The Lemon Jell-O Syndrome

by Man Martin

  He looked down, wiping his face against his arm, batting his eyes. He reached up to pull down more Sheetrock, keeping his eyes closed this time against the rain of debris.

  After blowing grit and grime from his nose and picking it from his eyelids, he studied his handiwork: an irregular starburst hole of jags and obtuse angles and a corresponding heap of Sheetrock on the desk. Someone’s going to have a time cleaning this up, he thought, and vaguely guesstimated the cost of repair, but the headache blossoming behind his eyebrows slowed its growth just a little bit. Above the Sheetrock, a yellow joist rose in the attic darkness, illuminated like a moon crater’s inner wall.

  Now for the acid test: “A ceiling hole is really just another kind of d—” Knolton’s imaginary voice began, but Bone silenced it by grabbing the joist—standing on his desk, he didn’t need to jump to get his hands over it—and, in spite of his sore palm, chinned into the dark attic heat, choked on his pen cap, and lowered to spit it out before lifting himself again.

  He saw little but his head’s shadow floating on swirling dust, but he hung a few moments, savoring his first success after a long drought of failure before lowering himself to the desk. So much for Knolton. A ceiling hole was clearly a different matter than a door. Still, it needed to be a good bit bigger if he intended to pull himself through, so he set to work with gusto until a hole, Tennessee-shaped and manhole-wide, exposed two joists. It would still take some doing to wriggle through; the joists were only about a foot and a half apart, but Bone figured he could do it.

  He did another chin-up and realized he couldn’t.

  It wasn’t that the joists were too close together; they were fine, nor was it another bout with his condition—that had elected to exclude ceiling holes from its jurisdiction—it was that he’d knocked out the hole too close to the side of the house. The roofline here was so low, he could lift his head no more above than nose-level to the joist. If he’d chinned-up higher on his first reconnoiter, he’d have bumped his head and spotted his mistake before going any further. As it was, he’d made an unnecessary mess, not to mention wasting time and energy and working up an even greater thirst—he was terrifically thirsty, he realized—for nothing.

  And nothing now remained to do but to begin the game anew.

  He dragged the desk to the center of the room—God, but it was heavy—stood on it, and gave the ceiling three jabs. It turned out that scissors are not meant to be gripped by the blade when used to pierce Sheetrock, and he managed to give himself a nice gash on the hand. Was there a risk of tetanus? When was his last shot? God knows, with all the crap falling from the ceiling, he was liable to catch measles, mumps, and rabies with shingles and scurvy tossed in for good measure. He tenderly wiped his hand on his pants and studied the wound running along his lifeline from his pinky to his ring finger, wondering how deep it was and wishing he had some water to wash it. It would probably need stitches, he decided. Damn, yet another thing to deal with if he ever got out of this room.

  When he got out of this room, he amended.

  Removing his shirt to bind his wound seemed melodramatic, but this was precisely what he did, figuring better melodramatic than sorry and feeling absurdly macho, covered with grime, bare-chested, his shirt wrapped tightly around his hand.

  It was harder and less effective jabbing the ceiling with his left hand, but he succeeded in starting a decent hole as well as gashing that hand, but not as seriously. His shoulders ached from reaching overhead, so he stopped and rested often, dropping his arms by his sides to shake the soreness out and get the blood circulating. His right hand throbbed no matter what position he held it in, distracting him so badly that not only did he forget to close his eyes against the rain of debris when he tore free the Sheetrock, but he allowed his jaw to hang slack, getting a good mouthful of dust and insulation into the bargain. He picked pieces and tatters from his teeth and dug a plug of dust from between his cheek and gum, but without water to rinse, the chalky Sheetrock taste stayed in his mouth.

  Outside, the swaying trees brightened in a flash of lightning. Maybe he should give another try at shouting at the neighbors from the window. No, the die was cast; he’d already made a hole in the ceiling and a wreck of his office. Besides, he’d sufficiently demonstrated that the neighbors weren’t close enough to hear him. They’d never liked him, Mary said. But she’d also written, “To the man in love with words, Love Mary.”

  At last the new hole was big enough, and he grabbed the joist, chinning himself up. It was much harder than before. He’d used up a lot of energy and couldn’t bear to put too much weight on his right hand, which was wrapped in a tee shirt with a crimson chevron of a bloodstain.

  There was more overhead clearance in this section of the attic, but not much, and the roof beam scraped Bone’s bare back as he tugged himself into the heat and darkness. With a sudden move that shot pain from his hand all the way up his spine, he released the joist and grabbed for the next one over. He lay for a time unable to summon the will to move, the joist pressing his rib cage, the migratory pain from his hand tingling in his forearm. Then, more slowly, he grabbed the joist with his other hand and hauled himself the rest of the way up.

  He rose tottering on all fours. The narrow joists gouged his knees and made the wound on his hand sing. He rested on his forearms to take the weight off his injured hand. He had made it. It was going to be okay. Two glowing holes in the ceiling below lit the interstitial triangles of support beams, and the narrow seams of light outlined the rectangle of the attic door; silhouettes of Christmas-ornament boxes, boxes of old clothes—his past with Mary—ranged themselves around him, and not only those but also leave-behinds of the family before them: shoe boxes and baby toys, fossilized under decades of attic dust. He crawled to the attic door, squeezing between support beams, ignoring the clamoring pain in his hand and head. Then he was on the rough floor planking in the center of the attic, and though he still couldn’t stand straight, he could walk in a crouch, and what a relief to get off his poor hands and knees!

  The air was heavy with dust and the attic insufferably hot, but he did not perspire. Almost there. He pushed down on the attic door, but powerful springs held it closed. It would need his full weight to open.

  “How do you expect to get through?” Knolton’s voice asked. “The attic door is still a door after all.”

  “It’s really more of a ladder,” Miranda Richter’s voice amended. “In any case, all he has to do is put his weight on it, and gravity will take care of the rest. It’ll open by itself, and he’ll just drop to the ground.”

  Bone could imagine Knolton wondering, but not mentioning, what would happen when the attic door opened. If the metal ladder unfolded, as it seemed certain to do, where would Bone end up? At what angle would he hit? Could he control his fall? The prospect of ricocheting against a wall or getting painfully tangled in a collapsible stair was not a pleasant one, but in for a penny, in for a pound was Bone’s motto by this point. He took hold of the ladder as tightly as he could bear, grimacing at the pain from his hand—the bloody stain on the tee shirt had stopped growing, at least—but he hesitated before bringing his knees onto the attic door.

  “Toodle-oo,” Miranda Richter suggested helpfully.

  Bone brought both knees up, and instantly the door swung down out of the darkness into the lit hallway below. “Wait!” he shouted. The ladder extended, unfolding, knocking Bone’s skull against the frame, and stopped. “Wait!”

  Iron bands clamped his head. He strained the nape of his neck against the frame, holding himself in place, trembling at the effort. What a hideous blunder he’d nearly made: wasting all this work escaping the trap of his office only to drop himself into the trap of the hallway, where his exit would be barred by not one but five taunting doors. His head slipped from the frame, and he went down. The ladder did not unfold the rest of the way, thank God, and Bone perched and panted.

  “You need to get back up that ladder,” Knolton pointed out unnecessarily
.

  Bone scrabbled up, holding his body low against the ladder to keep it from unfolding.

  Back in the attic’s safety, he crouched and panted until his trembling subsided. No harm done. He’d just keep going toward the back of the attic until he was safely over the living room, break through the ceiling there, and go down. No need to turn on the attic light; it was bright enough to see where he was going without it. The rough plank floor of the attic gave out after a little distance, and he crawled on knees and wrists—it hurt less than resting his hands on the joists. Above him the roof tapped and pattered in the falling rain. Then, contrary to expectations, he discovered that the light penetrated the opaque attic air only a little way after all, and he passed into darkness as if going through a curtain. His hand was throbbing less, though, or at least he no longer noticed it as much. His head, on the other hand, felt like something was crushing it. And his throat…

  To the man in love with words, Love Mary.

  Perhaps the “Love” was neither the object of a preposition—“(with) Love, Mary”—nor a present indicative verb “(I) Love (you), Mary” but a command, or at least a recommendation, offered to a man who’d unwisely given his heart to words: “Love Mary.”

  Far enough. He must be clear of the hallway by now. Probably over the living room. He balanced himself on the joists. With his less-injured hand, he pressed against the Sheetrock through the fluff of dust and insulation. It was going to be harder breaking through than he’d anticipated. If only he’d thought to bring his scissors. He definitely wasn’t going back for them. He pawed back the insulation until his palm pressed smooth Sheetrock. He pushed down. No good.

  “You’re going to have to put your weight on it,” Miranda said.

  Sitting on one joist and bent forward to brace his hands against another, Bone put his feet on the Sheetrock, powdery insulation almost up to his ankles. He tentatively lifted his butt, and at once there was a hollow tearing sound and the Sheetrock gave way. His butt hit the joist before he went through. Powder floated in the air, and he gave a dry, useless sneeze. Leg hairs cast shadows up his white calves. The hole wasn’t big, but he could see a corner of the rug that lay in front of the sofa, and there, unless he mistook, was a bit of the dining table. He was above the living room.

  The jagged Sheetrock reminded him of broken ice over a pond, and for a moment Bone imagined it actually was ice, that the builders had prudently constructed the ceiling from a special ice that didn’t melt at room temperature but would dissolve in the mouth. He instantly pulled himself back from the brink of this dangerous fantasy. He wasn’t that far gone. Soon he’d be drinking a glassful of actual water from the sink. He’d drink the first two glasses, he promised himself, with no ice at all, and then the third and fourth glasses he’d put ice in. Then he’d reward himself each day for the rest of his life by driving to the Quik-Trip and buying himself a giant cherry slushy.

  Maybe he’d have the first three glasses without ice.

  He lowered himself through the ceiling, holding onto the joist, the Sheetrock cracking and falling as he pushed through, slowing his descent. While his elbows were still bent at ninety degrees, his feet touched something solid. He was standing on the edge of the dining table.

  Bone let go and, in that speeded-up thinking you get in a crisis, realized a nanosecond too late that the table’s edge was not the sturdiest possible place to rest his weight. The commotion that followed came in a flurry of sensations: first his feet were touching the heavy oak table, then the table was under his arm, then he was on the floor, the table on top of him. All of this accompanied by the loudest possible knocks and bangs.

  Then it was over.

  There wasn’t even an echo in the stillness. Added to the crushing feeling in his skull and the all-but-forgotten throb in his hand was a magnificent shooting pain in his ankle. Blue and red spots flashed in his vision.

  “I will have broken my ankle,” he told Miranda and Knolton, employing the little-used future perfect tense to indicate that in the fullness of time, it would be discovered that he had done so.

  Bone rolled the table off his legs and turned sideways so his broken ankle rested on top of his good one. He allowed himself—and instantly regretted—one look back to check if it could possibly have swollen as elephantine as it felt, as if it were ripping open the shoe from the inside. A white cotton sock bloated over the canvas rim of the tennis shoe like a muffin, but the thought of gripping the heel and pulling off the shoe made everything go swimmy.

  Bone shut his eyes against the sight and began crawling to the—

  And this was when he wasted a perfectly good bellow on his own misery.

  Door.

  R, r

  From the Semitic resh (r), “head.” The Greek rho faced the opposite direction. The Romans added a leaning-post under the nose to prevent confusion with P. In the lowercase R, the entire bottom half of the face is amputated: r.

  rage: Fury to the point of madness, from the Latin rabere, hence rave and rabid.

  real: Almost incredibly, this monosyllable is a compound. From the Latin re “thing” and -al “real.” Real is not real by itself. It must be a real thing.

  redundant: Needless repetition, as in “extreme emergency” or “final outcome.” It would be as redundant listing redundancies here as listing clichés under the heading “cliché” would be cliché. From the Latin redundans, “overflow,” the unda meaning “water in motion, wave,” whence inundation, undulate, and surround.

  regret: Anguish over the past, from re (again) and the Old Norse grata, “to moan or sob” from the Proto Indo-European gher, a root with a wide range of meanings from “bellow” to “scrape or scratch.”

  rescue: To deliver from confinement or danger. From the Latin ex (out) and cutere (to shake), i.e. , “shake free of chains”?

  He had done it again. He had done it again. Hehaddoneitdoneitdoneitagain.

  He had managed to land in the one place besides his office or the hallway that did him no good whatsoever. If he’d come down in the kitchen or the bathroom, there would have been water. Even if he’d let himself down in the bedroom, there would have been a phone to dial 911. But here he was in the living room, with nothing to drink and every faucet, every spigot, every drop and gallon on the other side of a mocking threshold.

  He did not look back but slithered resolutely to the door.

  Surely his condition could not block him now.

  It could.

  It did.

  There were two entrances to the kitchen from the living room; he dragged himself around and tried the other. No good. He tried the back door and found the deadbolt bolted. Goody. And of course he didn’t have a key, so even if he could have opened it, he still couldn’t.

  Okay. Nothing to do but go back up through the ceiling. He had to get up on something, broken ankle or no, and lift himself through. Outside the picture window, the criminal rain tormented the dogwood and pummeled the knockout roses. Strangely, the broken bone was not as painful as his headache. Or his thirst. His tongue glued to the roof of his mouth. He tried swallowing but could work up no saliva.

  He dragged himself to the couch and took a cushion.

  “What are you going to do with that?” he imagined Knolton asking incredulously.

  “You’ll see,” he replied. He unzipped the cover and pulled out the stuffing. Tearing the cover was harder than expected, but once a rip started, it gave way easily until that last stubborn shred that just didn’t want to separate. But with the application of additional grunting and groaning, that tore too, and Bone had two strips of cloth.

  “You’re making a splint, aren’t you? But what are you going to use for a brace?”

  “You’ll see.” He wormed over to one of the ladder-back chairs he’d knocked down when he’d fallen from the ceiling.

  “You’ll never be able to break that, you know,” Knolton said.

  “Who said anything about breaking it?” Sitting beside the chair, he
began strapping a wooden leg to his leg. He pulled the cloth as tight as he could bear, but it loosened before he knotted it, and he had to sit for a while, hands resting on the floor behind him, waiting out a dizzy spell before trying again. “Please, God. This had better work.”

  There’s a saying that there are no atheists in foxholes. Other places without atheists include ordinary living rooms where someone is dying of thirst. If he ever got out, Bone swore the first thing he’d do was mail that damn letter to Laurence. Beyond the picture window, the backyard sloped. Angled trees grew in strange geometries in the roiling rain. Having tied the chair leg to his calf and thigh, Bone realized the tall ladder-back still wouldn’t be stable enough. It was awkward crawling with a chair tied to his leg, so he undid his straps. He laid these across his neck, then crawled, dragged the chair after him, crawled, dragged the chair, crawled—astonishing the distance between table and couch when measured out this way—dragged the chair, until he was close enough to the couch again to pull off the other cushion. He unzipped the cover and removed it, but for some reason the upholstery proved even sturdier than before. He tugged and yanked, gritting his teeth in a rictus of effort, but a rip refused to start.

  “The strange thing is,” the Knolton in his mind commented, “you’re not sweating. All this effort and the pain from your broken leg, and you’re not sweating a drop.”

  Bone knew why he wasn’t sweating but tried not to think about it. With one more Herculean pull, a rip began, and he tore the cover down the middle. He could not tear it completely in two, but he didn’t need to. Now came the time to stand on his own two feet. His own two feet plus the chair’s four.

  He pushed up from the sofa, keeping the weight off his broken foot, until he was able to sit. Cinching it as tightly as he could, he tied his chair-splint to his leg, starting midway between his knee and his ankle, the second tie just above his knee, and the last between the first two rails of the ladder-back at his waist. He rose, pushing himself up against the arm of the couch, pulling his makeshift splint after him. Even through the headache clamping his skull, there was a smack of triumph at how well the arrangement worked—still some Yang in the Yin, no matter what. The ladder-back served admirably not only as splint but as crutch and walker, too. By resting his weight on it, Bone took almost all the pressure from his bad leg, which was turning numb, and with its four legs, the chair was supremely steadying.