Mountain of Love
 
 
I watched with interest as Mr. Johnston escorted his bullmastiff into the waiting room. This would have been an effort at any time because of the sheer bulk of the patient. But progress was made all the more difficult by the massive growth encasing the beast’s upper thigh, rendering the right hind leg nearly useless. As the dog made her way through the door and down the hall, awkwardly swinging her leg wide and hunching her back in order to lift the leg and advance the foot just a few inches forward, the knee remained fixed and rigid, forcing the toes to scrape the ground as slow progress was made. Traversing the length of the twenty-foot hallway consumed nearly two minutes. Finally, with the help of the technician and the encouragement of the owner, she made her way onto the scale. The digits on the digital display danced for a bit before settling at 165 pounds.
In the examination room, I surveyed both the patient and her owner. Mr. Johnston was unique. Only about five feet six inches or so, he must have weighed more than three hundred pounds. In order to fit all that mass into such a small frame, his contour sported bulges around his center, making him seem almost as round as he was tall. His strawlike yellow hair was long, billowing, and wild, as if the trip over the pass from Fort Valley had been made with his head out the open window. He kept sweeping this hair up and back over his head with his hand as clutches of the stuff broke free and fell like coils of baling twine across his forehead, obscuring his eyes. His cheeks and nose were puffy and red and streaked like a city map with a network of prominent veins. His lower eyelids drooped sadly, Basset-like, a puff of pillowed and pale skin hanging loosely like dusty drapes below each of them. His upper lids seemed a bit too heavy to keep fully open, forcing him to tilt his head back slightly to turn his eyes up to my face.
He was dressed in dark sweatpants, the waist of which was cinched tightly around his middle, the drawstring dimpling his tummy at that spot, with adipose tissue bulging several inches above and below the knot. I hoped the drawstring was strong. I was sure that if it broke free, the pants would soon be around his ankles. I did not indulge the mental image. At the end of his legs, the pants failed to reach the white high-topped tennis shoes he wore, this probably owing to the degree to which he’d had to hitch the front of the pants up to cover his girth. Above his waistline, he wore a buttoned-up dress shirt, the bottom of which just swept the top of the sweatpants. It accommodated his girth only by his having left the last buttons undone. The effect was to make both the shirt and the pants seem ridiculously incongruous.
“Hello, Mr. Johnston. How are you this morning?”
“I’m fine. It’s Dahmun I’m worried about.” He got right to the point.
“What’s her name?” I had never encountered one quite like it.
“It’s Dahmun!” He offered no further explanation, but after a short pause, he spelled it as if for a dim-witted schoolboy. “D-A-H-M-U-N.” He shook his head and clucked his tongue in annoyance.
“Where did you get that name?”
Mr. Johnston exhaled an impatient sigh, as if my question was delaying some more important engagement.
“Well, among other things, I’m a linguist.” He paused in order to let the significance of that sink in. “The name is a patented syllylogy.”
I stared at him blankly. I had never encountered a syllylogy before, patented or otherwise, and my mind immediately veered dangerously into wondering with which government agency one would patent a syllylogy—or why.
“I have invented a language in which each syllable represents a discreet meaning. Words are then assembled which convey specific meaning by their very construction.”
“So what does Dahmun mean, then?” I asked.
“Well, the syllables represent … I mean ‘dah’ is a … uh … a large landmass, especially one with lots of altitude. Combine that with the syllable ‘mun,’ which signifies deep affection and fondness. See?”
He looked at me, apparently to watch the light of meaning dawn in my foggy eyes. The fog persisted.
“No, I don’t quite get your drift.”
He clicked his tongue again, clearly impatient with the obvious dullness of the pupil before him.
“Dah-mun. Dah-mun. Get it? It literally means ‘Mountain of Love.’”
“Oh, I see now.” And I really did begin at that moment to understand Mr. Johnston.
“Tell me what’s been going on with Dahmun. Start at the very beginning, please.”
“About four or five months ago, we were hiking on my property in the Fort.”
Fort Valley is a blind valley with an open mouth on the north end. It is contained by two ridges that run along the east and west flanks of its fifteen- or twenty-mile length. The floor of the valley is no more than two or three miles at its widest and is choked off as the ridges squeeze together and finally join at the southern end. It’s said that George Washington had scouted out this “fort valley” as a place to hide had the Revolutionary War gone badly. The valley would probably be missed if scouted either from the east or the west, and the mouth could be easily defended against intruders from the north. Over time, Fort Valley became the accepted name of the valley. It also became a place where lots of people settled who liked to hide their homes from prying eyes. It is occupied today by folks for whom Woodstock is too populated and occupied by weekenders escaping from the rush of the nation’s capital. Locals call it simply “the Fort.”
“Dahmun loves to go hiking with me. That day, we were going up a rather steep hill with loose gravel. She slipped and fell down on her poobus. I—”
“Excuse me.” I interrupted him. I was carefully writing down the history in the record and was sure I had been concentrating too hard on this task to have heard him correctly. “What was it that she hit when she fell?”
“Her poobus!” He waited for me to catch up. My face was apparently broadcasting that I was helplessly clawing for clarity.
“Poobus. Poo-bus,” he said again for me, more slowly this time and louder. I suspected another patented syllylogy, until he clapped his hand over the lower reaches of his right fanny and repeated again, “Poobus.”
“Got it. Go on,” I said, finally recognizing that he had just badly mangled the anatomical term pubis.
“So after she fell, she displayed some dysmobility for a few days. It might have lasted as long as a couple of weeks. Then it seemed to improve again. I wasn’t too worried at that point. I just assumed she had pulled a muscular infraction or something. But then I noticed that the muscles in the right rear were beginning to atrophatize.”
The linguistic license Mr. Johnston displayed began to tickle me. It seemed important to him that I recognize the mastery he possessed over nearly correct medical terminology. The oddities of the syntax and the reinvention of the words were so strange that I knew I would never...