THE M.D. A Horror Story

by Thomas M. Disch

  Many blocks away, on Luckner Boulevard, in bed 38 of the Henry Michaels Memorial Clinic, Robert Corning stared at his fingers with fascination, as they clenched and relaxed, clenched and relaxed in complete obedience to the dictates of his will. Robert had felt the shudder that had passed through the web more keenly than anyone. When Ben Winckelmeyer had died, he’d felt a jolt of adrenal panic, as though, an infant again, he’d heard his mother cry out to him: “Bubby! Bubby! Be careful!”

  And in the 4-H Pavilion of the former State Fairgrounds William Michaels palpated the rigid area of his abdomen. There was direct tenderness, but it was not acute, and (fortunately) no rebound tenderness. Another diagnostic test for suspected appendicitis involved the patient lying on his left side and stretching the psoas muscle, but that was not a maneuver William could attempt by himself.

  A voice from the darkness whispered: “You up there, in the top bunk. What time is it?” When he felt a prodding through the thin mattress of the bunk, he realized that the question was directed at him.

  “I don’t know,” he replied. “I have no watch. It was stolen.”

  “There’s a clock over the main door. If you sit up, you can see it.”

  The effort of bending forward at the waist produced a flash of exquisite pain. He drew a sharp breath and gripped the rough edge of the wooden partition reflexively. A splinter pierced the side of his thumb. As though he’d opened the door of a furnace, he felt the heat of his anger suffuse his whole body. While that door remained open he could not focus his mind on any particulars, there was only raw white rage blotting out everything else. Each new annoyance, each least reminder of his helplessness and pain, triggered another blast of wrath.

  It had been just the same when they’d made him strip off his soiled clothes that afternoon in the tent erected just inside the fairgrounds entrance. The PHA workers behind their Plexiglas partitions had paid no heed to any protests from the arriving detainees. They went through the motions of accepting, tagging, and boxing the old clothes and issuing the white cotton hospital uniforms with a maddening bland indifference to the distress of the people filing by. They did their work like cashiers at a supermarket, and most of the detainees being processed seemed to accept the situation with an unquestioning sheeplike docility. No doubt, they had known they had ARVIDS for some time and had foreseen being sent into quarantine. When William had protested and tried to bring his case to the attention of someone qualified to deal with it, he had been treated with routine brutality, as though he were just another overwrought and potentially dangerous detainee who required the simple remedy the PHA guards were always equipped to dispense—sedation. He had only the foggiest of memories of being forcibly undressed and wrestled into these concentration camp pajamas, ill-fitting and stiff with starch. Later, here in the 4-H Pavilion, someone had told him that most of the PHA personnel inside the camp spoke little or no English, so complaining was useless. Illegal aliens were given a choice between deportation and working in the quarantine camps. Most chose deportation.

  “Hey, asshole! What the fuck time is it?”

  William scanned the shadowy geometries of the pavilion—the sloping roof and bare rafters, the labyrinthine zigzags of the wooden partitions, all lit by one distant 40-watt bulb. He could see no clock, so he said it was four twenty-five, which seemed to content the man in the bunk below him.

  At ten the guards would unlock the main door and issue meal chits. Then those who hadn’t been detailed to clean up would have the liberty of most parts of the camp. Yesterday, still woozy from the sedative, he’d waited hours in order to use one of the reversed-charge telephones in Pioneer Hall. Staring at the plaques of mounted walleyes on the dark log walls, probing with his fingertips at the tender spot on his abdomen. Each person was allowed to make one call, and if there was no answer or the charge was refused, you had to go to the back of the line and start the long wait all over. He’d made three calls: to Lisa, which got answered by the answering machine; to his private line at MDS, which no one picked up; and finally (unable to remember Ms. Bright’s private number) to the general MDS number, where the operator refused to accept the twenty-five-cent charge. At that point Pioneer Hall closed down and William had had to return to the dormitory in the 4-H Pavilion before the seven o’clock curfew went into effect.

  He could not believe that he’d been reduced to such a zero, that with all the power he knew he had he could not do such a simple thing as to secure his own release from the hell into which he’d stumbled. This entire system was in a sense his own creation. So any rage he might feel was, in the same sense, his just dessert. But that made no difference. There was nothing he cared about now but saving his own skin. And he didn’t know how.

  73

  According to the clock on the tower of the Hanging Gardens Town Hall it was four twenty-five, but Judge wasn’t sure the clock was accurate or even functional. Since arriving in Wyomia, he’d learned that you couldn’t necessarily trust appearances or believe what people told you. At the inn where he was staying, for instance, there had been a big vase of roses in the lobby, but when he’d typed out the command SNIFF ROSES they smelled like rotting meat. Judge had always been a little suspicious of flowers, so he wasn’t surprised. But there were probably lots of things here in Wyomia just as false and deceitful that he accepted at face value. As Brother Orson never ceased to point out, the mouth of the wicked man is full of deceit and fraud. He lurks in the alleys of the villages, and in the secret places he murders the innocent.

  So Judge knew he had to watch his step or he would end up like one of the bodies hanging from the trees in the gardens of Hanging Gardens. Some of which were still alive and writhing in pain though most were dead and rotting. Sometimes it was the simplest things that could trip you up. You’d forget to eat for a few hours and then faint from hunger. You’d go too long without sleep and become groggy and careless. And not just in gametime but in realtime. Wyomia was like one of those drugs they lectured about in Phys Ed classes, the kind like crack that just takes over your whole life and you forget everything else. Now, forty-eight hours after he’d hacked his way into the program (he’d found the disc in a locked file of backups in the top drawer of William’s desk), the edge between gametime and realtime had become so blurry that he had to set the laptop’s internal timer to buzz at four-hour intervals so he would remember to visit the bathroom and go down to the kitchen and nuke a pizza or a can of soup. He’d also taken a couple of long naps on the couch here in his father’s study, but when he did, he left the game on the screen out of fear that a SAVE command might be booby-trapped and that he’d have to start from square one the next time he booted up the disc.

  Wyomia was a scary place, a country with more cemeteries than cities, and even those cities mostly deserted or else inhabited by demons and witches and other minions of evil. Dead people did most of the work, though you couldn’t tell they were dead just by looking at them. You needed a special kind of glasses available only here in Hanging Gardens. (He’d learned this from a talking raven called Karn, who’d told him that once he had the Spectacles of True Vision, Judge would understand the secret meaning of everything around him—and what was around him was William Michaels’s soul enchanted into a landscape.) Exploring the simulated environs of Wyomia was better than being able to read his father’s diary; it was like walking around inside his dreams. But to know the meaning of those dreams he needed the glasses.

  And there, around the corner from the Town Hall, on a street of sleazy shops, was an optometrist’s office, with a pair of gigantic spectacles hanging over the door as a shop sign. On the door was a brass plate with the optometrist’s name, Dr. Neudista. Judge knocked. The door swung open. He entered.

  —Hello, said Dr. Neudista. How can I help you? He was a short, bald old man with skin the color of white candlewax and lips as red as strawberry jam.

  ASK FOR SPECTACLES OF TRUE VISION, Judge typed.

  —Do you want wire frames or plastic frame
s?

  HOW MUCH ARE THOSE? he asked, using the mouse to point to a pair of glasses displayed on a severed head on the counter.

  When the optometrist turned round to see which glasses he’d pointed to, Judge took a straight-edge razor from the satchel he had been carrying all about Wyomia. It was filled with a jungle of medical paraphernalia he’d acquired in playing the game: knives, scalpels, forceps, tweezers, rope, glue, blowtorches, antibiotics, and placebos.

  KILL DR. NEUDISTA, he typed.

  —Oh, I wouldn’t do that, Dr. Neudista said, without turning around. Kill me, and you’ll never know what any of this means. That’s what my name is a pun on, didn’t you notice that? Herman Neudista.

  “You’re a nudist, is that what you mean?”

  —Only when I take my clothes off. Here. He handed Judge the glasses the head had been modeling and held up a mirror. See how you look in these.

  Judge stared at the mirror in dismay. He’d become a demon with short pointy horns and his whole face the dull, scaly red of an old tattoo. He lifted the glasses up from the bridge of his nose and saw his usual face in the mirror, but when he lowered them he became a red devil again.

  But what was more dismaying—when he looked away from the mirror, the old optometrist’s face had changed into Brother Orson’s. And he had horns like Judge’s, and his skin was red, and he’d taken off all his clothes.

  —I wondered when you’d recognize me, Brother Orson said with a chuckle.

  “How can you be here? In Wyomia?”

  —Why not in Wyomia? Do you suppose your father owns the entire country? No, it’s yours as much as his. Don’t you remember when you were just a toddler in little bib overalls with Smurfs on them? William would come down to Florida for long visits in the summer and on spring breaks, and he’d have his computer with him, and instead of telling you bedtime stories, you’d see them on the computer screen. That’s when you first got to know Wyomia. That’s why it all seems so familiar now. You’ve been here before, many times.

  “And you were here, too?”

  —In one form or another, yes. Don’t you remember?

  “I remember an apple that was lying in the grass.”

  —Like this one? Brother Orson held up a perfect picture-book apple of uniform unmottled red.

  “It was a poison apple. And you sliced it in two with your fingernail.”

  Brother Orson touched the skin of the apple with a taloned finger, and it split open to expose rotted pulp teeming with black specks.—See the legions serving Herman, he hissed. See a million microscopic vermin!

  Judge squinted at the specks in the apple and saw that they were an army of infinitesimally small, infinitely evil insects.

  —What we have here’s a mutant gene, Brother Orson explained, or rather, recited, for his explanation took the form of rhyming verse:

  So small it slips through every screen.

  Stained by it, your vital juice

  Ripens to illness, pain, a noose

  Of varied, slowly strangling ills,

  A plague that almost always kills.

  All this is bound within my curse

  Till I have thrown it in reverse.

  At first Judge did not pay much attention to Brother Orson’s words from an ingrained suspicion of anything that sounded like poetry. Poetry was a form of secular humanist propaganda that he’d been force-fed at school and more hateful than other forms because of the way it would stick in your head like the ads on TV. But then it dawned on Judge what the words were about.

  “That sounds like ARVIDS,” he said to Brother Orson.

  —Indeed. And these little critters are its seedlings.

  The insects made a shrilling sound, as though agreeing.

  —Vermin is not quite accurate. Properly speaking, these are mycoplasmas, the smallest, simplest free-living organisms.

  “Uh-huh,” Judge said. His aversion to scientific gobbledygook was more pronounced than his aversion to poetry. One of the things he liked about Brother Orson was that he never made you feel like you were in school being lectured at. Until now.

  —You’re not interested? Brother Orson asked, reading his mind.

  “I’m just not that good at science.”

  —But aren’t you curious to know the secrets of your father’s success?

  “I suppose. But I don’t see what that’s got to do with these microplastics.”

  —A long time ago, when the white man was taking charge of America, he found that he could kill many more red Indians by giving them blankets than by shooting them, if the blankets were infected with smallpox germs for which red Indians had no natural immunity. Whole nations were exterminated.

  “Uh-huh,” said Judge, who hated history probably more than any other required subject. History teachers were always trying to make you feel guilty about something—slavery or women not being able to vote or giving smallpox to Indians. And then, again, it dawned on him what Brother Orson was getting at.

  “You mean William did something like that with ARVIDS?”

  —No one has ever understood the etiology of infections associated with Mycoplasma incognitus. It can affect many tissues. It cannot be isolated in blood samples; the test for ARVIDS is rather for the by-products of the infection in its terminal stages.

  Now he was sounding like a Public Health Authority lecturer at school assembly, when everyone in the auditorium has to recite what the letters in ARVIDS stand for: Acute Random-Vector Immune Disorder Syndrome. Like the words were supposed to be some kind of charm to keep you from coming down with it. Whereas Judge knew ARVIDS was God’s judgment on sin, pure and simple, the sword in his right hand.

  —There are weapons more powerful than the sword.

  Judge glanced over his shoulder uneasily at the fire irons standing sentinel beside the fireplace. “I guess you mean the pen,” he said evasively.

  —No, not the pen. Not the poker, either. The caduceus. Do you know what that is?

  “Sure, it’s that twisty thing over the doorway at MDS.”

  —Your father has a caduceus.

  “Uh-huh.”

  —All that he’s achieved as a doctor has been through its power. It was by using the caduceus that he created ARVIDS. It has also been the source of your own unmerited good health, and all your family’s: your brothers, your mother, old Mrs. Obstschmecker, whomever your father has chosen to benefit.

  “How come I’ve never seen it?”

  —He keeps it secret. Wouldn’t you?

  “You mean hidden away.”

  —Hidden from most eyes… but with the Spectacles of True Vision—

  A buzzer rang.

  —Excuse me a moment, Brother Orson said, and disappeared through the back door of the shop.

  As soon as he was gone, Judge realized that the head on the counter was Lisa’s. There was still blood oozing through her hair where he’d struck her with the pointed hook of the poker.

  Lisa regarded him balefully. “I always did think you were a nasty little shit.”

  “Yeah, well. I never liked you much either.”

  The buzzer rang again.

  “It isn’t the phone this time, you know,” said Lisa’s severed head. “It’s someone at the door, you born-again redneck moron.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Judge, still without quite taking in what she was saying, since he’d turned his attention to the actual corpse on the leather sofa off to the side of the fireplace. He realized that sooner or later he was going to have to deal with the problem it represented. At some point corpses started to smell and got maggoty. He’d also have to clean up the blood, though he wasn’t sure there was any way to get the stains out of the carpet.

  He’d better start now, he decided. Reluctantly he typed SAVE, and the image of the severed head on the counter of Dr. Neudista’s shop shrank down to a white dot and disappeared, which was just what he wished would happen to the body on the couch. But Lisa’s dead body was here in realtime, and so was the person downstairs
at the front door who would not stop ringing the bell.

  74

  Judith had very nearly despaired of anyone’s hearing the bell and was considering simply walking away from her problems—leaving the body in the car and returning to the bus depot and taking the bus back to Florida. But finally, after what must have been ten minutes of ringing, Judge came to the door.

  “Oh, it’s you,” he said, peering out suspiciously through the one-inch crack allowed by the door chain. “I was wondering when you’d get here.”

  “I’ve been ringing the doorbell for ten minutes.”

  “Sorry, I had earphones on. Just a minute.” He closed the door, took off the chain, and opened it only a little wider, still barring entry.

  Even with everything else she had to feel distressed about, the first sight of him was a shock. His had become one of those faces that attracts the morbider sort of photographer, a face that registers at a glance as demented or, at the very least, disturbed. And then, on the heels of that distress, guilt—the guilt of knowing she must be responsible in some way for what she saw. This was her son. Her words, her cooking, her shifting moods and abiding presence had been the dye that had formed his character and modeled his face. Even the name he’d taken for himself—Judge—seemed to point to the same moral. Every child is time’s truest judgment on its parents, but even as a child Judge had seemed to gloat at the judgment he represented. And she had always refused to believe that he was just what she deserved.