THE M.D. A Horror Story

by Thomas M. Disch

  “But you don’t—” she began, and then broke off.

  He smiled, and again she became aware, to the point of distraction, of his lips and his teeth. “What don’t I do?”

  She had to look away from him in order to continue.

  “You don’t… believe in God. Do you?”

  “Where’d you get that idea? Because I stopped going to church?”

  “I suppose that’s why.”

  “Just because I don’t believe in everything the nuns taught us back at Our Lady of Mercy doesn’t mean I don’t believe in God. You never had to go to a Catholic school, so it’s a lot easier for you to be a Catholic.”

  He paused, as though waiting for her to disagree. Another time she might have, because she did resent his assumption that her faith was somehow a flimsier thing than his skepticism. But she didn’t want to get sidetracked into all that. They could discuss religion some other time. In fact, she realized with a sudden leap of joy, they would be able to discuss absolutely everything now! They were no longer limited to acting out the roles of older sister and kid brother. They could be equals!

  “Let me ask you a question,” he said. “But you have to promise not to get angry. It’s something we’ve never talked about, and if you don’t want to talk about it now, that’s okay.”

  She smiled, for she was sure she knew what he would ask about. “I promise not to be angry. Or to count to ten at least.”

  “I was wondering what you think is behind your anorexia.”

  “I knew that’s what you’d ask about. And I don’t mind discussing it—with you; I do with Father or Sondra. Because really they’re not interested in what I think. They just want to make me eat my vegetables. Do you remember having to eat vegetables when you were little? My mother—my real mother, Rhoda, who sends us the grapefruits every Christmas from Texas—was a sadist with vegetables. I would have to sit at the table facing a dish of cold peas until long after my bedtime. I hated peas. Which isn’t at all unusual. Dr. Helbron says he’s never known a single child who hasn’t gone through some trauma over vegetables, and kids hate peas more than anything else. According to him.”

  “So do you think that’s what behind the anorexia?”

  “If it were, then we’d all grow up to be anorexic. No, Dr. Helbron’s theory, and what you read in most of the books, is that anorexia is like a diet that’s got out of control. You start off like everyone else just wanting to take off a few pounds or a few inches, but where for most people dieting is always a big difficulty, for us it becomes… Enjoyable isn’t the right word. But it feels good the way that volleyball does when you’re playing really well. That feeling that you’re in control of the ball. Except that what I’m in control of is my body. I’m making it do what I want, not some authority figure out there telling me to eat my cold peas.”

  “You sound like you like it,” William commented. It was what Dr. Helbron was always telling her, too, but somehow with William it didn’t seem like scolding.

  “At some level I suppose all anorexics do, or they wouldn’t be anorexic. I realize it’s unhealthy. But it’s not a conscious choice anymore. Eating, the physical act of eating, disgusts me. I can make myself sick thinking about an English muffin with butter and jam, and I used to love English muffins. Yet rationally I know I’d be better off if I’d eat the English muffin.”

  “You didn’t seem to have any trouble with the birthday cake. Or with dinner.”

  “You’re right about the birthday cake. Dinner I had to force myself, and usually when I do that, I’ll throw up afterwards.”

  “You didn’t throw up tonight, did you?” he asked, in a tone of such concern that it almost was annoying—as though it would be all right for her to throw up any other time, but not on his birthday.

  “No. I thought I would. But I didn’t.”

  “It seems to me, from what you’ve been saying, that your anorexia is a perfect example of what Ben was talking about, a psychogenic disease.”

  “Thank you, Dr. Michaels, for your brilliant diagnosis.” She waited for him to come back with a sarcasm of his own, and when he just sat there, like Dr. Helbron at his most infuriatingly nonjudgmental, she went on: “What you’re saying is obviously true. But that doesn’t mean it’s just something in my head and that if I’d adopt a ‘healthy attitude’ I’d be cured. It doesn’t work that way.”

  “I never supposed it did. But if you agree that anorexia is caused psychogenically, why can’t it be cured the same way?”

  “I would think that almost by definition that’s what its cure would amount to. The only problem is, there are no psychogenic spas for the cure of anorexia, not that I know of.”

  “Didn’t you ask me just a moment ago if I believed in God? Well, do you?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “So, have you ever prayed to be cured?”

  “Prayer isn’t like that, William,” she protested. “It’s not like going to the Santa Claus in Dayton’s toy department and giving him a list of what you want for Christmas. It’s a conversation, like we’re having, only it’s God we’re talking with.”

  “If you needed something from me that I could give you, you’d ask me for it, wouldn’t you? Don’t you think God can handle your anorexia? Have you ever prayed to be cured?”

  “No. And I haven’t prayed to be made a millionaire either.”

  “When I was talking, before, in general terms about how the one area that medical science has been afraid to investigate was the area of psychic healing, you seemed to agree. But when it comes to your own case, look how you react.”

  She felt trapped in his logic. It was only a variant form of what Dr. Helbron was always telling her, in his smug, pipe-puffing way, that to get well she had to want to get well. But Dr. Helbron had never had the bad manners to drag God into it. Even her confessor, when the subject came up, was only concerned with her anorexia insofar as it led her into sins of disobedience. Father Balch had never suggested that she should pray to be cured. Because (it dawned on her) he’d never thought God had anything to do with it; he’d never believed that the anorexia was an affliction, like being crippled or blind, that God might exert his influence over. He’d thought, as everyone else did, that she was simply being self-willed and self-destructive.

  “You make it sound like voodoo,” she said.

  “If voodoo works, why not use it?”

  “All right, I’ll pray. Hail Mary, full of grace, cure me of my anorexia. There, do you think I’ll be better now?”

  “Maybe. It didn’t sound very fervent, though. You weren’t even kneeling.”

  She had to laugh.

  William took no offense at her laughter. He even seemed, by his smile, to share the joke at his own expense. But he didn’t let up either. “I think,” he said, “if you were to put it in more positive terms, it would probably work better. Instead of asking to cured, why not ask right out for a healthy appetite?”

  “A healthy appetite?”

  “You make it sound like a contradiction in terms.”

  Again, and more deftly than Dr. Helbron had ever been able to, he had cornered her. Appetite: the word, and the idea it represented, did make her feel queasy, even repelled. She could accept the need for food as a kind of fuel that kept the machinery of the body running. But appetite was another matter. People surrender to their appetites. And she did not want to surrender to anyone or anything.

  “I see your point,” she conceded, but she conceded no more than that. She did not kneel. She did not change the wording of her prayer, which had not been (she saw now) a real prayer at all, but a verbal formula without the force either of faith or of feeling.

  “You want to be alone, don’t you?”

  “You’re a mind reader, William.”

  “Okay, but before I go, I just want to do one thing. Okay?”

  “What’s that?” she asked guardedly.

  “Just close your eyes.”

  “Why?”

  “Just cl
ose them.”

  She closed her eyes, and when she did she felt his hands on her shoulders. She could feel his thumbs pressing into the muscles on either side of the bony knob at the base of her neck, while his fingers dug into the fleshy cavity just above her clavicle. At first she thought he meant to massage her, but the pressure he exerted, though firm, was unvarying. Then he removed his hands and said she could open her eyes.

  “What was that all about?” she asked.

  “I healed you.”

  She felt the blood rushing to her face, and with it a shock wave of feeling, of all possible feelings, so powerful as to literally take away her breath. She felt the shame of ridicule and the pain of betrayal; she felt the anger of violation and, worse than that, a horrible craven gratitude at having been, for even so little time, touched.

  “Get out of my room,” she whispered.

  “It will work,” he said, with no trace of a smile, with not a hint that he was making fun of her. “Give it time, you’ll see, you’ll be better. Soon.”

  When he’d left and she could hear his footsteps mounting the stairs to his own room, she prayed. Not on her knees, but from her heart. She prayed that it would not be so. She prayed that she would still be as she had been. Free. Autonomous. Untouched.

  39

  That night he had a dream. He dreamt he was in a large dark room with a high ceiling that sloped down right and left almost to floor level. The thick beams supporting the roof were exposed like the beams of Our Lady of Mercy Church, and like those beams these had words written on them in gold letters, but these letters were in the old German style and he could not decipher them. They glittered erratically, high overhead, as though reflecting the light of some far-off flickering candle. He was walking toward a small low window at the other end of this room across a thick gray carpet. At each step he took, the pile of the carpet would billow up like the very lightest snow, or like clippings of gray hair on the floor of a barbershop. It was weird but in the dream it didn’t seem so, it seemed perfectly ordinary.

  He didn’t know where he was going, only that he didn’t want to go there. Yet he had to, it was as inevitable as the bus ride to school. He felt angst. Angst is a feeling for which the English language has no equivalent. It is not the same as fear, nor is it quite the same as the English word that derives from it, anxiety. It is specifically the way you feel inside a dream when you have to do something that is nevertheless impossible. Trotzdem: nevertheless. Unmöglich: impossible.

  The window at the end of the room was the screen of a computer. The prompt character was winking on the screen, insisting that he issue a command:

  He didn’t know what to type and pressed the RETURN key. A series of pastel squares tumbled about on the screen, as in a patternless kaleidoscope. Slowly they coalesced into a kind of face, though a face reduced to such simple masses of dark and light that it might more accurately be called a skull. The face’s mouth hole gaped open to speak his name: “Billy.”

  It was not the resonant, movie-star voice of the god, but a voice at once more familiar and more terrible. He wanted to turn the computer off and erase the skullish face from the screen, but he could not, and, pixel by pixel, the face achieved a higher resolution to become unmistakably the face of his father, as he had seen him last, blood streaming from eyesockets and mouth, flesh lacerated by the shattered windshield, bubbles of blood fizzing at the wound in his throat as he had struggled for his last living breath.

  “Billy,” the ghostly image pleaded, “is that you? If you can hear me, speak to me. Are you dead now, too? Is that why I feel you here beside me? It is you. But where are you? Are you alive? Speak!”

  He could not speak, but his fingers touched the keyboard of the computer, and entered the name of the standard greeting program: HELLO.

  “Billy, can you understand my questions? Do you know where you are? Can you tell me what year it is?”

  He typed: 1980.

  The ghost gave a rasping sigh and raised its hands to press its eyelids down over the bleeding sockets. “Then it is not too late. You can still destroy that wretched stick before it does more harm. Will you promise to do that?”

  He realized at just this moment in the dream that he was having a nightmare, but the realization was not an exit door by which he might escape the dream world. Rather it is like one of those moments when you are walking in the middle of a city busy with people and cars and suddenly become aware of the immense size of the world about you, and know that your own little mote of consciousness is just a tiny flicker in a power grid of incalculable extent.

  THIS IS A DREAM, he typed, frantic for release.

  “Ah,” Henry Michaels said, “of course. Tell me, how is Madge, is she well?”

  YES, he wrote, yielding to the dream’s authority, and by that yielding winning for his father a kind of release from his seeming torment. For now Henry, no longer an image on a screen, seemed to stand before his son, unbloodied, whole, and dressed in his everyday clothes. He put forward his hand, as though to touch William’s face, then checked the gesture and, with a grimace, took a step backward.

  “I have no physical existence now,” he said in a tone of patient instruction. “No flesh. My senses are not as yours, though I can see you now. Now—and as you’ll be, as you could become. You must destroy that thing. What is the word you call it by?”

  CADUCEUS

  “The harm it has done your brother is only an atom of the evil that it can bring. I can see that evil ahead of you like a cloud of smoke. You must not let its power grow. Burn it. Tonight. Take it out to the barbecue and burn it.”

  William shook his head.

  His father caught hold of his wrist, his stony fingers forming a bracelet of physical, panicking horror in which William’s thinking, dreaming mind had no participation. It was as though his flesh had been invaded in a single onslaught by all its biologic enemies, by every virus and bacteria that can enter and deform the vital tissues of muscle and nerve, every horrible parasite that may be hatched from the flesh of human host. He screamed, but the scream did not win him relief from the dream or from his father’s ghostly grip.

  “I am sorry,” Henry said, “that I must do this. But you must be made to understand what you are doing. I would spare you the pain, if I could. But to see what I must show you, there must be such pain. That is something I cannot alter, for I am as little in control of this process as you.”

  “But I am in control!” William insisted aloud, struggling to break loose. “And the caduceus can be a force for good as much as for ill. I can heal with it. I can cure diseases that medicine has never been able to cure before. And I can learn what I am doing and pass on that knowledge. Believe me, I will be careful.”

  The ring of pain about his wrist passed, in spasms, up through his arm and metastasized into a thousand vector quantities of death, needles of malignity that pierced lungs and heart and lodged there, pulsing. It felt as though a lifetime’s possibilities of pain had been summarized and then, like a long-held high note, extended into an endless howl of damnation. Yet, looking down, he found that that howl had lifted him high above Willowville, which had become a circuit diagram of roofs and treetops and asphalt streets. One of the neighbors’ houses was burning, and the smoke fanned out from the blaze in a plume that spread southwestward toward the city. The horizon tilted, and he was flying, guided and powered by the pressure of the hand about his wrist, in the same direction. The traffic below them zipped by along the long double curves of the expressways at impossible velocities, a clockwork speeded up by trick photography. The pains were now suffused with a sense of exultation, as though they had been the seeds of this new power, seeds sending roots into his chest and soul, and bursting from his slender back as wings, invisible but exquisitely sensitive.

  Henry pointed to the winding streets and low tents and buildings of the State Fairgrounds ahead of them. A block wide perimeter of leveled houses formed a ring around the Fairgrounds, and this ring of demolitio
n was demarcated by high barbed-wire fences and patrolled by guards in gas masks and protective uniforms. At intervals along the outer fence were observation towers manned by more armed guards.

  Within the inner fence a mob of men, women, and children wandered about listlessly or sat on benches and curbstones, reading, talking, playing cards. They all (except for a few workmen in civilian clothes) wore the drab cotton pajamas and gowns that are the uniform of hospital patients.

  Inside the oval of the grandstand’s raceway, its three tall chimneys screened from the view of the Fairground’s denizens by the tiered seats of the bleachers, a large crematorium had been erected. Parked at it entrance were flatbed trucks piled with the bodies of the plague dead that had been gathered from the quarantine precincts. The stacked corpses had been sprayed with white powder so that they seemed to form immense composite plaster sculptures.

  “Poison,” Henry explained. “Otherwise the quarantine would be completely ineffective. Vermin would carry it throughout the city.”

  “Did you know that in German the word for poison is Gift?”

  “These horrors mean nothing to you? You care only for yourself, for your ‘career’?”

  “This is only a dream.”

  “Yes—but a dream that will come true, unless you stop now. Destroy the caduceus.”

  “I’m sorry, Father. I can’t.”

  “You won’t.”

  “You never understood what it is to be ambitious. That was the real difference between us. You don’t know what it’s like to know that you’re built on the same scale as the world. That you can be part of history.”

  Henry shook his head sorrowfully, but it was only, once again, a head on a television screen. “Remember me,” he whispered, almost as an afterthought.

  William nodded. He felt guilty for what he’d just said, but it was true. His father had never wanted to amount to anything. “Sure, Dad.”