THE M.D. A Horror Story

by Thomas M. Disch

  “Oh, we believe in pushing our children to excel,” Sister Fidelis said, with an earnest smile. “It’s all very different now from when we were in school. How old are you, Mr. Michaels—about thirty-five?”

  Henry winced. Women usually guessed him to be younger than he was. “Close enough,” he said. “Thirty-three.”

  “Well, when we went to grade school, it was unheard of to let children skip grades, no matter how bright they might have been. The reason usually given was that somehow one would not be properly socialized if one were not in a classroom with one’s precise contemporaries. But that’s nonsense. The real reason was simply that few teachers were willing to face the challenge they represented. It is easier simply to deny that the gifted have special needs, but I think it only fair that if we expect more from the gifted, then we must be prepared to give them more, especially when they are as young as your son and cannot simply plunder libraries. Oh dear, I’m afraid I’ve got on my hobbyhorse again. You must excuse me.”

  “Excuse you!” Henry answered, taking up her style of somewhat breathless candor, as a tenor joining the soprano in a duet will take his tempo from the one she has established. “Everything you’ve been saying is music to my ears. I really was worried about Billy having to spend hours playing Farmer in the Dell when he could be learning long division. Don’t get me wrong, though. I don’t want to pressure the kid into becoming another Einstein. But I do want him to be able to move ahead at his own natural pace. It looks like that will be quite fast enough without my pushing.”

  Sister Fidelis laughed, but in a conspiratorial way. “Now, Mr. Michaels, you must not say anything against Farmer in the Dell. It is a tradition of several centuries, and for anything to last so long there must be a reason. But before I gallop off on a long-winded lecture on the history of ring dances (about which I know virtually nothing), I really must excuse myself. I have two piano students waiting for me.”

  Henry held out his hand and presented his friendliest smile. “Sister, it’s been a pleasure.”

  Sister Fidelis added the pledge of her left hand over their handshake to declare, “I shouldn’t say this, Mr. Michaels, but I really hope he is as bright as you say he may be.”

  “Well, good-bye, Sister.”

  “Good-bye, Mr. Michaels. Drive carefully, the streets are icy today.”

  Henry blushed. He’d never felt the shame of his license revocation so intensely.

  12

  At four o’clock, as it was beginning to get dark, Madge Michaels started the engine of her ponderous red Dodge Monaco, waited until she was sure it wouldn’t die on her, and then backed the car out of the garage, crushing the plastic engine of Dundor’s troop train to smithereens with its right rear wheel and to further smithereens with the right front wheel. The car radio was tuned to WCCO, and so Madge didn’t hear the crunch of breaking plastic; neither, since she had swiveled around for a backward view of the driveway, did she see the wreckage left on the floor of the garage; nor if she had seen it, could she have realized the full implications this “accident” would have for the poor Greens, doomed now to defeat, slavery, and in the particular case of Dundor, impeachment and the ax.

  Billy, however, perched in the storage space of the garage, did witness the destruction of the toy train, and seeing its wreckage, he rejoiced. At once, boldly, he called on Mercury to fulfill his promise and teach him to use the caduceus, which he had already ferreted out from behind the stack of defunct screens where Ned had hidden it.

  Gods, of course, are not obliged to answer our prayers at our convenience. Many may never be answered at all. But Billy was not upset when no image formed in the latent darkness, for he knew that he had been forcing the issue. It was enough, for now, that he’d found the poison stick just where the god had told him it would be. Now it was his, and he meant to hide it where Ned would never think to look—in the attic, beneath a fleecy layer of insulation. Soon, Billy was confident, Mercury would return and fulfill his promise. Meanwhile, the destruction of the Greens must continue.

  He swept up the shatterings of the plastic engine and put them in one of the sealed bags that had already been put out into the garbage can in the alley behind the garage. Then, with the caduceus hidden under the jacket of his snowsuit, he went into the house by the kitchen door and, making certain no one saw him, he went up to the attic. He was supposed to be afraid of the attic, since Ned had told him it was haunted by the ghost of Grandpa Obstschmecker, whom Billy remembered with dim horror as a very fat man who had tried to hook him around the neck with the curvy part of his wooden cane whenever Billy got too near his platform rocker. That was just about all that Billy could remember of the man, but it was enough to have made the attic a place of dread. However, now that he felt himself to be under the protection of Mercury, Billy felt no fear about going into the attic. Indeed, he felt no fear of anything supernatural.

  He buried the caduceus under the gray nubbles of insulation that filled the long trough between the joists of the floor at the eastern end of the attic, where no boards had been laid. The roof sloped so close to the floor at this end of the attic that even Billy had to stoop low to keep from scraping his scalp on the nails that stuck out of the musty-smelling planks overhead. With a parting single-fingered caress of the withered wings Billy left his treasure secure within its mound of mineral wool.

  And there for many long weeks it lay undisturbed though never unremembered. Heavy drifts of snow blanketed the roof above, and melted, and froze, and were replaced by deeper drifts. Dundor was beheaded (by a miter box saw) and his corpse hung in the Hanging Gardens of Wyomia for all its citizens to shudder at and mourn. Reinhardt was crowned king, and on the very day of his coronation his mother Icksy persuaded him to sign a decree putting to death all who would not worship the god Mercury and offer sacrifices to him of burnt marshmallow. Fortunately for the peace of the realm none of the unhappy Greens—all of them reduced to slavery now—dared to oppose Reinhardt’s decree, but even this universal submission did not persuade the god to speak to Billy again. Strain his eyes as he might to see beyond the blackness of the bedroom ceiling, Billy could see nothing but random flickerings of the dimmest hues from which neither face nor sceneries emerged.

  Meanwhile in the world of daylight, he had entered the second grade, where already he was at the top of his class, even in arithmetic. His new teacher, Miss Beane, was not a nun but a member of a Third Order. A short, fat, redheaded woman with eyeglasses that looked like a pair of television screens, Miss Beane immediately made Billy her pet and held him up as an example to all those in Room 201 who had not yet memorized the addition and subtraction tables. Billy had done so in three days and then, on his own and without telling anyone, memorized the multiplication and division tables too. Arithmetic came as naturally to Billy as swimming to a trout; he couldn’t understand why other kids made such a fuss about it.

  Second grade was much more fun than kindergarten. About the only part of it he didn’t like was having to listen to the dumber kids trying to read aloud, but even that offered the novel pleasure of a conscious superiority. In kindergarten winning and losing had only been part of a game—and not even a game like checkers that took some thinking but dumb games like Old Maid or Snap. But second grade was the real thing. There were report cards, and you either got good grades or bad grades, passed or failed, and the kids who failed (the black kids, mostly) would end up dropping out of school and turning to drugs and becoming muggers and going to jail, while the kids who did best at school would go on to college eventually and then to success in life. Part of this Billy had figured out for himself, and part of it came from remarks dropped by Miss Beane and conversations with his father and with Ned.

  Not that Billy, who wouldn’t be seven until April, was all that concerned about that still very distant future in which he’d be accounted either a success or a failure. Right now he was just getting his bearings in, and hugely enjoying, what Miss Beane liked to call the world of books.
He had his own library card now, with which he could take out as many as eight books at a time. At first he’d mostly checked out picture books, since you could finish a book that had mostly pictures in it in no time at all. But then one Saturday in the middle of February when he’d asked Madge if she would drive him to the library, Madge pointed out that he’d checked out eight books from the library only the day before yesterday. Billy protested that he’d finished all eight books he’d taken out. Madge had agreed to take him back to the library but only on condition that he start checking out real books that were meant to be read, instead of picture books. The real books turned out to be much more fun, since Billy’s imagination could usually supply better images than most of the ones in the picture books, which were scribbly or blurry, while the pictures that Billy could see just by closing his eyes were as clear and detailed as a Technicolor movie.

  The one subject that Billy did not naturally excel in was religion. He could recite the answers to catechism questions well enough when he was called on to do so, but he didn’t like a lot of the things he was supposed to do in order to be a good Catholic. One Friday afternoon there was to be a class play about Blessed Father Martin Lugger, an Austrian priest of the nineteenth century responsible for developing devotion to Our Lady of Mercy. Billy was to play the part of Father Lugger’s companion, Father Kreuzer, and for that role he was to wear one of the cassocks worn by the altar boys when they served Mass. But Billy insisted the cassock was a dress and wouldn’t wear it. Even when Father Youngermann, wearing a cassock himself, came over from the rectory to remonstrate, Billy remained fierce in his resistance, and finally the part of Father Kreuzer was given to Jules Johnson, and Billy was stigmatized with a minus sign in the category of Shows a Cooperative Attitude on his report card.

  The next to last day in February was Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent and the day when Catholics go to Mass and have ashes smooshed on their foreheads. The entire student body of Our Lady of Mercy had to be at that Mass and wait while the grown-ups got their foreheads smooshed, and then it was the kids’ turn, pew after pew after pew. Even with three priests doing the job as fast as possible, saying the words that went with the ashes like tongue twisters perfectly mastered (“Remembermanthatthouartdustanduntodustthoushaltreturn! Remembermanthatthouartdustanduntodustthoushaltreturn!”), the process took more than half an hour. Billy got Father Windakiewiczowa and a great glob of ashes that covered half his forehead and then fell in black sprinkles over his nose and his cheeks. Billy didn’t realize what a bonus of ashes he’d gotten till recess, when he caught a look at himself in the mirror in the boys’ lavatory. He looked ridiculous, but there was no way, with the lavatory full of other kids, to wash the stuff off. Anyhow, everybody else was smeared the same way. The ashes only became a problem when he had to walk home after school. Usually he and Ned went home together, but Ned was taking Lent seriously and had begun a novena that was going to keep him on after school for an extra half hour till Lent was over. Billy refused to join Ned in making the novena (morning Mass was already more church than he had appetite for), and since it was too cold to wait in the playground, Billy headed home by himself.

  The way he was supposed to walk home was along Coughlin Avenue to Ludens, then west on Ludens to Calumet. These streets had the most stores and the most traffic. But it was dull always to walk home the same way, and if he went over to Calumet along Lind Street and then turned north, he would go through Brosner Park. Or if he walked north on Kuhn Avenue, he would go by the duplex where he’d lived before his parents got divorced. Ned would never take the Kuhn Avenue route, since it went past the Weyerhauser Junior High School, which was about half black and regarded as an enemy of Our Lady of Mercy. But Billy had never had problems on the way to and from school, being still so small that bigger kids didn’t think he was worth bothering. So on the afternoon of Ash Wednesday, being on his own, Billy decided to go home by way of Kuhn Avenue.

  Kuhn Avenue wasn’t really that much different from Calumet, except that the houses were squeezed a little closer together, and a few had cardboard nailed up over windows that had been broken, and the cars in the driveways were sometimes just wrecks, but otherwise Kuhn Avenue was like anywhere else, with front yards full of trampled snow or nontrampled snow, depending on whether or not there were kids in the houses, and lots of young pine trees not much bigger than Christmas trees that had been planted to replace the dying elms. Most of the sidewalks had been kept well shoveled all through the winter and so didn’t have a buildup of ice, the way the sidewalks along Calumet Avenue generally did.

  1633 Kuhn Avenue, where Billy used to live, was a house of cream-colored stucco with brown wood trim. The Michaelses had lived in the upstairs part of the house, and a family called the Cornings lived downstairs. There were only three Cornings, Marion, Orville, and Bubby. Bubby was handicapped and sat in the downstairs front window of 1633 Kuhn Avenue from morning to night, looking at the traffic go by and rocking his body back and forth in the wheelchair that he was strapped into. Bubby had made a strong impression on Billy when they’d been neighbors. In summers, when Bubby’s wheelchair would be parked in the backyard, Billy would use Bubby for an audience to the ever-ongoing adventures of Ronald Rabbit (those were the days before the bowling pin kingdom had come into being), and though Marion Corning had at first disapproved and tried to get Billy to keep away from her son, who was then ten years old, Bubby had made it clear, by various gurglings and thrashings about, that he enjoyed these private theatricals and wanted them to continue.

  He was there today, as usual, in the downstairs window, and he seemed to Billy to have grown almost to adult size since the last time he’d seen him. His head lolled to one side, and his eyes wouldn’t focus on anything. Even when Billy threw a very soft snowball at the window to get his attention, even then Bubby just sat there. Like (Billy remembered his father saying this of him) a vegetable. Children like Bubby never went to school, or got married, or worked, or did anything at all. They just got fed and grew. Billy found the whole thing fascinating.

  Even so, Billy didn’t linger long in the front yard of 1633. The weather was too cold, and Bubby too unresponsive. He continued on his way along Kuhn Avenue till he came to the corner of Pillsbury and the cyclone-fenced playground of Weyerhauser Junior High School. He didn’t even see the kids who beat him up until they ran up from where they’d been hiding behind a parked truck and caught hold of his arms. They took his books and threw them on the other side of the fence. They made fun of the ashes on his forehead and washed them off with snow. They looked in all his pockets to see if he had any money, and when they were sure he didn’t, they lifted him up by his arms and legs and swung him back and forth and then let go, so that he cannonballed into a big heap of snow that a snowplow had piled up in the gutter. By the time he’d got to his feet and blinked the snow out of his eyes, they were gone, but he remembered their faces and he knew their names, and he was so sure he would get even with them that he didn’t even bother crying.

  At home Grandma Obstschmecker bawled him out for not waiting for Ned and for walking on Kuhn Avenue, and all the while she was bawling him out he smiled to himself and thought that he would get even with her too. And just that thought seemed to do the trick because right in the middle of her tirade she got one of her headaches and had to go lie down in her room. When Ned got home he made a big fuss about Billy’s having washed the ashes off his forehead before Billy could tell him how it had happened. So Billy didn’t bother trying to explain, he just included Ned on his enemies list and took a book up to his room and read till it was time for dinner, which tonight was a frozen pizza, since neither Madge nor Henry was home to declare otherwise and Grandma O. loved frozen pizzas as much as they did.

  Lately Billy’s official bedtime had been extended from nine to ten o’clock, but tonight he went to bed at eight thirty. He turned off the lights and looked up at the ceiling, as certain that Mercury would know his need and come to him as someone waitin
g at a bus stop is certain that a bus will come, probably in the next fifteen or twenty minutes.

  First there was a kind of bubbling, as though the bedroom had become a giant percolator filled with boiling black coffee, and then the god appeared, without any clothes except the winged sandals and helmet he was shown wearing in the grown-ups’ encyclopedia at the library. The caduceus he carried was exactly like the one hidden under the insulation in the attic.

  Billy spoke first. “I did what you said.”

  —Yes. I know.

  Something in the way he said it made Billy think of Santa Claus, and of the song:

  He knows if you are sleeping;

  He knows if you’re awake;

  He knows if you’ve been bad or good…

  —Oh no, Mercury said lightly. I don’t concern myself with “bad” and “good.”

  “How can you tell what I’m thinking?”

  —A god knows that first of all. I also know that you want to be able to use your new talent, and I’m here to explain. But you must listen carefully, I won’t repeat myself.

  His new talent? “No,” Billy said carefully. “I want to know how to use the stick. The poison stick that makes people sick.”

  Mercury tapped the winged tip of the caduceus on his bright-red lips. —Already, Billy, even as you say that, you are doing one of the things you must do to make the caduceus effective. You’re rhyming. Do you understand how words rhyme?

  “When one of them sounds like the other, like house and mouse?”

  —Exactly. When you would curse someone with the power of the caduceus, the curse must rhyme. So until you have become quite handy at rhyming you’d do well to work out your curses ahead of time so that they’ll be accurate. That is the first thing to know. The second is that you cannot use the caduceus to undo what it has done. You can use it for healing, but not to remove its own curse. The third thing to bear in mind is that the caduceus you have is weak from lack of use. Think of it as a flashlight with its battery almost dead. It will grow stronger as you use it, and you will be able to transfer its power to other, less conspicuous agents: a spoon, for instance, or a cigarette. But for now only its direct touch can work harm. One final caution: It will not kill. Not directly. It may engender afflictions that will lead to death, and you may easily learn, by study, what afflictions those may be, and how cruel or blunted their pathology. But death as such is in the hands of… other gods. I believe that covers it. Do you have any questions?