“How long will it last?”
—It comes with a lifetime guarantee.
“Does it work on animals?”
—Surely. On anything that grows; plants as well.
Billy chuckled, thinking of what he’d be able to do to various dogs in various backyards that he had to pass on his way to school.
Mercury smiled. —Now, Billy, you must kneel and worship me.
“What?”
—Power is never free. It must be paid for, and spiritual power is paid for by worship. Just place your hand on the end of the caduceus.
Mercury extended his wand with the winged tip foremost. Billy put his hand on it. To his surprise it seemed warm and pliant. A smell filled the room, like the smell of hamburgers charring on an outdoor grill.
—Repeat after me: Thou, Mercury, art my god. I place my being in thy care.
“Thou, Mercury, art my god. I place my being in thy care.”
—Now I lay my soul in pawn.
“Now I lay my soul in pawn.”
—This upon thy staff I swear.
“This upon thy staff I swear.”
Billy felt a brief itching sensation in the palm of his hand. Then the caduceus vanished, and the god as well, and Billy found himself alone in the darkness, covered in sweat and trembling with the amazement of having such power.
13
Because Henry Michaels was divorced from his true wife, Sondra, and Ned’s mother was divorced from her true husband, Lance, they were both of them eternally damned to hell so long as they went on living together as man and wife (or so long as Sondra Winckelmeyer and Lance Hill were both still alive). This had been a source of general, low-grade feeling of distress to Ned ever since his mother had sat him down and explained that, despite the teachings of the Church, she and Henry were getting married and snotty little Billy Michaels was going to be his stepbrother. Now, however, the likelihood of their damnation had become Ned’s despair and daily obsession.
Ned’s concern had become urgent when, in the third week of Lent, an African missionary had come to Our Lady of Mercy to conduct a retreat for the upper grades. In the course of this retreat the priest, Father Borghese, had described the suffering of the souls in hell, souls of those who had died while living in a bad marriage (like that of his mother to Henry Michaels), or in the course of an abortion, or in an automobile accident shortly after committing secret sins of impurity. Father Borghese had described the pains of hell and its sickening stench, and he spoke of the terrible sorrow of the damned, forever denied the sight of God. Then, in a voice as beautiful as a singer singing, he had asked Why? Why did people do it? Why did they risk an eternity of happiness for a few fleeting instants of sensual satisfaction? Again and again, the missionary priest’s Why’s resounded through the nave of Our Lady of Mercy, and there was nowhere to turn, no way to hide from the certain doom the priest had pronounced against his mother and Henry, whose resurrected flesh would be covered with open, suppurating sores, whose mouths would be filled with the slime and slither of undying worms and scorpions, who would weep for mercy and receive none. There could be no mercy for those who had refused God’s love in their lifetime. His fatherly love would be denied them throughout eternity, and the souls of the blessed would look down from their heavenly glory and be made glad by the terrors and sorrows of the damned.
Ned had found this so-much-more-vivid certainty of his mother’s and Henry’s damnation upsetting in a wholly new way. It seemed only a matter of days or weeks until they would go to their terrible reward. He began to have worse nightmares than ever, from which he would awake trembling and sweating. Once he wet his bed. Madge began to hint that he might be taken to visit a psychiatrist, Dr. Helbron, in the Foshay Tower. How could he explain that the problem wasn’t his, it was theirs, the adulterous pair’s?
On Wednesday of Holy Week Ned went to confession with Father Windakiewiczowa and demanded to know what he personally must to do lead the two sinners from their lives of sin. Must he reproach Madge and Henry for living in adultery? Must he remind them of the terrible dangers they faced each day that went by without repentance? Should he, as other protesters have done, go on a hunger strike until they had agreed to submit to the Church’s holy authority?
No, Father Windakiewiczowa had advised, on no account was he to say a word to either of them. Ned must confine his efforts on their behalf to prayer and perhaps some moderate fasting, such as giving up desserts. It was the job of their confessors to stir Madge’s and Henry’s sluggish consciences.
Would Father Windakiewiczowa do that, then? Ned then implored. Would he phone Madge and Henry, and arrange a visit, and urge them to repent and turn from their sins? Father Windakiewiczowa became rather brusque at this point and told Ned, in effect, to mind his own business. Ned was meted out an unusually stiff penance (though he’d virtually nothing to confess on his own account except his unwilling involvement in his mother’s illicit cohabitation with Henry) and dismissed from the confessional.
Like the man in the gospel story, Ned’s last state was worse than his first. He walked through the bright early-April weather like a prisoner heading to his execution. How was he to go on living with them? How could he sit down at the same table, knowing that soon it would be their flesh singed and seared and not some sirloin steak? And to be forbidden even to talk about it!
But that wasn’t exactly what the priest had made him promise. He couldn’t talk about it with his mother or Henry, but nothing had been said about Billy. Billy was only just turned seven, but he was preparing for his First Communion, and he was brighter than most seven-year-olds, and they shared the same dilemma. Maybe together they could do something to save their parents from hell. In any case, they could talk about it.
But when Ned got home Billy was not in his room, or anywhere downstairs, and his outdoor jacket and galoshes were in the hallway by the back door, which meant that he had to be somewhere in the house. Grandma Obstschmecker was alone in her own room, drowsing in front of a game show. There was no sign of Billy in the basement, or in the other bedrooms upstairs, or on the sun porch.
Only one possibility remained.
Ned opened the door to the attic and peered up the steep stairs at the dark-raftered underside of the house’s roof. “Billy?” he called out. “Are you up there?” In reply there was a kind of rustling sound. “Billy?” he called out again.
This time Billy answered: “I’m up here, stay out.”
Ned went up the stairs. The air was colder up here than it was out of doors, and very damp. He began to feel a stirring of resentment toward Billy. The attic had never been officially declared to be Ned’s private domain, but he considered it such. Billy was supposed to be afraid to come up here, afraid of Grandpa Obstschmecker’s ghost.
At the top of the stairs Ned looked about and saw Billy squatting down at the far end of the attic, where no floorboards had been laid. A long slanting ray of the setting sun entered at the west dormer window and lanced through the space as though on purpose to expose the boy’s trespassing presence.
“What are you doing up here?” Ned demanded.
“None of your business.”
“I thought you were afraid to come in the attic by yourself?”
“Why should I be afraid? Are you?”
Ned said, “No,” and then he thought about it and realized that maybe he was. He had made up the story about Grandpa Obstschmecker’s ghost himself in order to throw a little scare into Billy, and he knew that ghosts were not supposed to be real. But people’s souls did live on somewhere or other, and long-dead saints often return in visions, and what was the difference really between a ghost and a vision?
Billy got a mean smile on his face. “You are so, I can see it, you’re afraid.”
Ned shook his head. “Why are you up here?”
Billy shrugged. “To play.”
“But it’s cold.” Ned could already feel goose bumps developing on his arms and across his chest as the damp ai
r penetrated the thin cotton/polyester of his shirt.
“I’ve got a sweater on.”
Ned noticed that there were wads of the insulating wool all over Billy’s brown sweater and his corduroy pants, as though he’d been rolling around in the stuff. He walked nearer to where Billy was hunkered down. The cold floorboards creaked.
Billy backed away. “What do you want?” he whined. “Can’t you see I’m busy?”
“Busy?”
“Just leave me alone!”
Ned knew now for certain that Billy was doing something wrong, but he couldn’t imagine what. Billy was too young by many years to be committing a sin of impurity. But what other kind of sin could you commit in an attic all by yourself?
Without forming a conscious strategy, Ned decided that the best course was to be straightforward and bring up the matter of their parents’ imperiled souls. “I was just at confession,” he began.
At first Billy couldn’t figure out what Ned was getting at. He kept expecting Ned to tell about some sin he’d committed, but instead it was all stuff about his father and Madge going to hell because they weren’t married.
“But they are married,” Billy insisted. “They’ve got the photograph in their bedroom.”
“Not in the eyes of the Church. Only their first marriages count—your dad’s to Sondra, and my mom’s to Lance. That’s who they’re really married to.”
“Well, I think it’s a dumb idea.”
“But if they die they’ll go to hell. Automatically. You can’t just ignore that.”
“That’s what you say. But Dad goes to communion. He couldn’t do that if he had a mortal sin.”
“That just adds to the sins. If you go to communion when you’re in a state of mortal sin, it makes it worse.”
“Why talk to me about it?” Billy reasoned. “You should talk to them.”
Ned shook his head sorrowfully. “I can’t.”
“If they do go to hell, it’s their own fault, but I don’t think they’d go to hell for changing their minds about who they should be married to. My mother says she’s a lot happier now with Mr. Winckelmeyer, so what can my dad do? He can’t go and live with the Winckelmeyers. And your dad—” Billy broke off diplomatically. It was an unwritten rule that nobody ever talked about Lance Hill.
“What about my dad?” Ned insisted, feeling aggrieved.
Billy smiled condescendingly, a carbon copy of the smile he’d seen his father use at the mention of Lance Hill.
“What about my dad?”
Billy sighed and repeated the epithet he’d heard Madge use, drunk in the kitchen talking with Henry. “He’s a cocksucker.”
Billy was unaware of the force of the tabooed word and the precautions governing its use, so he was not prepared for Ned’s reaction. Ned scrambled forward and grabbed at Billy but didn’t get a good hold. Billy skittered sideways on his knees, crouching low to duck beneath the rafters as they slanted down to the floor. Ned struck at him but his hand hit a rafter, and a protruding nail incised a long red line down the back of his fist. He screamed out “Jesus Christ!” before he could stop himself, then had to wonder it he’d just committed a mortal sin. The possibility made him even angrier. “I’m going to kill you,” he told Billy.
“It wasn’t me that said so,” Billy defended himself. “It was your mother, she said so. I just heard her talking with Dad.”
Ned knew Billy was telling the truth, but that didn’t make it any easier to stomach.
The blood was running down his hand and dripping from the tips of his fingers. The red drops turned black when they fell on the fleece of insulating wool. And there, as though his blood were pointing to it, was the dessicated wingtip of the caduceus. He pushed aside the little mound of insulation that covered the stick to which the wings were secured. “You stole this! That’s what you were doing up here. You stole it, and you came up here to hide it.”
“Don’t touch it!” Billy warned, waving his hands at Ned as he might shoo away a bird that had lighted on the lawn.
“Don’t touch it!” Ned repeated. “You’re telling me not to touch it? Oh, that is rich! Do you know what this is? Do you know what I can do with it?” The stories he’d told Billy about the powers of the poison stick came back to him, and he decided he would teach his brother a lesson.
“It’s dangerous,” Billy said, backing away.
“You bet your ass it’s dangerous. It’s so dangerous it’s going to—” He did not finish his threat, for he had taken the caduceus into his bleeding hand and at once a tremor passed through his body, like a wind moving through him, an electric wind that tore at the tissues of his body, twisting and reordering atom and molecule, shattering the crystal lattices of the DNA as a greater wind might shatter the windows of a house, and ever, as it moved through the lymph and in the muscles and along the veins and arteries, gathering new force, wreaking new destruction, inflicting new pain, pain so unimaginable that simply from the wonder of it Ned could not have spoken. He tried to let go of the caduceus, but his hand was welded to it as though it were a high voltage line that he had grasped, which in a way it was. The vibration had spread to every part of his body: in his ears, so that he heard a kind of howling, the sound of the twisting and wrenching of bone and ligament; in his throat, so that he could not speak or draw breath; in his ankles and his knees, so that his legs grew weak and he fell, striking a floor joist with his hip and landing facedown in the insulation. Its fibers scratched at his eyes, and he had not even the self-command to keep his eyelids pressed shut.
“I told you,” Billy said in a low, reproachful voice. “But you wouldn’t listen.” He got a grip on Ned’s arm and pulled him over on his side.
Ned began to choke. His eyes rolled back to show their whites, and his eyelids began fluttering arrhythmically. Then, from having been tense and trembling, his body went limp, and the caduceus fell from his fingers.
Billy bent down and picked it up. A residue of the power that had passed through made Billy’s hand tingle with a strange pleasure that vanished almost as soon as it was felt. It left behind a feeling of sadness, but of great calm too. He knew just what he must to do avoid being blamed for what had happened. There was no reason he should be blamed; what had happened to Ned was an accident. Billy had never meant for the curse he’d placed on the caduceus to light on his stepbrother.
Filthy dirty grimy grubby
When I touch you, be like Bubby!
“I’m sorry,” Billy said calmly. “I really am sorry. But I’d already said the words. And I can’t change them. I was going to use it on the guys who beat me up. I would never have used it on you.” There was a tear in his eye; he was telling the truth. It had been an accident.
Ned’s body began to rock back and forth slowly, as though in a cradle. Saliva flowed out of his slack mouth and down round his left cheek to drip into the insulation.
Billy bent down and looked closely at his face. “Can you understand me?”
Ned made a rhythmic mewling sound, just like Bubby Corning when he’d first known him, back on Kuhn, before he became a total vegetable.
Billy hid the caduceus under the insulation in another part of the attic. Then he went down to the bathroom (leaving the attic door open, so that when his father went to look for Ned at dinnertime, he’d know right away where to go) and systematically picked off each and every fleck of insulation from his sweater and pants. He knew there would be questions as soon as Ned was discovered, so by way of accounting for his own whereabouts after school, he inveigled his grandmother into a game of checkers. She was a terrible checkers player—never able to think ahead beyond the next move and therefore always astonished and resentful when she lost. Billy deliberately let her win the first game so she was amenable to a rematch. Toward the end of that game, Henry and Madge got home with a Chinese take-out dinner.
It was Madge who found Ned in the attic and who drove him to the hospital in the Dodge. The hospital couldn’t do anything for him, of course. Fo
r most of the next month Ned was tested, and Billy had to go through a lot of tests too, but nothing helped. Ned’s condition remained the same as when Madge had found him. The doctors didn’t have an explanation. Sometimes, they said, these things happen. Sometimes there is no explanation.
BOOK TWO
14
The elm in the backyard that had been dying from Dutch elm disease was alive again, not just on the mend but actually flourishing, and Ned seemed to be in communion with it in some strange way, his mind coming to awareness as the light of the dawn stirred in its leaves and easing into sleep only as the last glow of dusk left the sky. He could feel the juices bubbling up through the trunk of the tree, the shifting pressures of its different membranes, the thirsts of the roots, the lower leaves’ greedy twistings up for the light that the shadow of the house denied them; he could feel them in his own flesh, like a tune that’s always on the radio, filling you with its beat even when you’re not thinking of it.
Not that Ned felt any better himself as a result of this awareness of the born-again elm. His own body remained inert and benumbed, a mere anchor of living meat tethering his ever-conscious mind to the daybed on the north-facing, elm-shaded sun porch behind his bedroom. It had been Henry’s idea to let him spend the warmer months of the year out here, where he could watch whatever might be happening in the alley and the backyard. In effect it meant that he could watch the leaves of the elm turn this way and that way as the breezes determined. Yet even this random flickering yielded a kind of comfort, a smoothing-over of the prevailing ache of his own vegetative existence, the torment of being unable by so much as the blinking of an eye to indicate to those who tended the needs of his body—feeding him, diapering him, clipping his nails—that he was still a human being, that he could think, though not always very clearly, and that it was Billy who was responsible for his being this way, little goddamned Billy whose voice and footsteps and daily visits to the sun porch were like flames licking up from the coals of hell, searing Ned with a hatred that was still as intense as in the first weeks in the hospital when he’d slowly come to realize what had happened and now would always go on happening just the same, this living death, this eternal torment.
THE M.D. A Horror Story Page 7