THE M.D. A Horror Story

by Thomas M. Disch

  Even so, he had tried to keep the extent of his memory loss a private matter, fearing that if it were suspected he would have to return to the psychiatrist in the Foshay Tower to whom he’d been sent immediately after the accident. Dr. Helbron. He’d hated his trips to Helbron’s office even more than the sessions at the orthodontist, when he was being fitted for the flipper. Now, however, that he didn’t have to deal with Helbron, there was little danger of having his secret discovered, since there was no one else he knew who showed any curiosity about his past—no one but Herr Professor Nielson. And Nielson’s attention was usually directed to those students who craved it and actively clamored for it, the hand wavers and brownnoses.

  So the thing to do was to avoid being interesting. You had to look ordinary. Bright, but ordinary. Bright was okay at St. Tom’s, where the faster you moved up the academic ladder and the higher the scores you racked up on that ultimate video arcade game called the SATs, the better your credit rating. But ordinary was no less important. Ordinary was wearing the school uniform, which was, like the uniform most grown-ups wore, not a specific set of clothes but a style. Expensive but not loud or trendy. Ordinary as in the movie everyone was going to and which was set right here in Minneapolis, Ordinary People. It wasn’t necessarily that easy (aside from having the right clothes) to achieve genuine ordinariness. You might be too fat, or have the kind of acne that made people cringe when they saw you, or you might have noticeably strange ideas that you couldn’t shut up about, such as Judith with all her various crusades. But for his own part William was pretty sure he still qualified as ordinary, and he intended to hang on to that status by whatever means it might take.

  So, what would constitute an ordinary early memory? What would an ordinary thirteen-year-old remember about his ordinary childhood?

  He looked down at the paper plate with it dregs of catsup-dyed whey, and there was the answer: food. He could remember all kinds of food from his childhood that his mother never cooked, foods he felt a genuine nostalgia for when he saw them at the supermarket. Spam. Spam sandwiches with spongy slices of Wonder Bread soaking up the butter the Spam was fried in. Butter was the same word in German as in English, and feminine in gender: die Butter. Frozen pizzas, and the choice between the kind with gray nubbles of sausage and little red discs of pepperoni. Pizza in German had to be Pizza, but what was its sex? He made it feminine, figuring that Nielson wouldn’t know the sex of pizzas any more than he did. What else? Strawberry ice cream, that was a memory that went back to Kuhn Avenue and the ice cream truck that came by in the summertime. In no time at all he’d filled a page with early memories of food, writing in a rush and mixing the German and English together like cottage cheese and catsup. Then he set to work looking up the German for the words he’d left in English, and by the time the bell buzzed to announce the next period, he had every word in place. When he read it aloud in class, there wasn’t one of his classmates who didn’t think that William wasn’t entirely ordinary with ordinary memories of an ordinary childhood.

  31

  Of the twelve members of the Computer Club at St. Tom’s, four had Apples, two had Ataris, one had a Commodore PET, and the others had video game machines, except for William, who didn’t have anything, yet. He’d joined the club to learn BASIC and scrounge time on the club’s kit-built Altair, a donation to the Computer Club from its president, Jason Schechner, who’d moved up to an Apple the Christmas before last. The video game machine owners were not considered serious members and had been allowed into the club only to comply with the Student Council’s bylaw that required any student organization receiving the use of school facilities to have at least ten members. The video game contingent almost never came to meetings, and when they did it was to try and involve the others in their own ever-continuing game of Dungeons and Dragons.

  William probably wouldn’t have gone to Room 202, where the club was to meet that afternoon, since he knew that Larry Binns had not come to school today and so would not be demonstrating, as scheduled, the version of Space Invaders he’d programmed on his Apple. Plus, four other members of the club were off with the debate team to Bishop Cretin High School for the last meet of the year. But then in math class Jason Schechner’s sister, Lisa, had handed him a note from her brother saying to be sure not to miss the meeting at three o’clock. There was no reason given, but William recognized the note as a command and he was accustomed to deferring to Jason’s authority, whenever convenient. Jason was sixteen, and was taking advantage of the University-linked accelerated studies program to get his diploma from St. Tom’s in just three years, which he’d been able to do without damaging his reputation as one of St. Tom’s leading goof-offs and free spirits. He was using his Apple to design a kind of music-box-cum-guitar that would let its “player” pretend to be playing at virtuoso level. So far it wasn’t a marketable commodity, but you could see the promise. That Jason, with all his popularity and advantages, should deign to be William’s friend was considered something of a social anomaly by Jason’s other friends, who were all seniors or already in college, but it didn’t surprise William. Jason was a brain, and William was a brain, and brains have a way of forming a double orbit.

  And so, obedient to Jason’s note, William had not headed out, after the last bell of the day, to Bus 4, which serviced Willowville, New Hope, and the other north-lying suburbs. Instead he’d gone from his locker directly to Room 202. Like most of the second-floor classrooms at St. Tom’s, which had yet to grow into all its hand-me-down square footage from its earlier incarnation as an Episcopal seminary, Room 202 functioned as an attic. In addition to a supply of old metal filing cabinets and nests of stacking chairs, there were a number of orphaned exhibits from the science fairs of yesteryear, looking a bit enigmatic now that they’d been cannibalized of their reusable elements and had lost, in most cases, their explanatory posters.

  In the central panel of the frieze of blackboards at the front of the room someone had left a message:

  HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

  In smaller script beneath this, “I’ll be a few minutes late. Please wait. Jason.” For some reason Jason’s birthday greeting made William uneasy, and he took the eraser from the narrow ledge at the base of the blackboard and began erasing the chalked letters. No amount of erasing seemed to make the message completely illegible. The uneasiness intensified to a kind of panic, which was stupid, because there was no real need for him to be doing this in the first place. It was as though the letters he had to erase were not the actual ones he could see, ghostlike, glimmering behind the overlapping veils of smeared chalk dust; as though another message were decipherable behind it, which squinting his eyes almost closed he could read:

  HAPPY HALLOWEEN

  For a moment it was as though he were there again, in the fourth grade classroom at OLM, on the night of the Halloween party, the night the candy had been stolen from the big bowl. He remembered the obscenity the thieves had written on the blackboard, and how it remained there even after his father had erased it, and how he’d suggested writing another message over it—the same he could see now, until he blinked it back to what he knew was there, the words Jason had written there and he’d just now erased: Happy Birthday.

  But the memory remained, and he felt like a fisherman who has spent the whole day trolling without once feeling a tug on his line when at last a fish strikes. All the time he’d sat there in the lunchroom trying to dredge up an early memory, racking his brains for a single clear detail from the years he’d been at OLM, and now suddenly he could see that old classroom superimposed over the uniform tawny orange of Room 202, as though these walls were only a kind of veil through which he could witness that earlier scene: the empty desks, and the damp coats in the cloakroom where his classmates had left them when they’d gone to watch Frankenstein in the gym. He could remember getting up during the movie and going to the nun at the door to ask permission to go to the toilet, but that had been a lie: he’d really wanted to go back to the classroom alone.
But why? And why did that big metal bowl, emptied of all but a few worm-eaten apples, seem in retrospect a happy memory? The significance of these recollections remained tantalizingly out of reach, as though he’d been spinning the dial of the TV and caught a single vivid scene from an old movie, but without the sound, without knowing how the story began or where it was going.

  “Hey there. Happy Birthday,” said a voice from behind him, as though reading the message erased from the blackboard.

  He turned around to face his friend. “Jason, hi.”

  Jason was dressed not in the normative designer-brand sportswear favored by most St. Tom’s students but in prefaded jeans, heirloom sneakers, and a black sweatshirt pledging his allegiance to Led Zeppelin. Somehow the effect remained normative. The suntanned, swimming-trimmed body inhabiting these clothes was obviously a product of affluent suburbia and not of that romantic, dangerous inner city that Jason visited two or three nights a month to attend rock concerts or go drinking with a fake ID. “Glad you got my note. And glad to see you. Two reasons: Reason number one, I wanted to give you this.” He handed William a small package, about the size of a cigarette pack, wrapped in a white paper napkin and held together with two red rubber bands, of the very small kind that Jason used (when he was not at school) to hold his hair together in a ponytail. “Well? Aren’t you going to open it? You can’t thank me properly until you do.”

  “What’s the second reason?” William asked suspiciously. “There isn’t going to be some kind of surprise party, is there? I told my mother I didn’t want anything like that. And I was serious.”

  “The second reason has nothing to do with your mother. It may be a surprise, if you let me keep it one, but not a surprise you’ll have any objection to. Okay? Now open your present and thank me for it.”

  He opened the napkin-wrapped birthday present. It was a pack of Camel cigarettes. An open pack, and only partially full.

  “Cigarettes? I’m thirteen so suddenly I’ve got to start smoking cigarettes? Jason, what is this—1950?”

  Jason smiled knowingly. “Not cigarettes, schmuck. Joints, grown in Jamaica, hand-rolled by yours truly. You see, it’s true, what the representative of our police department said about the danger of drugs being ever-present in our schools. Here you are now, confronting the danger.”

  “I’ve confronted the danger before, thanks. It only made me feel sleepy.”

  “It could have been you needed to sleep at the time, but you were repressing it. This stuff unleashes all your most stifled longings, all those buried feelings. It’s a scientifically proven fact.” He smirked, and the separate silken hairs of his incipient mustache twitched like the sentient whiskers of a rabbit. St. Tom’s dress code allowed for the growth of any amount of facial hair, but this was a liberty that few of the students either wished or were able to exercise. Jason’s mustache, such as it was, was one of only seven in the entire student body. “So, what do you say, shall we drop some dynamite down the old mine shaft, hm?”

  William was of two minds. On the one hand, he theoretically disapproved of drugs, or at least felt leery about taking them. On the other hand, he was curious. His earlier experiment had been two years ago, after his team had lost a Little League game, and it hadn’t amounted to more than a couple of puffs. The results had not been drowsiness (that was a white lie) but a coughing fit. Since then he had mastered the art of inhaling tobacco smoke without going into convulsions. Why not? he asked himself, and right away he thought of one good reason.

  “Well, I’d like to, but I don’t think we should do it here, do you?”

  “I’ll let you in on a secret. Unless you begin to manifest clinical symptoms of acute psychosis, no one will hassle you for sneaking a joint up here in Orangeville. The janitors do it, the jocks do it, even J.D. McCudahy does it.”

  J.D. McCudahy was the principal of St. Tom’s.

  “I don’t believe you,” said William.

  “Believe what you like.” Jason helped himself from the Camel pack, then took a red butane lighter from the pocket of his jeans and lighted the joint. “Some people say—” he began, holding the smoke in his lungs. Then exhaled, and continued in his normal voice, “that pot dulls your brain, messes up your thinking. But what I think”—he handed the lighted joint to William, who accepted it with studied casualness, an actor in the movie Jason was directing. Jason resumed his train of thought—“is that pot intensifies it. If you’re an illiterate dude with an attention span limited to a Tom and Jerry cartoon, then pot will intensify your empty-headedness, and eventually you’ll progress to a drug that will wipe out consciousness altogether. But”—he reached for the joint, inhaled, handed it back—“if you’ve already got some kind of mental life going, then the pot will just bring some more zest to it. Calculus is a gas on grass.”

  William found that hard to believe, but he didn’t say so. He’d become fascinated with the blackboard again, where, to his relief, no words were legible now, not “Happy Birthday,” not “Happy Halloween.”

  “Have you ever had hallucinations?” he asked, partly to keep Jason talking, partly out of real curiosity.

  “On pot? Are you serious?” Jason squinted good-humoredly at William through the thin helices of smoke.

  “Drugs can do that, can’t they? And even without drugs. A few minutes ago, right in this room before we were smoking, I had a minor hallucination. I was looking at the blackboard where I’d erased what you’d written and I could swear I could still read the words, but instead of saying ‘Happy Birthday,’ what I saw was ‘Happy Halloween.’ Now, with the pot, I don’t see anything.”

  “Oh well, at that level,” Jason said, with the same confident authority that Dr. Helbron had possessed on all matters concerning his professional specialty, the mind, “we all hallucinate. Pot excites the eye’s phosphene activity, which also relates to dreaming, and to the fizzle of colors you see after you’ve been looking at something bright and then close your eyes.”

  William had pushed the right button, and Jason went on to explain everything he knew about the chemistry of the brain, which led in turn to Jason’s hobbyhorse, which was the problem of how to account for miracles. Jason had become a zealous atheist, after a happy childhood as a Reform Jew untroubled by questions of faith. Miracles, according to Jason, when they weren’t out-and-out frauds, could also be the result of phosphene activity that had been coordinated by some telepathic means so that a single hallucination could be experienced by a group of people in unison.

  “I’ll tell you the book you’ve got to read,” Jason said, when his theory had been stated and the joint smoked down to a twist of paper. “No, better than that I’ll lend it to you. Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception. Ever heard of it?”

  “I’ve read Brave New World.”

  “Yeah, that’s a good one, too. What Huxley was on to, long before the actual laboratory work had been done, was the connection between brain chemistry and what’s called altered states. You feeling anything, other than sleepy?”

  “You mean, is my state altered? I don’t think so. Except for being nervous that someone is going to come in here, and we’ll get reported.”

  “Then let me get rid of the evidence.” Jason went over to one of the derelict science exhibits, which consisted of a large glass sphere filled with thin streamers of shredded paper in various colors. He dropped the remains of the joint through a small aperture in the top of the sphere. “Pure science,” he observed, “often yields unexpected applications in our daily lives.”

  “What was the second reason, Jason? Come on, don’t keep me in suspense.”

  “Look out the window.”

  William went to the window and looked out. The bright daylight saving sky was sliced in two by the jet trail of a plane slanting west toward the airport. Tall, elderly hedges of white lilac defined the horizon and the extent of the school’s grounds. A squirrel darted for a tree trunk and spiraled up to peek out from behind the lowest branch. William felt he’d establ
ished a kind of understanding with the squirrel, a fellowship based on a shared, groundless fear. “What am I supposed to be looking for?”

  “Don’t you recognize any of the cars in the parking lot?”

  There weren’t that many cars left in the lot, and his eye lighted at once on a gray Honda Civic identifiable even this far away as his ex-stepmother’s by its extreme grottiness. Madge never took the car to a car wash. What the rain didn’t wash off gradually bonded itself to the paint.

  “What’s she doing here?”

  “It’s your birthday, isn’t it? What do you think?”

  “But why should you… I mean, you don’t know her. Do you?”

  “Can I help it if older women find me irresistible?”

  “Seriously.”

  “It’s a traditional birthday maneuver. She got my number from Judith, and asked me if I would keep you after school long enough so she could take you off and do birthday-type things with you. I can’t tell you more without spoiling her surprise. Now, stick these inside your knapsack where they won’t get crushed”—he tapped the cigarette pack that was not a cigarette pack—“and go cash in your birthday chips.”

  32

  As soon as he was near enough to the mud-crusted Honda so that she didn’t have to shout, Madge waved and said, “Happy Birthday, Billy.”