The Lemon Jell-O Syndrome

by Man Martin

  Wren presented another mystery. “Of obscure origin,” Partridge comments, and obscure is right. The Old Norse is ridnill, but why the intrusive w in English? To suggest the swiveling movement of wings? Because wrens make nests of twisted straw and twigs? Onomatopoeia for its convoluted song, described in Betelweis’s Guide to Birds (1999) as “a rich bubbling chatter of churring and chitting, falling in a cascade of notes”? Parenthetically, Guide to Birds itself was the most twisted reference work Bone had ever come up against—arranged not alphabetically nor by genus but by color. “Birds that are mostly black,” “Birds that are mostly white,” “Birds that are mostly black and white.”

  Bone spent the morning doggedly and joyously pursuing wraith and wren down old trails and cold trails, losing the scent and picking it up again, and around 10:15, he was conscious that something happened—what, he didn’t know, but something, a noise in the room, a flash of movement in his peripheral vision.

  “What the hell,” Mary said that afternoon when she came to look in on Bone. “Bone, you spilled coffee all over the floor. Didn’t you see it?”

  Sure enough, the coffee mug she’d given him—“I are a grammar teacher”—lay in pieces in a brown puddle of arabica on the floor beside the desk. Moist brown footprints showed where he’d walked through coffee on the way to the bathroom.

  “It must’ve spilled.” Bone deduced the obvious.

  But he didn’t recall spilling it.

  There were other mysteries. While talking to the contractor and his son the next day, Bone glimpsed another flash in his periphery, at which the contractor gave a peculiar look and then exchanged a glance with his son. Had they seen it, too?

  That same morning, a wobbly, elongated toothpaste ampersand appeared on the bathroom tile beside the sink, the explanation for which Bone could not surmise; ditto for the scrapes and bruises his knuckles didn’t remember getting. But all of these were minor affairs: his health was improving; doors—thanks to Wonderful Double-Doc Lemon Jell-O’s precursor—posed no further problems; and his work on Words—he had sent out a fresh barrage of queries to agents and publishers—was proceeding apace. There was also the sweet torture of Mary’s daily visit to look forward to, when she came to look in on him and take him to physical therapy and doctor’s appointments. Moreover, he had his daily letter of gratitude to write. The mystery would solve itself. And so it did.

  W, w

  Originally, as the name suggests, co-joined Us. (V did not exist except as a variant of U, which is why the letter is not named “double-vee.”) In some typefaces, such as Garamond, we can still see the overlapping tops (W). Along with Y, W is one of two consonants that is sometimes a vowel, as in the archaic Welsh, cwm, “a steep hollow.”

  wed: From the Old High German wetti, “to pledge,” similar to the Gothic gawadjon, from which also come engage, wage, wager.

  word: From the Latin verbus, whence also verb. Capitalized, it refers to the Bible, “the Word of God,” as well as the Son of God: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God.” (John 1:1)

  work: Effort undertaken for pay. From the Proto Indo-European, werg´-, one of the earliest words ever spoken. Originally, the past participle of work was wrought, with each letter voiced—commencing with twisting wr- and culminating with -ght’s gnash—tough to pronounce, as if it were hard steel that had to be wrestled into shape.

  wren: Of obscure origin.

  Coming back from having a walking cast put on his foot, Bone exercised the astonishing misjudgment of placing a hand on Mary’s knee. Mary lifted it by one finger as if it were a banana peel and returned it to Bone’s lap without comment. Bone stared at the windshield through a sudden humidity filling the car, and Mary pulled into the Publix parking lot, where she got out to buy groceries. Alone in the car, Bone repeated the word “stupid” to the dashboard a number of times. When Mary returned with her cart of sensible purchases, the world seemed to go black before Bone’s eyes, and he found himself unable to stop his garrulous chattering, babbling for them all the way home, like the little piggy of the poem.

  When she pulled into the carport, Mary opened the glove compartment and took out an envelope, which she handed to Bone. Divorce papers. Bone began to say something and coughed, discovering a sudden dry patch in his throat. She hated to do this now, she said, but Bone said, no, they might as well get it over with. This way they knew where they stood. These things happen, Mary said. Yes, Bone said, they might as well be mature about this; they should go into the kitchen, ahem, and sign them. As dutifully as Mary was tending to him, she’d made it crystal clear that they were kaput, that it was over, that she was with Cash now. Sometimes in these situations the phrase “painfully clear” is employed, and seldom have pain and clarity joined in sharper juxtaposition. Bone, as willing to give Mary her freedom as any other thing in his power—an armful of fresh-cut flowers, his heart—resolved not to show how he hungered for her daily visits and from then on, just as one avoids looking at the sun, not to let himself stare in her direction.

  His discomfiture was in no way lessened by a change of heart by Cash, who’d become seemingly unable to get his fill of doing helpful chores for Bone: the driveway had been edged to within an inch of its life; the lawn had endured all that weeding, feeding, and seeding could do for it; the boxwoods looked as if they’d been served out with an ice-cream scoop. When Mary and Bone pulled into the carport, Cash and two of his employees were even then installing japonicas in the front bed.

  To distract from the afterglow of humiliation as well as the intermittent reappearance of Cash’s watchful face in the kitchen window, a sight that sent a centipede’s chilly legs running down Bone’s spine, Bone carefully read over the papers, commenting that they were much less complicated than he’d have expected. Mary explained that she’d printed them off the Internet. She didn’t want any money, Mary said. He’d gotten in serious trouble signing papers before, but Mary wanted to assure him that it wouldn’t happen again. The process would take about thirty days for an uncontested divorce.

  He signed, and as he gave the papers to Mary, she said, “What was that about?”

  “What was what about?”

  “You just stuck your arm up in the air. You didn’t notice?”

  “No. What?”

  “You stuck your arm up, like this.” She jerked her hand over her head and let it fall. “You didn’t notice it?”

  “No, I—” Then he realized he had seen one of those flashes of movement, like the others he’d glimpsed at odd intervals. Could this explain the minty white squiggle squeezed on the bathroom wall, his busted coffee cup, his bruised and bloodied knuckles?

  Limongello’s diagnosis when they told him about this new symptom the next day was dyskinesia, “bad movement,” from the Greek, dys-, “bad,” and kinein, “move,” delivered with a physician’s simple confidence that people feel better about an illness if they hear the word for it in Greek, the same way a mechanic will display for you a tailpipe half-eaten by rust or a greasy handful of sheared lug nuts in the expectation that this will resign you to the body blow your bank account is about to suffer.

  It turned out the same precursor that helped Bone manage doors could also cause sudden involuntary movements, in this case, sending Bone’s arm up into the air. The side effect was listed alongside strange dreams, thoughts of suicide, compulsive gambling, sexual addiction, dry palms, sweaty palms, mood swings, irritability, night sweats, day sweats, dry mouth, headaches, nausea, vomiting, hair loss, and itchy skin. How had Bone overlooked it?

  “Is there anything I can do to stop it?”

  “We’ll try to get those meds balanced and see what happens.”

  Next morning, Mary asked, “You know all that mint that’s growing in the side bed? Dorothy at Nuts ’n’ Berries says if I make mint jelly, I can sell it there.” Bone said to knock herself out but opined that the clientele of Nuts ’n’ Berries was not much for eating lamb. “Some of them do. And any we don’t sell, I’ll
give away for Easter.”

  Mary ran to General Hardware to get some half-pint jars, and Bone hobbled to the utility room to fetch the big canning kit. He filled the pot with water and set it on simmer.

  What was he doing, Cash wanted to know when Bone came outside with his split-oak basket and green-handled garden shears. Trimming mint for Mary, Bone said, regretting instantly the inclusion of her name. Cash, lips pressed together until they nearly formed a duckbill, looked westward toward Peachtree Industrial, where Mary had gone, and asked if he needed any help with that, and Bone said no, he could manage, and then Bone said, “Whoa!” because at that moment his arm chose to rocket up, launching the shears out of the basket into the air.

  Cash returned to his crew, filling in a raised bed in the side yard. Bone didn’t ask but thought Cash’s business must suffer from all the work he was doing pro bono for Bone. In the last month, the original crew of five stalwart, clean-cut Mexicans and true had dwindled to a sketchy pair: a gray-bearded man with an eye patch and a dirty Braves cap, which had been jammed on his skull as though fastened with rivets, and a Hispanic who looked like he’d been molded out of softened lard, for whom walking entailed a side-to-side roll like a ship on heavy seas, his pink lips moving in what Bone believed was a silent prayer that angels not take him home to Jesus en route to the wheelbarrow.

  Bone knelt, carefully extending his broken foot in its outsized padded tennis shoe behind him, scissoring the green fragrance into the air from the feathery stalks. A yellow butterfly bobbed at eye level and darted by. Mint is shockingly easy to grow and, once started, shockingly hard to stop, so Bone was able to harvest a heap sufficient to jelly every lamb between there and New Zealand. Inside, he rinsed it, checking the pale undersides of leaves and picking off a solitary spit bug, white with foam, the only insect able to endure the touch of mint oil on its tender belly. When Mary clinked in with her box of half-pint jars, she found the mint waiting fragrant and water-beaded in the sink, the pot of water bubbling on the stove.

  “Thank you,” she said. “You didn’t need to do all that. Don’t you need to work on Words?”

  Bone said he’d already gotten in some work this morning and would work some more that evening. He was nearly done. Really nearly done. “I went ahead and contacted the dissertation committee and set up my defense.”

  “Wow. That’s great. Well, we don’t need to start the canning yet,” Mary said. “First I need to make a mint infusion.”

  “Ah, and how do you do that?”

  “I’ll take care of it,” she said. “You go and work on your book.”

  And so Bone went to the office to work as Mary prepared to infuse.

  There comes a point after even the most arduous writing process when the author realizes with numbed awareness that the long trek is over and the book is finished. So he leans back from his keyboard, in Edmund Hillary–esque stupefaction, saying, “I’ll be dog. This is the end, huh? Guess I might as well print it.”

  Bone’s final entry was zzz, the cartoon onomatopoeia for snoring, which The Oxford English Dictionary traces to H. G. Wells’s Tono-Bungay, 1909. But Bone believed it went back a quarter of a century earlier. He’d searched the Net and pored through massive hardbound folios of collected cartoons at the main library, hunting the first cartoon with those three lightning bolts inked over a sleeping body, to no avail. He was certain it’d been Thomas Nast, the cartoonist who gave us a fat rather than skinny Santa, the donkey and elephant as political symbols, and lanky, goateed Uncle Sam; somewhere a cartoon pictured Boss Tweed, dimpled fingers laced over a bulging checkered vest, a balloon with a Z oozing through puckered lips. And Bone was as certain as certain could be that that Z had been suggested to the German-born Nast by schnarken, “snore,” which starts with s-, but sounding more like an unvoiced z-, besides which, had Nast used S, it would have appeared that Tweed had sprung a leak or was trying unsuccessfully to whistle; had it been SH, it would have seemed Tweed was telling someone to “sh”; and SHN would have been merely perplexing. So Nast hit upon Z, instantly to be imitated by lesser followers, a genuine addition to American idiom, lost in the pile of Nast’s many other contributions.

  But lacking the cartoon itself as the first link in the chain of evidence, it came to nothing but conjecture, and after researching hours and weeks at home, on the computer and in the library, wondering if he’d have to bear it out even to the edge of doom, Bone came to a realization.

  It didn’t matter.

  It didn’t matter whether Nast came up with Z or someone else did, perhaps Hogarth—but it couldn’t have been Hogarth; Hogarth never used speech balloons!—in any case, it didn’t matter. The thought of this made Bone laugh, and he went into the kitchen, where even then Mary was ladling translucent green syrup into jars.

  “I’m done,” he told her, surprised to hear himself speak the words. “I’m done with Words.”

  “Wow,” she said. “Bone, that’s terrific.”

  “If I meet with my dissertation committee in October, I can squeak under the wire to have my hooding ceremony in January. I’ll be a PhD.”

  “You must feel terrific.”

  “Really, I don’t feel anything at all,” Bone said, but he was smiling as he said this. “It’s like I’ve been dipped in Novocain. I don’t know how I feel.”

  Still somewhat dazed, Bone walked to the mailbox and looked through the mail, smiling to find another response from someone he’d written in gratitude. One letter was a postcard picture of the Atlanta skyline. Bone’s blood chilled when he turned it over and saw these words.

  Your life is in terrible danger.

  Do not tell anybody about this message, but meet me

  at the Waffle House on the I-285 access road

  at 6:00 am. tomorrow.

  X, x

  Scholars dispute whether the Greeks invented X or adapted it from the Semitic samek (x), “fish.” Compounding the puzzle, samek looks nothing like a fish but seems derived from the Egyptian djed, a scaffold-looking hieroglyph representing the god Osiris’s backbone. Western Greek pronounced X /ks/; Eastern Greek, however, which became the dominant dialect, pronounced it /kh/. English is the loser by adopting the Western pronunciation. Had we done otherwise, XING would not be a bastard expediency of signage but a legitimate abbreviation, and Christ and crucify would begin with a cross.

  x: In math, the unknown, an abbreviation of the Arabic xei, “thing.”

  Though not officially supposed to drive in his walking cast, Bone left the home before Mary’s arrival and at 7:12 was sitting facing front in a booth at the back, the All-Star glistening in grease and heavy white plates before him—he felt akin to a fool to sit without ordering something—when warm air gusted in, and the waitress and short-order cook called out in unison, “Welcome to Waff—” before their greetings died at slight intervals in their throats. A man in a dirty gray-streaked beard and greasy baseball cap stood by the jukebox, his gaze panning the restaurant, until one eye—an ominous black patch covered the other—fell upon Bone like a chill. The waitress cast Bone an anxious and protective look as the man sat opposite him.

  The stranger leaned his beard over the coffee cup. “You don’t recognize me?” He pulled off his cap and lifted his eye patch to reveal a right eye as clear and bright as the left. Bone’s arm shot up in terror, upsetting his plate of hash browns.

  Limongello.

  Or rather the man who’d once impersonated him. The fake Limongello assured Bone he had no intention of alarming anyone, reaching under his back collar to pull out the little pillow that had formed his hunchback and making a whisking motion of his fingertips over his dirty, colorless wardrobe. “All this is just a disguise.” Bone suspected some of it wasn’t just a disguise. “I can’t let anyone guess my real identity.”

  Bone snorted before he could stop himself. “This is your idea of being inconspicuous?”

  The fake Limongello chuckled and shrugged. “The main thing is I’m not recognized.”

/>   “How’d you ever get a job with Cash?”

  “He needed someone to speak Mexican.” Fake Limongello indicated himself with a thumb.

  “Goddamn it, that’s not even a language. You mean Spanish. Do you even speak Spanish?”

  “High school. I can count one to twenty, and I know the words to ‘La Cucaracha.’ I can ask where the sister of Pedro trabajas at. I say that sort of stuff to Jorge and gesture what to do. Mostly he gets the idea. Mostly.” Fake Limongello stared into the middle distance. “I knew all along I wasn’t the real Dr. Limongello, but as soon as I heard about your condition, I was sure I could help.”

  Bone’s fingers spread on the table as if it were a keyboard. He was heavily conscious of the need to speak slowly, calmly, and soothingly and above all to make no sudden movements. “Don’t worry. It’s okay. We can get you help.”

  “I don’t need help,” he said. “I am help. Don’t you get it? I’m back.”

  “I see that.”

  “I don’t mean I’m back here,” he said. “I mean I’m back. My self is back.”

  “Y’all need anything?” the waitress asked. Not lifting his eyes from the madman across the booth from him, Bone transmitted thought rays: Call 911, call 911, call 911. Limongello waved her off and said, “No, we’re fine,” his tone calm and pleasant, his expression the same quizzical, humorous one he always wore, his dark eyes sparkling. “My name is Mulligan Wye. My friends call me ‘Flash.’ I’m a used-car salesman down near Stone Mountain. I knew all along I wasn’t Limongello, but I didn’t know who I was. I knew who they told me I was, but that’s not the same. They kept telling me who I was, and I tried pretending. The meds made it easier, but I was still just pretending. I didn’t feel like me. But I do now. I got it back. I got my self back. I’m Flash Wye. I’m a used-car salesman. I live down near Stone Mountain.”