hallway opened his door a crack but chose not to step out. The hell with it. “I can’t get through,” Bone said loudly enough for anyone who wanted to get a good earful. “That’s why I’m here. Sometimes I can’t go through doorways.”

  So Mary and the nurse walked him through, manipulating his legs, into a room with an examination table, two black-cushioned chrome chairs, cabinets, and a sink.

  “Will the doctor see us soon?” Bone asked, still feverish with shame, but this was another question destined to go unanswered. The nurse left, and Bone sat on the examination table, Mary in a chair. Dumbed-down scientific illustrations adorned the walls: colorful branching neurons, glands squeezing out hormones in fat teardrops, arrows indicating potential problems in the temporal lobe and frontal cortex. A poster told a modern-day pharmaceutical fairy tale: in the first panel a smiling man in a white lab coat talks to a damsel slumping sadly under a soot-black cumulus cloud. In the second panel, posture much improved, she ventures a timid smile—not exactly happy but willing to appear happy—and the cloud, while still overhead, has diminished, now a manageable dove-gray instead of black. Bone contemplated the implied moral … and she coped as well as could be expected ever after.

  “Are y’all waiting for me?” A man in a white lab coat, smiling as if it were his first day on the job, stood in the door.

  “Dr. Limongello?”

  With one hand the doctor took Bone’s shoulder, and with the other he gave a vigorous Rotary Club handshake, coming awkwardly close, quizzical, snapping bright eyes scrutinizing Bone as if life’s secrets were printed on the inner wall of his skull. “This is the first time I’ve seen you, right? This is your first appointment?” he said, and when Bone said it was, the doctor said to Mary, “Well, aren’t you lovely?” making her blush, and for a moment, Bone thought the doctor was going to kiss her hand, but instead he just shook it and said, “Well, let’s take a look-see at the patient.”

  Limongello bustled around the room as if assuring himself everything was where he’d left it: the sink handles, the glass jar of cotton balls on the counter, even the cartoon woman with her hovering thundercloud received his touch. Bone and Mary had been warned the double-doc was “eccentric,” but they hadn’t been prepared for this. What accounted for that smile that shone not only from his mouth but from every pore of his f
orehead? The awareness that patients were his bread and butter? The delight of diagnosis, being able to see through the translucent mystery that others find opaque? An effort to reassure? Happy anticipation of helping a stranger?

  Limongello looked in a drawer beside the sink and found an otoscope. “Might as well rule out an inner-ear problem. Say ‘ahhh.’” Bone said it, and Limongello chuckled. “Just kidding, you don’t have to say ‘ahhh’ when someone looks in your ear.” He looked into Bone’s ear with a disappointed “Huh!” Then, “So why don’t you tell me what seems to be the trouble?”

  As Bone recounted his two episodes of immobility—three counting the one that had occurred just outside the door—the doctor set the otoscope down, looking from Bone to Mary as if gauging whether they found this tale as astonishing as he. “That must have been terrifying. We’ve got to do something for you folks.” Limongello rubbed his jaw and said, “Okay, I want you to walk from the front of the room to the back. Nothing fancy, no heel-to-toe, just walk normally.” Bone walked as normally as possible after being told to “walk normally” while Limongello watched, after which he had Bone close his eyes and told him to bring in one hand at a time and touch a finger to his nose, standing first on one foot, then the other. Limongello sat perched forward as far as possible in a chair beside Mary, staring raptly at Bone. “So the first time, you were taking a bath?”

  “He wasn’t taking a bath; he was just in the bathtub,” Mary supplied.

  Limongello looked at Mary, then at Bone. “So why were you in the tub?”

  “I don’t really remember,” Bone lied.

  Limongello wore a satisfied-dissatisfied look, like a poker player seeing through an opponent’s ill-advised bluff. “’Zat so?” The doctor’s demeanor said he didn’t believe it was so but had decided not to pursue this line of questioning; instead he abruptly slapped his thighs twice, announcing, “I am so hungry I could eat a horse. Well, a small one. Ah-ha-ha-ha. I didn’t get anything for breakfast but coffee and some damn raisin toast. Have y’all eaten?” They hadn’t. “Wait here a sec.” He disappeared, leaving them to gape at one another, but came back a few moments later without his lab coat. “I told my assistant to fill in. What say we go to the cafeteria and talk this over?”

  “What about your other patients?” Bone asked.

  “Ah.” Limongello waved dismissively. “They’re in good hands. You’re now my most important case. Think you can go through?” Limongello invited Bone to go through the door, and this time Bone was able to, a fact that Limongello noted, thoughtfully rubbing his chin. Bone headed toward the waiting room, but Limongello stopped him. “No, no, no. We’ll go through the ‘Bat Cave.’” He led them through a back entrance at the end of the hall. Bone worried his condition would strike and freeze him at the door, but in the doctor’s magic presence, he went through again without trouble.

  “Are you sure this is okay?” Bone asked once they were in the elevator.

  “Let me tell you something,” Limongello said. A hand on Bone’s shoulder again, his faint breath on Bone’s cheek. “Your case is of real interest to me. It’s—not exactly—but very similar to certain other—very mysterious cases that’ve had me stumped some time now. I think your syndrome holds the key to something major. If we got to you in time.”

  Leaving the doctor’s office felt like taking an unscheduled holiday. Limongello allowed Bone to pay for lunch after warning them off the meatloaf and recommending the fish sandwich, which was what he got himself, along with an orange soda.

  They selected a corner table, and Limongello asked about Bone and Mary, learning that Mary was a church secretary and Bone a college professor. He seemed interested in Bone’s opinions on grammar and was impressed that Bone had written a book. Soon they became so comfortable that Mary asked, “What kind of name is Limongello? Italian?”

  “I’m only Italian on my father’s side,” Limongello said breezily. “On my mother’s side I’m Scotch-Irish.” Although he’d said nothing funny, he laughed, and his laugh was so easygoing and natural that Mary laughed, too, and there were good feelings all around.

  “So, Doctor,” Bone asked, “what’s wrong with me? Am I cracking up?” Trying to match the doctor’s breeziness (and failing). “Cuckoo crazy?” He pointed a twirling index finger at his temple, the time-honored representation of broken gear-work inside.

  “In a nutshell?” Limongello said. “I think you think too much.” Mary gave Bone a sardonic I-could-have-told-you-that look, but Limongello was as unsmiling as a head on Mount Rushmore. He lifted his breaded fish off the bun and, with the delicacy and precision of a surgeon, cut a bite with his spork and chewed thoughtfully before speaking again, looking at Bone with the gaze of an art critic considering a painting by a promising but flawed talent. “I think your problem is neurological. But then, you’d expect me to say that because I’m a neurologist. A priest would say it was spiritual. An accountant would say it was financial. Ha-ha. Each of us only sees what we’re prepared to see,” Limongello said with sudden seriousness.

  “So what do you think is wrong?” Mary asked.

  Limongello made a sound between a tch of concern and sucking a morsel of whitefish from his teeth. He took a tennis-ball-sized rubber brain from his pants pocket and, halving it like a pecan, pointed out the curve of a pale question mark inside. “We used to think the brain was a bank where you made deposits and withdrawals. Like this neuron is the memory of Aunt Sally, and here’s the part that knows the square of the hypotenuse, and down here is why you can’t stand rutabagas. But the truth’s a lot stranger. It’s more like a highway system.

  “The brain sends messages to the body, and the body sends messages to the brain, and one part of the brain sends messages to the other parts, and around and around like that. Everything’s sending messages: neurons, glands, even blood cells. But there’s no place where the messages stop or start, no origin or destination. That’s the mystery. What we got at the end of the day is all these messages running around, but what no one’s ever been able to find is the self—who’s reading the messages? Who’s directing it all? We may never find it. We can find the messages for your emotions easy enough: dopamine and oxytocin to make you feel good, and noradrenaline and calcitonin to make you feel bad—‘Good, good, you’re happy now,’ or ‘Uh-oh, uh-oh, you’re getting tense,’ but we can’t locate the you that actually reads the messages, the self that feels happy or sad or whatever. Sure, we can go in with a big old scalpel, skriiik,” with an alarmingly vivid impression of slicing meat, Limongello swiped diagonally across the rubber brain, “and chop out a lobe, and after that you won’t hate rutabagas or remember Aunt Sally, but that’s not the same thing. We’d never know if we got rid of the memory, that piece of yourself, or just ripped out the pathway the message goes through. You might blow up the highway the farmer gets to town on, but that’s not the same thing as killing the farmer. You understand?”

  Limongello didn’t wait to see if they understood. “Your problem is so specific, not a general motor deficit, only a problem with doors. Maybe your brain has one tiny road—a one-laner, a dirt road, an alley—for the message about getting through doors. Just that and nothing else. When you come to a door, the message about how to walk through has to travel down that one particular road. For some reason your brain, maybe even your self, can’t get the message, so you can’t go through the door.”

  “But it wasn’t a door,” Mary said. “It was a bathtub.”

  “The first time, yes,” Limongello conceded. “When I say doors, I really mean thresholds; I mean transitions. At times the message about doors doesn’t go through.”

  “I don’t have a problem with doors,” Bone said. “There’s one right over there.”

  Limongello said, “Logically, you know what a door is. You can define door. You can draw a door. The highways for those messages aren’t blocked, just the side road of going through doors. I’m not kidding when I say your problem stems from thinking too much.” Limongel
lo leaned back and laced his fingers across his chest, tapping his thumbs. He cocked his head, viewing Bone at a forty-five-degree angle. “It’s been proven that thought, all by itself, alters the brain’s function. For example, if you’re having a pity party, being a Gloomy Gus, and you clap your hands and say out loud, ‘I feel terrific,’ your hypothalamus will give you a little boost of dopamine and you’ll actually feel a little better. Strangely enough, though, if in the middle of feeling really, really good about something, you think to yourself—even briefly—‘This is how I feel when I’m happy,’ or even ‘I’m happy now,’ you’ll get an immediate decrease of dopamine. And if your hormones are signaling embarrassment or fear, and you think ‘I’m angry,’ you may suddenly discover you’re furious. The message system is very complicated.”

  “Is there a medication?” Mary asked.

  Limongello’s lips twisted briefly in displeasure, and a sigh lifted and dropped his shoulders. “Why’s a pill always the first thing people want? Sorry, but I just don’t want to risk that. Not yet. We don’t know if this is a type of epilepsy, or Parkinson’s, or what. Giving the wrong medication could be disastrous. Disastrous. For example, that messenger I told you about, dopamine. When that messenger goes to one part of your brain, it says that things are copacetic. Life’s not so bad. But to another part of your brain, that same message, dopamine, is how to do a pirouette. So far, so good. But in another part of your brain, that same message tells you to start listening to the voices in your head, how your friends are out to get you, your wife is running around on you, the cable guy is working for the CIA, or your doctor is a loony using you for medical experiments.” Limongello waggled his fingers in a witch doctor’s booga-booga-boo gesture. “The exact same messages mean entirely different things at different times in different parts of the brain.”