The Lemon Jell-O Syndrome

by Man Martin

  “Good for you,” Bone said. He tried to keep his smile from wavering, but it was no use. His arm shot up. He began giggling. Mustn’t giggle.

  “Fortunately, I got a plan,” Wye said, “and you got an ace in the hole Cash don’t know about.” Flash waggled a thumb at himself. “Me. He don’t know he’s got a double agent on his yard crew. And I’ll tell you something. You got Cash worried.”

  “Me?”

  “Why-oh-you, you,” Wye affirmed. “He says to keep an eye on you and Mary whenever we come to do yard work. Haven’t you noticed how often Cash comes around? No yard needs that much work! Look at your knockout roses—they’ve been watered and fed and mulched and trimmed to hell and back! Cash’s whole business is going to wrack and ruin keeping an eye on you.”

  “Why’s he worried about me?”

  Wye gave Bone an exasperated look. “You really are dumber than ditch water. I mean, you’re walking around with a dictionary in your head, but you don’t got the sense God gave a stick. Meaning no disrespect,” Wye mused and picked up a bacon slice, which he chewed. “In any case,” he leaned forward, “now we can start on your cure.”

  “I’m already being treated,” Bone said.

  “And a lot of good it’s doing you,” Wye responded sardonically with a nod at Bone’s rogue arm. “We already talked about this. You don’t want to just be a bag of chemicals, do you? You’re more than that, aren’t you?”

  “It’s not like that.”

  “It’s exactly like that,” Wye said. “I found the cure, Bone. Not a treatment. Cure. The cure to Self-Dislodgement. I worked it out on my own. I was on the right track with those tasks I gave you, but it was just the start. I’ve been working out some more intensive therapies.”

  Bone did not like the sound of that. “You nearly killed me.”

  “What?”

  Bone well understood the folly of alarming this graybeard loon, but he didn’t care; squeezed in a vise of fear and anger, he shook until silver ripples shivered across the black coffee in the cup by his fingertips. “That damn therapy of yours nearly killed me. I was stuck in my house for—” the next word was spoken in a half-sob—“days. I couldn’t get through the door. I nearly died of thirst, thanks to your goddamn therapy.”

  “I don’t understand.” Wye took a toast triangle from Bone’s plate and chewed, ruminating. His eyes dulled, and he looked down at the table. “Did you try square dancing?”

  Now Bone really had to laugh. “Oh, I tried square dancing! I tried square dancing! I tried going on all fours, squeezing through windows, I ended up crawling through the attic and breaking my leg. I tried square dancing!”

  “And the therapies I gave you. The three tasks, you were doing those?” When Bone didn’t answer, Wye looked up, the mild, quizzical, humorous glint back in his eye. He nodded, shook his head, nodded again, and took a bite from the buttery center of the toast, chewing as he spoke. “The therapy doesn’t work if you discontinue it, Mr. King.”

  “It isn’t a therapy!” Bone said loudly. His arm went up like an exclamation mark, and an empty plate—pakkatta- pakkatta-pakka—did its own little rotating dance. Then Bone repeated more softly, “It isn’t a therapy.”

  “It is,” Wye asserted calmly. “It is a therapy. But you’ve only just started. I’ve developed a whole new set of tasks.”

  “Do your treatment, and suddenly I’ll be happy. Right.”

  “Happy? I never said you’d be happy. I’m crazy, but I’m not a quack! I never said you’d be happy. I just said you’d be your self. That’s all I said.”

  “If you’re going to tell me something hokey like think nice thoughts and do good deeds for the neighbors—” Bone began.

  “There’s a lot more to it than that,” Wye said peevishly. His brow creased and lower lip stuck out, but he regained his composure as soon as he’d lost it. “It goes a lot deeper. As soon as you undergo the full treatment—” He leaned back, displaying himself—his dirty, gray-streaked beard, his hair mashed down as if the baseball cap were still crammed on it, the Halloween-pirate eye patch flipped over his eyebrow. “Well, look at me.” The personal testimonial was not as compelling as perhaps he imagined.

  “All right, so what’s the next phase of this ‘treatment’?” Bone aimed for a sardonic note but missed the mark, sounding, in spite of himself, curious—curious almost bordering on hopeful.

  “Ah!” Wye said, and “ah!” again. He leaned forward, fingers laced. “That’s the thing. The next part of the treatment won’t work unless you figure it out for yourself.”

  “What?”

  “It’s a custom-made treatment. You have to figure it out on your own. It’s part of the deal. You have to relearn to empathize with yourself. You have to see yourself as a person who’s worthy of having what you need. You have to know there’s things that matter, that you can say, ‘This matters. It’s important.’ You have to find something to say, ‘I need this.’”

  Bone tried being stern, but an irrepressible sunny bubble of Yang was rising in the heart of midnight Yin. “You left me to die,” he said, returning to what seemed the crux.

  “I had to go to Leipzig.”

  Bone slapped the table in his anger. “There is no Leipzig!”

  Of course, what he meant was there is a Leipzig, only Wye had never been there. Wye seemed to understand this. “There is a Leipzig,” he retorted calmly. “There’s different kinds of Leipzig. There’s a Leipzig of the self.” He tapped his forehead meaningfully.

  Bone gathered his breath and said slowly and precisely, as if he were translating word by word from semaphore flags, “It’s okay. It’s going to be okay. Just wait here and I’ll get help.”

  “You doubt my methods,” Wye said. “You don’t trust me.”

  “I’ll get you help. You’re sick. Oh, God.” Bone leaned back in the booth. “I actually believed there was a plague out there—an epidemic of selves dislodging from people’s brains. Oh, God, how did I ever fall for that?”

  At this Wye became upset. “I wasn’t the only one. We weren’t the only ones. You think I’d have bothered you if I was the only one? There’s others. Radical Self-Dislodgement is real! You remember the woman I told you about who said, ‘okely-dokely’? I’ve seen her; when she’s ranting about politics, there’s this weird light in her eyes, and you know, you just know, that’s her self trying to get out, it’s pulling at the bars, but it can’t because it’s trapped inside all these catchphrases and sound bites. That’s what I’m talking about here.”

  “Oh, my God, I just realized. You’re talking about your own wife, aren’t you?”

  Wye turned his head away and looked somberly out the window. “It’s too late for her. I tried to help her, but the syndrome went untreated too long, and now she’s totally dislodged.” He turned back to Bone. “You want that to happen to you?”

  In spite of knowing better, the prospect of dislodgement horrified Bone. But he merely said, as calmly as he could, “You are very ill, and you need professional help.”

  “You aren’t going to use my therapy.”

  “No. I’m not.” He was almost sorry to tell him this.

  “You’d rather take a pill,” Wye said as if the word itself were a pill, “that makes your arm go up and live without the woman you love than put yourself in my hands.”

  “It seems preferable.”

  “I wish you’d listen to me. We’re on the verge of an epidemic here. A plague. This is serious. Americans are ninety percent dislodged from their selves from the start.” Wye shook his head. “But if you don’t believe me, you don’t believe me.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I can’t force you to undergo therapy.”

  “Damn straight you can’t.”

  “And that’s your right. But will you at least acknowledge my right to seek my own mental health in my own way?”

  “You need serious help,” Bone protested.

  “And from where I sit, you need serious help,” Wy
e said, smiling and turning up his palms. “We’re at an impasse. We both have our different ways, and we both think the other one’s making a mistake. I wasn’t kidding with my note. You are in terrible, terrible danger, but even so, I say you have the right to make your own mistakes, even if they’re very serious. Will you acknowledge I have the same right?” Bone’s arm went up. “You got to admit,” Wye said, “there’s something to be said for my position.” He jammed his baseball cap on his head and stood, flipping his eye patch into place, retrieving his hunchback pillow, and snagging another piece of bacon from Bone’s plate. “At least admit I have the right to choose my own path.” Wye gave one of his long, slow winks, where the eyelid traveled as steadily down the eye as a drawn shade—the dramatic effect of which was marred by the eye patch—then closed the door, leaving the waitress and short-order cook staring as if Elvis had just left the Waffle House.

  “Oh, my God. You’ve got to call the police immediately,” Mary said when Bone recounted seeing the madman formerly known as Dr. Limongello. “Where is he?” Jars bobbled against each other in a sterilizing bath of simmering water, and the kitchen was filled with the pleasant steam of orange zest and sugar syrup; Mary and Bone had embarked on canning marmalade.

  Bone scratched the end of his nose. “I couldn’t say.” A subtle obfuscation, meaning I’ve decided not to say.

  “It’s not just you,” Mary said. “Think what he might do to other people. And for his own sake. He’s a danger to himself.”

  “It—” Bone said but didn’t have anything to add and left the naked pronoun hanging in space. Any defense would have been a lie: that Flash hadn’t nearly killed him, that the catastrophe might have happened anyway. Why he’d mentioned seeing Flash at all, who can say, unless it was the irresistible temptation of such a toothsome piece of news to report to a woman whom he still loved. But having admitted Wye existed, Bone didn’t divulge that he was, so to speak, right under her very nose, in a greasy baseball cap and an eye patch filched from a Halloween pirate costume. Let Flash try to work out his own cure in his own way; let him uncover, if he could, the secret to prevent the self from dislodging.

  “You could have died,” she said, and the rest of the day, at irregular intervals, she caught Bone’s eye and mouthed, “You could have died.”

  Mary wasn’t the only one displeased by Bone’s meeting with Flash Wye.

  “He’s a very dangerous man,” Dr. Limongello said when Mary told him at their next appointment. “There’s no telling how much harm he could do if he’s willing to pose as a physician.”

  “But he doesn’t say he’s you anymore. He knows who he is now,” Bone said.

  “And it’s not just other people,” Limongello went on, ignoring Bone’s protest. “He’s a danger to himself.”

  “That’s just what I said,” Mary said.

  “And not just that,” Limongello said, “by shielding him, you might be an accessory. In fact,” he tucked his chin against his Adam’s apple, “your crime might be more serious than his. He can’t help it.” Bone shifted miserably on the examination table. Was that a gleam of vengeance in the doctor’s eye?

  The Morton Library on the seventh floor of the General Classroom Building was a library only in the broadest and most general sense of the term. It had perhaps a hundred or so books arranged behind glass-doored bookshelves. The principal library occupied twin buildings next to the concrete square laughingly known as the “quad,” with a glass-walled bridge spanning Decatur Street to “Library South.” But it was in the Morton Library that Bone met his dissertation committee for the final time. There was the requisite amount of chaffing.

  “You may have set the record for the longest time completing a dissertation,” Dr. Susik said.

  “I’ve been going through some personal issues,” Bone explained. But Susik was only ribbing him. She was a grammarian herself, one of the old school, and famished for recruits.

  “This dissertation of yours,” said Dr. Moore, the only one who bordered on hostility; a theorist and specialist on Derrida, she whiffed eighteenth-century mustiness in Bone’s proposal and had been against it from the start. “It’s really nothing but a list of words. And not a very complete list.”

  “It’s really more of an appreciation,” Bone said. “After all, what’re definitions but an attempt to find meaning?” He realized he was quoting Limongello. No, he corrected himself, he was quoting Flash Wye. He coughed, and his arm went up.

  The committee exchanged glances, and Dr. Vinsonhaler asked Bone to wait outside while they discussed him. Bone sat in the hall on a bench with a padded cushion. To his right, a ponderous thunderhead in the window began to bloom in the summer sky. How long before Vinsonhaler opened the door and let him in? It was nothing to be concerned about—just what they put you through before signing off on your dissertation, a last piece of hazing before admitting you into their little club.

  He suddenly realized the dissertation wouldn’t make a difference. Not really. People wouldn’t see him differently. He wouldn’t be different. He’d accept the degree, of course; he’d earned it and would accept it. It meant more opportunity. But it wouldn’t change anything that mattered. There was no sadness in this thought; that was the peculiar thing: no sadness or sense of loss or anything like that, just a realization, like looking out the window and seeing it was going to rain. At that moment, Vinsonhaler opened the door to invite him in so the committee could congratulate him.

  “That’s great, man,” Cash said when Bone told him later. “You finally did it.” He didn’t sound especially enthusiastic, and the “finally” felt aggressive, a little snipe the yardman couldn’t resist. Cash asked, “Is Mary in there?” He stood in the kitchen door, leaning against the jamb, his elbow jacked above his ear. He didn’t look at Bone but at something along the ceiling, above Bone’s head and to the left.

  Cash and Mary stood by the stump of the Rose of Sharon, Cash doing most of the talking. Mary, one arm folded across her abdomen, the opposite hand on her hip, watched Bone go up in his walking cast to the mailbox. Bills and an outsized letter on card stock: an engraved invitation from Georgia State to his own hooding ceremony.

  “They’re talking about you.” Flash crouched in the English ivy near the mailbox, spraying poison ivy with Roundup. The conversation between Cash and Mary ended. Cash went to chew Jorge out about something and Mary to the kitchen door.

  In Bone’s periphery, two cars parked at the curb. He registered that the second was a black-and-white patrol car even as the door opened and an officer got out. Bone’s arm shot up, banging his knuckles against the mailbox lid. Dr. Limongello, the real one, got out of the other car. Things weren’t making sense. Had Limongello run a stop sign? What were the odds of his getting ticketed in front of Bone’s house? The doctor spared Bone no more than a glance, staring instead at Flash, bent down amid the poison ivy.

  “That’s him,” Dr. Limongello said. Only now was Bone piecing together significances. “She can identify him.” Mary came up the driveway, not running but in long strides.

  The officer said, “Are you Mulligan Wye?”

  Here Flash faced a conundrum: admitting his identity would result in being taken off in a squad car, but denying it would substantiate his mental illness, resulting in being taken off anyway. If he weighed these considerations, he hesitated no longer than any man after an unexpected question. “That’s me.”

  “I’ll need you to step into the car for me,” the deputy said. Helping him into the backseat, the deputy cupped the top of Wye’s baseball cap, not pushing, just lightly touching, like a priest’s blessing, as if out of solicitude lest he bump his head. All this time, Bone stood slack-jawed. The entire episode had taken less than two minutes.

  “I knew who it was as soon as you said you’d seen him,” Mary said. “What a getup! He really is crazy.” So Mary had snitched.

  Limongello stood, arms folded, clutching his elbows, his chin tucked against his neck, yet somehow his head st
ill level.

  “What’s going on here?” Cash asked with restrained impatience, believing all this was somehow about him. And why shouldn’t he think that? One of his two remaining workers had just been abducted by the law. But Bone had been thinking that he, Bone King, was the focal point of this tableau, and Limongello—the real one—had been thinking he was. Mary thought she was, too, and so, no doubt, did Flash, and the deputy. Bone looked down the driveway. Even Jorge, with shy eagerness watching hidden behind his rake’s insufficient concealment like Greek letter phi (Φ), had something to tell his family that night: my life among the crazy Anglos. Yes, Jorge, too, like each of the rest of them, was thinking, This is about me, this is another episode in the story that is about what happens to me.

  Now the deputy gave a signal, and Limongello, raising his chin in acknowledgment, then tucking it back against his Adam’s apple, got into his own car, rumbled it into motion, and followed the patrol car out of the neighborhood.

  “What happened?” Cash asked again. “What’s going on?”

  “I’ll tell you about it later,” Mary said in a fatigued voice, already heading back to the house. The show was over here. “When we get home.”

  Y, y

  Derived, like F, U, V, and W, from the Semitic waw (y), “peg,” and the one that most closely resembles its ancestor. In addition to its familiar pronunciations as vowel and consonant, it is on rare occasions pronounced /th/. Typesetters used Y in place of a defunct Old English letter, the thorn (Þ), which represented the /th/ sound. The “ye” in kitschy signage such as “Ye Olde Gifte Shoppe” does not mean “your”; it is prosaically and unromantically pronounced “the.”

  Yang and Yin: From the Mandarin, “light” and “dark,” or possibly “sun” and “moon,” depicted as interlocking black and white whorls, each with a dot of the other in its center, symbolizing unity or the cosmos. Compare alpha and omega.