THE M.D. A Horror Story

by Thomas M. Disch

  But she knew, even as she expressed that pious hope, that the marriage was over.

  It wasn’t even that upsetting. She’d been more fraught, more agitated, during the president’s impeachment. Though of course that had gone on for several months, and this was only beginning.

  If it were done when ‘tis done, then ‘twere well it were done quickly.

  Tomorrow. Otherwise she would have to contend with Judith Winckelmeyer while she was packing the bags.

  Tomorrow! She felt as giddy as a teenager. The one thing nobody had ever told her about divorce was that it could be such fun.

  64

  If you looked at the screen in a certain way you really couldn’t tell the difference between Brother Orson and a real person looking into a TV camera. Sometimes Brother Orson even came across as more real. But you had to be connecting with what he was saying, with the meaning behind the words. Then his eyes were like two tunnels opening at some infinite faraway distance into heaven’s direct light. You looked into those eyes and you were really part of the way there. Or when he said I will open my mouth in parables; I will utter things that have been kept secret from the foundation of the world. Then you could see in the very shape of his lips as he spoke, the edge of that secret. It was like a joke that he was sharing with everyone who was saved, like an amazing punch line that makes it clear that all the terrible things that were happening now during the Last Days were actually a blessing and a gift, and the plague a cleansing fire, and the scorn of unbelievers a precious raiment for the adornment of the righteous.

  That’s why the more people ridiculed Judge’s faith, the stronger his faith became. They could subject him to their shrinks and deprogrammers, they could bombard him with phone calls from people who claimed they’d been involved in Brother Orson’s operations, who claimed he didn’t exist, they could fix an electronic trigger round his ankle to keep him caged like a dog inside his bit of suburbia. But they hadn’t made a dent in Judge’s faith. Finally, when Judge had threatened to call the local Ma Bell hot line and post a bulletin to the effect that the son of the big celebrity doctor William Michaels was being denied his basic freedom of religion, they’d backed down completely and let him interface directly with Brother Orson on a 900 line. His stepmother had been ready to call his bluff (though it wasn’t a bluff, he would have done it), but the famous Dr. William Michaels was too concerned for his media image.

  It pissed Judge off a little that his stepfather was so indifferent to Judge’s involvement with Brother Orson. Judge knew William thought Brother Orson was some kind of consumer fraud like savings and loans or Scientology, but had he ever told Judge to be careful or just said to stop watching Brother Orson? No, he was a permissive parent, he couldn’t care less. Brother Orson came down hard on permissiveness. He liked to quote Colossians, third chapter, twentieth verse: Children, obey your parents in all things: for this is well pleasing unto the Lord. But then he would say, in almost the same breath, Suppose ye that I am come to give peace on earth? I tell you, Nay; but rather division: The father shall be divided against the son, and the son against the father.

  Luke’s lines reflected Judge’s own experience much better than Paul’s. Once, interfacing with Brother Orson on the 900 line, Judge had had the nerve to point out what seemed to him the contradiction between the two verses. Brother Orson had bowed his head and wrinkled his eyebrows into a frown of thoughtfulness, as though the question had never occurred to him till just that moment. Then he’d looked up, right into Judge’s eyes, and smiled one of those tunnels-to-heaven smiles, and that’s when he’d said, You must ask yourself, Judge, who are your true parents. Your true parents are your parents in the baptism of the Gospel. You have a father in heaven and one on earth, and another in the water of your baptism. Judge would have liked to know more about his true parents in the baptism of the Gospel, which was the first he’d heard of that idea. But Brother Orson didn’t always spell out his deepest meanings. You had to take what he said and think about it.

  One thing that was immediately clear was that Paul’s injunction to obey one’s parents in all things referred to one’s parents in the baptism of the Gospel, not to the two adults who happened to be Judge’s legal parents. It was about them that Christ had been talking in the parable of the unjust steward. Make yourselves friends, Christ said, of the mammon of unrighteousness. Meaning it was okay to accept the money and other advantages that came from living with the Michaelses and to be polite to them. Judge gave their mammon the worship they required, neat haircuts and shined shoes, thank-yous and excuse-mes, passing grades in all his classes, even if that meant repeating the lies and deceits of atheistic humanism when he took exams, whatever had to be done to get through the system.

  But it didn’t mean they owned him. It didn’t mean that they hadn’t drunk the wine of Babylon. They were partakers of her sins, and God knew their iniquities, and so did Judge. Partly he knew them just by instinct, but he also knew them by listening to the tap he’d put on the house’s main optical fiber cable. Mostly what Judge heard wasn’t that interesting. Over the phone William never talked about anything but business, sometimes medical business, usually wheelings and dealings connected with his real estate projects around Mille Lacs Lake. If Judge had realized those deals had had the potential of bringing his stepfather to financial ruin, perhaps even sending him to prison, he might have paid more attention. He’d just seen them as evidence of mammon doing business as usual.

  It was Lisa’s calls, much more, that he liked to listen in on, especially when she was going on about how much she couldn’t stand him, which was one of her favorite topics. Like just now when she’d joked about his murdering her. That was something he had thought about, in fact. Not his killing her himself but what was likely to happen to her after the Judgment. Brother Orson had spelled out some of the details pretty graphically. In many ways Lisa understood him a lot better than his real mother, who seemed to think Judge was like a defective TV set and that if she could just find the right knob and fiddle with it, Judge would suddenly slip into focus and be just like her, another renegade Catholic do-gooder serving up shitty food to brain-damaged addicts in soup kitchens. Brother Orson had no use for people like that. In the last days Judith would be burnt up in the same fires that would consume Lisa and William, and all her so-called good works wouldn’t abate his wrath one bit. The crusades against fur coats and abortion and killing nuns in El Salvador and quarantine camps—the Lord God Jehovah didn’t give a shit about any of that. Where were you when I laid the foundations of the Earth? he would ask her. Who shut up the sea with doors? And then he would zap her straight down to the garbage pits of Gehenna where Moloch rules and the fires are not quenched.

  Till that day came, however, Judge was under the thumb of their unrighteousness. This close to his eighteenth birthday and legal freedom Judge still couldn’t try and make a break for it. Even if his credit card was valid for purposes of travel, the trigger banded around his ankle would go off anytime he crossed the invisible perimeter set by the parole board. He would not hear it, but somewhere in some security office a blip would appear on a screen along with his name and social security number and automatically a federal parole officer would be on his case. Judge had tested out the system twice. The first time he’d got as far as Brother Orson’s downtown Minneapolis office, where he sat in the waiting room twenty minutes before being cuffed and returned to the Michaelses’. The second time he’d headed north away from the city, and they’d picked him up even faster. So there was no way of escaping his mother’s visit and all the lectures he was sure she meant to deliver, all the psychological gobbledygook and Catholic bullshit.

  It upset him.

  Judge did not like to admit that the forces of unrighteousness, including his mother, had the power to stir him up like this, so that his muscles felt like they were being roasted in a microwave (not his skin, his muscles), so that his head felt like there were calipers squeezing closed round his skull. He k
new it was just his emotions, but it felt like his body. Back in the bad old days, at the Florida State Correctional Facility for Juvenile Offenders in Starke, he’d been made to take pills that had dulled down the feeling but dimmed his thinking processes at the same time. So since then, to avoid the medicine, he never complained about the burning-up feeling when it happened.

  What he did instead—what he did now—was dial Brother Orson’s 900 number.

  And Brother Orson would appear—he appeared now—and he would lift up his eyes till they met Judge’s own gaze levelly, and his lips would part in a little smile of recognition.

  —Why if it isn’t my old friend Judge. Howdy, Judge. Welcome to the arms of Jesus.

  “Howdy, Brother Orson,” Judge replied.

  He didn’t even think to enter his greeting on the keyboard, he was that off-kilter. But it didn’t seem to make any difference to Brother Orson, for his brow furrowed, as though sensing Judge’s unexpressed distress. He leaned forward in his high-backed chair, and a ray of light struck his silvery-gold hair, dazzled a moment, and dulled to a shimmer.

  —I think I know what’s troubling you, Judge. It’s the lies the media are spreading about us—lies, doubts, distortions, they’re impossible to escape. The unbelievers saying that I don’t exist, that I am nothing but a computer-generated image. That when I’m talking with you, it’s just a script written by a whole stable of paid writers. That when I respond to your questions, my answers come from a computer programmed to provide one-size-fits-all wisdom. They’re saying Brother Orson is just a new style of Santa Claus, a fiction, a myth, a lot of nonsense. And you know what else they’d say if they dared to, Judge? They’d say the same about Jesus Christ and God Almighty. They’d say there’s no devil, he’s just a superstition from the Middle Ages, so don’t worry about him, go and have yourself a good time. There’s no devil, no hell where sinners will pay for their sins, no Ten Commandments handed down to us, and the Bible is just another book like the books they make you read in school, Huckleberry Finn or The Catcher in the Rye. They made you read those two, didn’t they?

  Judge nodded. He didn’t remember ever having complained to Brother Orson about the secular humanist brainwashing he received at school, and he certainly hadn’t mentioned those two books in particular. Brother Orson had known without being told; it was not unusual.

  —Well, woe unto them, that’s all I can say. Woe unto them. Because hell exists, and there are devils in it, waiting to make the acquaintance of those unbelievers. One of those devils looks at a sinner and that sinner starts burning up inside like he was a cigarette the devil lit up.

  “Brother Orson,” Judge said, unaware that he was interrupting, “I am burning up inside. That’s why I phoned you now.”

  —Judge, said Brother Orson, do you believe in me?

  The question didn’t seem to connect to what Judge had just said, but the connection was there in Brother Orson’s eyes.

  “Yes, sir. Absolutely and completely.”

  —Absolutely and completely, Brother Orson repeated, though Judge had not typed the words out on the keyboard. I knew that, Judge. And now I am going to unfold a mystery. I want you to reach behind your computer to the power switch.

  Judge leaned forward and put his finger on the computer’s power switch.

  —Now if I were what the unbelievers say I am, I would disappear from the screen you’re looking at, if you turned off the electricity, isn’t that so? But I am not what they say. My voice is not sound waves, it is not broadcast signals, it is not wiring inside a microchip. It is the voice of faith, and when there is faith in your soul you will hear that voice, with or without electricity. Do you believe that, Judge?

  “Yes, Brother Orson, I do.”

  —Then click the switch off. And I will be with you still.

  With no hesitation, like a diver bounding from a familiar springboard, Judge turned off the power switch. The image on the screen seemed to undergo a shift of hue, as though a shadow had passed over Brother Orson’s face, but when the shadow had passed, Brother Orson’s face was still there, bright as an angel’s. Even his clothes were like an angel’s, a kind of short white dress like marble statues wear in museums.

  In an instant, in the twinkling of an eye, the burning-up feeling inside his body was gone. His mind was suddenly crystal clear. He hadn’t realized how clouded and staticky it had been before, the way you get used to wearing smudged glasses until, just as in First Corinthians: Now we see through a glass, darkly, but then face to face.

  Brother Orson smiled, and this time the secret that his lips had always seemed to hint at became known to Judge. Brother Orson had put on the flesh of incorruption. That was why he had to appear on television screens as though drawn by an animator. He was no longer a physical person. It was as Paul had written: We are confident, and willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be present with the Lord.

  And Judge was present with the Lord, here in his suburban bedroom, with its shelves and closets loaded with junk, apparel for his mortal flesh. The very walls about him had been reared by the wages of sin, which is death. But when this corruptible flesh shall have put on incorruption, as Brother Orson had, then death is swallowed up in victory, and the old law was overthrown and a new law declared. That was the prophecy of Paul. And now the prophecy was fulfilled.

  Judge, who had refused from an early age to kneel at the ringing of the bell when his mother had made him come with her to church, knelt now on the beige carpet.

  Wordlessly, Brother Orson held out his hand. Reverently Judge kissed it.

  He felt his own flesh change. Flames rose from the carpet and from the white Formica of his desk, but they were without heat or hurt. The room became unbearably bright, as though its air were gases fluorescing in a neon bulb.

  Then the bulb blew.

  65

  During the two and a half years that Ben Winckelmeyer served of his five-year sentence, he had developed a fascination for the Book of Job. This was due in part to the fact that his reading matter had often been limited, by the whims of the warden, to the Bible, but mostly because he genuinely shared Job’s sense of outrage and puzzlement. The more he read the story and thought about it, the more bizarre it seemed, particularly God’s final set-piece of self-congratulation, after he’d ridiculed Job for being a ninety-eight-pound weakling, after he’d delivered his natural history lessons on vultures, ostriches, and whales, when he got to the crocodile: “Consider,” God had said, “the chief of the beasts, the crocodile, who devours cattle as if they were grass: what strength is in his loins! what power in the muscles of his belly!” On and on God goes, for two pages of small print, about the sinews of the crocodile, its thick skin, its terrible teeth, how weapons are useless against it, how even its sneezes are to be admired. God doesn’t come right out and make the comparison, but it seemed clear to Ben that God was proposing the crocodile as an emblem of his own awful power, to which the noncrocodile part of creation must make an unconditional obeisance. Which Job does, repenting in dust and ashes, whereupon there is an unlikely restoration of the status ante quo, as though to say nobody ever really has to suffer, it’s only a phase you pass through. Just hang in there, show due respect for crocodiles, and all will be well.

  What could God, or the author of the Book of Job, have been thinking of in singing the praises of the crocodile at such length? To Ben it was on a par with Stalin’s having his portrait hung in every jail cell in Russia. What do crocodiles have to do with justice? Jesus! It wasn’t that Ben had a different opinion than God. He agreed that justice was a mug’s game, and that the likeliest way to recoup one’s losses was to kiss the crocodile ass of constituted authority. And as much as Job, Ben had done so by following the canny advice of his old friend Dan Turnage and being born again under the auspices of the right-wing evangelical group that Turnage had pimped for since the American Tobacco Alliance had gone belly-up. Ben became a role model of a whited sepulcher and, just as Turnage had pr
omised, was released at his first parole hearing.

  Even after his release Ben continued to be an active member of the Son of Man Foundation, for he’d discovered the secret wisdom of the Book of Job, that it is exciting and profitable to work for crocodiles. He found he had a talent for inventing the kind of nonsense people could pretend to believe in order to feel that they were on the side of the crocodiles. He became an expounder of Creation Science and an enthusiastic supporter of Pat Robertson, and as a private joke between himself and the Almighty he took to wearing Izod shirts.

  Meanwhile, like Job, his fortunes were restored and his possessions doubled. Those were the eighties and the market had been kind to most investors, but to Ben’s teenage stepson the market had been a very genie. During the time Ben was in prison, the boy had made a small fortune playing the market. His first big killing came from National Biodynamic Labs, a private, for-profit research hospital offering an experimental cancer treatment that involved the use of monoclonal antibodies. The technology for creating monoclonals had only come into being in 1975, and the therapy it made possible was time-consuming, incredibly expensive, and virtually untested. NBL represented a literally desperate hope. Prudent investors naturally had shied away from the stock until the first test results began to be published showing significant rates of remission. Then the gold rush had begun, and William Michaels’s initial investment of $95,000 (insurance moneys he’d received at his father’s death, which he’d been allowed to invest at his own discretion) had grown to almost a million.

  Ben had looked on in wonder, as the boy had moved with an unerring instinct from stock to stock, always buying into companies like NBL at just the moment their fortunes were about to take off. After William’s third great windfall, Ben, just out of prison and feeling the recklessness of conscious freedom, had put his own fortunes into William’s hands. It was like riding a winner’s coattails at the roulette table, except that William’s success seemed too consistent to be ascribed to luck. If William’s profits had been the result of mergers and takeovers, one might assume that he was dipping into the data bank of some inside trader, but that could not be the case. William’s talent had nothing to do with the market, and everything to do with medicine. He seemed to have a dowser’s instinct, even before becoming a researcher himself, for knowing from the bare outline of a medical experiment whether or not it would succeed or fail. After a while, Ben simply accepted William’s gifts as God-given and no more to be questioned than the sufferings and deaths that were the rich loam, so to speak, from which these profits sprang. Having toiled in the service of the American Tobacco Alliance so many years, it wasn’t hard for Ben to set a limit to his curiosity concerning the ultimate source of his income. In the last analysis, he supposed, all money came from crocodiles.