The Lemon Jell-O Syndrome

by Man Martin

  “I have a job,” Bone protested.

  “This would just be extra,” Mary said quickly. “In case you want a year off to work on your book and maybe look for another job. How do we make this happen?”

  “I knew you was the practical one. You got to proceed real careful, because if we spook him, you won’t see dime one until the thirty-first of Neverary.” Rachel gave the future plaintiff of King v. Limongello a final soft touch of the towel, which she threw into her bag of dirties. “For starters, you can’t talk to anyone about this. I mean En. Ee. One. No press, no newspapers. En. Ee. One. Okay, all done. Let’s put your gown back on and cover you up before you catch cold.”

  That afternoon, Rachel’s lawyer-boyfriend came, timing the visit when Rachel was on break; without going so far as to deny that he was a lawyer or somebody’s boyfriend, they’d deemed it politic to let everyone assume he was an ordinary visitor come to see Bone. The boyfriend wasn’t the sort of person to whom the word “boyfriend” is normally applied. For one thing, he was a lot older than the typical boyfriend, but then Rachel was a lot older than the typical girlfriend.

  The lawyer took in the cockpit of dials and nozzles on the headboard, the IV, and the watercolor cottage with an appraiser’s eye, sat, took three pens out of his shirt pocket, and began writing on his yellow legal pad: to start with, there were medical expenses, to which Mary replied they had no idea how much the hospital stay would be, but the lawyer-boyfriend said he had a pretty good notion and wrote a string of digits, and then there was money for loss of work.

  “Listen,” Bone said.

  Mary said pain and suffering, and the lawyer wrote that number.

  “Stop.”

  The lawyer said reupholstering the furniture, repairing the ceiling, and incidentals and wrote another number, and Mary said punitive damages.

  “I don’t want to sue,” Bone said.

  The lawyer-boyfriend’s lower lip drooped, not in dismay but in surprise, as if Bone had broken in to ask them the capital of Nebraska. The lawyer explained that they weren’t going to sue. “We’re going to show him these numbers, and he’s going to write you a check.”

  When Bone said he didn’t want to do that, either, the room got as still as a stone, and as cool, but the lawyer’s face had no more expression than a mannequin’s. “It’s not Dr. Limongello’s fault. It just happened,” Bone explained. The lawyer eyed his legal pad, as if expecting the numbers to speak up on their own behalf, and looked up, his face impassive as before. At that moment, if someone had thought of dropping a pin, the crash would have resounded like the fall of a bowling ball. “I’m not doing this,” Bone said. His voice, which was almost back on all cylinders, stalled. “It’s not his fault, and I don’t want his money. I know it’s expensive, the hospital and everything, but I’ve got insurance—”

  “God, you dope,” Mary said, and Bone was astonished to see her eyes shining.

  “I think,” the lawyer said, and stood, returning the pens to his pocket, “I should let you think about this. I don’t want you to rush into something.” He looked at Mary and back at Bone. “I’ll wait for your call.” He put his hand on Bone’s shoulder in lieu of a handshake and gave him a brief V of a smile, but no impatience in his voice, no nothing. He left.

  “Mary, I just don’t think—” Bone began.

  “You are such a dope.” Mary put her fist to her forehead. Her chin trembled the way Bone recognized meant she was about to cry.

  “Everything will be okay,” Bone promised. “I have a job.”

  “You don’t have a job,” Mary said. “They’re not renewing your contract. I found out when I turned in your end-of-semester stuff. There was a letter in your faculty mailbox; it must’ve been there for weeks.”

  It took a moment for Bone to exit the former topic and find the turn lane for the current one. “But Gordon said he wouldn’t fire me.”

  “Not for your disability. They didn’t fire you for that. It said it was an economic decision. It said they’d already made the decision to let you go before they learned about your condition. It mentioned something about a document. Bone, did you sign something about your condition not being a disability?”

  “What?” A shadowy recollection glimmered at the threshold of memory, and under the covers, Bone’s legs tingled and prickled in a way that seemed illogically connected with the fluorescent light overhead (fluorescence, “essence of a flower,” what a glaring misnomer, but never mind that now), and in the hallway someone wheeled a cart and called out for Juan. “I—I might have. Yes.”

  “Don’t you see? You don’t have a job. You don’t have insurance.” She rubbed the wet from her cheek with the heel of her hand and seemed about to kneel beside his bed but changed her mind, instead crossing her arms, one elbow clutched in the opposite hand, and turning her head to the door, upper lip stretched down to prevent her nose from running. “This isn’t the time to go all noble and principled. You can’t walk away from this.”

  Bone was in a quandary: on one hand there was his Tennessean work ethic that dictated you don’t shake people down for money; on the other hand was raw, staring necessity. After delivering her bombshell, Mary collected her purse with busy officiousness, as if she’d like to stuff Bone in it, and left without giving him his customary kiss on the forehead.

  Rachel’s expression, when she came to wheel Bone down to physical therapy the next day, looked like five miles of glacial ice. They were angry with him, but Bone didn’t know the right thing to do.

  That afternoon in physical therapy, he shared his dilemma with Hernia.

  Hernia temporized, giving Bone a wintergreen Life Saver, then taking one himself, holding the pack to his mouth and pushing it in with his thumbnail. He sucked and nodded, directing his stare perpendicular to Bone and puckering his lips as if kissing something in the air.

  “Well,” he said slowly, “I know how you feel. But it sounds like God’s been playing pretty rough with you up to now. Maybe He’s finally deciding to cut you a break. I think you ought to take the money. You got to be grateful, am I right, or am I right?”

  Bone took the money.

  V, v

  The direct descendent of U, with which it was once used interchangeably. Johnson omits V from the first edition of his dictionary, although conceding it “ought to be” considered as a separate letter. The Latin V was pronounced /w/, so that Caesar’s famous boast, “Veni, vidi, vinci,” came out “Waynie, weedy, winky.”

  Venus: The Roman goddess of love and desire takes her name from the ancient Proto Indo-European wen-, “to desire,” a fertile root with many shades of meaning, such as “respect,” hence venerate; “wish,” hence wish and winsome; and “hunted or sought-after,” hence venison and win.

  very: Commonly used to mean “to a great extent” but originally “true,” as in “the very thing.” From the Latin uerus, “true,” whence veracity, verdict, and verify.

  On the morning of the fifth day, just as Bone had begun to think he would never leave the hospital, he did.

  First Rachel and Mary performed a brief pas de deux about steering the wheelchair; as Rachel arranged Bone’s crutches on the armrests, Mary maneuvered behind and took the handles, at which the nurse did not look altogether delighted but made no objection.

  “I can push that if you like,” offered Cash, standing just inside the door.

  “No,” Mary said, “I’m good.”

  Poor Cash. Who could blame him for feeling out of place? Something useful to do might help, but Bone’s suggestion that he’d like Cash to push the wheelchair only made things worse: Mary repeated she was good, and Cash said he’d just as soon carry the suitcase, sounding as if he expected to find it coated in sticky seepage.

  Rolling down the hall toward Carlo, Bone bade him farewell. How many soccer tournaments did he have that weekend? Carlo shyly held up three proud fingers, and Bone chuckled admiringly as he rolled past.

  After a silent wait at the elevator door, Rachel r
emarked on Cash’s kindness to take a day off for this, and Cash said he was his own boss and could take time off anytime he wanted. Rachel said that must be nice, and Cash said it was. Rachel had pressed the down button, but Cash pressed it again. Cash said Rachel didn’t have to come down with them if she didn’t want to, but Rachel said that was all right, and besides, it was procedure. Cash nodded, frowning first at his smeary reflection in the elevator door and then at the fist clutching Bone’s suitcase.

  “There’s something I don’t get,” Bone said. “When I had my first attack, I kept hearing all about this wonderful Dr. Limongello, and—” The pause at the end of the statement expressed the letdown of the real deal after having encountered the unreal one.

  “He is wonderful,” Rachel said, “in spite of everything. I know a lot of bad stuff went on, but you’re lucky to have him. He’s, like, famous. You’re lucky to be in his hands.”

  “But people said, you know, he had this really eccentric bedside manner.”

  “He does, didn’t you notice?”

  “What?”

  “He says ‘goldurn.’ He said it today when he came to check on you. ‘How’s this goldurn condition of yours?’ How many neurologists go around saying ‘goldurn’?”

  “That’s it? He says ‘goldurn’?”

  “Well, it’s part of it.”

  The doors shushed back, followed by a small commotion as Cash worked past Rachel and around the barrier of Bone’s crutches to stand in the back beside Mary. The elevator counted down in yellow numbers above the door. Now they exited into the hall, and Bone’s chair cornered left, then right—Bone’s pounding bloodstream foretelling the approach of something momentous—slowing at the automatic glass doors before bumping over the borderline between the hospital’s whispering cool and the outside’s abrupt warmth, slowing once more at the shoreline between the smooth white concrete sidewalk and the pimply blacktop of the parking lot, and blue sky rolled into sight under the concrete awning.

  Sky!

  Clouds!

  And beyond the car roofs, on the other side of the street, the ragged green heads of trees!

  Desist with the exclamation marks; enough is enough. But, he asked himself, what do you do if your heart is become an exclamation mark? Had the aperture of his mind’s eye widened to include birds, he might have burst.

  After hesitating curbside, as if half-hoping for the truck to drive up on its own, Cash explained unnecessarily that he was going to get it. Rachel and Mary helped Bone onto his crutches.

  “Dave said you came this close,” Rachel pinched a button of empty air in front of Bone’s face, “to turning down that money. I don’t know if that makes you a saint or a dumbass, but my money’s on dumbass. Well, good-bye, Bone. Take care. And you take care of him.” She leveled a pointer finger at Mary. Atop his crutches, Bone reached clumsily to the nurse, but while pretending not to notice, Rachel sternly shook her head at the vacancy to his left: nurses don’t hug. She turned and the glass doors parted before her, and then, changing her mind, came back and gave Bone a peremptory embrace. “Take care,” she ordered again before going inside and leaving them to wait for Cash.

  Bone wound up sitting between Mary and Cash, since they’d loaded him into the cab before laying the crutches in the back. Touching Mary’s cool, bare midriff, his elbow jerked back, after which he sat, arms docilely pinned to his abdomen, hands clasped between his thighs as if he were praying in a bathtub. Buildings and signs passed outside in brilliant glare, and then overreaching trees glided by, sheathing the passengers in darkness and coolness.

  The truck pulled into Bone’s carport under a “Welcome Home” poster whose flowers and butterflies must have depleted an entire pack of Sharpies. “Mary did that,” Cash explained. “I’ll take it down for you. I guess you two need to talk over terms and conditions.”

  “Right,” Bone said, a tad too quickly. The solution to looking after Bone during his convalescence, handling the excess dough bloating his bank account, and what Mary could do after losing her job had been found in one convenient stroke. Lucky them.

  Mary held the kitchen door and, fortified by Dr. Limongello’s precursor pill, Bone had no more trouble entering than naturally occasioned by going on crutches. The house had the unfamiliar-familiar feel of a home you’ve been away from: no smell of must or dust but no warm, faint aroma of human habitation, either. Mary had cleaned and straightened so that the house resembled the dwelling of a reasonably tidy professor rather than the lair of a nutcase who rode a pogo stick indoors wearing a spiked helmet. It surprised and inexplicably dismayed Bone to find no hole in the living room ceiling, and Mary explained that Cash knew father-and-son contractors who’d repaired the holes, but not wholly repaired: they still needed to paint. The couch hadn’t been reupholstered, either. Two cushions sat naked.

  Bone raised his crutch and, with a delicacy of which he’d have thought himself incapable, gently touched the spot with an appreciative rubber tip, ice-smooth though unpainted, and his fingers imagined the powdery surface, reliving with a horrid thrill an ordeal he could neither recall nor forget. He still had his dream, but as it penetrated that the same spot would stymie him every time, the moment just before putting his weight on the ceiling and breaking through, his interest waned, and the dream came less frequently, spaced by more mundane imaginings: explaining the etymology of “cynic” to a disbelieving dachshund, showing up to his elementary school reunion in tighty-whities

  Bone said he guessed he’d better make out a check. Mary got the checkbook from a dresser drawer, and Bone filled it out. “I’ll pay you the month in advance. Is that good?” Mary said it was good, and he wrote it out and gave it to her. She stared at it—the account still had both their names—before folding it crisply in the center.

  “Oh, and you got this.” Mary handed him a letter. “Who’s Laurence Hobbs?” It delighted Bone to get a letter from his old friend, unretired after all these years. Mary, cleaning up the house, must’ve found Bone’s letter and mailed it for him.

  “The librarian where I grew up.” He tore the envelope and skimmed the reply. Later, he’d take time to read more closely and savor. “I’m writing letters to everyone who made a difference to me. I’ve pretty much gone through my schoolteachers; next I’ll write some of my undergrad professors. It’s easy getting addresses on the Internet.” He didn’t mention this was due to the fake Limongello’s prompting.

  “You do that a lot?”

  “Well, maybe not every day,” Bone confessed.

  Mary smiled and shook her head. “You’re really something. I can’t even get Cash to call his own mother.”

  Cash entered with Bone’s “Welcome Home” poster rolled into a big white ball. “I’ll throw this away for you,” he offered.

  The next morning, Mary reported for duty, making him a light breakfast of yogurt and fruit and seeing to it he took his precursor: a small dosage, the doctor had explained, an innocuous white tablet smaller than an Advil. Would there be side effects? Limongello had made Bone read over and sign a veritable Who’s Who of potential negative reactions—No taking chances with you anymore, Mr. King!—before writing the prescription.

  Had Bone suffered any of these? Strange dreams? (Yes, but no stranger than usual.) Uncontrollable sexual urges? (No. Phoo.) Thoughts of suicide? Mood swings? Dizziness? (No, no, no.) Bone didn’t even have dry mouth, the commonest side effect of all. Strange that this was all there was to it: nearly die of dehydration in your own house, desiccated victim of an imposter doctor madman, and all they had to do was patch the ceiling and give you a white pill to fix you up as if nothing had ever happened. The contractor and his son would come and paint the ceiling, and Limongello would monitor Bone until he got his meds balanced.

  Mary left after breakfast, saying she’d check in at lunch. Consoling himself over her absence, Bone went through his e-mails. Oglethorpe University was looking for a humanities professor. The campus, which Bone drove by almost daily, was an oasis
of medieval-looking stonework amid the uniform background of gas stations, fast-food joints, and dry cleaners along Peachtree Industrial, furnished with turrets and battlements, somebody’s notion of how a college ought to look, a notion with which Bone wholeheartedly concurred. The job was right up Bone’s alley, but he saw little likelihood of landing it. Nevertheless, he brushed up his vita and sent in an application. No harm in trying, after all.

  He poured himself a second cup of coffee, then went back to his manuscript. Returning to Words after an extended absence was like tugging on a cold, wet bathing suit. His entries had been growing increasingly—eccentric. Jesus, the butter must’ve really been slipping off his noodles; nevertheless, there was some interesting, valid research here. He realized how close he was to finishing, and then he’d have his PhD even if he didn’t find a publisher. Throwing caution to the winds, he e-mailed Dr. Susik, his dissertation chair, to set up a final review. Meanwhile, wrinkles needed ironing.

  To wit: the Middle Dutch wreed, wrac, and wringen gave us wrath, wrest, wrist, writhe, wreathe, awry, wry (a “bent” sense of humor), wreck, wreak, wretched, wrench, wrangle, and wrong. In all of these—it both disappointed and elated Bone that Partridge left this unstated—wr- is clearly a morpheme for “twist.” Pronounce wrestle as it’s spelled, and you can not only hear but feel the consonants tangle at your alveolar ridge and tumble down your palate. This much is obvious, but a few words defy the pattern. Write, for example, descends not from wringen, “to twist,” but reissen, “to rip or rend,” but doesn’t writing have more to do with twisting—a pen tip forming sinuous S, gaping G, undulant U—than ripping? And wraith, Partridge relates not to wreathe or writhe, which it so closely resembles, but ward and warn, though surely the metathesis, the sounds twisting so that r roughly rubs the w, is because no wraith stands flat-footed like a warden delivering a warning but spirals from its crypt in a corkscrew of milky smoke.