THE M.D. A Horror Story

by Thomas M. Disch

  Eternity. The African missionary, Father Borghese, had talked to them at the retreat about eternity, how no living person could ever understand what it was like, what it meant that something should just go on and on and on, a pain that never changes, with no hope that it can ever be relieved. Father Borghese had even made the comparison of how a sick person lying in bed will shift from one side to another, or cough up phlegm, or put a washcloth on his forehead, but that in the eternity of hell even such small comforts are denied the damned. “We cannot imagine that,” the priest had said, in a low, moaning voice, “we can’t begin to understand.” But Ned understood. Ned could have given Father Borghese lessons in the meaning of eternity and hell and the torments of the damned, the worst of which, according to the priest, was the despair of being denied, forever, the sight of God. But on that score he’d been wrong. After only a little while in hell the damned stop believing in God, supposing that they ever had. Or they came to believe in a very different kind of god, not the kindly creator of heaven and earth but the cruel architect of the inferno the damned inhabited, one who could look down, gloating, from his power and glory and take satisfaction in their suffering.

  Such a god as Billy Michaels.

  Not that Billy could be said to gloat. Almost the opposite was true. He was the ideal kid brother and faithful companion, always ready to help out with the messy job of feeding him, and never giving up on the unverifiable idea that Ned had a living mind trapped inside the inert hulk of his body, an idea that both Henry and Grandma Obstschmecker had long since given up on, though for Madge’s sake they maintained a halfhearted fiction. But Billy seemed to have no doubt at all. Early in the morning and again as soon as he was home from school, he would come to Ned’s bedside to read aloud from the comic strips in the Star Tribune, holding up the paper before Ned’s face and pointing to each of the characters in turn, to Lucy in “Peanuts,” to Dagwood, to Dennis the Menace, and Mark Trail, reading the words in the speech balloons, and then, if there was a joke, explaining it. Or he would tell Ned about the day’s events at school or in the neighborhood, who’d flunked social studies, who’d been sent to detention for fighting on the playground, whose car had got its fender mashed on the thruway. Often when he had homework to do he would bring it into Ned’s bedroom and work at the table beside the window, while Ned, weighted down by the chains of his paralysis, would lie in bed, staring at the ceiling or at the wall, according as his impotent carcass had last been positioned, and have to listen to the droning remarks of his tormentor. He must hear Billy’s homework assignments read aloud, long catechism lessons recited until they’d been got down pat, biographies of Daniel Boone and the first astronauts in space. Even in summer Billy persisted in tormenting Ned with his damned brotherly love. Eventually it had become a source of concern to Henry that his son was spending too much time with the invalid, that there might be something morbid in this vigilant concern. Ned had heard Henry discussing it with Madge when they’d been sitting in the backyard drinking beers while they waited for ribs to be barbecued.

  “I don’t see what possible harm there can be in it,” Madge said. “It’s kindness, that’s all it is. If someone learns to be kind at age eight, maybe they’ll grow up to be kind adults.”

  “It’s not his being kind I worry about. It’s the time he spends up there. Talking to him. It’s like those bowling pins he used to play with.”

  “You never objected to those.”

  “He was younger then.”

  “You’re saying that Ned is like a bowling pin?”

  “No, Madge, you know that isn’t what I meant.”

  “And he’s up there now in the sun porch, listening to every word we say.”

  Henry had no reply to that, and a few minutes later Ned heard the bang of the screen door to the kitchen.

  The leaves flickered. From far off there was the sound of a lawn mower. A robin lighted on a branch of the elm and flew off. Eternity continued.

  15

  “When I was your age,” Henry reminisced, resting his rake against the trunk of the elm tree and digging into the pocket of his shirt for a crumpled package of Kents, “there was none of this nonsense about bagging leaves, and nobody talked about composting then, either. We just burned them. Either in a trash barrel or in a big pile in the back alley. That was one of the nice things about this time of year, the smell of bonfires everywhere you went. It’s a nice smell.” He lit a cigarette, considered the flame until it got too close to his finger, then flicked it out.

  “Could we make a bonfire?” Billy asked hopefully. He had the job of going through the piles of raked leaves and taking out any sticks large enough to puncture the leaf bags. His sweatshirt and pants were covered with shreds and crumbles of dead elm leaves, and the stuff had got down inside the neck of his sweatshirt and was making him itch like crazy.

  “Sorry, pal, but if a cop car drove by and saw it, I could get fined two hundred dollars, and that’s a pretty high price to pay for the pleasure of burning leaves.”

  “Why rake them up at all? Why not just leave them where they are?”

  “Because the lawn wouldn’t grow in the spring. If you ever go into a real forest you won’t find a lot of grass underfoot. So if you want a nice lawn you’ve got to rake the leaves.”

  Henry took up the rake with a sigh and started making a new leaf pile. The wire teeth of the fan-shaped rake snagged in the rank grass beneath the littering leaves, grass Henry had not mowed since early in September. The process reminded him of his hog-bristle hairbrush on the bathroom ledge with its steadily accumulating tangle of lost hair. A bald spot was definitely starting to be visible at the back of his head. “It’s not only the trees that are losing their thatch,” he commented ruefully.

  Billy looked up, waiting for the “but also” that would round off Henry’s meaning. When it didn’t come, he asked, “What’s thatch?”

  “It’s what people in England used to use to cover the roofs of their houses before asphalt shingles were invented.”

  Billy looked up at the roof of the Obstschmecker house. The green trim had flaked away around all the second story windows and on the attic’s gable, and the drainpipe had got disconnected from the gutter, but the shingles all seemed to be in good shape.

  “It’s an expression for hair,” Henry explained. “I was thinking how I’m losing my hair just the way the trees are losing their leaves. It happens to some men when they get older, but I wasn’t expecting it to happen to me, not for a while yet.”

  “What makes men get bald?”

  “Billy, if I could answer that question, I’d be a millionaire. Some men still have a full head of hair at eighty, others start going bald while they’re in college, and no one knows why. It’s something in the genes—and don’t ask me what genes are, because all I can tell you about them is that they’re the smallest part of every person, so small you can only see them in a microscope, and only doctors at universities know anything about them.”

  Billy nodded knowingly. “We’ve studied about genes in science. They’re what kids get from their parents. I got half my genes from you and the other half from Mom, and you both got your genes from your dads and moms and so on all the way back to Adam and Eve.”

  “Well, you’re more of an expert on the subject than I am.”

  Billy extracted a longish windfallen branch from the leaf pile and snapped it into three manageable pieces. “When you were my age, did you put on costumes and go trick-or-treating on Halloween?”

  Henry smiled, and nodded. “Sure, up to a certain age.”

  “What age?”

  “Ten or eleven. Maybe twelve. I was a shortie till high school, so I could keep on trick-or-treating longer than most kids.”

  “How’d you dress up?”

  “As a ghost, when I was little. Then one year I was a pirate with a black patch over my eye, and another time I was a bum. And one time I must have worn a mask from the dime store because I can remember the mouth of the ma
sk getting soggy and shapeless after I’d eaten a piece of apple pie without taking it off. Can’t remember what it was a mask of, though.”

  Billy sprang his trap. “So why can’t I go trick-or-treating?”

  “We’ve been through all that, pardner. You know why.”

  “Other kids get to. There’s no law against it like against burning leaves.”

  “But your school doesn’t like the idea, and they’re having a nice party on Halloween where you’ll get just as much candy as if you went around from house to house asking for it. And no one’s parents will have to worry about the chance of someone playing nasty tricks.”

  “You mean, putting razor blades inside of apples and like that?”

  “Right, it’s been known to happen.”

  “But I won’t go to places like old Mrs. Wirtz’s. I’ll just go to places that have a jack-o’-lantern in the window. That’s what Ralph says to do. He gets to go trick-or-treating and he’s only in second grade.”

  “But he goes to the public school, right? And they’re not throwing a party for their kids to go to.”

  “But I don’t want to go to the stupid party. I know what it’ll be like. We’ll have to sit in the auditorium and watch old movies. And the older kids will take all the best candy for themselves and just leave popcorn and apples and that stuff for the little kids. That’s what happened last year.”

  Henry sighed. He was in total sympathy with his son’s feelings in the matter. A school-sponsored party couldn’t begin to compare with the excitement of going trick-or-treating, and as for the danger of razors in apples, he figured that was in the same class of risk as being hijacked when you take an airplane or getting hit by lightning. The real reason for the ban on trick-or-treating, which was not even hinted at in the letter from Sister Fidelis that had been sent home with all the students at Our Lady of Mercy, was that the neighborhood was now at least one-third colored, and having troops of grade-school kids parading around after dark with sacks of candy was an open invitation to disaster. But naturally you didn’t want to spell that out in a way that would be obvious to the kids. It would sound too much like prejudice.

  Hoping to shift ground, Henry asked, “What are you going to wear for your costume?” The unstated assumption was that the costume in question was the one Billy would wear to the school party.

  At first Billy was silent, sensing that any answer would represent his surrender to the idea of the school party. But then, almost as though he’d been following the drift of Henry’s unspoken thoughts, he announced, “I’m going as a colored person.”

  “What?” Henry reacted with sincere dismay. “No, that would not be a good idea, Billy.”

  “Why not? I’ll put charcoal on my hands and face like I did last summer by accident when we had the picnic. You said then I looked just like Little Black Sambo. And Mom laughed.”

  “Billy, there are kids at your school who are colored, and for them the color of their skin is a sensitive matter. They would think you were making fun of them.”

  “But it’s just a costume. If I have to go to that dumb party that’s what I want to wear.”

  Once again Henry had to admire his son’s skill as a negotiator.

  “Tell you what, Billy, let’s leave it up to your mother. If Madge says it’s okay for you to go to your Halloween party in blackface, you can. Okay?”

  “Okay,” said Billy. “And otherwise I can go out trick-or-treating?”

  “No,” said Henry judiciously. “That’s out of the question. Now let’s finish stuffing these leaf bags, what do you say?”

  Billy said nothing but trudged, with seeming obedience, over to the separate pile of twigs and branches, to deposit the latest pickings from the mound of raked leaves.

  Called, he thought. Crawled. Walled.

  He stared into the woodpile as intently as if it were ablaze.

  Falled. But “falled” was not a word. And neither was “talled.” He started going through the alphabet systematically, trying to find a word that would rhyme with “bald.” Scald? That was a real word, but he couldn’t think of any way to fit it into a curse that would work. He’d learned, over the last year and a half, that only real words would work. If you used nonsense words, the curse either didn’t work at all or was very, very weak.

  He tackled the problem from the other direction:

  Touch the handle of this rake…

  But he didn’t want to give Henry a stomachache, or any other kind of ache either: he wanted him to go bald.

  Then all at once he realized that the answer was staring him in the face. He reached down and took one of the largest and most jaggedy twigs from the woodpile. Twig in hand, he headed for the back door.

  “Hey, we’ve got a lot more bags to stuff,” Henry said.

  “I’ve got to go to the toilet,” Billy lied.

  All the way up to the stairs of the attic, and all the while he rubbed the twig and the caduceus together, transferring the power of the one piece of wood to the other, he continued to mutter, and improve on, the curse that the twig would carry:

  One touch of this leafless twig

  Will make you bald as Porky Pig.

  When he returned to the backyard he dropped the twig on a part of the lawn his father had not yet got round to raking. Then, with an impish grin, he volunteered to take over the job of stuffing the leaves into the plastic bags.

  Henry was happy to be done with the stooping and the bending. Before he started raking again, he lit another cigarette—but then, before he could start raking, Grandma O. came to the back door to announce a phone call from the Snelling Employment Service.

  “Hey!” said Henry. “That could be it. Cross your fingers for me, kid.” He dashed into the house, and Billy felt a sudden rush of relief. Almost from the moment he’d dropped his twig on the lawn, like a mine ready to explode, he’d wished he hadn’t done it. His dad really didn’t deserve anything so awful to happen (and for his dad, Billy knew, being bald really would be awful).

  He broke the twig in two, and then broke each of those pieces in two. But he wasn’t sure, even so, that being broken would have removed the curse from it. Burning seemed safer. He went to where Henry had left his flannel shirt hanging on the wooden railing of the back stairs and took a book of Hunt’s Tomato Catsup matches from the shirt’s pocket.

  With the first match the pieces of the twig lighted easily, but they wouldn’t stay lit. They fell out of the tepee shape in which Billy had positioned them and lay smoldering on the square of concrete that served as the bottom step of the wooden staircase.

  The wind blew out the next match he tried to light.

  The third seemed to take. Billy watched, mesmerized, as an orange flame wriggled up the smooth gray bole of one twig like a living creature. The flame-creature crawled from one twig to another. It grew, and shrank, and grew again, as Billy would hold one twig at an angle to another, the way you light candles from wick to wick.

  “Good heavens! William! What on earth do you think you’re doing?” Grandma Obstschmecker was down the steps before Billy could think what to do. She grabbed the burning pieces of the twig from his hand, and threw them to the ground, and stamped on them till the flames were out.

  “You know better than to play with matches. Whatever possessed you to do a thing like that? And right by these old steps. You could have set the whole house on fire. William, why are you smiling?”

  “I’m sorry, Grandma.” But it was really impossible not to smile at the idea of Grandma O. with her head as bald as Porky Pig. He tried to think about how he was probably going to be punished for starting the fire, but then he’d think of Grandma O. bald as an egg and the grin would come back, he couldn’t help it.

  “What do you think is so funny, William? Tell me.”

  “Nothing, Grandma.”

  Maybe, he thought, the fire would have already done away with the curse. Maybe she wouldn’t go bald. It would be interesting to find out. Thinking about it like that,
scientifically, it was possible to stop smirking.

  Grandma O. regarded him quizzically, and then delivered her final verdict. “You are the strange one,” she said, “and no doubt about it.” Then she went back into the house.

  For just a moment Billy had the feeling he used to have when he was smaller and had been able to see to the inside of things, to where there were faces and bodies and buildings and animals. It was a feeling of being at the same time very large and very small. Taller than the tallest grown-up and smaller than the smallest gene. The light in the backyard seemed to flicker, as though a cloud had passed across the sun, and a gust of wind sprang up to lift some of the raked leaves from their mounds and piles and scatter them back across the raked part of the lawn. Then the feeling was gone and everything was the way it had been before.

  16

  “Hey, listen to this, this is interesting.” Billy aimed the beam of the little plastic tensor lamp at the column of text in the Junior Universe of Knowledge under the heading of Halloween and read aloud: