THE M.D. A Horror Story

by Thomas M. Disch

  Father Lyman smiled and stepped down from the pulpit and nodded to Sister Fidelis in the organ loft, who was ready to hand with her own rendition of the Lord’s Prayer.

  58

  “Judge,” Mrs. Obstschmecker urged in a commanding whine, “are you sure this is a good idea?”

  Judge heeded her no more than Madge would have. He just stood there at the edge of the crowd funneling through the church doors and wouldn’t budge. “Won’t take but a minute, ma’am. Then we’ll zip right off to that cemetery and get those roses to your old man. Anywhere I ever been to church you stop by after the service even if it’s only to shake hands.”

  This was precisely what Mrs. Obstschmecker was dreading. There had been a period, years back, when they’d tried to make people kiss the person sitting next to them in the pew, no matter who they were or what disease they might have. The Kiss of Peace it was called. Mrs. Obstschmecker would only go to church then when she had someone she knew sitting on each side of her. Finally in the eighties things returned to normal and you only had to nod and smile at people at that point in the Mass.

  The crowd diminished to where only Judge and Mrs. Obstschmecker and the people who’d been sitting up at the communion table were left inside the church.

  Judge shook hands with the black priest.

  “You must be the young man who dealt so roughly with Father Youngermann. From everything people have told me it seemed unprovoked and unnecessary.”

  “I was out of line an’ I admit it,” said Judge, “and I beg to apologize for my hasty action. I would’ve never used my feet against a man if my arms were free. I have a bad temper, and I know that is no excuse.”

  “I will convey your apology to Father Youngermann. I’m told that he wasn’t seriously hurt. Are you… visiting the Twin Cities? I don’t think I’ve seen you at OLM before.”

  “I’m from Florida. But this lady here has been going to your church for a while, I believe.”

  “Oh yes, hers is a familiar face.” The black priest held out his hand. “Mrs.…?”

  Mrs. Obstschmecker offered her fingertips (but not her name) for a gingerly handshake.

  “I am not a Catholic myself,” Judge volunteered.

  “No?” (The black priest was not letting go of Mrs. Obstschmecker’s fingers, despite the hint of a gentle tug.)

  “I was brought up a Catholic by my mother, who is now a nun.”

  “Really?” (She tugged again, and the priest responded by clamping her hand inside both of his and flashing his dentures in a priestly smile.)

  “I am a follower of Brother Orson. Praise God.”

  “I always praise God.” (At last he let go of her hand.) “But I can’t say I’d do the same for Brother Orson.”

  “Maybe not, but there was things you said from the pulpit about the Lord’s Prayer and the Judgment soon to be that could of come right off one of Brother Orson’s audio cass-ettes. I was wondering if you had seen his TV show.”

  “No, I can’t say I have. I’ve read about him.”

  “Then you’ve read lies, prob-ly. That’s all you ever hear in the media about him, seck-uler humanist lies.”

  “Judge!” Mrs. Obstschmecker tugged on his coat sleeve. “We should be getting to the cemetery.”

  “This is my great-grandmother, by adoption,” Judge went on, unbudged. “I am taking her to the cemetery where her husband is buried. If you would like to come with us, I will tell you about the promises the Lord has made through his prophet. As you said, in the pulpit, we are living in the Last Days. A Judgment is approaching. All men will not be saved.”

  “Do you know, I think I’ll take you up on that.”

  “Father, please!” Mrs. Obstschmecker acted as though the smoke alarm in the kitchen had gone off. “There’s no necessity!”

  “What’s the old saying? Opportunity knocks but once. I’ve never had a chance to speak with a follower of the famous Brother Orson. None of my parishioners”—he turned to wink at the members of the parish council who’d been hovering at the edge of the conversation—“are likely to become heretics in that direction. As I understand it, Brother Orson holds out little hope of salvation for the sons of Ham.”

  “That’s true. But we are not forbidden to testify unto the heathen.”

  “And you will be heading back this way after a while?”

  “After this lady has had time to pray beside the grave.”

  “Judge, really! I’m sure the Father has more important things to do.”

  “The name is Lyman,” said the priest, holding out his hand again to Judge. “Lyman Sinclair. No need to call me Father.”

  “I didn’t mean to. I got but one father, God Almahty.” Then, with an odd smile, as an afterthought, “Which art in heaven.”

  Mrs. Obstschmecker was too flustered to reprimand Judge for showing so little appreciation to William for having adopted him as his own legal son. It was true, of course, that the boy had no real father (unless it was Ben Winckelmeyer who’d got his own daughter pregnant, which Mrs. Obstschmecker had heard Madge speculating over the phone when she thought her mother wasn’t on the line), but for him to say he had no father was certainly an act of ingratitude.

  Judge led them to the Cadillac, and the priest was suitably impressed, which led to Judge’s explaining who his adoptive father was, and the priest was suitably impressed at that, too. It never ceased to astonish Mrs. Obstschmecker that the name of William Michaels—Dr. Michaels—should be known by so many people who’d never met him. But in fact this black priest had met him, for as they set off for the cemetery (Mrs. Obstschmecker had insisted she’d be more comfortable in the backseat), he explained that he’d gone to school with William at OLM.

  “Well, isn’t that something. You and Billy classmates, my goodness.”

  But the men in the front seat continued talking to each other as though she hadn’t said a word. The priest was interested only in hearing Judge go on about one thing, Brother Orson. Judge, however, wanted to explain about the Rapture and the Last Judgment and some book that was sealed with seven seals, and some horses connected to that. All a lot of nonsense as far as Mrs. Obstschmecker was concerned, and after a few minutes the priest got tired of it, too.

  “Actually, Judge—that’s your name, ‘Judge’?”

  “Since I was baptized into Chrahst, Judge’s been my name. Praise God.”

  “His real name is John,” Mrs. Obstschmecker said, leaning forward to speak directly into the priest’s ear. “John Winckelmeyer.”

  “Actually, Judge,” the priest continued, “I’ve read the Book of Revelations myself, and I’ve got my own ideas about what it may mean. What I’m more interested in is Brother Orson himself and your, uh, relationship with him.”

  “I relate to him every day. Praise God.”

  “On the TV, you mean?”

  “And in my heart.”

  “But the image you see on the TV, you realize, don’t you, that it’s like a cartoon. And when Brother Orson is talking with that angel who’s got so many opinions—”

  “The Angel Lazarus. Praise God.”

  “That’s not a real angel, that’s a computer-generated program. And when you ask them questions—if you’ve got that interactive capability—”

  “When I ask the Angel Lazarus a question, the Angel Lazarus tells me all I need to know. When I was in prison, like Paul, for testifying to my faith, the angel came to me and said I would be redeemed from my bondage. Soon, the angel said. And so I was, not two weeks later. That’s when the Lord sent me here.”

  Mrs. Obstschmecker sighed and gave up trying to keep the boy from making himself look worse than he had to. He talked about his time in prison without an ounce of shame.

  “But you was asking about do I know what I see is a kind of cartoon. Well shit, any fool knows that. But is the pope off in Rome any different? Doesn’t he have his Cistern Chapel with all its graven images of what God’s supposed to look like?”

  “For one thing
,” the priest said, starting to sound like the boy was getting to him (which he always did eventually; Mrs. Obstschmecker had seen him drive William right up the wall), “it is the Sis-teen Chapel, not the Cistern Chapel—”

  “I know that. I was making a joke. Now let me ask you: you think when you see your pope on TV that those little dots sprinkled on the TV screen is a real person? Isn’t that a picture the same as Brother Orson’s picture? Only difference is, Brother Orson is more careful how he gets his picture taken.”

  “Are you aware of the stories that have been in the newspapers? Do you know about the trial going on right now in Florida? It’s not the media who are saying the man is a fabrication. It’s people in his own organization. People who were officers. The chief of the studio where the programs are put together has said, and I quote, ‘Brother Orson is no more real than Mickey Mouse.’”

  “Well then, I guess Mickey Mouse must be more real than we knew.” He turned sideways to smile at the priest. “That’s another joke. Praise God.”

  The boy did have a wicked smile. It always put Mrs. Obstschmecker in mind of the nice young senator who used to work for President Reagan. Oliver North. Except that Judge’s hair was shorter and he had a stockier build.

  “The obvious answer to your question,” Judge said, in his most serious and reverent tone of voice, “is Paul to the Corinthians: For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face. That is a clear prophecy of Brother Orson. And as for the lies in the media, it’s no news that Brother Orson has got enemies. And enemies spread lies.”

  “You have an amazing faith,” said the priest.

  The boy smiled. “When I have spoken with Brother Orson, he has said to me, Judge—he called me by my name, Judge—you have a per-fect faith. And I guess if he said it, it must be so.”

  59

  Valerie Bright was the perfect administrator: brusque, incurious, a benevolent martinet toward her staff, who either loved her or left, and discreetly obsequious to her superiors; to Ben Winckelmeyer on a daily basis, to Dr. Michaels whenever her duties took her within the perimeter of his personal regard. She understood his need for privacy. Creative natures require solitude, and it was one of Ms. Bright’s primary duties (though not one listed in the official job description of the administrative director) to create that solitude for him.

  Ben had discovered her at a Christian Fellowship Breakfast in Eden Prairie some time after his release from prison. Even then she had seemed to him the incarnate spirit of the eighties, one of those plump, gilded assistant directors of a government agency who would appear on the Nightly News denying guilt, glaring at the cameras through enormous glasses, shameless and unconfoundable. This had been during a troubled period for the breakfast’s sponsor, the Son of Man Foundation, and Ms. Bright had shown the stuff she was made of by proclaiming her undiminished faith in the copresidents of the foundation, Hal and Bess McKinley. If the Lord had bestowed unusual bounties on them, surely that was a mark of his grace and no reason for a media witch-hunt. When less confident voices expressed misgivings and even repeated the media’s allegations, Ms. Bright had held her hands over her ears and declared, “I don’t want to hear any more so-called facts.” Then, lowering her hands and smiling warmly, “I thought this was supposed to be a fellowship breakfast.”

  She had been much cast down when the McKinleys, at their sentencing, had acknowledged some degree of guilt with regard to the funds that had disappeared, though they still insisted that they’d always tried to follow the promptings of the Holy Spirit. The judge had said he’d try to do the same in meting out their sentence, which was eight to twelve years, or half that term if either of the copresidents was able to help in locating the missing funds.

  Ms. Bright had been furious. “I just know that man was being sarcastic,” she’d confided to Ben on their first date, two months after the fellowship breakfast. “Mean and sarcastic.”

  “Try not to think about it,” he had urged.

  “You’re right, I know. But when I think of those two beautiful people in some terrible prison…”

  “Prison doesn’t have to be terrible. If I hadn’t been in prison, I probably wouldn’t have found my way to Jesus. Prison can lead sinners back to God.”

  Ms. Bright had squeezed his hand. “You are such a brave man, Ben Winckelmeyer! And you’re right, too. The Lord doesn’t send us more grief than he knows we can handle. In the long run, it probably will be a blessing.”

  A month later, Ms. Bright had found herself unemployed, when it developed that the Eden Prairie Development Fund (EPDF) in which she had served as executive secretary, represented a significant part of the vanished assets of the Son of Man Foundation. Ms. Bright had accepted this stroke of fate without a murmur of protest. Ben believed her when she said she’d never had the faintest suspicion that EPDF had been anything but what it seemed, a real estate developer. The woman was a jewel, and Ben had offered her a position with Medical Defense Systems at a salary matching what she’d been earning at EPDF.

  She expressed her gratitude at the job offer with a hug and a kiss. “But no more than that, mind you,” she’d said, lowering the protective barrier of her glasses to peek out over the top of the frames flirtatiously. “That’s all any man gets till I’m wearing a wedding ring!” This to a man who’d rounded the bend of sixty, a man almost twice her own age. And she was in earnest: if he’d proposed, she’d have accepted. To Ms. Bright marriage represented only a more intensive form of management.

  At Medical Defense Systems headquarters Ben addressed her as Ms. Bright, an appellation she preferred to Miss. Ms. represented her commitment to feminism, albeit a fundamentalist feminism. She believed in women’s right to equal pay, and was alert to any sign of on-the-job sexual harassment, including the use of loose or insinuating language, as more than one former employee of MDS had learned to his cost.

  Except in her dress, which was unexceptionably drab, costly, and ladylike, Ms. Bright avoided stereotypically feminine behavior. If a man held a door open for her, she froze in her tracks and would not go through it. She prided herself on doing no cooking that could not be done in a microwave. The only magazines she read were Fortune, U.S. News and World Report, the Journal of Hospital Administration and, until it ceased publication, The Good News Gazette, the McKinleys’ monthly newsletter. She loved baseball and attended the Twins’ home games on Sundays.

  At all other times, so far as Ben could determine, she worked. She worked not only as administrative director for Medical Defense Systems, but soon was acting in a similar (though unacknowledged capacity) for other businesses that nestled under MDS’s capacious umbrella. For MDS was much more than a simple research facility in the war against ARVIDS; it was also, in some sense, a chain of hotels, a prison system, and a realty and construction company. Indeed, the profits of these related businesses—the Minnehaha Hostels, the MedSec Group, and the Northwestern Development Fund—rather dwarfed, as financial entities, their parent (or host) organization, MDS, and Ms. Bright soon was devoting considerably more attention to these affiliates and offshoots than to MDS itself, which in its nature could not be administered efficiently. For if one’s business is research, and there is no guarantee that the research will achieve results, and if that business defines itself as not-for-profit, then what can an administrator do? There was only one supplier for the ten thousand mice that MDS purchased every year, at twenty-five dollars apiece, and that supplier did not give discounts for quantity. If Dr. Michaels approved a particular experiment, then MDS had to bear the expense. Funding sources seemed not to be a problem. In its not-for-profit infancy, with a staff of only the good doctor and some two dozen technicians, MDS had played a significant role in developing the vaccine that had brought the AIDS epidemic to an end. Now, with ARVIDS cutting its much wider swathe and wreaking proportionally greater havoc, MDS had virtual carte blanche both from the government and the big foundations. Whatever Dr. Michaels wanted, Dr. Michaels got—from twenty-five-dollar m
ice to twenty-five-thousand-dollar incinerators for the disposal of said mice’s infected corpses.

  For the profit-oriented concerns, especially for Northwestern Development, Dr. Michaels’s word was not so inevitably taken as law. Indeed, his connection with this side of things was generally deemphasized. He was known to be a member of the board in all three companies, and a shareholder, but so were many prominent figures in the medical world and in state government. Minnesota hoped to set an example for the rest of the country in operating a system of treatment and security that would be fair to both the victims of the plague and the community at large. If the investors who helped create that system also realized a profit in doing so, that was one of the benefits of the free enterprise system—and none of anyone else’s business.

  But even in a medical emergency on this terrible scale, there were people who insisted on monkey-wrenching the system, and it was another of Ms. Bright’s unwritten duties to deal with such troublemakers. In most cases, this meant reaching an understanding with former long-term residents of one of the Minnehaha Hostels who wished to take back a benefaction (freely given) to MDS, now that they supposed themselves recovered and out of reach of ARVIDS’s scythe. Less numerous but more troublesome were the disgruntled heirs of those whom MDS had been unable to help (some 46 percent, alas), who threatened to litigate to recover a testamentary endowment. No such litigation had ever succeeded, but it always looked bad, and there were certain confidential documents that it would not do to have subpoenaed, so sometimes an out-of-court settlement was the wisest course. In all these matters, Ms. Bright and her legal staff could be counted on to realize the organization’s overall goals with a minimum of fuss.