The determinate “the” that tells which threshold—the sentence is useless if it only claims that Bone crosses thresholds in general—is a driplet hanging from “threshold” itself. And “threshold”—what does it signify? A vacancy between two places—crossing a threshold necessarily means crossing into something, but that something is withheld, a ghostly implicature buried in the deep structure of the sentence.
Who could blame him for his inability to navigate such syntax?
Dr. Limongello’s office was in one of the medical buildings sprouting around Northside Hospital like mushrooms around a tree stump. When they arrived for Bone’s appointment—Mary had taken the day off—a receptionist gave them a clipboard, thick with forms to complete, instructing them to sit in the waiting area. If Wonderful Dr. Lemon Jell-O’s wonderfulness were measured by how many people he kept waiting, he was a wonderful doctor indeed.
They waited. Bone perused the periodicals laid out for their delight: sailing magazines (Bone didn’t sail) and golf magazines (Bone didn’t golf) as morning melted into a puddle of noon and their stomachs began to growl. Mary went to the desk to ask if the doctor would see them soon or if they should go ahead and get some lunch.
“There’s a cafeteria downstairs,” the receptionist offered.
“If we go down and eat, will we lose our place?” Mary wanted to know. The receptionist didn’t answer that one, and so they went back to waiting.
Finally, a nurse bade them follow in the wake of her swishing thighs, out of the waiting room to the final door of a door-lined corridor.
“Wait in here,” the nurse instructed.
“I can’t,” Bone muttered, heat rising in his face.
“What?” the nurse asked, and then repeated, “Wait in here.”
“I can’t,” Bone repeated more loudly than he’d intended. A curious patient down the hallway opened his door a crack but chose not to step out. The hell with it. “I can’t get through,” Bone said loudly enough for anyone who wanted to get a good earful. “That’s why I’m here. Sometimes I can’t go through doorways.”
So Mary and the nurse walked him through, manipulating his legs, into a room with an examination table, two black-cushioned chrome chairs, cabinets, and a sink.
“Will the doctor see us soon?” Bone asked, still feverish with shame, but this was another question destined to go unanswered. The nurse left, and Bone sat on the examination table, Mary in a chair. Dumbed-down scientific illustrations adorned the walls: colorful branching neurons, glands squeezing out hormones in fat teardrops, arrows indicating potential problems in the temporal lobe and frontal cortex. A poster told a modern-day pharmaceutical fairy tale: in the first panel a smiling man in a white lab coat talks to a damsel slumping sadly under a soot-black cumulus cloud. In the second panel, posture much improved, she ventures a timid smile—not exactly happy but willing to appear happy—and the cloud, while still overhead, has diminished, now a manageable dove-gray instead of black. Bone contemplated the implied moral … and she coped as well as could be expected ever after.
“Are y’all waiting for me?” A man in a white lab coat, smiling as if it were his first day on the job, stood in the door.
“Dr. Limongello?”
With one hand the doctor took Bone’s shoulder, and with the other he gave a vigorous Rotary Club handshake, coming awkwardly close, quizzical, snapping bright eyes scrutinizing Bone as if life’s secrets were printed on the inner wall of his skull. “This is the first time I’ve seen you, right? This is your first appointment?” he said, and when Bone said it was, the doctor said to Mary, “Well, aren’t you lovely?” making her blush, and for a moment, Bone thought the doctor was going to kiss her hand, but instead he just shook it and said, “Well, let’s take a look-see at the patient.”
Limongello bustled around the room as if assuring himself everything was where he’d left it: the sink handles, the glass jar of cotton balls on the counter, even the cartoon woman with her hovering thundercloud received his touch. Bone and Mary had been warned the double-doc was “eccentric,” but they hadn’t been prepared for this. What accounted for that smile that shone not only from his mouth but from every pore of his forehead? The awareness that patients were his bread and butter? The delight of diagnosis, being able to see through the translucent mystery that others find opaque? An effort to reassure? Happy anticipation of helping a stranger?
Limongello looked in a drawer beside the sink and found an otoscope. “Might as well rule out an inner-ear problem. Say ‘ahhh.’” Bone said it, and Limongello chuckled. “Just kidding, you don’t have to say ‘ahhh’ when someone looks in your ear.” He looked into Bone’s ear with a disappointed “Huh!” Then, “So why don’t you tell me what seems to be the trouble?”
As Bone recounted his two episodes of immobility—three counting the one that had occurred just outside the door—the doctor set the otoscope down, looking from Bone to Mary as if gauging whether they found this tale as astonishing as he. “That must have been terrifying. We’ve got to do something for you folks.” Limongello rubbed his jaw and said, “Okay, I want you to walk from the front of the room to the back. Nothing fancy, no heel-to-toe, just walk normally.” Bone walked as normally as possible after being told to “walk normally” while Limongello watched, after which he had Bone close his eyes and told him to bring in one hand at a time and touch a finger to his nose, standing first on one foot, then the other. Limongello sat perched forward as far as possible in a chair beside Mary, staring raptly at Bone. “So the first time, you were taking a bath?”
“He wasn’t taking a bath; he was just in the bathtub,” Mary supplied.
Limongello looked at Mary, then at Bone. “So why were you in the tub?”
“I don’t really remember,” Bone lied.
Limongello wore a satisfied-dissatisfied look, like a poker player seeing through an opponent’s ill-advised bluff. “’Zat so?” The doctor’s demeanor said he didn’t believe it was so but had decided not to pursue this line of questioning; instead he abruptly slapped his thighs twice, announcing, “I am so hungry I could eat a horse. Well, a small one. Ah-ha-ha-ha. I didn’t get anything for breakfast but coffee and some damn raisin toast. Have y’all eaten?” They hadn’t. “Wait here a sec.” He disappeared, leaving them to gape at one another, but came back a few moments later without his lab coat. “I told my assistant to fill in. What say we go to the cafeteria and talk this over?”
“What about your other patients?” Bone asked.
“Ah.” Limongello waved dismissively. “They’re in good hands. You’re now my most important case. Think you can go through?” Limongello invited Bone to go through the door, and this time Bone was able to, a fact that Limongello noted, thoughtfully rubbing his chin. Bone headed toward the waiting room, but Limongello stopped him. “No, no, no. We’ll go through the ‘Bat Cave.’” He led them through a back entrance at the end of the hall. Bone worried his condition would strike and freeze him at the door, but in the doctor’s magic presence, he went through again without trouble.
“Are you sure this is okay?” Bone asked once they were in the elevator.
“Let me tell you something,” Limongello said. A hand on Bone’s shoulder again, his faint breath on Bone’s cheek. “Your case is of real interest to me. It’s—not exactly—but very similar to certain other—very
