THE M.D. A Horror Story

by Thomas M. Disch

  And now Judith was on the phone.

  “Judith?”

  “I’m sorry, did I wake you up? It’s an hour earlier there, I thought you might still be up.”

  “Is something wrong? Where are you?”

  “I’m in the Greyhound station in Miami. But don’t tell Father, not for another half an hour anyhow. By then I’ll be on a bus. I’m coming home.”

  “But Ben just talked to your doctor today. He said you’d be in the hospital another two weeks.”

  “I left the hospital right after lunch. My mother always comes in the afternoon, and I couldn’t face another one of her visits. She does nothing but complain about her health. I’m the one in the hospital, though it’s really more of a mental institution, but she spends the whole time whining about her health, and not having money for her own hot tub. She was always like that, but she’s worse now. It was such a dumb thing to do, coming down here.”

  “But Judith!”

  “Don’t be angry, and don’t worry about me. I’m really quite well. In fact, I’ve never been better. That’s one of the reasons I had to call you. I couldn’t call from the hospital, there was never any privacy. And the food! It was just like everyone says about hospital food. It was so unwholesome. And I was starving, but even so, when the meals came, I would just look at the little shreds of meat in cold gluey gravy and cry. From hunger! And the food at my mother’s was almost as bad in its own way. Microwave junk food, with the same awful gravy only piping hot. And endless pints of ice cream! Rhoda can eat a whole pint of ice cream while she’s watching a game show. And breakfast? Breakfast is sugar-coated cereal and croissants. It would have made anyone bulimic to be with her for a week. I mean, Burger King would look like a health spa in comparison. Unconsciously I think that’s why I came down here. Because I knew I’d get sick. But I’m not sick anymore, not really. I was making myself throw up. That night when you said you cured me? You really did! But I refused to accept the fact.” She paused for breath, and added: “I must sound hysterical.”

  “You sound wrought up,” William agreed.

  “Do you know what it was?”

  “What what was?”

  “The problem, the anorexia. It’s just what all the books about anorexia said it was. Sex. I refused to accept the idea that I was becoming a woman, that I was going to have breasts, and boyfriends, and all the rest of it. I didn’t want to have a woman’s body. And I starved myself so I wouldn’t.”

  “Judith, you haven’t been drinking, have you?”

  Judith laughed. “Is that what I sound like? I sound drunk? Maybe I am, but not on alcohol. I’m drunk on movies. That’s all I’ve been doing today. When I walked out of the hospital, I took the bus downtown, but I still didn’t have any idea what I was going to do. So I went to see Romeo and Juliet. Oh, William, it was so beautiful. Not just beautiful, but—I don’t know, I can’t describe it. About fifteen minutes into the movie I started crying, and I didn’t really stop crying till it was over, and then I stayed to see it a second time, and it was just the same, I couldn’t stop crying. It made me realize that I’m not in touch with my own deepest feelings. Anyhow, at that point it was seven o’clock, and I was famished, so I went to the restaurant nearest to the theater, which was a Cuban restaurant, but not at all lower class, though my mother goes into a panic if she sees a word of Spanish anywhere, I don’t know why she lives here, but the people in the restaurant were all very well dressed, and I ordered the first thing I saw on the menu on the wall, which was arroz con pollo, which turned out to be half a boiled chicken with a great heap of beans and rice, and all the while I was wolfing the stuff down I kept remembering scenes in the movie, and I would start crying all over again, right into my beans and rice, and at the same time I was enjoying the meal like no other meal I’ve ever eaten. I’m sure the waiter thought I must be crazy. You probably think I’m crazy.”

  “No. But it sounds like it must have been a great movie.”

  “Oh, William, it is! As soon as I’m back I want to take you to see it, if it’s still playing somewhere. I never understood what all the fuss was about Shakespeare. When we had to read Julius Caesar and even when they showed us the movie, it was like being taken to a museum to look at all those battered old statues. I don’t know, maybe I’m growing up. Maybe I should go back and look at the statues again.”

  For just a moment William thought he might try and stem the flood of Judith’s monologue by telling her about the statue of “Mississippi—Father of the Waters” he’d seen at the courthouse and the similar but less lasting impression it had made on him, but really he was more interested in hearing Judith rattle on than in trying to calm her down. “So then what happened?” he prompted.

  “Then I went to another movie, though first I thought to call the hospital and explain that my mother had taken me out to dinner and I would be spending the night at her house—the hospital is really very lax, since you pay for the room you’re in whether you’re in it or not—and then I called my mother, who wasn’t home, as usual, she’s always out at a bar drinking, so I left a message on her machine saying I had a headache and please not to call till late in the morning. And then I went to see Grease. Have you seen Grease?”

  “It’s another movie?” He knew it was, but it was easier to ask leading questions than to spoil her story by explaining that he’d seen the last fifteen minutes of Grease on a double feature, but hadn’t stayed to see the beginning.

  “William, what century are you living in? I thought everyone at St. Tom’s but me had seen Grease. It’s a musical comedy with John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John. Who are both so wonderful! But then I started crying again! It was as though it was the same movie, but everyone was dressed in different costumes. They were singing these beautiful songs, rock and roll songs, which ordinarily don’t have much effect on me, but tonight for the first time in my life I understood them!”

  William was completely outside his own dream at this point, but it was as though he’d entered Judith’s. What she was saying was so classic it was hard to take her seriously. “I didn’t think rock and roll was supposed to be difficult to understand.”

  “No, of course not. Not for anyone in the world but me and Olivia Newton-John. God, did I identify!”

  “Judith, I’m sure Grease is an unappreciated masterpiece, and when it’s showing on a double feature with Romeo and Juliet we can see them together and compare notes. But I still don’t understand why you’re at a Greyhound bus station.”

  “I didn’t have enough actual cash for an airplane ticket, unless I went standby, and I thought if my mother had found out I wasn’t at the hospital, she might have them check the airports but not the bus station. Who would ever take a bus from Florida to Minneapolis?”

  “No one. And maybe you shouldn’t either.”

  “Oh, I guess I should have explained all that part right at the beginning. The thing is, my mother and this doctor, who I think she must have had an affair with at some point, are keeping me here as some kind of hostage. Isn’t that awful? Like those poor captives in Iran. The thing is, when I got here I was determined not to let go of my anorexia. When you touched me that night and said I was cured, I got very upset. And angry. But I gradually did start to feel different about eating. I wanted to eat. All sorts of things I wouldn’t have touched before that. Hamburgers! One day I went to Burger King and ate a Whopper! And I liked it! And didn’t throw up afterward. But I did not want to give in. So when my mother phoned and said why didn’t I come down for a visit, it seemed like a perfect excuse. I mean, I really do hate the way my mother eats, which is a classic anorexic syndrome. But I would get so hungry that I would eat all the same things she did, which did make me feel genuinely sick, but even at that I wouldn’t have been vomiting after every meal if I hadn’t made myself do it. Which is the next stage for most anorexics, bulimia. So, she took me to this sinister doctor who’s a friend of hers, and he incarcerated me in his dreadful clinic. And I was stuck. Eit
her I admitted there was nothing wrong with me, which I was still too stubborn to do, or I stayed on at the clinic and had to eat their terrible food. And all the while my mother was just gloating, because she figured she could keep me a hostage in Florida and get who knows how much money in child support.”

  “So you just up and left the hospital?”

  “Finally. Today. Yes.”

  “Good for you.”

  “I don’t know how you did what you did, William. But I am so grateful.”

  “Hey, listen, you did it.”

  “It would be silly for us to argue about it. How is summer school going?”

  “Terrible. You were right about old Lilah Gear-heart. She’s a lunatic. But I think Civics would be a pain even if Joan Rivers taught it. The Minnesota state constitution is inherently dull. The German class is dull, too, but only because I have to keep memorizing new vocabulary.”

  “You’re going to grow up to be the world’s most hardworking workaholic.”

  “Oh, it’s not all nose to the grindstone. Today Mom and I had a grueling workout with a Frisbee that she’d found under somebody’s shrubbery. And after I’d declared myself too tired to go on by sailing the Frisbee onto the roof of the garage, she let it be known that she’s going to have a baby. Sometime before Christmas.”

  “How wonderful! Tell her how thrilled I am for her—but don’t tell her till tomorrow morning. William, they’re announcing the Nashville bus, I’ve got to go.”

  “Nashville?”

  “That’s where I transfer. I just thought: there’s no reason you have to tell them I’m on a bus at all. Just say I called to tell you about the movies. Okay?”

  “Yeah, but when Rhoda calls up to say you’re a missing person, they’ll start to worry.”

  “I’ll phone them myself from Nashville. William, I’ve got to go: I love you.”

  “I love you too.”

  Judith hung up.

  It was true then, all of it. Not that there had been any doubt after what had happened today to Jimmy Deeters. The only thing, really, that had given him to doubt at all had been the way that Judith’s anorexia had seemed to get worse ever since his birthday, and then her being put into a hospital. That, and the fact that the caduceus had seemed inert. But in his dream Mercury had explained about that. What had he said? Listening to Judith on the phone, the dream had got all hazy. He could remember the last part, having to dissect the corpse that was laid out on some kind of tomb, or altar, and the corpse’s penis shooting off the sperm, and then his embarrassment waking up and finding out that that much of the dream had not been a dream at all.

  He got out of bed and went into the bathroom to wash his crotch, but he did it in the dark so as not to dispel any fragment of the dream he could still get hold of. A bowling pin: Mercury had thrown it to him and he’d put it into his pocket.

  Then it all came back, the three questions he’d asked and the answers Mercury had given. His account was overdrawn, and interest charges were accruing. He would have to find another Jimmy Deeters or the caduceus would lose its power. And he had to do it soon if he wanted to give his unborn baby brother (for some reason he was certain it was going to be a boy) the birthday present of a clean slate of health. The prospect of finding new victims made him uneasy. When he’d seen Jimmy Deeters’s mother on the Evening News, he’d begun to feel guilty about what he’d done. And maybe the death penalty was too drastic a punishment for Jimmy’s crimes: blindness would have kept him from becoming a career criminal as effectively as death. In the future he would do well to temper his justice with a little more mercy. Also, he shouldn’t use his power on strangers. Perhaps there’d been a worthwhile side to Jimmy Deeters that his court record would not have revealed. Maybe he had musical talent. Maybe he’d have joined the army in a year or so and turned all his aggressions to some constructive purpose. From now on, he vowed, he’d be more responsible in the ways he exercised his power.

  By the time he’d arrived at this laudable conclusion he’d toweled himself dry and had changed into a fresh pair of pajamas. Then he got back between the bedsheets and dove effortlessly into the pool of a deep and dreamless sleep.

  46

  Lilah Gerhart was not vain about her appearance, but she was aware that her good looks were a professional asset and tried to dress accordingly. Adolescent children could be merciless toward the teachers they considered dowdy. Today, though she had no teaching duties per se, she’d worn her best summer dress, a striking cotton print with gigantic red flowers exploding on a field of white. Her lipstick precisely echoed the red of the flowers, as did the barrette that secured her jet-black hair in place above her left ear. Miss Gerhart’s features were inherently dramatic—strong cheekbones, a firm chin, and a Roman nose—and she emphasized that drama quite consciously with makeup and a hairstyle that commanded attention. Teaching was a form of theater, and in the theater there is no place for reticence or false modesty.

  Summer school had been over for a week, but she had agreed to come in to the office and help Mr. Paley, the new principal, prepare the schedule for the next school year. She had also agreed, reluctantly, to speak with the insufferable Michaels boy about the grade he’d received in Civics. The boy’s stepfather had had the nerve to go directly to Mr. Paley with his complaint, but Mr. Paley had been quite firm and insisted that the matter properly was the concern of the teacher and the student, not of the principal and the parent. And so the appointment had been set up. Of course, it was not the grade in itself that was at issue but the boy’s preposterous ambition of skipping from freshman to senior year and graduating from St. Tom’s at the unheard-of age of fourteen. A C+ in Civics did not automatically doom the possibility of his entering the Early Admissions Program, but in combination with Miss Gerhart’s strongly worded advisory note (she was the senior member of St. Tom’s Early Admissions Program Committee) the boy could count on at least two more years before graduation. At least two.

  At five minutes to ten, Miss Gerhart (who was always punctual herself, since she expected the same consideration from others) locked up the principal’s office (Mr. Paley had not arrived yet; he, evidently, did not practice the courtesy of kings) and went down the hall to the Counseling Office. The Michaels boy was already there, waiting outside the door.

  “Good morning, William,” she said cheerfully. “Have you begun to enjoy what’s left of the vacation, now that summer school is over?”

  “Not a whole lot, Miss Gerhart. Not after I got my grade from you.”

  “Yes, I understand that you’re not used to receiving anything less than an A. But I assure you some of your fellow classmates would envy you your C plus. Dick Larsen, for one. The hockey team is going to have to find another goaltender this year, I’m afraid. But I don’t consider myself to blame for that, or for your C plus, for that matter. A student’s grades are based on his or her performance.”

  “I performed well enough on the final.”

  “And that’s why your grade is as high as it is. But I would trust a bright young fellow like you to do well on any multiple-choice test. Personally, I think such tests have little place in a humanistic discipline like Civics. Fortunately for you, that is not how the State Board of Education views the matter.”

  “You mean you’d have flunked me if you could?”

  “What you speak of as ‘flunking’ can also be regarded as an opportunity for growth, and yes, I would have liked to give you that opportunity. One of the essential tasks of secondary education, and in particular of the study of Civics, is to prepare the nation’s young people to become concerned, responsible citizens. On the evidence of your term paper I feel I’ve failed at that task, while you have passed the course. I won’t have another opportunity to correct my failure, and I regret that, for I think that if I could have had you again in my class for an entire school year, I might have begun to get through. Civics really ought not to be squeezed into two months of hard cramming, but again the State Board has other views. How
ever, I’m not the only teacher here at St. Tom’s. Perhaps Mr. Raab or Miss Milman will be able to succeed where I’ve failed. I hope so.”

  “And that’s the reason you gave why I shouldn’t be admitted to the Early Admissions Program—so Raab and Milman could have a chance at me?”

  “Have a chance at you? That’s a rather self-centered way to put it, isn’t it? In any case, my note to the committee is a confidential matter. Yet the gist of it is easily summed up: I don’t think you are either socially or intellectually mature enough to meet the challenges of an unstructured environment like the university.”

  “What about my SAT math scores? They look pretty intellectually mature, I’d say. They’re better than the average grade that’s required to get into Harvard.”

  “My, what a lot of research you seem to have done on the subject!” She pushed back the half of her hair that was not held in place by the barrette, a gesture that commonly precluded her most definitive statements. “Obviously, you’re gifted in the area of math. But there are enrichment programs available right here at St. Tom’s for our math prodigies. You’re not the only one, you know. In any case, William, I did not agree to meet you to discuss my confidential recommendation to the Program Committee. I understood that you wished a fuller explanation of your grade in Civics.”

  William glared at her. His hostility was barely under control, and Miss Gerhart had to make a conscious effort not to tease him or to seem amused by his futile effort to adopt her own tone of implacable objectivity. She, after all, had had years to practice that tone. For someone so young and so aggrieved, he really was handling himself rather well.