THE M.D. A Horror Story

by Thomas M. Disch

  “I’ve got to go wash up Ned now and feed him his breakfast. Make sure you’re ready to go before Judge gets here. I got down your best wig, it’s on your dresser.”

  Mrs. Obstschmecker hated being told what to do by her daughter but went about doing it nonetheless. By the time she had showered and dried and powdered and got into her best summer dress and then decided the white dress was more suitable for a visit to the cemetery, it was time to begin to worry whether the boy would be late.

  But then the doorbell sounded, and Mrs. Obstschmecker felt the same little tingle she’d felt sixty-five years ago in Anoka the first time Mr. O. had called at the house with a bouquet of flowers. This boy had come with a bouquet, too—roses, no less, which Lisa Michaels had picked from her own rosebushes—so they would not have to waste good money at the florist’s, after all.

  It was hard to catch everything the boy said, since he kept forgetting to speak up, and even when he did, his Florida accent made him hard to understand. But he was a proper southern gentleman in terms of opening the car door (he was driving William’s sky-blue Cadillac) and helping her into the safety belt. Looking at him sideways as he sat behind the wheel, with his back scarcely touching the seat behind him, Mrs. Obstschmecker could almost suppose it was her husband as he’d been in the 1930s, the hair short but still neatly parted, the Clark Gable–type mustache, the size of him. Even the stiff white collar and the bow tie, since that was the fashion again.

  “You would have liked my husband,” Mrs. Obstschmecker said in a burst of generosity. “He was a lot like you.”

  “I’m sure that’s so,” the boy answered, never turning sideways, keeping his eyes on the street, a responsible driver.

  “August 20, 1970. I’ll never forget the day. A stroke. No warning. One minute he was watering the lawn, the next minute, gone! Madge—that’s Madge Michaels, my daughter, you’ve met her at the house—”

  “Yes, ma’am, many times.”

  “Madge was at the hospital, and I called her, and they sent an ambulance right off the bat. But there was nothing they could do.”

  “We’ll all be called to Judgment sometime,” said the boy, “and usually sooner than we think. That’s God’s way.”

  Mrs. Obstschmecker tried to take some comfort from this reflection. The boy’s tone of voice made it sound as though it should be comforting, but the idea seemed almost the opposite, a threat. Protestants had their own slant on things, which didn’t mean that they were right, but they thought they were, so you had to be polite discussing religion.

  “I hope you don’t mind my asking,” she began with an exaggerated delicacy, “but how is it that you came to be a Protestant. I mean, your mother, after all, Mrs., um, Winckelmeyer—”

  The boy made a loud snorting sound, which had been just the way Mr. Obstschmecker had laughed at something when he didn’t want to laugh out loud.

  “She’s Catholic, isn’t she?”

  “That’s hard to say, ma’am. She says she is, but I guess the pope off in Rome says she isn’t. She’s one of these skizmatics.”

  The boy made it sound like a kind of appliance, or a car, and Mrs. Obstschmecker had to smile. There could be no question about the pope questioning her faith. Whatever the Holy Father wanted her to think she thought. She was against birth control and abortion and pornography and priests getting married and women becoming priests. She didn’t go to Mass every Sunday, but at her age that wasn’t to be expected.

  “And were you sent to a Catholic school?” Mrs. Obstschmecker pressed on.

  Again, the boy made his snorting sound. “Just about everything I did had some Catholic connection. I grew up in this big com-mune outside of Miami. We grew our own pesticide-free Catholic vegetables and brewed Catholic beer by the barrelful. They are all drinkers, those Catholics down there.”

  “So how is it that you left the Church? You must have been very young.”

  “I’ll be eighteen on the Fourth of July, and I been a follower of Brother Orson since I was fifteen.” He turned sideways to give Mrs. Obstschmecker a significant look. “We don’t call ourselves Pro-test-ants. The time for pro testing is over. Now’s the time for Judgment.”

  Mrs. Obstschmecker waited for an answer to her question, but none was forthcoming. The boy turned his attention back to the road, and two blocks further on they pulled into the OLM parking lot, once the school playground. The school had closed down years ago for lack of funds and students.

  The boy locked the car and offered his arm for the walk round the corner of the church. Everything seemed as nice as could be, but then, the moment they came to the church steps, the spell was broken. A crowd of colored people had gathered about the main door, as though they were waiting to throw rice on a bridal couple. Mrs. Obstschmecker couldn’t see over their heads and wondered why they were all just standing about.

  The boy tapped an older black man on the shoulder and asked, “Is there some problem about going in the church?”

  “There’s protesters blocking the doorway. Some of them got themselves chained to the railing.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “They don’t like Father Sinclair bringing in the Imani Temple people.”

  “And having the women say ‘Our Mother who art in heaven’ instead of ‘Our Father,’” added a black woman.

  “Uh-huh.” Judge turned to ask Mrs. Obstschmecker, “You still want to go to Mass?”

  “Are they having Mass?”

  The boy passed the question on to the black woman. “They having Mass?”

  “If you can get into the church, it’s already started.”

  “Shit, that’s no problem.”

  The boy stooped down and scooped up the short, portly body of Mrs. Obstschmecker like a groom on his honeymoon sweeping up his bride to carry her over the threshold of their new home. She was utterly flabbergasted but not to the degree that she forgot to secure her wig with both hands. The boy mounted the steps, saying “Scuze us, please,” and “Stand aside, please.” The crowd on the steps parted to either side, revealing the row of demonstrators sitting, arms locked together, on the top step of the church. They had a bedsheet banner spread out before them that said, NO MORE VOODOO MASSES. GOD IS OUR FATHER?!!

  It dawned on Mrs. Obstschmecker as she saw the demonstrators, and they saw her, cradled in Judge Michaels’s arms, that they were all whites while all the people they were keeping out of the church were black.

  Judge began walking up the last two steps across which the bedsheet banner was spread. “Please don’t go in Our Lady of Mercy,” the oldest of the demonstrators shouted, a man whom Mrs. Obstschmecker recognized by his beard and his Roman collar as Father Youngermann, the church’s pastor. “The archdiocese does not approve of the new liturgy. Father Sinclair has no right to be saying Mass here. Please do not cross—”

  “I’ll tell you what,” said Judge. “I’m going to kick you in the face if you don’t move your ass. I got this lady here wants to go in, and I mean to take her in.”

  “Just stay where you are, everyone,” Father Youngermann said to the other demonstrators. “We will not be moved.”

  A woman at the far end of the line began to sing “We Shall Overcome,” and the others took it up.

  Judge aimed a kick at the priest’s solar plexus. He doubled over, and the men on either side of him didn’t try to keep their arms locked in his. They even slid sideways to make room for Judge to pass between them.

  “No violence!” shouted the woman who had started the singing going. “There must be no violence.”

  Once inside the big doorway, Judge set Mrs. Obstschmecker back down on her feet. The blacks who’d been kept out by the demonstrators were coming into the vestibule single file, through the breach Judge had made.

  “Well now,” said Judge matter-of-factly, as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened, “where do you generally like to sit—up close by the driver or back here by the door?”

  57

  Father L
yman Sinclair looked down from the pulpit of Our Lady of Mercy Church and waited for the spirit of prophecy to give him a jump start. The congregation was used to Father Lyman’s ways and knew his long pre-sermon pauses were not signals to them to be quieter, as they would have been from Father Youngermann. Almost the opposite: Father Lyman actually encouraged people to whisper and confabulate and get comfortable around each other. “Half of communion,” he liked to say, “is communication. And who says the Mass has to be a military exercise?” So, while they waited for Father Lyman to come to a simmer, many of the parishioners turned to their neighbors to tell them what they’d seen of the demonstration outside and how the tall white boy with the old lady in the third pew from the front had kicked Father Youngermann in the stomach.

  Father Lyman himself knew nothing of the fracas, but he was aware of the two strangers. Not that many white parishioners attended the ten o’clock service at OLM, not since the Imani Temple people had been invited to move their worship service here from All Souls’ Parish, from which they’d been removed by force after they’d lost their long legal battle with the archdiocese. For almost five years the leaders of the African-American Catholic Church (the official name for Imani Temple) had been ordaining their own independent clergy and developing their own liturgy, modeled partly on that of their fellow heretics and apostates, the American Catholic Church. The main practical difference between the two movements was that Imani Temple claimed the right, even though its members were excommunicated, to share all Roman Catholic places of worship, a privilege not generally accorded them. In all the Twin Cities only Our Lady of Mercy had opened its doors to the Imani Temple, and here only because of Father Lyman’s political savvy. With the parish council’s help he’d been able to make an end run around Father Youngermann on one of the latter’s periodic retreats to his favorite Josephan detox center in Phoenix, Arizona. Father Youngermann had returned to the sobering discovery that OLM had opened its doors, and its ten o’clock Sunday service, to the Imani Temple. Still more sobering had been his discovery that the doors couldn’t be closed. Now it was Youngermann and a small band of ultramontane rednecks who had taken up civil disobedience as the court of last resort.

  But these matters, just because they were uppermost in the minds of the congregation, were not what Father Lyman wanted to speak about. A good sermon should be a lesson in prayer. That had been the constant theme of Monsignor McKibben, the Jesuit who had taught homiletics at the North American College in Rome.

  So there it was, like a door opening before him, the way to begin. He began: “When I was in Rome, studying to be a priest, I had a teacher, an Irish Jesuit who’d been a missionary in Zimbabwe and Taiwan and I can’t remember where else, and this man had a favorite saying about sermons. ‘A good sermon,’ he said, ‘is like a lesson in prayer.’ Now most of you have probably heard me preach a few sermons that didn’t exactly follow that prescription. Some of my sermons have been more like political speeches than like prayers. What’s prayer, after all? It’s talking with God. Which isn’t easy. It’s a lot easier talking with other people, ‘cause they’ll talk back and you can tell if you’ve made a connection. With God it’s more like you’re on the phone with someone who’s listening so hard he forgets to say even ‘Mm-hm,’ or ‘How’s that?’”

  “Mm-hm,” said someone in one of the front pews, and right on top of it, from the back of the church, Kristi Aldritch called out, “How’s that, Lyman?”

  Father Lyman joined in the laughter.

  Then, after a beat, “The Bible says there’s one prayer that’s all anyone ever needs, and you know how it begins: Our Father—”

  “Or Our Mother—don’t forget her!” It was Kristi again, always to be depended on to look out for equal opportunity for her sex, always alert to patriarchal ploys.

  “Well now, Kristi, you’ve got a point. I guess we won’t any of us know what sex God is till we get to heaven and see for ourselves. But let’s suppose that Jesus wasn’t just an old-fashioned sexist who didn’t know better than to suppose the Almighty Alpha and Omega might transcend questions of gender. Let’s suppose he meant something by starting off his prayer to our father. Fathers and mothers are different kinds of people.”

  There were several low Mm-hms and Amens.

  “Mothers are just plain closer, for one thing. When you’re a baby you suck milk from her breasts. She hugs you. She loves you. She’s there. Fathers… they can’t be counted on the same way. They’re not always around when you need them. They’re off at their jobs—”

  “Or in jail!”

  “True enough, Kristi. Anyhow, he’s away. Maybe far away. Like the prayer says, Who art in heaven. Though, just as a side note, the Protestants say Which art in heaven, and in terms of the gender problem, that’s interesting, ‘cause ‘who’ is for people but ‘which’? ‘Which’ is like saying God is something else besides a person. Anyhow, who or which, he’s in heaven, far away from human shit and misery. It’s all blue sky and sunshine, and your prayer is like a kite you’re sending up there—”

  “Kites again, Lyman?” This from Jerry Stiller, who was sitting with the other members of the parish council around the communion table. It was true, and no accident, that kites were a regular feature of Father Lyman’s sermons. His first consciousness both of sin and of redemption had come in the form of a kite.

  “Mm-hm, kites again. And what’s written on the kite is just the basic message man has to send to God. Hallowed be thy name!”

  “Amen, amen!”

  “Oh no, not so fast. We got a lot of the Our Father left before we hit Amen. We got Thy kingdom come. Not came, it’s not here yet. But it will come. It’s the first thing we’ve got to believe. It’s faith and hope rolled together in one big promise. It will come, it is coming. And I believe it’s got to be very close. Just think what year it is. One nine nine nine. A few months now the odometer of history will be turning over its last row of zeroes, and then—The trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.”

  “Hallelujah!”

  “Hallelujah, indeed. But that trumpet is sounding not just glory hallelujah, it’s sounding judgment, and there’s not going to be anywhere to hide from the sound of that trumpet, no safety perimeter sealed against the plague he’ll send down, the plague we already can see mowing people down around us. No fallout shelter, not against the radiation God has got. No sterile labs, no millionaire mansion with its air pumped in from tanks of oxygen.

  “So we better all shape up. We better mean it when we say Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. ‘Cause that’s what the judgment will be about: Have we done his will? Have we loved one another? Not just said nice things about love on Sundays in church, but got out and done some actual hands-on love. ‘Cause he knows, God knows, he knows for sure.”

  He paused and smiled and caught the eye of Jason Beale. Jason was the main security officer at the A & P. “What comes next, Jason?”

  “Daily bread,” Jason muttered, pretending shyness but pleased to have proved he was actually following the sermon.

  “Right. And that’s the part of the prayer everyone understands: Gimme. That’s what people mostly think prayer is about. Gimme this, gimme that. Once you got the bread you need some butter. Anyhow, in the daily bread category we seem to be doing pretty well and I’ll bet most of the people Jesus was dealing with weren’t exactly starving. Not with the wedding feasts and loaves and fishes. So maybe the daily bread he’s talking about means something else. Maybe it’s like the bread of God, in John, chapter six, verse thirty-three: The bread of God is he which cometh down from heaven, and giveth life unto the world. Or, in a nutshell, Jesus said unto them, I am the bread of life. That’s clear enough. What the prayer is asking is for God to be here”—Lyman gave the side of his gut a solid slap—“every day, inside of us, where we can feel him like a full belly of food.”

  Another pause, and then the verse, “And forgive us our trespasses, as w
e forgive those who trespass against us. Another version has ‘debts’ and ‘debtors,’ Forgive us our debts. I wish I knew which bank would do that, and that reminds me at some point we’ve got to discuss the building fund. That ceiling up there looks so pretty, with those big rafters, and the stained glass either side. I read in the Star-Tribune that considered purely as a work of architecture this Church has got it over the basilica downtown. A landmark of the twenties Byzantine Revival no less. But structurally the roof is a borderline case, and the inside of the dome needs more than a can of paint. So that’s one debt that’ll have to be paid and not forgiven.

  “Trespassing, on the other hand, I’ve always thought is an essentially harmless activity. You see all those woods when you drive north a ways out of the city with the signs tacked on the trees, NO TRESPASSING. And I will confess that I have sometimes trespassed—as I’ve been trespassed against, which I try to deal with forgivingly, such as when a basketball game starts up at eleven P.M. just outside my bedroom. Loud noise late at night is definitely trespassing. But evil? No, evil is something else, which the prayer comes to next. Trespassing can get you into trouble, even into jail, but it means well. Trespassing is just looking for fun. A joint, if I may say so, is a trespass. But evil…” Lyman shook his head.

  “Evil hurts people, and it may not even know it’s doing so, like a tank that just runs over innocent bystanders in a crowd, or a banker investing millions of dollars in cigarette companies. Oh, you start looking for evil and it shows up all over the map, and all you can hope for, really, is that fate doesn’t put you in a situation where evil starts to look tempting, where it looks like an easy score but it ends up homicide. Lead us not into temptation.” He paused again.

  “But deliver us… from doing the evil we might be tempted to? Or from the evil that’s out there like Jaws or this damned plague that’s keeping everyone but us sitting home locked up in their houses, this plague that doesn’t sniff around for sinners like old AIDS did, but just strikes down anyone it takes a fancy to, like some psycho sniper? The prayer doesn’t specify which kind of evil it has in mind, and what I think is that there’s no real difference. The evil that gets hold of you when you decide that nothing but your own ass is worth saving, that is the same evil as the one that chews you up directly. Now, I could be quite wrong about that. In fact, that’s probably a heresy. It’s like saying evil is too big and too bad to break loose from once you get to be a sinner. And I know, or I hope, that has not been true for my own particular sins, some of which definitely passed beyond the category of No Trespassing. That part of the prayer I still haven’t scoped out, but maybe that’s why Jesus said this prayer would last a lifetime. ‘Cause all the problems we’ve got to discuss with God, all the ones nobody’s got an easy answer for, they’re all there, built in—fathers and children, power and glory, heaven and earth, bread and the national debt, and the knowledge of good and evil. God bless you.”