The Lemon Jell-O Syndrome

by Man Martin

  “We both learned it.” She closed her eyes to recite, “‘Ful weel she soong the service devince, entuned in hir nose ful seemly, and Frenssh she spak ful faire and fetisly.’ God, I’d close my eyes to shut it out of my head, and I’d still see it. ‘Frenssh’? ‘Frenssh’?”

  Bone was too weak to laugh, but he shook his head and smiled. Cash stared, puzzled, an outsider to the joke and not sure how to react. Cash’s presence was as awkward as you might expect, but Bone supposed that his wife’s lover thought it was the right thing to do and, moreover, on reflection, that it was the right thing to do. Still, it was, as already noted, awkward, but it was how their mothers had brought them up: when someone’s in the hospital, you visit. Nobody’s mother ever foresaw connections such as your lover’s estranged husband, but you navigate the best you can with what guidance you’ve been given.

  Bone obliged his rival with a blow-by-blow account of his diagnosis—extreme dehydration—the risks to kidneys and other organs, his gradual reinflation with liquids via IV tube, the physical and occupational therapy, and his general prognosis. Cash went “uh-huh, uh-huh” at each detail with the palpable lack of interest of a nine-year-old at a seminar on irregular verbs. After Bone finished his rundown, Cash stayed until he could decently leave and then stayed an additional five minutes after that, conscientiously inflicting a generous portion of his valuable time on them, his eyes shifting around the room as if hoping to find some new topic of conversation in the wall-mounted TV or the watercolor cottage, looking like a cat mistakenly invited to a wedding among a large family of mice, who has nothing to say to any of them but for the sake of decency is abstaining from eating one.

  T, t

  From the Semitic taw (t), “mark,” a meta-letter unique in the Semitic alphabet; instead of a monkey, or a house, or an ox, or a throwing stick, it is a mark that represents nothing but a mark.

  time: The interval between events. (See space.) From the Old English tima, also meaning “tide,” the seafaring Anglo-Saxons not differentiating the ocean’s swell and sink from the abstraction they embody. From the Greek kairos and ultimately from the Proto Indo-European di-mon, a compound using the root da-, “cut to pieces.”

  tmesis (t me' sis): A figure of speech in which a syllable or word is inserted into another word, often for dramatic or rhetorical effect, as in “a whole nother” or “in-freaking-credible.” From the Greek tmesis, “cutting,” or “cut,” thence the Proto Indo-European da-. (See time.)

  By the third day, Bone had adapted to the hospital routine where friendly, helpful people brought him food, gave him pain medication and ice chips, and took his blood and where his only duty was to get well and take nonsensical strolls down the hallway in his hospital gown and boxers. He learned the trick of feeding his IV bag through his bathrobe sleeve before rehanging it on the pole so he could stroll with his bathrobe decently belted instead of in his unclosable hospital gown, parading his underwear in front of God and everybody. Fulfilling his role as quirky patient with strange diagnosis, he gossiped with the staff: Jenny, the Jamaican nurse, had a ten-year-old in a gifted program; Dr. Quick was getting her pilot’s license; and Carlo the custodian played in not one but three different soccer leagues. Think of that: three.

  In his room, he worked on Words, feeling inexplicably that this, too, was part of his role—playing the part of a man working on Words. After lunch, Rachel took him to the sunroom, which was filled with donated toys cheerfully abused by recuperating youngsters: crayons scrubbed down to molars, Lincoln logs in insufficient numbers to construct so much as a lean-to, a jigsaw puzzle missing a butterfly-shaped piece with blue sky and the tip of a sail. Famished for a glimpse of the outside, Bone brought his face close to the scratchy Plexiglas window, peering at an adjoining wing of the hospital and a stingy trapezoid of sky, but the window was about as transparent as a shower door, so he had no more idea of the weather than a goldfish in a bowl.

  That afternoon, Rachel wheeled him to the elevator to visit with the pretty physical therapist who flexed his knees, massaged his calves, and made him lie on his back and raise and lower his legs while other people pedaled stationary bikes, pulled giant rubber bands, and walked in slow lunges across the floor. A sign said, “Stop if you feel faint or pain.”

  Bone pointed this out to a fellow patient. “You can’t use ‘feel’ as transitive and intransitive in the same sentence,” he said. The other patient gave him a funny look, and Bone apologized. “God forgive me. I’m a recovering grammar teacher.”

  The other patient chuckled and offered Bone a wintergreen Life Saver. He was in for a hernia, he explained, but didn’t live in Atlanta. He was only down for a conference when “Bam! Rupture.”

  “Still,” Hernia said cheerfully, “you got to be grateful.” He kept running his fingers over his yellow hair, delicately touching pinkie finger first, then each finger in turn, as if playing a musical scale. “You got to be grateful, am I right or am I right?” Hernia seemed very grateful.

  “Yes,” Bone agreed sincerely, “you got to be grateful.”

  Mary came each day. Bone didn’t expect Father Pepys to visit, but he did, having read about Bone in the Journal. After praying for Bone’s return to full health, amen, the three of them made ill-fitting conversation, cluttering but not filling the silence. Bone listened with unfeigned delight to Pepys, who for some reason wore a contrite expression each time he looked at Mary.

  Bone asked her, “Could you give me an ice chip, please?” Mary slipped a sliver between his dry lips with her cool fingertips, a sudden ecstatic confluence of warm, cold, soft, hard, dry, and moist. He attempted an elaborate witticism to keep her eye: “This hospital has the best ice chips I’ve ever had; we must get their recipe” but only came out with a quiet “Good.”

  After Pepys left, Bone said, “He is a nice man. Coming to see me.”

  “He’s an idiot,” Mary said. She looked at her hands. “He fired me, you know.”

  “No!”

  “He didn’t even do it himself. He left me a letter. Some of the blue hairs on the vestry found out about, well, about me. They fired me.”

  “Son of a bitch. What will you do for money?”

  She half-shrugged. “Cash is taking care of it. And I’ll find something.”

  “Yes. Meanwhile, as you say, Cash will take care of it.”

  “Listen, about everything.” She looked down at her folded hands. “I’m visiting you because, you know, you’re in the hospital. Nothing’s changed between us.”

  “I understand.”

  “I didn’t want you to get the wrong idea. I’m still with Cash.”

  “I understand, really.”

  “We are adults, after all. These things happen.”

  A sturdy, stifling silence hung in the room. “I know,” Bone said. “Nobody’s fault.” He wanted to tell her he had no expectations and was simply happy to have her there. As Hernia said, he was grateful. He ran his fingers one at a time over his hair, as if this private gesture would communicate his gratitude.

  “Do you want me to adjust your broken foot?” Mary offered. “It looks uncomfortable like that.”

  “Actually, do you mind putting it up on a pillow? It is getting a little stiff.”

  “Certainly.”

  Bone asked, if it weren’t too much trouble, would Mary deliver some end-of-semester paperwork to Fulsome for him. She said she’d be glad to, and Bone was effusive in his thanks: passing the conversational ball back and forth as if it were shatter-prone alabaster, like the two hyperpolite chipmunks from the Warner Brothers cartoons: “After you, my fine fellow.” “No, after you.” “I insist.” And like that.

  “I’m sorry, wouldn’t you like to watch the news?” Bone asked.

  “Oh, thank you,” Mary said, “but you don’t like the news, do you? I’m sorry.”

  “No, it’s okay. I’d like to watch the news if you want to. Really.”

  “Quit apologizing to each other.” Rachel stuck her head in the
door. “We can hear you all the way out in the hallway.”

  Mary turned on the six o’clock news. No rain in the forecast. Then Bone’s own name was mentioned, and his face came on the screen, at which point he realized he was no longer watching the news but had fallen asleep and was only dreaming about watching the news; then he was in the attic again, crawling joist to joist.

  While at the hospital he slept neither well nor poorly but was always on the verge of dozing when awake and the verge of waking when dozing, and every time he fell asleep, he had the same dream of crawling through the mazy attic of his unconscious. He believed if he could break through the ceiling just once and find out what happened next, he wouldn’t need to have the dream anymore.

  When he woke, he found Dr. Quick and an unfamiliar doctor by his bed. You’d spot the man as a doctor the instant you saw him, even though he didn’t wear a lab coat; snow-white hair stopped cleanly at his head’s equator like a tonsure, and from there up, his northern hemisphere was not only bald but gleamed as if buffed with Minwax. His chin receded slightly, and he had a mannerism of emphasizing this by tucking it against his Adam’s apple when he was being doctorly and concerned, as he was being now.

  Bone asked, “Are you here to look at my ankle?”

  “I’ve never seen you before,” the doctor said, his hands folded across his belly—not a big belly, but Bone thought he might be sticking it out a bit for the added measure of solemnity and solidity it gave him.

  “And I’ve never seen you,” Bone confirmed. An accurate but odd conversation. “Who are you?”

  “I’m Dr. Limongello.”

  U, u

  Like F, from the Semitic waw (U), “peg,” with the bottom stem lopped off. U is the immediate ancestor of V and W, which up to the sixteenth century were represented by the same symbol, so that evil was euil, love was loue, and wife was uuife.

  un-: Appropriately for a prefix that reverses or negates the word that follows, the -n is an upside-down u-. Compare with Greek and Sanskrit, anti.

  Uranus: Roman sky god, husband of Gaiea, “earth,” from the Greek ouranos, “heaven,” possibly akin to the Hittite wara, “to burn,” therefore, “giver of light.”

  utopia: Coined by Sir Thomas More in 1516, a pun on the Greek eu-topia, “good place,” and u-topia, “no place,” so the word contains the wry wisdom that hunt though we will for a land of peace and harmony, we won’t find it. More, once a favorite of Henry VIII, fell from grace and was beheaded in 1535 after failing to attend Anne Boleyn’s coronation. Boleyn herself was beheaded less than a year later.

  The real Dr. Limongello performed an examination almost identical to the impostor’s, after which he assured Bone that, although presenting with unusual symptoms, the illness itself was not unheard-of. Bone lay cheek to pillow as the double-doc sat by his bed, telling about some very important chemicals called neurotransmitters that come from other chemicals called precursors, while from the hall rose and fell the muted bustle of nurses and doctors making their rounds, discussing patients or something funny someone’s husband said, and coded messages chimed up and down the ward.

  There was one precursor, Limongello explained, that everyone had ignored because everyone had thought precursors didn’t do much but wait around to turn into neurotransmitters. Only they’d been wrong. The brain has a purpose for everything, even the smallest and most insignificant tittle, like this particular precursor. Sure enough, it turned out that while no one was paying attention, the humble precursor was unobtrusively going about its chores, one of which was getting people through doors. It so happened that Bone’s brain didn’t make enough of this precursor, and without it there to man the switch, certain messages couldn’t get through, which meant Bone couldn’t get through. “Good news is, it’s easily treatable with medication. We just have to give you a synthetic version of the precursor that your body should be producing naturally.”

  “Isn’t that risky?” Bone asked.

  “Risky compared to what?” Limongello asked, silently inviting Bone to compare the possible side effects of medication versus dying of thirst with a broken ankle in his own living room.

  “So that’s all I have to do? Take a pill?”

  “Well,” Limongello said, “the doctors here have to get your levels restored, and then we’ll take it slow and monitor you until we get your meds balanced, but, yes, that’s really pretty much all there is to it. Take a pill.”

  The next morning, Rachel explained to Bone and Mary what had happened. She wheeled in a cart laden with a basin, sponges, and a little tower of towels, announcing in an unnaturally carrying voice, just like a wisecracking but no-nonsense TV nurse, “Are we ready for our sponge bath, Mr. King? You stay, too, honey,” she told Mary, who was getting up to leave. “You won’t see nothing you haven’t seen before, I don’t guess. Close the door and make sure no one comes in. Now, Mr. King, let’s see if we can slip off that gown.”

  When the door was closed, Rachel said in her normal voice, “I need you to listen up. This is real important. I needed you here,” she told Mary, “because I figure you’re the smart one.” She disconnected Bone’s IV and helped him pull off his gown. He felt the warmth of his blush all the way down to his chest. “You got a regular harem here, don’t you, chief?” she asked. “Just a sec, we’ll cover you with a blanket so me and her can do our job without getting all distracted. Meanwhile, scoot up. We got to get this towel up under you.” She got the towel up under him and covered him up, tucking the blanket under his shoulders, then began with his face, soaping lightly and rinsing with a moist sponge. “I got a friend in Limongello’s office who says there’s been lawyers in and out of there like nobody’s business. Now, you absolutely cannot tell where you heard this.” She pointed the sponge accusingly in Bone’s face. “I know she won’t blab, but I don’t know how much sense you got. This would lose me and my friend’s job both. Got it?”

  “Got it,” Bone said.

  Rachel leveled the sponge at him two more seconds for good measure, then took a towel from the cart and patted his face dry. “Limongello had another patient, a regular loony tune, who’s been AWOL a couple of weeks now, but he exactly fits the description of the man who told you he was Dr. Limongello.” With Bone’s tingling face dry, Rachel pulled the cover and began softly and studiously sudsing his chest and arms, giving special care to the crinkles and creases at his elbows and armpits. “This guy, the other patient, went missing once before, and they thought they had him fixed, but he must’ve gone off his meds, because now he’s gone again. Anyway, that guy must’ve been the one who said he was Limongello. Their records show both of you checked in for an appointment on the same day, but neither of you stuck around to see the doctor.” Rachel’s sponge dabbed up three prismatic bubbles caged in Bone’s sternum hairs, then, with two parenthetic sweeps of her towel, she dried his chest.

  Mary’s “Hunh” at this was a thoughtful hunh and a pondering hunh, the hunh of one on whom a light has broken.

  “Poor devil,” Bone murmured. “So that explains it. He was mentally ill. Still, you know, I think he was honestly doing his best for me. He really was a nice man.”

  “Jesus, Bone,” Mary said. “Shut up.”

  Shaking her head at Bone, Rachel told Mary, “I knew there was a reason I wanted you here.” She said, “Here, lift your arms and we’ll get your pits.” Rachel washed, rinsed, and toweled his torso, then pulled the covers back and did his legs. “Now you need to roll over, boss, think you can do that?” Bone rolled on his side, and Rachel pulled the covers up to his hip and soaped his back. He wondered if and feared that she’d go so far as washing between his fanny cheeks. She did. Nothing escaped this woman.

  “So Dr. Limongello,” Mary said, “is partly responsible for this mess.”

  “Check,” Rachel said. Bone could tell Rachel was addressing Mary, not him, and although he avoided looking at Mary while he was being bathed, focusing instead on the sheet under his nose where a wrinkle forked and s
et off in two ridges over the side of the mattress, he imagined Mary’s nods of agreement and attentive frown of comprehension. “Now, if you know what’s good for you, you’ll listen up. The doc’s got his panties in a wad you might sue. Maybe they were negligent letting patients poke around in supply closets, putting on lab coats and stuff, and Limongello’s office never bothered checking why y’all both ran off before you saw the doctor. If you ever want to see a doctor’s blood pressure go through the roof, just whisper the word ‘malpractice.’ My boyfriend says it’s not the gold mine it used to be since tort reform, but Limongello’s still in a pretty tight fix because it’s not just a matter of a settlement, it’s Limongello’s whole reputation if it gets out his patients run around pretending they’re him. The last thing Limongello wants is that getting out. Compared to that getting out, malpractice is just chicken feed.

  “Now comes the good part.” Rachel pulled the covers back again and said, “Lift up your butt some; we’re going to put some extra towels underneath.” She spread his legs and began, with the same gentle but thorough and meticulous detachment, to wash his scrotum, which was not the least bit erotic but yet—apart from the complicated embarrassment of having his privates scrubbed by another woman in the presence of his estranged wife—indisputably pleasant. “You can take over this part if you’re jealous,” Rachel offered Mary, and—though Bone did not suspect this—irrationally, Mary was a bit jealous. Bone kept his eyes trained on the ceiling during this process as the women discussed how to handle Dr. Limongello, like conspirators planning a surprise for Caesar on the Ides of March: Here, as I point my sword, the sun arises.

  “They wrote about you in the newspaper, you’ve been talked about on TV, it’s been on the radio. You can’t buy that kind of publicity. Limongello sure as hell doesn’t want his name pulled into this. At the very least—at the very least,” Rachel said, “you ought to get free medical treatment for life out of this. And—” a pause, during which Bone felt some coded transmission pass between the two women—“maybe some additional compensation for being out of work.”