THE M.D. A Horror Story

by Thomas M. Disch

  Usually he was able to focus on schoolwork. Even with his knack for assimilating science textbooks directly into his bloodstream as systems of self-evident truths, even with the Apple assisting at his homework, there was a certain amount of drudgery that had to be accomplished to meet the demands of his physics and chemistry teachers; for English there was an unending slog of books to be read: Pride and Prejudice, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 1984, preachy, long-winded novels that you had to “appreciate” according to the lights of the English teacher, Mrs. Simms. It was a lot like catechism classes back at Our Lady of Mercy, only you had to be able to produce the correct answers “in your own words” instead of just reciting them. American History was much the same, except that Mr. Raab prudently had retarded the march of time so that his class would not encounter any living controversies that might get someone’s parents fussed. It was halfway through April, and they had just arrived at the causes of World War I. He had to produce five hundred words on that subject for Monday’s class. It wouldn’t do to say stupidity or greed and leave it at that. Mr. Raab required heroes and villains and ethical problems with three reasons in favor and three against, and that meant an elaborate paraphrase of the official version set forth in their textbook, Sea to Shining Sea. Which he would do, just as he’d done it for the Greatness of Theodore Roosevelt and the Importance of the Railroad in the Winning of the West, with the intended result that he was now pulling down an A- in Raab’s class, though probably more as a mark of sympathy than because of his perfunctory, paint-by-the-number essays. (Lilah Gerhart, to do her credit, had had his number on that score.) His mother’s suicide and Ben’s being sentenced to five years in prison had made both William and Judith pariahs at St. Tom’s—not out of meanness on anyone’s part but because no one knew what to say to them. And then, when it began to be clear, on top of all the rest of it, that Judith was pregnant, and when the rumor sprang up, natural as a weed, that the father of her child was her own father (who’d already pleaded guilty, after all, to killing his infant son), it had become impossible for Judith to remain at St. Tom’s. If her pregnancy became known to the press, the publicity would be fatal. Mr. Paley was too much the diplomat, however, to expel an honor student with a chance at becoming valedictorian. Instead, she’d been given her diploma early in March, whereupon she’d flown off to her mother in Florida, beyond the reach of scandal. And so, after all those years, Rhoda Winckelmeyer had at last won the long-fought battle for the custody of her daughter.

  William had not asked for, nor would he have accepted, an early discharge from St. Tom’s, since it would have entailed his leaving the Early Admissions Program, diplomaless, and having to go to another school for a retread of his senior year, a grim prospect. In any case, the easiest way to avoid being buried by an avalanche of bad feelings was to concentrate on nailing down good grades. He studied the way that kids in Japan are supposed to study, to the exclusion of everything else, as though his life depended on it. It wasn’t that he didn’t feel real grief. He felt terrible about what had happened and dreaded that worse might still be in store. But what could he accomplish by dropping out of school? It helped to have something to do, a routine to follow, meals to eat, tasks to complete, a life he could pretend to live. If you pretended long enough, it would start to be real. Six more weeks and he’d have his diploma, and then he would start his first courses at the U, and never mind summer vacation. Six weeks was nothing. There were people in the Guinness Book of Records who’d lived in cages filled with poisonous snakes for longer than six weeks.

  Such were his good intentions, and usually his willpower could be counted on to carry them out. Sometimes, though, he did get antsy, or angry, or depressed to the point where he had to do something, not just sit around and study or fool with the Apple or watch TV, but to feel himself exert an influence on the world. He had to use the caduceus and feel its power.

  But not (he’d promised himself) on people, not anymore. Reminded by the continued well-being of the elm in the backyard, and of the other elms in Brosner Park whose lives and limbs he’d saved, he confined the use of his power to strictly arborial ends, tying bits of yellow yarn to the trees he meant to doom (often beside frayed yellow ribbons left over from the hostage crisis) and bits of red yarn to any surviving elms. Only in the past two weeks, as the first buds had opened on the trees, or not opened, had the results of his ministrations become apparent. All along the row of newly built condos that Madge had taken such a dislike to, the seedling maples had expired, their brittle young skeletons lifeless as the tiny plots of sod about them. But against those plants that William would most liked to have seen perish—that is, the dense curtains of hanging plants darkening so many rooms of the Obstschmecker house—the caduceus’s power was unavailing, for it had been through that power originally that these plants had acquired their extraordinary vigor. Pot-bound, malnourished, cut back, and cursed, nothing could inhibit their kudzulike vitality. Whether for good or ill, what the caduceus once had done it could not later undo.

  He had not, therefore, used the caduceus to confer the gift of unfailing good health on the fetus in Judith’s womb, as he had blessed his brother. Any infant suffering Bradley-Chambers syndrome was supposed to be enviable, but who knows how long it might have gone on living—or what it might have become—if Ben had not murdered it? And because William was his mother’s son and Judith her father’s daughter, there was a chance (a lesser chance than with their parents but not negligible) that a child born from their union might also have Bradley-Chambers syndrome. The odds when both parents had that recessive gene was one in four, and the odds that you would pass on the recessive gene to otherwise normal children was one in two. So, a one-in-sixteen risk—and there was no test to determine whether either he or Judith carried the gene. The proof was in the pudding.

  It was, however, possible to determine, by amniocentesis, whether the fetus was afflicted with Bradley-Chambers syndrome. But this Judith refused to do. “It would be pointless, for me,” she’d said when they’d last discussed it, the night before she was to fly to Florida. “It would only make the remaining months of the pregnancy more difficult, if the test results were positive. You certainly can’t suppose that I’d have an abortion. Not after all you’ve heard me say on the subject.”

  “You never saw what that thing looked like,” William had said darkly.

  “Whatever it looked like, it was a human being. Anyhow, that’s not true. I did see it. I paid Mrs. Ruddle five dollars to let me come in when Sondra wasn’t there and to hold the baby. I felt guilty going behind Sondra’s back, but I felt I had to know.”

  “You’ve heard the thing screaming. It was always in pain, every minute of its life. If you had a pet that was in constant pain, you’d have the kindness to put it out of its misery. But to another human being you wouldn’t show the kindness you’d show a pet.”

  “As I recall, that was one of the arguments that Father’s attorney used at the sentencing. It didn’t convince the judge, and it doesn’t convince me. I’m really disappointed in you, William, that you should stand there and argue in favor of your own child’s murder. I thought you had more decency that that.”

  “I’m only arguing in favor of amniocentesis, of our knowing where we stand.”

  “Wherever it is, it’s me who’s standing there, not you. And there is no valid medical reason for undertaking such a risk. There is a risk with amniocentesis, you know: one chance in a hundred and fifty of inducing a miscarriage. And no benefit to be derived.”

  “Except knowledge.”

  “We’ll know soon enough in any case. In July, my doctor says.”

  When they’d had that conversation, abortion had still been a theoretical possibility. Now, with the pregnancy just two weeks short of the third trimester, that hope was gone.

  And William had entertained the hope. Not that Judith would ever have agreed to it, he knew quite well she never would, but there was a good chance with Bradley-Chambers cas
es that the fetus would abort spontaneously. Beyond that worst-case possibility, even if the baby were as normal as one of the Waltons on the TV show, William did not want to be a father at the age of fourteen. And if he ever did become a father, he didn’t want Judith to be the mother of his child. Technically it might not be incest, but it felt like incest, and it would look like incest to other people. Marrying Judith would be a lifelong embarrassment, even supposing it was what they both wanted, which it wasn’t.

  He couldn’t understand now how they could have been so dumb or so careless. It wasn’t as though they’d been driven by some overwhelming passion: it was more like a project they’d undertaken for a science class, at least in the preliminary stages. Judith hadn’t taken any precautions because that was against her principles, but she had let William do what he could on his own by way of avoiding a baby. And except for one time—the night of Reagan’s election, when Ben and Sondra had been out of the house to another fund-raiser at a downtown hotel—William had always been wearing a condom. But that once, obviously, had been enough.

  So far Ben didn’t know anything. He’d been too wrapped up in his own legal problems to pay much attention to anything that was happening around him, and now he was in prison and Judith was in Florida, and all their visits were over the phone. Rhoda knew Judith was pregnant—that was unavoidable—but Judith had promised William not to tell her mother who had played Romeo to her Juliet. However: If the baby should prove to have Bradley-Chambers syndrome, then Judith’s silence would be beside the point. The chances that anyone but Ben or William could have been the father were on the order of twenty-five million to one. Talk about leaving fingerprints at the scene of the crime!

  Sometimes, thinking how unnecessary all this anxiety was, how easy it would have been to have taken a simple test and known for sure, William wanted to climb the walls. Several times he’d phoned Judith in Florida, but whenever he’d worked the conversation around to the subject, Judith would say they couldn’t talk because her mother might be listening on the extension line. And now she’d stopped answering the phone at all. When he called he got either an answering machine or Rhoda.

  He was helpless. There was nothing he could do. Nothing but wait. Wait for the rain to stop raining. Wait for graduation. Wait for the baby to be born. One in sixteen wasn’t bad odds. In Russian roulette your odds were only one in six, and lots of people played Russian roulette and won.

  At noon he shared a can of chicken noodle with Grandma O., and then he put on rubber rainboots and a plastic poncho and went out to brave the elements. Under the poncho a nylon backpack produced a hunchback-shaped bulge. Inside the knapsack, wrapped in Saran-Wrap to keep any more of the original bark from shredding off it, was the caduceus. Without even having to touch it, he could feel the power stored inside, a constant tingling in the small of his back, as though his nerves were wired into it. He could almost see himself as one of those battery-operated robots that had replaced model trains as every kid’s favorite Christmas present. For a while he lurched along the puddled pavement robot-style, not bending his legs at the knee, swiveling his head from side to side in quick, ratchety twitches. But that got dull, since there was no one else out of doors in such weather to pay attention, and anyhow he was too old now (only a few months from starting at the U) for that kind of goofing off.

  The rain got worse, and he decided to get himself a quarter bag of potato chips, then admit defeat and head back home. He went into the little grocery at the corner of Coughlin and Austin and took a bag of Old Dutch potato chips from the bottom shelf of the crunchies rack. Only when he got to the counter and was digging into his pants pocket for the quarter, did he realize that he’d forgotten to transfer his billfold, change, and the house key from yesterday’s pants to today’s. Madge was at work, and Grandma O. had gone up to Ned’s room after lunch to watch “As the World Turns.” Once she’d settled in her rocker, she would probably stay with Ned until “General Hospital” was over at three o’clock, and William knew from past experience that she was deaf to the doorbell, knocking, and even the telephone when she was upstairs with the TV on. No doubt that was why she was willing to make the effort of going upstairs.

  He looked up at the old man behind the counter, who was waiting for the quarter, and explained: “I’m sorry, I left my money at home.”

  “That’s okay,” the old man said, with a prissy smile, like Mr. Whipple in the toilet paper ads. “You can leave your money home and that bag of chips here.” He bent forward over the counter and appropriated the bag of potato chips.

  William was peeved. “I’ve bought all kinds of stuff here, I’m in here almost every other day, and I can’t have credit for a quarter bag of potato chips?”

  “Store policy,” the grocer said, nodding his head knowingly. “The sign’s right up there over the cigarettes. I’ll read it for you if the print’s too small: IN GOD WE TRUST. ALL OTHERS PAY CASH.” He repeated his mean little smile: “Sorry.”

  “Yeah, sure, I can see you’re real sorry.”

  William stalked out of the store and stood fuming in the shallow recess of the doorway. The rain had got heavier in just the little while he’d been in the store, so heavy that even wearing the poncho he’d be soaked by the time he’d walked a block. For that matter he’d soon be soaked standing here in the doorway. There was a big canvas awning that spanned the front window of the store that would have served quite well as an umbrella, but it was rolled up tight. Whipple probably only opened the awning if you paid him admission.

  Sorry! William could have made the old asshole know what sorry was—if he hadn’t made it a principle not to use the caduceus on people anymore, whether for good or for ill. In the past few weeks, since moving back to the Obstschmecker house, he’d come to have second thoughts about almost everything he’d done with it. Not regrets, exactly: Jimmy Deeters, Miss Gerhart, the bigwigs at ATA, they’d all got what was coming to them. But maybe his punishments had been too drastic. Maybe he’d been what’s called a hanging judge. It might have been better to have gone easier on some of the people at ATA and given them just a smoker’s cough—what is it called, emphysema—instead of terminal cancer. A temporary problem that would go away after a while, or that could be reversed. How often, hearing his little brother screaming in endless irremediable pain, he’d wished he could have taken away the perfect health that for him had been only a curse. Health is no blessing when you live in a torture chamber. If he could take away what he gave, or give back what he took away, if each curse or blessing could be like a door that could be gone in or out of, locked or unlocked by the caduceus’s power…

  There was a sharp rapping on the glass of the door. He turned around to see the grocer gesturing at him to move away from the doorway. “You’re blocking traffic!” the old man shouted through the glass.

  At the same instant as the rapping he felt in the small of his back a zap of something that was neither electricity nor warmth. As though the caduceus itself were reacting to the possibility of its being used as a key. He smiled at the old man behind the glass, and walked off into the rain with a genuine sense of delight, happy to pay the price of a soaking for the idea (which he might not have had in any other set of circumstances) of a curse (or a blessing) that worked like a lock.

  He began to work out the details as he walked through the pelting rain, which was no enemy now but the outward and seemingly inevitable expression of his own state of mind. By the time he’d got to the next corner everything was in place but the rhymes. And then, noticing a pay phone that shared the same pole as the traffic light, he had an inspired hunch and reached in to the coin return slot to see if there was a quarter someone had left inside. When he found that there was, he wasn’t even surprised at the world’s being so ready to fall in with his plans. The glow that still radiated from the mid-small of his back, making every muscle a conscious entity, that glow seemed also to guarantee the success of any action he might undertake. He felt infallible as a pope. If he�
�d had a basketball in his hands and aimed it at a hoop all the way at the other end of the court, he’d have made a basket at that moment. If he’d been playing cards, he’d have drawn the card he needed to complete a royal flush. There was a great flash of lightning and then a splendid, long, lingering roll of thunder. Heaven itself seemed to agree.

  Across the street, catercorner from the phone booth, was a shelter for a bus stop. There were two people in it, and then, by another act of Providence, the Coughlin-Como bus came along and scooped up the two people and carried them off. He crossed the otherwise untrafficked street and took refuge in the bus shelter, where, in no time at all, he had four lines that would do the job. Deftly he slid the knapsack off his shoulders, and, crouching, took out the caduceus and stripped off its protective cellophane. He touched the caduceus to the quarter he’d found in the pay phone and spoke aloud the verses of his improved, reversible incantation: