THE M.D. A Horror Story

by Thomas M. Disch

  She turned left on Fifth toward the Nicollet Mall, where there were still a few pedestrians and almost as many PHA officers. One of the officers headed toward Judith the moment he spotted her and asked to see her green card. She’d had three different blood tests on the bus trip up from Florida, all duly noted on her card, but even so the PHA officer acted as though she were an illegal immigrant caught trying to cross the Rio Grande. Despite the fact that ARVIDS seemed to be distributed uniformly through the country, strangers were treated everywhere with suspicion and hostility. The problem was that in a city of any size, everyone is a stranger to all but a small circle of neighbors and coworkers, so everyone in the big cities went around feeling suspicious of everyone else.

  Dayton’s, for a wonder, was still open for business, and opposite Dayton’s, in the middle of the mall, was an unattended canvas-roofed kiosk with a sign that said, THE CHAMBER OF COMMERCE WELCOMES YOU TO MINNEAPOLIS. FREE MAPS AND INFORMATION. An arrow pointed to the maps that weren’t there. All along the mall the Muzak was playing an all-string version of a Beach Boys song.

  Next to the information kiosk was a Sprint booth, and it occurred to Judith that Lisa or William might have left a message with her housemates in Florida explaining the situation. Everyone in the Twin Cities seemed to have disappeared. She had called William at home and only got an answering machine. She’d tried to reach John on his private line, but no one answered. At MDS there was a recorded message saying that the central switchboard was being reprogrammed and anyone calling MDS should wait until Friday to call back. She’d tried calling her father at home and got another answering machine. She’d called Madge and got her mother, and when she’d tried to reach Madge at the clinic she’d got a “please-call-back-later” receptionist.

  She entered the booth, took her receiver from her purse (there was no such thing anymore as a public telephone, only cable access), plugged it in, and punched in her ID number, and then 111, which put her through automatically to her own number in Florida.

  Griel answered, and said yes, there had been a message from her father, who’d called from a PHA detention center in a state of outrage. Apparently both he and William had been arrested at a highway checkpoint, and he couldn’t be released until someone came to where he was being held and vouched for his being who his ID said he was. He’d waited a whole day for one of the directors from MDS to come and sign him out, but the woman had apparently vanished from the earth. There was more, but he hadn’t been able to tell Griel the whole story, because the PHA had only let him talk for two minutes.

  Judith dialed the number of the detention center at once, and spent fifteen minutes confirming the fact that Ben Winckelmeyer was indeed still there. For more information she would have to come to the detention center in person.

  Which she did. The taxi ride cost her a mind-boggling forty dollars, paid in advance, and even at that rate the driver refused to wait outside. He was probably right in predicting that it would take at least a couple of hours to process all the red tape it would take to get Ben checked out.

  The detention center had been a Holiday Inn in an earlier incarnation, and the only indication that it was so no longer was a high, wraparound cyclone fence topped with razor wire and the letters on the marquee identifying it as MINN. STATE POLICE HEALTH INVEST. UNIT 17.

  The policewoman at the reception desk was much more human than the people she’d had to deal with on the phone. She only had to show her green card and answer three questions on an ID check and she was shown to the room where Ben had been put. Her armed escort could not have been much older than fifteen and full of the special kind of self-importance that comes to those who exercise authority at a precocious age.

  When the young guard unlocked and opened the door, a mingled stench of Lysol and vomit whooshed forth. Ben was standing up, his back to the wall, looking like he was waiting to be shot. His face seemed finally to have caught up with his true chronological age after all these years of looking perpetually, pudgily fifty. He was an old man now.

  “Judith,” he said, “thank heaven.”

  She kissed him on both cheeks. “Are you okay?” she whispered.

  His smile was almost recognizable. “I think I’ll have to take the Fifth Amendment on that.”

  “What happened? Is William here with you? I don’t know any more than what I learned from Griel.”

  “It’s a long story. Maybe we should wait till we’ve got our exit visas. As to William, I’ve no idea where he is. He was still at the checkpoint getting a blood test when they took me here. I’ve tried calling him at home. No one answers. I’ve tried to talk to someone at the checkpoint, but it’s like arranging an audience with the pope.”

  “And the MDS switchboard isn’t working.”

  Ben looked grim. “I know. And I think I know why. But that’s something else we’d better save till later.”

  Later was not long in coming. Ben’s own BMW had already been retrieved from its garage and was waiting, with the keys in the ignition, by the time the paperwork was completed. Off her own bat, just to be helpful, the policewoman at the reception desk made a determined effort to learn from the PHA what had become of William. The PHA people swore that no one by the name of Michaels had been dispatched to Detention & Evaluation or to any local hospital. They were able to provide the name of the officer who’d been in charge of the checkpoint on Monday afternoon—Sgt. Janet Beale—but she had failed to report to work since that time. Presumably, William had been released after his blood test showed he was clean. Otherwise, the PHA people insisted, there would be something in the records at the checkpoint—as, for instance, there was for Ben and the chauffeur and even the limo.

  “You’ll probably find him at home,” the policewoman suggested with an unconvincing smile. “Many people become very upset when they’re stopped at a checkpoint. And with the window of his car shot out, well, who could blame him if he’s not feeling all that sociable? There’s days I don’t pick up the phone for a lot less reason than he’s got.”

  “You’re probably right,” Ben agreed. He’d have agreed to anything at that point he was so anxious to get away.

  And then they were out on the expressway, and moving at what seemed to Judith a criminal speed. “Father!” she shouted, bracing her feet against the floorboard. “Watch out for that van!!”

  Ben neither slowed down nor speeded up, and the van that had tried to pull in front of the BMW swerved back to its position in the slower-moving right lane.

  “I’m sorry,” Judith said. “I’m just not used to being in a car. In Florida I ride the bus or I walk. Mostly I walk.”

  “You left your luggage at the Greyhound station?” Ben asked, as they neared the downtown exit.

  “Yes, but there’s no need to pick it up now. Getting home is the first priority.”

  “My first priority is finding out what’s become of William. Do you mind if we detour by his place first?”

  “As you like. Though my concern is more for John than William. If John’s found some way to remove his parole band so he could leave town without triggering any alarms—”

  “That’s not too likely. And you’d better remember to call him Judge. He’s sensitive about that.”

  “Judge, yes, of course, I’ll remember. But with so little time left before he turns eighteen, a couple of weeks, it would be foolish to violate parole.”

  “Ten to one the reason he wasn’t answering the phone is that he was communing with Brother Orson. Was his answering machine on?”

  “All it said was leave your message at the beep.”

  “He’s probably just avoiding you. He’s at the age when he prefers to be left alone.”

  “He was always at that age, Father. Always.”

  Ben chuckled, but said nothing. He didn’t have to. Judith knew he was thinking “Like mother, like son.” And it wasn’t really fair. As a girl and a teenager, she’d been prickly in many ways, but never systematically hostile. She hadn’t seen her
father and Sondra as the Enemy. Her mother, off in Florida, that was another matter. She had been the Enemy, until, in the last few years, Alzheimer’s disease had made her a mere object of pity.

  Judith sighed, realizing just how much she did have in common with John. With Judge, she corrected herself. She must remember to think of him by that ridiculous name.

  As they came in sight of the exit to Willowville, she finally broke the ice and said, “If you’d rather not tell me about what happened…” It was all the cue Ben needed, and the story was not long in telling, how they’d been pulled over at the checkpoint, the stray bullet, the shattered windshield, how William had insisted on leaving the limo to look at the girl who’d been shot by the PHA officer, and how they’d been separated, Ben and the chauffeur being hauled off to the detention center while William was still inside the little shed where they did the blood testing.

  “The worst of it was afterward, when I was waiting for Ms. Bright, and she didn’t show. I got so fraught. It was getting to be one A.M., two A.M., and I was locked in that nasty little room—you smelled what it was like—and I could feel my heart… fluttering. That’s not the word, but I don’t know how else to describe it. I felt like I’d been sent back to Stillwater. Except the quarantine camps would be even worse than that. Finally I bribed that kid who let you into the room to get me some Seconals and I was able to sleep. I slept till noon, and then I had to wait hours to use the phone. And when I couldn’t get through to anyone I really started to panic. I’m still panicking.”

  “You sound as rational as ever,” Judith reassured him.

  “I know. There’s a part of me that just wants Ben Winckelmeyer to continue on a business-as-usual basis, and then there’s the other part of me that’s in charge of my basal metabolism and not my thought processes, and that part of me is still going Bong! Bong! Remember that smoke alarm that went off every time you started to fry a lamb chop? That’s what I feel like right now. Inside me that alarm is screaming ‘Lamb chops! Lamb chops!’”

  Judith laughed aloud. “Oh God, I’d forgotten that alarm. And it only ever went off for lamb chops, nothing else. The house could have burned down, it would be mute, but just try and fry a lamb chop!” She leaned sideways as far as her seat belt allowed and was able, by stretching her neck, to plant a kiss on Ben’s cheek.

  “My goodness,” he said, switching effortlessly to a tone of mellow reminiscence, “how long has it been. It’s good to see you. You’ve got so big.”

  “My bottom, I know. If my thirteen-year-old anorexic self could see me now. But a big ass is actually supposed to be a good thing, especially for women, as against a big gut. It means you’re less at risk for some dread disease or other. Father, isn’t that motorcycle going to— No, I’m sorry, highways simply do this to me.”

  When the motorcycle had weaved on ahead through the traffic far enough so she could take her eyes off it, she asked, “How is Judge?”

  “Bizarre. I like the boy, mind you. He’s actually more interesting for being so peculiar. Though it’s hard, at times, to think of him as my own lineal descendant.”

  “One of the women who lives with us—Griel, the one you talked with on the phone—she swears there’s a real person behind Brother Orson’s cartoon face. She says she’s met people who’ve talked to him in the flesh. But that’s not what the news is saying, is it? Griel has also met people who claim to have been taken up in flying saucers. Do you think there’s an actual Brother Orson?”

  Ben hooted. “You might as well ask me, do I believe in Santa Claus? Yes, Virginia, of course I do.”

  “You and William!”

  There was an awkward pause between them. Judith had never openly acknowledged to Ben—to anyone, for that matter—that William was her son’s natural father. Yet she knew that Ben had long ago figured it out for himself, and they’d come to an unspoken understanding on the subject just as they had about her being a lesbian.

  So there was no need now to spell out what she’d meant by her unconsidered “You and William!” William’s steadfast faith in Santa at the age of six and Judge’s dauntless faith in Brother Orson now seemed to have issued from the same stubborn root, from some genetic disposition to belief in its purest form.

  Yet she couldn’t reconcile herself to the boy’s invincible wrongheadedness. “Does he know what’s been happening in the news?” she demanded of Ben. “Has he watched the coverage of the trial in Florida? Has he heard the witnesses? It’s not their enemies now who are saying Orson is a fabrication, it’s the people who’ve been running the organization for years.”

  “Remember how long some people went on believing in Nixon? In Reagan? In Guru Ma? The worse the charges, the tighter the noose, the more a loyalist can pride himself on his loyalty.”

  “But eventually…?”

  “I agree: eventually Judge will be disillusioned. If he isn’t already. He’s not as willing to get into an argument on the subject as he would have been a year ago, even six months. Maybe he’s stopped believing but is just too proud to admit he lived such a long time in Fantasyland.”

  “What does William make of it all?”

  “He takes it in stride pretty much. Refuses to argue about it with Judge. I think he may even admire his stubbornness. The chip-off-the-old-block effect.”

  So there it was, out in the open after all these years, the truth she had no wish to discuss.

  “If there’s a gene for stubbornness,” she said, “he might as easily have gotten it from me, don’t you suppose?”

  Ben glanced sideways with an amused smile. “Oh, I’ll grant you that.”

  “It doesn’t seem ever to have upset you, the thought, or the suspicion…” She could not, even now, say it in so many words.

  “I think it might have, if I’d figured it out soon enough. That is, before Judge was born. But I was in prison then, and prison was like a toothache. You can’t think of anything else. You must have gone through hell, though.”

  “I worried. And I prayed a lot.”

  “And then your prayers were answered.”

  “In the sense that he didn’t have Bradley-Chambers syndrome, yes.”

  “But you knew that was a possibility.”

  Judith nodded.

  “And you never considered getting an abortion.”

  “Of course not.”

  Ben shook his head. “You are,” he marveled, “an amazing offspring.”

  Ben fell silent after that, and Judith slouched back against the leather seat cushion, relieved to be let off the hook, and turned her attention to the scenes of Willowville unscrolling through the windows of the car. At least half the lawns were enclosed by metal fences of the kind erected around the detention center, as though a man’s home these days were not so much his castle as his dungeon. The lawns were still well kept up, and you could see sprinklers operating, a luxury that Florida had had to restrict years ago. Otherwise, it was the Willowville she remembered. Even the fact that the only people you could see were people in cars had been true in the Willowville of yore.

  While they were still a long way from William’s neighborhood at the northern edge of Willowville, Ben slowed the car to a crawl and pulled over to the side of the street. They coasted to a stop beside a red, white, and blue mailbox.

  “Father?” she asked. “Are you all right?”

  He smiled the way he did when he was getting ready to deliver a zinger, but then he didn’t deliver it.

  “Could you… help me… release the…” His fingers fumbled at the safety belt release.

  She helped him out of his safety belt, then loosened his tie.

  “It started to go dark there for a while,” he explained without her asking.

  “Would you like me to go telephone for help?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “Just give me a minute or so. A hospital sends out an ambulance these days, there’s always someone from PHA with them. This time we’d both end up in detention. Or worse. I’d ask you to drive us,
but I really don’t think I could get up and out of the car and over to your side. These damned bucket seats, I can’t just slide over. I think the best thing right now is a little nap.”

  He laid his head back awkwardly on the seat’s headrest and closed his eyes. Judith held his right hand and watched his life quietly ebb away, like the sun sinking through the limbs of trees at a far horizon. It was the kind of death you pray for, a divine Mickey Finn, no pain, no warning, just the simplest closing of the door. She envied him and felt blessed.

  72

  At the moment of Ben Winckelmeyer’s death, a shudder passed through the web. Those filaments nearest the center, already under the strain imposed by the earlier snapping of its first-woven thread, registered the effect most forcibly.

  The elms along Calumet Avenue and in Brosner Park, on which Billy Michaels had so long ago exercised the power of the caduceus, felt a sudden sickening incapability at their phloem’s soft core, and all through the night that followed, as the affected sap spread through their limbs and leaves, the elms succumbed to the deaths deferred by the caduceus’s potency. By morning their yellow leaves littered the streets and lawns.

  There was a tingling in the scalp of Mrs. Obstschmecker as dark, wiry hairs formed within the follicles that had lain fallow so many years, and as she slept, the old woman’s right hand crept out from its cocoon of bedclothes to scratch at her bristly scalp.

  In his bedroom upstairs, Ned knew a more painful quickening as his tongue, so long inert, pressed against the roof of his mouth, hungry not for food—for he heeded the operation of his digestive tract no more than the beating of his heart—hungry, rather, for speech. His jaw clenched; the left zygomatic muscles tensed, tugging at the flesh of his upper lip. Then the muscles all went slack, like a weight lifter’s arms as he collapses onto the bench after his utmost exertion.

  In the next room his mother slept, and she, too, dreamed, her tongue pressed against her soft palate, remembering a thirst it had not known for many years, craving a single drop of chilled wine, a sip of orange juice laced with vodka, a long, cold draft of beer—booze in whatever form, barrels of it! Nothing less could fill the void that years of abstinence had hollowed out in her. She woke and went downstairs to the kitchen and filled a tumbler with diet cola, and then, barefoot, she went into the backyard, where the lawn chairs had been left spread out, and sat and marveled at the yellow leaves drifting down through the windless June air.