Sunday, June the 19th, 2005

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Ornamental Pond Guilt

When Blodgett worked as a brain analyst, in the period immediately after a war, he became intrigued by cases of what was dubbed Ornamental Pond Guilt. One Saturday afternoon, pursuing his own projects in an otherwise deserted lab, he discovered that by exposing samples of dead brain tissue to an all-enveloping gas filtered through a Kleigland Sieve, he could never achieve the same results twice. He made his way to the canteen, notebook in hand, and scribbled down both the data and his conclusions while drinking cup after cup of nettle tea.

By chance, the canteen employed as mop-person a patient who suffered from Ornamental Pond Guilt. Pabstus V. was one of the first recorded cases of the syndrome, and though by no means cured, his condition was such that he could perform simple tasks such as mopping the floor of a canteen. Blodgett spilled some of his tea on the floor, and Pabstus V. mopped it up. It is one of the most poignant moments in medical history.

Blodgett was, of course, familiar with the case of Pabstus V. He knew that, when following the instructions to assemble an ornamental pond in the garden of his invalid mother, the patient had been stricken with a monumental sense of guilt which left him a gibbering wreckage of a man. Over the next eight months, a series of quacks prescribed various potions, tablets, infusions, and even injections. (The story that leeches were applied to his shoulder blades is apocryphal.) Pabstus V. was eventually carted off to the clinic, but there was little hope that he would ever recover.

Well did Blodgett know that it was the incredibly complex battery of techniques devised by Doctor Fang that had brought the patient so far that he could mop a canteen floor. What Blodgett did not know was that the impossibly handsome and stylishly-dressed figure wielding the mop to mop up his spilled nettle tea was Pabstus V.

Doctor Fang, of course, was ridiculously secretive about his methods. When he died after toppling into a crevasse during an ill-advised hiking holiday, he left no records, not a shred of documentation to allow others to continue his work. There was a fear throughout the clinic that Pabstus V. and the thirty-four other Ornamental Pond Guilt patients would relapse, and no longer be capable of mopping up canteen floors. Hence Blodgett's Saturday sessions in the lab. He knew that if he could discover some way to reproduce Doctor Fang's results, his name would resound throughout the world of brain analysis. A small world to be sure, but it was the universe to Blodgett.

When he came face to face with Pabstus V., but knew him not, that was the first nail in the coffin of Blodgett's career. The second was when Pabstus V., impossibly handsome and impossibly clumsy, accidentally whacked the brain analyst on the head with the wooden handle of his mop. Blodgett was knocked unconscious. When he came to, hours later, he remembered nothing of the last twenty years of his life. He was like Ronald Colman in Random Harvest. He thought he was still what he once had been, a would-be poet, starving in a garret, and thence he returned, to scribble twaddle instead of scientific data. And Pabstus V. remained mopping the canteen floor, a little recovered, yes, but still engulfed by Ornamental Pond Guilt until his dying day.