THE M.D. A Horror Story

by Thomas M. Disch

  William smiled the kind of smile he allotted to the similar merry pranks of his sons, ostensibly indulgent but in fact as unamused as if he’d been watching cassettes of “Pee-wee’s Playhouse” and the “Muppet Babies,” cassettes that Jason and Henry had played over and over until William had memorized the timing of every pratfall, explosion, and canned laugh by heart. Children can be terrible bores, even the brightest, even his own. The only solution to the problem, as to most, was to ignore it. Let children lead their life apart in Nannyland. Lisa agreed.

  Meanwhile this problem refused to be ignored. The turtle grinned up at William insistently, its lipless mouth looking like some small gardening tool, a hedge clipper or pruning shears. Its neck slid out from its carapace to almost a swanlike length before William realized that this was no turtle at all but a large, black, wormlike snake.

  —Don’t you remember Rottencore?

  “Yes, of course. Then, you’re…” He felt confused.

  —When the Wise Men finally got to Bethlehem, what did they do?

  William ignored the question, as being rhetorical, and marveled: “The other times I’ve seen you, you were an adult.”

  —Gods are any age they want to be. Jesus, for instance. At Christmas he’s a baby. A few months later he’s a dead grown-up. I think it must mean something, but the truth is, Dr. Michaels, I didn’t come here to discuss hermeneutics. He tilted his head to the side and smiled the same tongue-biting smile as earlier.—That’s a pun: Hermes, hermeneutics, get it?

  William said nothing.

  —Oh, you’re not any fun. I was going to show you something, but now I don’t think I will.

  “They worshiped the Christ Child. Is that what you were after?”

  Though the boy made no reply, William realized that he was demanding to be worshiped himself. He hitched up the legs of his pants and knelt on the lowest step of the clinic’s entrance.

  The boy held out the radio control device, except that it had become a caduceus.

  William put his hand on the caduceus, and prayed aloud: “Thou, Mercury, art my god. I place my being in thy care. Now I lay my soul in pawn. This upon thy staff I swear.” As he renewed the pledge he’d first sworn so long before, Rottencore slid down from the child’s shoulder, coiling round his pale, bare arm and about the caduceus, to brush the back of William’s hand. The snake’s chill length looped once more round William’s wrist, effectually handcuffing him to the child. It lifted its head to grin at him again, exposing its hypodermic-like fangs. Then, with the deft precision of the nurse who had found the same vein only minutes earlier to administer a sedative (the second within two hours), Rottencore bit into the softest part of his forearm, drawing blood with a regular suctioning peristalsis from the median cephalic vein.

  —Not too greedy, Rottencore. We don’t want him to go into shock. With his free hand the boy stroked the pulsing body of the snake. His hand was larger than it had been only moments before, and William’s correspondingly smaller. It wasn’t blood that Rottencore was drawing from his veins but the form and stature of his body.

  —Yes, it’s as I was saying, Billy, the gods are neither young nor old, and we appeal, like Disney cartoons, to children of all ages. Indeed, when we would speak with a grown-up, like yourself, it’s usually necessary to make some alteration in the consciousness we would address. As Jesus remarks in Matthew, chapter eighteen, verse three, “Unless you become as little children, you shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.” And again, it is written—Ezekiel, chapter nine, verses five and six—“Go through the city and smite: let not your eye spare, neither have pity. Slay utterly young and old, both maids, and little children, and women: but come not near any man upon whom is the mark; and begin at my sanctuary.” As he quoted the verses of Holy Writ, his voice took on the familiar redneck twang of Brother Orson. His mimicry captured both the man’s sanctimony and his belligerence. Then the mask was dropped, and Mercury spoke in his usual smooth, musical baritone.—What do you say, Billy: let’s enter the kingdom of heaven, shall we? Let’s smite a few maids and little children?

  The god (who had grown to the stature of a youth in his early teens) reached forward to grasp Rottencore’s head and, not without some resistance on the part of the snake, to extract its fangs from the flesh of Billy’s forearm.

  —You’re turning to marble, you see. He ran his finger along the vein from which the snake had been drawing blood.—Soon you’ll be stone from the tip of your nose to your pituitary, stone through and through. But still as human as I am.

  “Are gods human, then?”

  —You can see for yourself that we are. Oh, the Jews objected to letting it be known how much the Creators share with their Creation. (Indeed, the scandal goes deeper, for who did the creating, and who was created? The jury’s still out on that.) And the early Christians were no better. How does John end his first epistle? “Little children, keep yourselves from idols. Amen.” It wasn’t till nearly the year one thousand before decent statuary began to appear again with any regularity.

  Billy looked up at the god with puzzled respect. He couldn’t understand anything he was saying. What was the jury he was talking about? How had Mercury grown so big so quickly? And how had Billy become so small, a boy again, no bigger than he’d been when he was five?

  Mercury regarded his massive marble hands with a complacent smile.—That? A simple matter of transfusion, together with the repetition, three times, of the scriptural phrase “Little children,” and the work was done. But come, hop on my shoulder, and I’ll take you to Olympus. We don’t have that long before your sedative wears off, and I’ve an omen to show you.

  Obediently, Billy let himself be lifted to the god’s shoulder. Then Mercury opened the door to Medical Defense Systems and they went inside.

  The lobby clock said it was 6:04. A maintenance worker in blue coveralls was waltzing a whining polishing machine across the terra-cotta tiles of the floor. He didn’t look up as Mercury and Billy passed before him and went inside an elevator. The elevator doors closed, and when they opened again they were on the ninth floor, where the administrative director, Valerie Bright, was sitting at one of the work stations, squinting at the monitor through her large glasses and typing in short, decisive bursts. The early sunlight, slivered by the venetian blinds, made bands of brightness on the dark silk of her jacket.

  The god set Billy down like a giant paperweight on the desk beside Ms. Bright, who glanced up with a look of annoyance and then resumed her work at the keyboard.

  Billy felt slighted. Even though he might appear to be five years old and wasn’t wearing any clothes, he was, nevertheless, her boss, she should treat him with a bit more respect. He considered pissing on her keyboard: that would get her attention. Then he realized that the god must be playing another one of his tricks on him. He twisted his torso round (it was slow work, since he had turned to stone), and regarded Mercury with an impish smile.

  “This isn’t really happening, is it?”

  —It is and it isn’t. In fact, if you were in your office now, it would appear just as you see it. The janitor would be in the lobby, polishing the floor. This woman would be busy with the same task. But you are not really here. At the moment you are somewhere else, under sedation, and that has had the effect of bringing us into a more tender rapport.

  As Mercury placed a hand on his shoulder, Billy felt a sickening warmth diffuse through his body, a conviction of certain harm to come, such as a child feels when a doctor assures him that what he’s about to do is not going to hurt, all the while the doctor is intending to perform surgery.

  He cast about for some delaying tactic, a question that would fend off the knife’s approach.

  “What is she doing?” he asked the god. “Why is she at the office so early?”

  —Why don’t you ask her yourself?

  “Can she hear me?”

  —She can and she can’t. But whatever question you put to her she must answer truthfully, for she is
under my compulsion—just as you are.

  Billy turned his eyes toward Ms. Bright, and asked her, “What are you doing?”

  She removed her glasses and grimaced and spun round in her office chair to look at the naked marble boy on the desk. “I’m transferring funds,” she told him, “from MDS’s unnumbered Swiss account to my own. This time I don’t intend to leave the sinking ship without something to show for it.”

  “This time?”

  “I worked seven years for the McKinleys, fiddling and finagling, and when the Son of Man Foundation went down, I didn’t even have pension rights. So when I started here, I made damned good and sure that wouldn’t happen again. This time I’ve been provided for. I figure, with Dr. Frankenstein in E & D, I’ve got at least forty-eight hours, providing I can keep that old fart Winckelmeyer out of my hair. And he’s still waiting bail, and there hasn’t been even a phone call yet from Frankenstein. So far so good. Knock on wood.” Ms. Bright looked around for anything that might be made of wood, but she was not at her own desk, and there wasn’t so much as a walnut nameplate.

  Billy was furious. “You mean to say you’re stealing Dr. Michaels’s money? My money?”

  “It’s my money now, kiddo. Screw Dr. Michaels.” Ms. Bright turned back to the monitor that connected her with her broker’s office in Zurich.

  Billy couldn’t believe what he’d heard. Ms. Bright was supposed to be a born-again Christian businesswoman. She was always going to fellowship breakfasts and pinning cheerful Christian thoughts on the bulletin board. And here she was calmly embezzling company funds. He couldn’t move, he couldn’t even speak. But he still could do what any other naked five-year-old marble statue could. He pissed on Ms. Bright’s busily typing, beautifully manicured hands, a steady stream of hot yellow urine that vanished in steam as it struck the keys of the keyboard. Ms. Bright didn’t even deign to look up. She’d been released from the god’s compulsion, and none of this had ever happened, except in the mind of the sedated man strapped to the stretcher in the vast Admissions Wing of Como Hospital, the man pissing in the pants of his Giorgio Armani suit and moaning in his sleep.

  68

  The first thing he was aware of was the bad smell. Then he could feel a generalized pain throughout his body, an aching within and a soreness over all his skin. He wanted to return to sleep, to feel nothing, to be no one, but now there were noises as well as smells and aches, voices and footsteps on the stairs, and then the void before him brightened as the overhead light came on, and the mattress shifted beneath him as someone sat on the bed. He braced his mind against the shock of the light as fingers peeled his eyelids back from his eyes. The brightness speared right to the middle of his brain, erasing every other sensation.

  Then his mother’s voice said, “All right, you can come in.”

  He did not want his eyes to focus, to have the bleary shapes resolved into known forms, but the process was as much out of his own control as the opening of his eyes, and there blazing beneath the ceiling bulb were two faces—one that of his mother, too familiar to register as more significant than the buzzing of a fly, but the other face, the man’s, was unfamiliar and somehow unsettling.

  “Ned?” Receiving no response, the stranger turned his face sideways and asked of his mother, “Can he hear us?”

  “Who can say. The sounds may register, but whether our words make any sense to him… I doubt it. There’s no way to tell.”

  “Jesus.”

  “His irises will dilate or contract according to the level of light in the room. All the processes that are automatic: breathing, peristalsis. Even the occasional blinking of the eyes. But they’re like windshield wipers, it’s not something his mind controls.”

  “He looks so young. But he must be… thirty-six?”

  “Thirty-seven. After about the age of twenty-two, when I made myself stop overfeeding him, he seemed to stop aging altogether. I used to kid myself he looked like you, but really I don’t suppose he looks like anyone. If you never smile or frown, your face doesn’t develop an identity.”

  “The secret of eternal youth.” The stranger picked up his hand and turned it around, palm upward, as though reading his fortune. “Is he a lot of trouble—feeding, cleaning up?”

  “It used to be, but I’ve got it down to a science now. It doesn’t seem possible to get rid of the smell, though. It must have penetrated through the whole house by now, but I don’t usually notice it, and Mother hasn’t been able to smell anything for years. And we don’t have many visitors. Except for William, now and then. He’ll still come and spend the whole evening here with just Ned and Mother.”

  “No kidding. What’s it like, having a celebrity in the family?”

  “I can’t think of William as a celebrity. I mean, he’s not that different from other doctors in the same income bracket. They’re all rolling in money, and they all think they’re the center of creation, and William’s no different. But I guess it still seems a little strange to be his employee. I’m sure the only reason he set up the Memorial Clinic was to give me my own little kingdom. He can be very generous.”

  “I’m glad to hear it.”

  “Also, to be fair, I suppose he does have a real concern for people with Colmar’s syndrome. He lived here all these years in the same house with Ned. It must have got to him.”

  The buzzer sounded, and his mother went to the phone on the wall and listened, nodding and purring assurances. “Mother’s in a fret,” she explained. “I’ve got to go down and smooth her feathers for a moment. Would you mind staying with Ned a little while?”

  “Your mother never was that happy to see me.”

  “She’s not used to having visitors in the house. Especially overnight visitors.”

  “Is that an invitation?”

  “Unless you’ve already arranged something else.”

  “I’m a homeless person.”

  The buzzer buzzed again.

  “Duty calls,” his mother said, but she still hesitated at the door. “Lance, it really is wonderful to see you.”

  When she had left the room, the stranger was still holding his hand. Now he began to experiment with it, lifting it, lowering it, shaking it by the wrist to make the fingers waggle. All these motions were accompanied by the familiar bone-deep pain he experienced during each day’s patterning exercises.

  The man put his hand beneath his chin and tilted his head back to look him in the eyes. Where the man’s fingers pressed against the flesh of his face he could feel a kind of burning. The burning became more intense until it seemed his head had been put inside a furnace.

  And then, where the web had been weakened, it was rent. The light lanced through his eyes to pierce the long-sealed ducts of the lachrymal glands. Tears began to issue from the gland, each one a blissful remission of the pain and the burning, each exerting a further minuscule pressure on the web.

  The web was vast. Each bane and each blessing that had been created by the power of the caduceus was a filament in its immense architecture. But the center of the web was here in Ned Hill’s inert and pain-wracked body, the first to be blighted by William’s curse. Here was the knot that secured the integrity of the entire fabric, and now that knot had slipped.

  The fabric was unraveling.

  69

  For a fleeting instant, as he woke, William could remember the dream, though only in a shattered form: the snake’s hypodermic fang entering his arm, the polisher gliding across the lobby’s floor (which seemed, even as the memory faded, as real as if he’d been there in person), and a general sense of grievance against Ms. Bright. But the gist of the dream escaped him, whatever the god might have said, whatever warning or portent it might contain.

  He was staring up into the springs of a metal cot. There was a stabbing pain in his lower gut. But he could not touch the spot, his hands were strapped to his side. His feet, as well. He could lift his head just enough to see the canvas restraints that bound him. But he could see nothing of the larger space b
eyond the narrow confines of the cot, for curtains were drawn on either side, through which a fluorescent brightness penetrated to create a diffuse institutional twilight, unchanging by night or day. Even with so little evidence, he knew, from the smells and a low thrumming of respiratory ills, coughs and wheezes and moans of self-communing misery, he knew where he must be: the ward of a public hospital where those suspected of having ARVIDS were tested and—the great majority—dispatched to the camps.

  He tried to call out, but he was unable to raise his voice above a hoarse rasp. Even that effort hurt his throat. He waited, as captives must, thinking the thoughts of captivity: futile anger, impotent rage, fantasies of revenge. But he did not pray or try to strike a bargain with the forces that had betrayed him to this fate, for helpless as he found himself, he did not, in an essential way, doubt his power. Someone would come, he would explain who he was, he would submit to the blood test (his blood had been tested at weekly intervals, as was everyone’s who worked at MDS; he’d nothing to worry about on that score), and then he would be released. What had happened was an accident, a slip on the ice. One moment one is walking along the sidewalk, the next one is on one’s back, short of breath and sore, amazed but still structurally sound.

  The one thing that nagged at him was the pain in his lower right abdomen. His problem calling out was no puzzle. The last thing he remembered inside the little shed at the PHA checkpoint was the woman guard getting her knee in his back and wrapping her arm around his neck, forcing him to his knees. In the process she must have hurt his larynx. But why the pain in his gut? She must have kicked him when he was on the floor, unconscious. Thinking about it, imagining the kick, triggered an anger that let him forget the pain. He promised himself he would track her down and see that she paid a suitable price for what she’d done, something to pain her gut. Appendicitis? Yes, that was precisely where she’d kicked him. Appendicitis it would be.