THE M.D. A Horror Story

by Thomas M. Disch

  50

  “Do you know,” Judith said, assuming a kneeling position on the cowhide laid down as a hearth rug over the white carpet, “my first real memory of you is from Halloween. It was years ago, when Sondra and I came visiting the place on Calumet. Remember?”

  “Vaguely. I remember you brought over a jack-o’-lantern bigger than the one my dad had already made.”

  “You were dressed as a doctor.”

  “That’s right, Young Frankenstein.”

  “But I can’t remember how I was dressed.”

  “A witch, I think.”

  She shook her head, and the fake diamond pin in her hair twinkled in the darkness. “That doesn’t sound right.”

  William poked at the embers and produced a brief flaring up of the flames that gave Judith’s bare arms and shoulders a wonderful tawny glow. She was still dressed in the flowing saffron-colored tunic she’d worn to the school’s masquerade dance, but she’d taken off her long-thonged sandals the moment she’d got back to the house. The sandals and the crescent-shaped pin in her hair had come from Sondra’s endless supply of junk clothes; the tunic Judith had made herself. She was the Greek goddess Artemis.

  She had wanted William to go to the dance as her brother Apollo, even offered to make his costume for him, but he’d balked at the suggestion. Instead he’d dug up an old green track suit, smeared his face and hands with green hunting makeup, added an 89-cent green shower cap, and said he was a Martian. It was easily the least fussy and cheapest costume at the dance, and it had the further unplanned advantage that since the makeup rubbed off at the lightest touch no one had wanted to dance with him. Judith had not danced much either, but that was because the thongs of her sandals kept slipping down from her thin calves unless they were tied so tightly they were painful. They’d left at the first offer of a ride.

  “I remember now: I was St. Clare. St. Francis’s sister.” She laughed in the nervous way of someone looking at an old and unbecoming family snapshot.

  “That’s right. You had on some kind of gunnysack. Quite a change from tonight.”

  “From a saint to a goddess? It’s a logical progression. And besides, Clare and Artemis were both virgins.”

  William poked at the fire some more, by way of steering the conversation in some other direction than sex. Sex was fun to talk about only with boys his own age, where the rules were clear as to what lies you could get away with and how far you could carry certain lines of speculation. But with your own three-years-older sister, what could be spoken of? You could tease her about boyfriends or about her vanity, and that was it. But Judith didn’t have any boyfriends, and though she was beginning to be beautiful, she wasn’t vain about it. Happy, in a Cinderella-ish way, but that wasn’t the same as vain.

  “Speaking of virgins,” Judith said, “have you heard what they’re saying about Elizabeth Naughton?”

  When he shook his head, she leaned closer and lowered her voice. “She was pregnant.”

  “And she isn’t now?”

  “They say she had an abortion. In August!”

  “Is that a bad month for abortions or something?”

  She smiled, but at once corrected it to a frown. “Abortion isn’t something to joke about.”

  “So what is the proper way for us to deal with it? Should we go up to her after English class and tell her she’s guilty of murder and insist that she wear a big M on all her clothes?”

  “William, abortion is a serious crime.”

  “Liz isn’t a Catholic, is she?”

  “That doesn’t make any difference.”

  “Not to you. It probably does to her. Seriously, Judith, lots of women have had abortions, and if you’re going to live in the world with them, you can’t go around staging a protest anywhere you’ve sniffed out a sin.”

  “Well, how would you feel if I told you she’d murdered Mr. Paley?”

  “I’d be curious to know why. Was he the father, is that what you’re implying?”

  “Will-yum! I just chose Mr. Paley as a random example. Be serious.”

  “You always say ‘be serious’ when I start to win an argument. And it’s always the same argument. If you’d had an abortion and felt guilty about it, I could understand your being so obsessed with the idea.”

  “I don’t deny it’s an obsession and that my own feelings get tangled up in it. This summer when I went down to visit her, I found out that my mother had had an abortion before she had me. She told me that the last time she visited me in the hospital, and she added that if Father had had his way I’d have been an abortion, too.”

  “I guess, if you look at things from an either/or point of view, we all of us can be considered failed abortions.”

  Judith clamped down on the impulse to laugh so that it emerged as a kind of muffled sneeze. “You’re just trying to provoke me. Why do you always have to act out the part of a bratty kid brother?”

  “Did I bring up the subject of abortion? Anyhow, I wouldn’t necessarily credit everything your mother says on the subject of Ben. She obviously holds a grudge against him, and I wouldn’t put it past her to have made up the whole thing, knowing how you’d react. Besides, that’s all ancient history. Ben’s certainly not guilty of promoting abortion these days, is he? Speaking of which, isn’t it getting late for them to still be at their party? Mom’s in no shape to party all night long.”

  “Actually, sometimes at the end of a pregnancy there’s a period when you get this great charge of energy and you feel up to anything. That’s what the book says anyhow. It’s such a miracle, isn’t it? The more I think about it, the more amazing it is. Two little cells connect and the result is everything we think, everything we do.”

  Somehow, no matter what she said, his impulse was to contradict her. He knew he should stop it, but it was like chewing fingernails or scratching poison ivy. “If you’re speaking of us, there’d have been four cells. But a miracle? Why is what ova and sperm cells do any more miraculous than what cancer cells do? Or hair follicles? Any cell just does what it’s programmed to. It’s like a robot with a minicomputer telling it, ‘Now do this, now do that.’”

  “Oh, William, you’re such a romantic. It gives me goose bumps when you talk that way.”

  “I’m not saying that miracles don’t happen down at the level of the individual cell, only that it’s hard to tell the difference between a miracle and business-as-usual. We just don’t know how things happen down there.”

  “We could find out,” Judith said in a tone of mock suggestiveness, which she couldn’t quite bring off. When William looked up in surprise, she blushed and turned her head.

  The easiest thing to do was pretend she hadn’t said it, or at least that it didn’t mean what it seemed to. William erected an impromptu barricade of philosophy, trotting out a neat idea he’d discovered in a book in the school library called Six Before Breakfast, a collection pointing out the paradoxes that were involved from a scientific viewpoint in the various miracles reported in the Old and New Testaments, such as the quantity of water it would have taken to produce a global flood or how the sun could not have stood still in the sky without the earth stopping its rotation and what the results of that would be, according to the laws of inertia. This particular paradox had to do with the Virgin Birth and the nature of Christ’s genetic makeup. Was he a haploid, with chromosomes only from his mother? Or did he also have a set of chromosomes from God the Father, and if so, wouldn’t it be possible, at least in theory, to create a genetic map of God’s chromosomes? Admittedly, there are a lot of genes in the makeup of any individual, millions, maybe billions, but still a finite number. And once gene splicing became an exact science, would it then be possible, in theory, to duplicate what God had done and create another Jesus in the laboratory?

  Judith listened patiently to his whole account, and when he was done her only comment was: “It’s Young Frankenstein all over again.”

  Before he could insist that it was a serious theological proble
m the phone rang. The cordless phone was not in its cradle, so William went into the kitchen to use the wall phone. It was Ben calling from the Reagan fund-raiser to say that he and Sondra would be spending the night downtown at the Radisson, since Sondra insisted that he was too drunk to be allowed to drive home, and she was too tired. “And anyhow we’re still having fun. What have you kids been up to? Any ghosts come to the door begging for candy?”

  “Not so far. We’ve just been sitting in front of the fireplace, talking. Did you want to talk to Judith?”

  “No, just have a happy Halloween.” Ben hung up.

  When William returned to the fireplace, Judith’s saffron tunic lay on the carpet, but Judith had left the room. “Judith?” he called out.

  “You don’t have to shout, I can hear you quite clearly. And I heard everything Father said over the phone.” Her voice was coming out of the speakers set into the bases of several of the phones in the house. She had the cordless receiver and was using it as an intercom. In the darkness it was easy to think of her voice as ghostly. It made him remember the times, back in the Obstschmecker house, when Ned would turn off all the lights and hide and start talking in the voice he used when he wanted to be scary.

  “Did I ever tell you what I did when I was in Nashville?”

  She hadn’t, and you couldn’t help wondering. Her bus ride from Florida to Minnesota had taken almost a day longer than it was supposed to. Judith had described her journey at such epic length that no one had pressed for further details, but William had noted the discrepancy. “No,” he said, returning to the fireside, “you never did.”

  “The bus arrived in Nashville late at night, and I just couldn’t face sleeping another night sitting up. So I went to a hotel. And then I went to a bar and ordered a grasshopper. I was sure they wouldn’t serve me but they did. Have you ever had a grasshopper?”

  “It’s a kind of mixed drink?”

  “It’s just delicious. Would you like me to make you one? I know how, and there’s crème de menthe in the liquor cabinet.”

  “Sure, why not.”

  Carefully, he lowered a split log onto the andirons and heaped the embers beneath into a mound high enough to crisp the white flesh of the log. While he tended the fire, the phone broadcast muffled bumpings and thumpings and then a subdued gurgling, which must have been the blender. A green flame fanned out from the back of the log and seemed to waver in sync with the blender.

  Judith appeared, wearing a kimono in Halloween colors and carrying a tray with two parfait glasses. They clinked their glasses, and William agreed that a grasshopper was better than an ice cream soda.

  “So that’s how you spent the night in Nashville, drinking grasshoppers?”

  “Not the whole night. But I did feel rebellious, sitting there in my Miami T-shirt and waiting for John Travolta to come over and ask me to dance. The only problem with that was that it wasn’t a bar where people ever danced, and John Travolta wasn’t there, or any other male under the age of fifty. Anyhow, I didn’t want to dance. I wanted to be kissed. Ever since I saw those two movies I couldn’t think of anything but the fact that I was almost old enough to vote and that I’d never been kissed. Have you?”

  “Been kissed? Not like in the movies.”

  “It always seemed like such a repulsive idea to me, putting your tongue into someone else’s mouth. I couldn’t see what purpose it could serve except to stop the other person from talking. But then, seeing those movies the day I phoned you from the bus station, I realized there had to be more to it. Do you know, sometimes people spend hours kissing each other, and not doing anything else, just kissing.”

  It dawned on William that Judith was not speculating in any idle way, that she was leading up to something. “Judith,” he protested, “if you’re thinking that you and me…”

  “Why not?” she insisted. “It wouldn’t be incest, for heaven’s sake.”

  “Why wouldn’t it?”

  Judith chuckled in a superior way. “Because our biological parents are completely different. Suppose Father hadn’t ever met Sondra, and we met each other instead and got married, and then they met for the first time and fell in love. Would it be incest for them to get married? Of course not.”

  “Sounds like you had that all thought out ahead of time.”

  “Anyhow, I wasn’t suggesting that we have sex. But I don’t see why we couldn’t kiss each other. Aren’t you curious to know what it’s like?”

  “To be perfectly honest, I find the whole idea embarrassing.”

  “More embarrassing than covering yourself with green paint and wearing a shower cap to a dance and saying you’re a Martian?”

  “Maybe not more, but equally. Oh, okay, why not? I’m willing to try it. But if it’s not really pleasant, we don’t have to keep trying, agreed?”

  “Agreed.”

  “Should we be sitting up, or lying down, or what?”

  “Right the way we are is fine, but you better give me your glass first. There’s more grasshoppers in the blender if you want some more later.”

  She placed the two parfait glasses on the floor off to the side of the fireplace. The new log was burning nicely, and the bark was crackling. Judith positioned her hands on William’s rib cage and on the side of his neck, but she couldn’t bring herself to bring her lips nearer his. They remained in that position some time, motionless as two mannequins in a store window, smiling stiffly, as for a photographer, and avoiding looking into each other’s eyes. It was like being poised to dance and waiting for a record to play.

  “I think it would be easier,” he suggested, “if we closed our eyes.”

  She nodded in agreement, and closed her eyes, and waited for him to take the last few centimeters of initiative. He brought his lips closer to hers but not quite touching. His nose and upper lip were tickled with warm feathery blasts of breath from her nostrils. Something in his chest resonated sympathetically, as though her exhalations were the softest and lightest of mallets a musician used to touch the bars of a xylophone, and their kiss, when the music came to it, was the sound that issues from that touch: involuntary, clear, and low.

  51

  In death Henry could not keep from yielding completely to the embrace of all his morbid fascinations. Combustion, dissolution, the sudden rending or wrenching of any complex tissue—these were spectacles that lured him like a moth to a flame. Indeed, before the flaming log in the fireplace, the likeness amounted to identity. He was himself that log, those glowing gases, the reckless, ecstatic release of years of slow stockpiling of cell on cell. Simultaneously—indeed, with no sense that the burning log and the awakening of the two children to sexual maturity were distinct processes—he shared in and even, in a sense, directed that first kiss and the motions flowing from it. When William’s hands pressed Judith’s breasts it was with a certainty of experience and a reverence for the flesh that were his father’s inadvertent gift and that gave his touch a grace, a tenderness, and an authority they would not otherwise have possessed. William did not know this, and Henry, having come this near the flame of mortality, could not have kept from the final joy of immolation, and so his visitation on that Halloween night, far from serving to warn William away from what he was about to do, had helped precipitate the action. The log was reduced to soot and ashes in only a few hours; it took four days for the parallel process to be completed. Yet to Henry, outside of the arithmetical chronologies that govern mortal life, the two events seemed to begin and to end in the same moment. He was more fortunate than the moth in that he was allowed a little time to appreciate his final brightness. He could witness the first quick uncoilings of the filaments from which the fibers of his grandson would be knit. He saw them double and redouble, and then with a sense of both sorrow and horrible hilarity—as though only now after so many years’ experience of death had he finally understood the joke that all skulls are grinning at—he turned away and let himself be pulled down into the darkness from which even the dead cannot arise. H
enry’s spirit was no more.

  52

  Sondra knew within moments of the delivery that something was wrong. She had remained conscious throughout, cooperating with the doctor, breathing just as she’d practiced through the months, and riding the pain when it came like a rodeo rider on a bull, or a surfer on a curling wave. When it was over she felt that moment of supreme relief, more precious than any pleasure, by which our nerves seek to excuse the fact of pain, and then she waited for her maternal rights to be accorded her. But instead of showing her the child, the two doctors and the nurse seemed to have formed a kind of barricade of their white-gowned bodies to prevent her seeing it. It was alive, she could hear it squalling, why wasn’t she allowed to see it? She tried to frame the question aloud, but already the second doctor—the anesthesiologist—was administering the gas she’d had no need for during labor. She wanted to protest, it seemed so unfair, and then with that strange lack of transition between fading away and coming to that can happen in a hospital or a dentist’s office she was in a small bright room and Ben was lying asleep in a chair by the foot of the bed. Something awful had happened, but she no longer wished to know what it might be. She let Ben go on sleeping, and when he began to stir, she pretended to be asleep herself. The child was not dead, she had heard its first cries, there must, in that case, be something wrong with it, something visible. It must be deformed.