THE M.D. A Horror Story

by Thomas M. Disch

  “I’m taking German in school, did Madge tell you? St. Tom’s is the only high school in the Twin Cities where it’s possible to study German.”

  “I would go upstairs with you,” she said, ignoring his attempt to capture the spotlight, “but right now I have to clean up in the kitchen. Madge gets conniptions when she comes home to a sink full of pots and pans.”

  Reluctantly he got up from the table. “I’ll go up and see Ned now.” Grandma O. nodded her approval. Passing through the dining room he saw his knapsack lying on the box containing the Silentype printer. Remembering the Camel pack inside and what a snoop Grandma O. could be, he took the knapsack with him as he went up the stairs. At each step he half expected the bell to begin ringing again, but the only sounds to be heard were his own footsteps and the creaking of the stairs.

  33

  There was a girl in New Jersey or somewhere like that called Karen Ann Quinlan, who had been in a state of coma and considered brain-dead for years. She had only been kept alive by the machinery she was hooked up to in a hospital, and her parents had had to fight with the hospital over whether to take her off the life-support machinery or leave her on. Theoretically that kind of equipment could keep a vegetable body like Karen Ann Quinlan alive for decades. As “alive” as the body of Ned Hill. But what kind of life could that be? Ned wasn’t brain-dead. His eyes opened and closed; he could breath and swallow water and soft foods; he urinated and defecated, though he was not in control of either process. And his hair grew. In fact, Madge had such an aversion to shaving Ned and to cutting his hair that he was beginning to look like some kind of biker. He was also getting fat, since Madge would let him go on eating the things she whipped up in the blender as long as he’d keep swallowing—and he’d keep swallowing as long as something was being shoveled into his mouth. At this point he was no fatter than Madge herself or than Grandma O. In fact, the three of them looked like they could all have shared the same clothes, and maybe they did. The white nylon shirt Ned was buttoned into today had undoubtedly come from the nursing home where Madge worked, St. Malachy’s Hospice. They let her have all the old uniforms she wanted for free, the ones with stains that wouldn’t wash off. This one had a huge tan amoeba all down the front, representing, probably, the better part of a cup of coffee.

  In another twenty years, maybe there’d be a case about this kind of situation. If the decision had been William’s, he would not have hesitated: he would have Ned put out of his suffering and any healthy organs donated to people needing transplants. Surely Ned, if he were still conscious in some dim way (as Madge tried to believe), would have wanted the same thing for himself. Imagine lying here, day after day, with the flies settling on your face and crawling around your eyes (the way they were right now) unless someone was around to shoo them off (which wasn’t worth the bother, they just flew right back). It used to be they’d at least haul Ned out onto the sun porch in the summertime, but he’d got too big for Madge to lug him out there by herself, so now the limits of his existence were this room, this bed, and that body. And it stunk—room, bed, and body. There was no way anyone was ever going to keep up with Ned’s sanitary requirements. His waste products weren’t produced at intervals, in neat bundles; they just sort of leaked out of him, the way the water leaked out of the radiators at school. At least with the radiators you could keep bowls under the leaks.

  And it wasn’t just Ned who suffered (assuming he felt anything at all). The situation was worse for the people who had to take care of a human vegetable than for the vegetable itself. Both Madge and her mother were obsessed with Ned. Their lives revolved around his requirements. The idea they had about the bell was only the latest bee in their bonnets. Madge also continued to waste a couple of hours every night doing “patterning” exercises, which meant her using Ned’s inert limbs as a kind of human rowing machine. William couldn’t see the point of it. Who needed a vegetable version of Arnold Schwarzenegger? But of course you couldn’t say any of that to Madge. Ned had become the god she worshipped and the crucifix she was nailed to, and to call the worship into question was like suggesting that all the pain of her martyrdom was wasted effort. Her only hope, as far as William could see, was that somehow the vegetable would wither on the vine and die, but after more than six years of living death Ned seemed as vital—and as sickly—as the damned houseplants spilling out of their pots and planters all over the house.

  —Such cruel thoughts, Billy, said the voice he’d heard before, at the foot of the stairs. The voice of the man who wasn’t there.

  Knowing the voice wasn’t real did not make it less interesting. Just the opposite. The strange thing was not that he was hearing voices but that his reaction was primarily curiosity, not fear. Partly because the voice seemed friendly. Partly, maybe, because of the marijuana he’d been smoking. “Pot” you were supposed to call it, if you wanted to be hip.

  —Fear can be experienced in different ways. But it’s true, you have no reason to be afraid of me. I am your friend.

  “Do you have a name?” William asked aloud.

  —Of course. Don’t you remember it?

  William shook his head.

  —Then let me assist your memory.

  A hand, as much larger than his own as a grown man’s would be larger than an infant’s, gripped his shoulder, the thumb pressed to the nape of his neck, the fingers digging into the flesh of his pectoral muscle. He became rigid in that grip, unable even to lower his head to see the hand that had laid hold of him—to see if he could see it. Where the thumb and each fingertip pressed against his flesh he could feel a distinct but indefinable sensation, a tingling like the tingling of Ben-Gay. The sensation spread through his body in a twining filigree, like the interference patterns set up in a still pool as an insect, as many insects, skate across the surface. He feared he would pass out and concentrated on looking at what was before him clearly and steadily, ignoring the pulses of brightness that seemed to want to override his field of vision—and what was there before him to look at was Ned. His head had fallen back against the pillow, and his mouth hung open slackly, but somehow his eyes seemed focused and aware of what was happening. Even his slack-jawed expression could be interpreted as awe instead of mere idiocy. What was it that Ned could see that he could not? He twisted against the grip of the hand, and the ripplings of energy that spread from the fingers suddenly drew cable-taut, and along that cable—or rather, through it, like a wind channeled through a wild tunnel and amplified by that constriction—flowed the ruthless, discovering energy of the god. As a tornado sweeps up the prairie topsoil to reveal the rocks that have persisted beneath the detritus of the centuries, so the god, with a single pressure of his inhuman hand, dispersed the shallow sediments beneath which William’s memories had lain buried. He felt overwhelmed and lifted up all in the same instant. The figure visible before him, Ned sealed in the sepulcher of his own diseased flesh, testified with equal eloquence as to the guilt of what, so long ago, William had done as well as to the power that had allowed him to do it.

  Instinctively, as a hooked trout might writhe against the barbed steel in its mouth, William twisted to be free from the hand’s grip—not, now, to escape the god but in simple eagerness to turn from the sight of Ned, and his own guilt, and to regard the god, and his power. The hand let him loose (though, it may be, only as the fisherman might pay out some line), and William turned round and saw, again, the god Mercury.

  —Even now you doubt me, the god remarked, lifting the caduceus in his right hand with a little flourish, like the conductor of an orchestra, signaling for silence. You would rather think me some delusion induced by your first whiff of a psycholeptic drug than acknowledge my power and accord the worship that is my due.

  “I do worship you,” William declared earnestly. “Anyone seeing you like this would have to. But it’s true that I don’t believe you’re here, in this room, physically, the same way I am. And I think the pot may have something to do with it, though I don’t know how.
Am I wrong?”

  —No, that’s not too far off. You’ve lost that quicker apprehension you had in childhood that let me speak to you directly, as we are speaking now, but shall not again. In the future we will have to conduct these rendezvous when you are dreaming. Or when, as now, your consciousness has been suitably altered and you’re not in, as they say, your right mind. But I must warn you: the police department is quite right, drugs are dangerous. And the more fine-tuned the spirit—the more poetical, if you prefer—the greater the potential for danger.

  “The caduceus,” William said eagerly. “Can I have it back?”

  —It is where you left it. The god took a step backward to allow William to precede him out of the room and up the stairway to the attic.

  No sound of footsteps but his own followed William up the stairs, and he thought of what the god had said: “Even now you doubt me.” So he must not turn around, as though doubting that Mercury were behind him. He remembered climbing these same steps on Halloween, lighting his way with the jack-o’-lantern. Mercury had called himself Lord Saman then, and the snake on his caduceus had been alive. He remembered the cold, wet coils of the snake wriggling in his hands, like a piece of liver when it comes out of its cellophane wrapping.

  He remembered his father bleeding in the wrecked car.

  —But that was not your fault, said Mercury, though his voice seemed to come from a distance now. Indeed, you had secured his good health to the full extent of the caduceus’s power, just as you did for the women who still live in this house and enjoy such good health here. But good health is no surety against accidents. Feel guilty for the bald bitch downstairs, if you must feel guilt. Feel guilty for those who lost their teeth eating the candy you cursed, but think who they were and whether you do not, in fact, take pleasure in what became of them. Feel guilty for the vegetable your brother. But for your father? In his death you are guiltless. Surely you know that.

  William crossed the attic from the top of the stairs directly to where, so long ago, he had buried the caduceus beneath a thin covering of loose insulation. And there it was still, as the god had promised and memory prompted, the brittle stick with the dessicated sparrow corpse affixed to it. He held it again, and again could feel, though diminished almost to extinction, the power of the thing.

  My power, he thought, and felt for a moment as though his body were as the god’s, a compact radiance that the words of his curse or his blessing could release.

  The god did not correct this thought. Indeed, his purpose was accomplished, and he had departed.

  34

  The moment Sondra hung up the phone on old Mrs. Obstschmecker, who had rambled on nonstop for nearly fifteen minutes, it rang again. She could hear the Cuisinart whirring away in the kitchen, so it was no use hoping Judith would answer it. At this point she’d be up to her elbows in cake batter.

  Sondra picked up the cordless phone from where it nestled out of sight behind the drapes. It emitted a shrill tweet and before she could say hello, Ben’s voice boomed out through the whole room: “Damn, I thought we had that thing fixed!”

  She sighed. “The man came in, he said it was working fine. How do I adjust it so it doesn’t broadcast all through the living room?”

  “You’ve got me, sugar. And you’ve got a guest for dinner. I hope that’s okay.”

  “Ben! It’s Billy’s birthday!”

  “I thought we were going to start calling him William.”

  “Who is it?” she asked, quickly running through the worst possibilities in her head.

  “Dan Turnage. You remember him? From ATA.”

  Sondra, though she often did defend herself against her husband’s business associates by forgetting or creatively misremembering their names, needed no further reminding as to Dan Turnage. Turnage was the champion asshole of the lot. She had loathed him at first sight, and closer acquaintance had only confirmed her first intuitions. Years ago Turnage had been a sports figure (twelve years as second baseman for the Twins, and another two years as coach); now he was a vice-president for the organization that funded most of Ben’s research, the American Tobacco Alliance. Turnage was ATA’s chief figurehead, the person who had to make all the poker-faced disclaimers and denials on TV whenever there was some awful new piece of evidence about the dangers of smoking. Turnage could look any camera in the eye and say that smoking did not present any danger to health, as far as he was concerned, because he’d been smoking two packs a day from the age of sixteen and still did twenty push-ups every morning. Then he would smile his thin-lipped smile and light a cigarette and blow smoke at the newscaster. His most infamous moment in the spotlight had been on “60 Minutes” a year ago, when Morley Safer had done an utterly damning exposé about ATA and the new push in the southern states to market chewing tobacco to children. On that occasion Turnage had punctuated his remarks with streamers of brown spittle into a big brass spittoon and, missing once, on Morley Safer’s shoe. “Sorry about that,” he’d drawled, “I must be getting out of practice.” Nothing anyone said ever made a dent in his cool. Ben, behind his back, called him “our cigar store Indian.” Turnage was considered ATA’s major PR asset, and he was the single person in the world Sondra most hated having to be polite to.

  “No, Ben,” she said. “Not him, not tonight. Explain that it’s William’s birthday.”

  “I did. And he’s got him a present. A baseball mitt.”

  “He’s already given William one baseball mitt, if you’ll recall. He probably travels with a trunk full of the damned things. It’s just public relations. And William doesn’t give a hoot about baseball.”

  “Well, he can pretend, can’t he? It’s about time the boy started learning to be a hypocrite.”

  “Ben, have you been drinking?”

  “Nothing beyond what duty requires. Turnage is in a mellow mood, and I want to continue that process, sugar. It’s business, it’s what pays the bills. You never object to spending the money, so don’t make it any harder than it is already to earn it. I don’t like the bastard any more than you do, but I’ve just pitched a proposal for a new project, and he seems to like it, but he’s not exactly a quick thinker. He has to be coached, and buttered up. A nice dinner, some wine and candles, a bit of flattering attention, surely we can manage that.”

  “You mean, I should smile when he tries to feel me up.”

  “He’s not as bad as all that.”

  “He also has terrible breath.”

  “True,” Ben agreed. “But we’ll put him at the far end of the table. Okay?”

  “Do I have any choice?”

  “I can see him heading back to the bar. We’ll be home sometime between six and seven. See you then.”

  There was another electronic screech signaling that he’d hung up. Sondra dropped the phone on the floor, hoping it would break. It bounced once and lay on its side, buzzing angrily.

  “To answer your question,” said Judith, who was standing in the archway that opened onto the dining area, “no, you don’t have a choice.”

  “Judith, you know it’s not nice to eavesdrop.”

  “I wasn’t eavesdropping, I was listening to your broadcast in the kitchen. There’s no way that I’ve been able to discover to know when the phone is going to work like a public address system and when it isn’t. If there were an instruction manual…”

  “I think it got thrown out with the Christmas wrappings. Anyhow I’m sorry to snap at you. It’s not your fault, it’s mine, I should have put my foot down.”

  “He’d only have stomped on it.”

  “Aren’t you in a mood. I hope the cake is all right.”

  “The cake is fine. It’s just gone into the oven. And the dinner will be all right too.” Judith stared defiance at her stepmother, waiting to see if she would be challenged in her declaration that she was still to act as the cook for William’s entire birthday dinner.

  Only then did it dawn on Sondra that she had no idea what Judith was intending to make for that dinner
. She’d been delighted with her stepdaughter’s offer to take on the chore. Cooking for Ben was hard work. He liked dishes in proportion as they were trouble to make, and he could always tell when Sondra tried to cut culinary corners by serving take-out and deli-type food, even when it came from Byerly’s. Sondra did not exactly rebel against his demands, but she’d never learned to enjoy cooking. Julia Child and the rest of that lot were a mystery to her. And Judith was a greater mystery, for why would someone who hates to eat food have such a passion for preparing it? Judith said she did the cooking by way of trying to overcome her anorexia, and she did seem to make more of an effort to eat the dishes she cooked herself. But Sondra had seen her in the kitchen in the throes of rolling out the crusts of pies that she would never eat a bite of, since they were destined for church bake sales, and it was obvious from her absorption in such tasks that the girl genuinely enjoyed fondling dough, and paring vegetables, and chopping onions, and beating eggs, and performing all the other boring rigmaroles that were the bane of Sondra’s existence. No, she had no intention of reasserting her authority in the kitchen, certainly not on Dan Turnage’s account.

  “Ah, the dinner,” she said. “That reminds me. I hope there’ll be enough now that we have a guest. As I recall, Mr. Turnage is a man with a large appetite.”

  “There’ll be more than enough,” said Judith.

  “And, um, what have you planned?”

  “I showed you the recipe for the cake. It’s a hazelnut upside-down apple cake, from the Cuisinart cookbook. And the rest is a combination of all William’s favorite foods from childhood.”

  “And what are those?”

  “You’re his mother,” said Judith smugly. “I wouldn’t think you’d have to ask me a question like that. Anyhow, the whole idea is to make something that will be a surprise for everyone. So, can I go back to the kitchen now? It’s going to take you at least an hour to go get William and bring him back, and that won’t give you much leeway for being here to greet our guest.”