The Lemon Jell-O Syndrome

by Man Martin

  Goddamn. Goddamn. Goddamn.

  Bone needed to get his act of kindness out of the way, per Limongello’s instructions, so for twenty minutes he rounded up strays and returned them to the cart corral. The double-doc had certainly known his business, predicting the three tasks would lose their joy. But surely Limongello hadn’t foreseen this? How long since Bone had performed his morning ritual? In the car he clapped his hands, saying, “This is a good day.” But he only felt worse. Since he was avoiding people, paying his daily compliments would also be a challenge. He’d get back on his regimen, but in the meantime, he didn’t have the intestinal fortitude to face the inside of the Kroger, so this time instead of grocery shopping—the adverbial “this time” a necessary rationalization, implying a next time that would be not only successful but effortless—he got a three-piece from the Kentucky Fried Chicken drive-through and ate in the car, tipping the Styrofoam cup of coleslaw into his mouth at the red light instead of using the spork in order to keep one hand on the wheel. He left the KFC bag with its greasy paper napkin and sucked-clean chicken bones in the car, taking only the enormous plastic drink cup. (Drink pail would have been more apt than cup, given its bladder- busting volume.) He’d finished it, but the ice, still having Pepsi residue, would provide further, if diluted, refreshment once melted. Besides, why waste a perfectly serviceable cup with many useful days before it?

  Friday, he ran down the mailman, waving his arms and calling, “Wait! Wait!” because he’d missed him when the truck had come to the box. The mailman, who anticipated an envelope of suspected anthrax or at the very least an urgent package to mail, was taken aback when he learned all Bone wanted to say was “Thanks for the great job. I really appreciate the way you bring mail the same time every day.”

  God, what was wrong with Bone’s voice? What a strange, rusty squeak!

  After the mailman fiasco, Bone hit on a way to follow through on Limongello’s regimen without the unpleasantness of dealing with actual people. Every day, he’d write a letter to a person he had reason to be grateful to; this way he could simultaneously take care of tasks two and three.

  Hunger struck at odd hours, and sleep lost correspondence to sunrise and -set. He ate three meals in a row—going to Taco Bell as soon as he finished his KFC three-piece, and thence to Krystal, the last bite of burrito grande still in his mouth; paper bags, napkins, sporks, unused ketchup and hot-sauce packets, and fast-food receipts mounded on the passenger-side floorboard. He slept fourteen hours in a row, then stayed up ’til dawn, watching Spanish-language soap operas and infomercials on amassing real estate fortunes and direct-marketing household cleaners and pure positive thinking. He cast a queasy eye on the students’ finals, piled on his sofa. He finally gave everyone an A without checking them and was done with it. He’d go back to being a real teacher next semester.

  Saturday.

  Bone made up his mind with an I’ll-show-them intensity to throw himself into Words; fanning up fresh hatred for Knolton’s skullduggery would banish the drabness and flabbiness of life without Mary. Even if Grisamore didn’t want the manuscript, so what? Someone was bound to want it. Besides, he needed to complete it for his dissertation. He worked into the afternoon, amending the introduction for a book that might never be published, until he became uncomfortably aware that he needed to use the bathroom. Predictably, the office door blocked him. His condition always struck when getting through was especially urgent. Impatiently—his bowels were insistent—he began square dancing, skipping the formality of bowing to his partner and his side and the preliminary do-si-do, starting with a brusque promenade, and unwisely, in spite of Limongello’s advice against thinking too much, permitting himself a moment of self-consciousness: This is the way I get through doors.

  The door wasn’t having it; Bone could not get through.

  He tried again. Surely, this time would work.

  Damn.

  No time for a third try: he had to go now. For a makeshift toilet, he dumped out a box of paper, turning and squatting just in time. Disgust, shame, and relief—plus a little gratification at his quick thinking—mingled in him, but now that the crisis had been dealt with, he shouldn’t have any trouble getting through; it was only needing to go so badly that’d stymied him in the first place. Printer paper was not as soft or absorbent as the two-ply in the bathroom but was good enough under the circumstances. He put a lid on the box and gently pushed it into the hallway with his toe. Once he got through the door, he could dispose of it.

  He square danced again, this time going through all the careful preambles of bowing to his partner, bowing to his side. It was a square dance without brio, however, a pensive and a meditative square dance, the square dance of a man concerned with getting things right. Dancing and stamping contemplatively, he thought of Mary’s words: “They never liked you.” Why did he think of that now? It turned into the caller’s singsong, chanted to fiddles and clapping: “They never liked you. They never liked you.”

  He came to the door and again couldn’t get through. Damn.

  He stood nonplussed, and then a solution hit him, so simple it was surprising the Wonderful Double-Doc Lemon Jell-O hadn’t thought of himself. He couldn’t walk through, but surely he’d be able to crawl. He’d attend to the box of feces once on the other side; then he could get back to work. He shook his head. The things he went through, coping with his absurd condition. He got on hands and knees to crawl out, but when he got to the door, he froze.

  Well, what do you know about that?

  He stood. Now, this was definitely inconvenient. Okay, but no big deal. He’d write a little longer and try again. The condition was sure to abate on its own if he ignored it.

  He sat, fingers poised at his computer, but didn’t touch the keys. At his wrist was a letter he’d written and addressed but not yet stamped. Care of the Cook County Library, it was written to Laurence Hobbs, the librarian, letting him know how the interest once shown in a hayseed bookworm had changed Bone’s life, and how grateful Bone was. Was the condition striking because Bone had been remiss in fulfilling the three tasks? But he’d intended to mail it, and look at all the trouble he’d already gone to to Google the address, taking his laptop into the bedroom to hook up the cable. (Bone deliberately denied himself an Internet connection in the office to prevent cyberspace-lollygagging.)

  What was the point of working on his manuscript? Outside the window, a bird angled down through the oaks and disappeared into the Rose of Sharon. Words would never be published, not with Bone’s name on it. How could Grisamore turn to Knolton, that quack? Because Bone hadn’t met the deadline, that’s how. He had only himself to blame.

  Without ,warning Bone’s pulse beat with longing for Mary. It wasn’t making love he thought of, or her beauty, or even her companionship; it was the way she drank water. That long, uninterrupted swallow, plonking down the empty glass with a gasp, devoting herself to the experience of an ordinary glass of water even to the exclusion of breathing. That fact seemed wonderful to Bone, but maybe part of the reason it seemed so was that he was starting to feel pretty thirsty himself.

  When you got down to it, all Bone’s separate problems—his syndrome, his unfinished dissertation, losing his publishing contract, losing Mary—his flubs, failures, and false starts—the Yin and Yang of his life, mostly Yin—were all aspects of one big problem: not following through. The cardboard box, sitting and reeking and possibly seeping on the other side of the door, was a metaphor; he let things slide, hence they got worse. But no more. This was it. He’d make changes starting here and now. It wasn’t the end of the world. Mary didn’t love him. She never had. Sure, it hurt like blisters, but he was better off. He’d show her—if he’d looked in the mirror just then, he’d have seen his chin thrust forward in determination. Meanwhile, he had his manuscript. He’d finish it and have his PhD. He’d find another publisher. Hell, resubmit it to Grisamore. Why not? Grisamore would be sure to want it once he saw how well it’d turned out. Bone was taki
ng charge of his life again. He pressed the save button, went back to the top of the page, and reread his introduction.

  He had a bit more water tinged with brown cola in the plastic cup at his elbow, and he drank it. Now another way out occurred to him. If he sat on the floor in front of the threshold, facing into the room, and allowed himself to fall backward, his upper torso would land in the hallway, and surely once his top half crossed the boundary, the rest of him wouldn’t offer any trouble. He imagined witnessing the plan in action as if he were a video camera mounted on the ceiling, pleased at the prospect of elegant success, the satisfaction the Coyote must’ve felt studying the dotted line on a blueprint, charting a dislodged boulder’s trajectory to the X-marked intersection with the Roadrunner.

  Bone sat on the floor, hands on his knees, scooting his butt across the hardwood until his back was to the threshold. Man, that box really stank. He’d gotten used to it, but this close it was something awful. How had it come to this? A car filling with fast-food receipts and containers, a house filling with plastic cups, dishes sitting a week without washing, and feces in a cardboard box. He released his knees and let himself fall back.

  Only he didn’t fall.

  Now, this was too much. He pushed on his knees to make himself fall, but it did no good. Was something wrong with his plan? He turned the other way, facing the door now, to see if he could fall in the other direction. He let go of his knees and fell with marvelous success, banging his head on the open drawer of a filing cabinet he’d forgotten to allow for.

  Leaving the office began to assume the dimensions of Job One. Not that it was a crisis; he’d definitely be out before matters progressed as far as that, but his manuscript could wait until he reached the other side of that door.

  His faux-leather rolling office chair presented itself as the next obvious solution. It wouldn’t fit through the door, but when it jolted to a standstill at the frame, the momentum ought to eject him into the hallway. Starting at the desk to build up speed, he launched toward the door. Unfortunately, the manufacturers of rolling office chairs, not considering them transportation devices, don’t design them for building up speed. The instant Bone pushed off, the chair lost momentum. It stopped a little past the starting line.

  Trying to maintain velocity by giving additional pushes with his feet did as much to retard his progress as improve it; moreover, as he discovered, rolling chairs are designed with as little thought to maneuverability as to speed, at least with distances greater than scooting up to or away from a reasonably nearby workspace. Whereas a conventional grocery cart comes equipped with a single rogue wheel with its own notion of where the cart should go, his rolling office chair had five such wheels, each as independent as a hog on ice, and even then a hog of an infuriatingly distractible and inconsistent disposition, a hog greatly in need of a good dose of Ritalin.

  On the third attempt, Bone smashed his hand between the wall and the arm of the chair. Naturally, it was the same hand he’d pierced on Cash’s chain-link fence. If he had a broomstick, he could use it as a pole to propel himself, but then, as he considered it, the rolling-chair concept was doomed to failure. Even at maximum rolling-chair speed, he’d never attain enough velocity to overcome the friction of the faux-leather cushion and slide into the hallway. No, he’d have to come up with another method.

  Q, q

  From the Semitic qoph (q), “monkey.” The monkey’s tail curves like a contented cat’s in the uppercase and in the lowercase hangs as if a lead weight were tied to it. Of all the ideographs in the Semitic alphabet—the oxen, pegs, houses, doors, weapons, eyes, hands, and mouths—only little qoph refers to nothing of practical value, except the delight we have always taken from our funny little cousins and the pleasure of an ancient scribe discovering that with one elegant downstroke, he could signify tail as well as butt cheeks.

  quack: Onomatopoeia for a duck call, also any irritating noise. A healer who boasted or quacked about his salves was called a quack-salver (a pun on quicksilver, mercury being a common ingredient for medieval medicines?), hence quack as a term for a bogus physician.

  Bone awoke, cottonmouthed and headachy; it had been late afternoon, and now it was night. He needed to leave the room now, and no more fooling around. He arose and square danced, once, twice, three times for good measure. Each attempt as useless as the one before. He tried crawling on all fours and on his belly. He tried sitting on the floor and falling backward again. Somersault. No luck. He did not resort to rolling the chair again.

  Naturally, the one thing he needed, an office phone so he could call somebody, he didn’t have. His cell phone was in another room. He cussed his perverse obstinacy in not permitting Internet in the office. What he’d have given to tap out a quick “Help, Get Me out of the Office” e-mail. To whom would he have sent it, and what would they have made of it? Would the recipient of a message like “This is very embarrassing, but I’m trapped in my office. Please come at once to release me” have thought it a new identity-theft scheme, like the e-mail saying a friend is marooned in Zimbabwe and needs a moneygram? No matter. These questions were moot.

  His head hurt too much to go back to sleep. He was very thirsty now. Remembering a trick from his Tennessee childhood of sucking something to work up spit, he put a pen cap in his mouth and, sure enough, got some relief.

  Might as well work on his manuscript and try again later. He couldn’t manage to write anything new, so he made do with revising, adding a phrase, taking out the same phrase, polishing and unpolishing the same few lines and getting nowhere until sunrise.

  The neighbors would be up now. He made another futile attempt to square dance through, then cranked open the window and shouted, “Help!” And again, louder, “Help!”

  They never liked you.

  They wouldn’t be able to hear him, he decided.

  “Well, I’ll just have to go through the window,” he said, rolling up the shirtsleeves of his imagination.

  “If you use something as a means of exit, that makes it a door,” he imagined E. Knolton’s mellow accent interjecting, “and, as we know, you can’t go through doors.”

  “Shut up,” Bone retorted. “A thing doesn’t change identity just because we use it for a different purpose. If you wear a frying pan on your head, it doesn’t make it a hat. And anyway, you’re just imaginary.”

  “Touché,” he imagined Miranda Richter chiming in supportively. “Illegitimi non carborundum.”

  “Thank you,” Bone said. “You’re the one I should have married.” Bone’s knee was on his desk, and with a final push up, he was standing. The office windows were high jalousies, and even cranked out to their fullest extent offered little room for a full-grown man to squeeze through. “I can’t go straight out,” Bone pondered aloud. “The best way to do it, I reckon, is lie on my back and go feet first, so I can bend my knees. Once I’m to my waist, I can wriggle around onto my stomach, lower myself as far as I can, then drop into the holly bushes.” Bone studied the sill, the distance to the ground, and the holly bushes below, estimating the cost of his escapade in cuts, scrapes, abrasions, and bruises. Outside, the air darkened, and the Rose of Sharon leaves shivered and turned in the wind of an approaching storm. He moved his pen holder to the edge of the desk, as well as his computer, several spiral-bound notebooks, and an unabridged Devil’s Dictionary that Mary had given him during their courtship. He opened it and looked on the inside cover.

  To the man in love with words, Love Mary.

  “Here’s an interesting word,” he said, like a man abruptly changing the subject of conversation. “‘Defenestrate.’” He put the dictionary beside the unmailed letter. “Throwing something out of a window, from the Latin, fenestria, ‘window.’ I will now defenestrate myself.” He lay on his back and pushed his feet toward the open window.

  His feet would not move.

  For the first time, something like genuine panic flared in Bone’s stomach. Goddamn it, why did it have to occur to him that windows a
re just another type of door? Goddamn Knolton anyway; the man was a menace even in the imaginary state.

  He climbed off the desk. Now he was really in a fix. Soberly, but knees trembling, he did one last square dance, bowing, do-si-doing, and attempting to promenade through the door. It didn’t work. He knew it wouldn’t work. He couldn’t go through the door, and he couldn’t get through the window. What other way out was there, unless …

  He climbed back on the desk and with his good pair of red-handled scissors jabbed the ceiling, gratified and horrified by how easily they punched through. “This is silly,” he told himself. “I’m really overreacting. I’m sure I could have gone through the door on my own if I’d just waited a little longer.” Nevertheless, he kept jabbing, hot attic air brushing his face as a black wedge took shape in the white ceiling. Presently he was reaching through the smooth white ceiling to pull down a hunk of Sheetrock, at which a confetti of shredded-paper insulation, dust, and no doubt rat turds fell into his eyes. Outside, wind whirled and whipped the Rose of Sharon in the approaching thunderstorm, and a serrated leaf ripped from its branch, pressed briefly to the windowpane, and passed on, while on this side of the window, Bone’s heel, unaware, stepped on the letter he meant to mail and knocked the dictionary Mary had given him to the floor.