THE M.D. A Horror Story

by Thomas M. Disch

  —Appendicitis. It was the god’s voice, distant and muffled, as though he stood some distance away from the cot in which William lay restrained. A kind of shimmering appeared on the curtains veiling the ward from his view, like a TV tuned to an inert channel, a scattering of pale violet blips that did not resolve into coherent forms.—You had appendicitis once, but you wouldn’t remember it. You thought it only a stomachache, and you had the good sense to use the caduceus at once. That was the first time you used it, in fact, after poor Ned had had his accident.

  “I don’t remember.”

  —Who remembers every cough and cold and stomachache they’ve ever had?

  The suspicion formed, as beads of sweat, before his mind had framed the words. “Why are you telling me this? Why are you here at all: I’m wide awake, I’m not doing drugs.”

  —I’ve come to say good-bye while there’s still an opportunity. I’ve become quite fond of you, William, in a peculiar way. We gods to have our vulnerabilities, though not in the same sense you mortals do.

  “No! Please! If I’ve done something wrong—”

  The god’s laughter pierced his flesh like a blast of winter wind through a thin cotton shirt.

  —Wrong! Can you suppose I concern myself with right and wrong? Have I ever urged such considerations on you? Health and unhealth, life and death, these are my antinomies. And they’ve been yours. You mustn’t think, because I’m leaving you, that you have fallen in my estimation. That has never been the way of it. When the god withdraws his aegis, then must the hero come into his own.

  “I’m going to die then?”

  —Had you ever supposed otherwise? All mortals die, and William Michaels is mortal. You can draw your own conclusion from that. What I hope, William, is that you die well, not in abjection but bravely and with a little style.

  “Then don’t let me die here!”

  —You have my word for that: you won’t die here.

  “I mean, in quarantine, a prisoner.”

  —I wasn’t quibbling, I knew what you meant, and my promise is for that. You’ll die just where you wish—at home, in bed.

  “Thank you.” He managed a rueful laugh.

  —And so farewell.

  The flickering faded from the curtain. It was too late to offer his own good-bye. The god had departed.

  70

  Mrs. Obstschmecker was in such a state she didn’t know what to do. She was sure that having Lance Hill in the house spelled trouble, she knew it like she knew two plus two. But would her daughter listen to her? No, not a word. Madge even swore he’d done some kind of miracle for Ned, started him to crying. Mrs. Obstschmecker couldn’t see anything very wonderful in that, especially since ever afterward Ned hadn’t stopped crying except when he was asleep. His tears meant about as much as the water dripping from a leaky faucet. The boy’s plumbing was broken, simple as that, but Madge insisted it was a sign Ned was going to get completely better, and now there was another one of her cases at the clinic who was the same age as Ned and he had actually started to be able to move his lips and curl his fingers, so that made Madge even more certain about Ned. She couldn’t talk about anything else. She went upstairs all the time with that Lance Hill, from the moment she got home from work to the moment she went back to the clinic in the morning. She even had her dinners upstairs, and when Mrs. Obstschmecker dared to complain about having to eat nothing but microwave dinners, Madge just laughed and told her she had only herself to blame if she was too proud to sit down at the same table with Lance. She could hear them up there laughing and moving furniture around, and not a word about how long the man was going to go on staying with them. Officially his room was down in the basement, in the room Henry had fixed up for a playroom for the kids before Ned got sick, but he was almost never down there, he was upstairs with Madge all through the night so far as Mrs. Obstschmecker could tell, and in the daytime he was all over the house, in and out of the kitchen, up and down the stairs, as though the house were his.

  It wasn’t pride that made Mrs. Obstschmecker leary of sitting down to dinner with Lance Hill or having any more to do with him than was strictly necessary. It was a concern for her health. You could tell just by looking at him that the man was sick, and if that wasn’t enough you could hear him in the bathroom throwing up into the toilet, not to mention his coughing in the morning, which he said was a smoker’s cough, though he never smoked. Thank heaven for that at least. She’d said to Madge, what if it was the plague? It was the same symptoms they warned you to look for on TV. Madge just told her to mind her own business. She wouldn’t discuss it, and when, in desperation, Mrs. Obstschmecker had threatened to call the Public Health hot line, Madge said, “You do that and you’ll have the lot of us sent to a quarantine camp.”

  And that was probably true. The Public Health officials denied all the time that they put everyone who was living with someone who had the plague into the camps along with the sick person. Mrs. Obstschmecker as a general rule believed what the authorities told her, but in this case you had to wonder. Madge said there were two houses within just a block along Ludens that were boarded up with black-and-yellow striped tape that meant the PHA had been there, and that was just one street. What happened to the other people living in a house, the ones who weren’t sick, when it was sealed up by the PHA? Alternative housing, that’s what the newscasters said, and they could show pictures on TV to prove it. But still, you had to wonder.

  So she hadn’t carried out her threat to report Lance to the Public Health Authority, and she probably wouldn’t even if the man died of the plague right here in the house. She didn’t know what they’d do with the body, probably bury it in the basement or stick it into the deep freeze, if the deep freeze still worked. That’s what you were always hearing other people had done. That was safer than trying to dump a dead body on an empty street, since a lot of people got caught when they tried to do that. What a world it was where you could sit at your own kitchen table drinking hot milk and eating strawberry jam on toasted raisin bread and think about things like that!

  Looking at the almost empty jar of strawberry jam gave Mrs. Obstschmecker a clever idea. It used to be, back in the days before Mr. Obstschmecker had died and she had been busier in the kitchen, that Mrs. Obstschmecker had made her own jam and applesauce and canned tomatoes and pickles and such, and the bulk of her home canning had been stored on shelves in the basement. There almost certainly was nothing left of those efforts but the empty jars, but Lance Hill wouldn’t know that, so if he should happen to come down to the basement while she was there (which wasn’t likely, since he usually slept till well past eleven), it wouldn’t seem as though she’d gone down there to snoop in his room—which she was perfectly entitled to do in her own house, you couldn’t even call it snooping. No, she’d gone downstairs to look for a jar of strawberry jam.

  The bulb at the top of the steps had burnt out (Madge wan terrible about replacing bulbs), and when Mrs. Obstschmecker had got to the bottom of the steps, there wasn’t even a dead bulb in the main basement overhead socket. For a moment, in her exasperation, she considered tramping all the way up the stairs to get a flashlight, but just coming down the steps had left her a little winded. To be able to manage the steps at all at age ninety-two was remarkable enough, if you thought about it. Anyhow there was enough light to find her way around.

  In the room where Lance had put his things Mrs. Obstschmecker was astonished to discover the brass standing lamp that used to be by the chair in her own bedroom before Madge had remodeled everything. With a working three-way bulb in it! And here was the couch that had been up on the sun deck till the springs busted out through the bottom. And sheets and two blankets draped over the armrest. Still unfolded: Obviously Lance was sleeping upstairs, and probably right in the same bed with Madge.

  When Mrs. Obstschmecker had hinted at this suspicion to her daughter, Madge had shot right back by asking her if she and Lance weren’t still married in the eyes of Holy Mother Church,
an expression Madge used only when she was trying to be sarcastic. Even so, Mrs. Obstschmecker hadn’t known what to answer. In fact, even though he’d left the States in his twenties and was now of mature years, even though he’d deserted the army and had admitted to being a sexual deviate and had got AIDS back in the eighties, despite all those things, it was true, Lance was Madge’s husband and therefore entitled to sleep with her anytime he liked, which Mrs. Obstschmecker had always found a hard pill to swallow when Mr. Obstschmecker had told her that was the Church’s teaching and her confessor had said he was right. “That is the cross,” Father Windakiewiczowa had told her, “that the wife must bear.”

  Lance’s one little suitcase was unlocked, but there was nothing very interesting in it, just shirts and ties and papers and underwear that hadn’t been properly laundered for some time. Men’s underwear was a problem never discussed on the ads on TV. She used to have to soak Mr. Obstschmecker’s shorts for an hour before washing in order to get rid of the stains from where he hadn’t wiped himself properly. There were more crosses wives had to bear than Father Windakiewiczowa ever dreamed of.

  The papers didn’t look that interesting. All official-looking documents. No letters, no pictures, just one old grubby paperback titled Astrology for Leos. But then, inside the breast pocket of the jacket he’d left hanging on the hook behind the door, Mrs. Obstschmecker made a discovery that justified the effort of coming down to the basement. A gun. Not a very big gun, but definitely a real gun that would fire real bullets. Mrs. Obstschmecker had never had a gun in her hand before. It was an odd feeling. She almost could have wished the gun belonged to her. She almost considered taking it. But of course Lance would have known whom to blame. She returned it to the pocket of his suit with a cluck of disappointment.

  And just in the knick of time, too, for the next moment she could hear footsteps coming down the stairs, and she barely had time to step outside the room before Lance appeared, wearing the peach-colored cotton bathrobe that Madge had spent eighty-five dollars for at Dayton’s.

  “Well, well, Grandma O.!” he said, with a big smirk. “I didn’t think you could handle the stairs.”

  “I don’t know why not.”

  “That’s what you said yesterday when Madge wanted you to come up and see Ned.”

  “I can handle the stairs if I make an effort.”

  “I see.”

  She knew what he was thinking, he was thinking she’d come down here to snoop in his room. So she played her trump: “I came down here to get a fresh jar of strawberry jam. We’re almost out of jam.”

  She headed toward the farther, darker end of the basement, which meant having to go past the deep freeze. As she did, she could hear it rumbling to itself. So it did still work! But why was it on? There certainly was plenty of room in the freezer that was part of the icebox in the kitchen. Madge wouldn’t have had to bring anything down here. Unless there were things in the freezer she didn’t want her mother to know about. Ice cream?

  “Can I help you get the jam?” he asked in a way that seemed like he was really asking something else. It dawned on her that it might have been Lance, not Madge, who’d turned on the freezer.

  She said, “Yes, I’d appreciate that,” and she led him to the shelves that Mr. Obstschmecker had built so long ago (it must have been before the war) and pointed to the topmost shelf, where there were rows of dusty pint-size mason jars. “Up there, I think.”

  Lance went and got the stepladder from beside the broken washing machine and brought it back and climbed up to the top step. “It’s so dark. I can’t see very well.”

  “That’s why I went into the playroom and turned the light on there,” Mrs. Obstschmecker declared, with a sense of having perfected her alibi.

  “Well, I can’t see any jars that aren’t empty. But there’s this.” He came down off the stepladder and showed her a letter.

  “What’s that?”

  Lance blew dust off the envelope, and squinted. “It says, ‘For Billy.’”

  “Oh yes.” Mrs. Obstschmecker nodded her head as though she’d just remembered something. “I put that there a long time ago. Let me see.”

  He handed her the envelope. “Yes, of course,” she said. She recognized the jaggedy handwriting at once as Henry’s. “You see—it’s my handwriting. My goodness, what a long time ago I must have left that there!”

  He looked at her skeptically but made no direct challenge. “What about the strawberry jam?”

  “Just look around, it’ll be on one of those shelves. I’d better go back upstairs.”

  She managed the steps faster going up than she had coming down, she was that eager to get to her room and open the letter. She couldn’t imagine what Henry would have written in a letter to Billy or how the letter had ended up where it was, but she was sure its contents would be interesting.

  Once in her room, she switched on the electronic lock that bolted the door shut. Then she took the letter into the bathroom and wiped off the dust with a Kleenex. She wiggled a fingernail under the flap of the envelope but the glue held fast. “Darn it!” she fretted, but she did not give in to impatience. She’d dealt with this same situation before, and she knew that if she took the time to steam open the envelope, no one would ever be the wiser, if and when she had to pass the letter along. So she hid the letter at the bottom of the lingerie drawer until such time as she would be sure to have the kitchen to herself.

  No sooner had she closed the dresser drawer than the telephone rang. She picked it up without waiting to hear who it was on the answering machine.

  As usual, it was someone asking for Madge.

  “I’m afraid my daughter is not here now. You can probably reach her at the clinic.”

  “Is this Mrs. Obstschmecker?”

  “Yes, it is,” she answered, surprised at even that degree of recognition.

  “This is Judith Winckelmeyer.”

  It took a moment for the name to register, and then she said, “Judith Winckelmeyer! For goodness’ sakes. It’s been years since I’ve heard your voice. Where are you?”

  “I’m in Minneapolis, at the bus station.”

  “I didn’t know you were planning a trip here! You know, I just had the nicest time with that boy of yours. He drove me out to visit Mr. Obstschmecker at Veterans’ Cemetery, and to Mass beforehand, and all the way there I kept thinking how much he looked like my husband. I don’t believe you ever met Mr. Obstschmecker. He would have been before your time.”

  “You wouldn’t know where I could find William, would you?”

  “Well, if he’s not at home, I suppose he must be at work.”

  “I’ve tried phoning both places, and I simply don’t get an answer. I don’t want to take a taxi all the way out to Willowville if there’s no one there.”

  “Of course not.”

  “So I called you on the chance that William or Judge or Lisa might have stopped by.”

  “No. But you wouldn’t believe who is here: Lance Hill!”

  “Who?”

  “Madge’s first husband. Ned’s father. He used to be called Lance, but now he says he’s Launce, because he’s been living in Canada such a long time. And now he’s living in our basement. Isn’t that something?”

  “Do you have a number where I could call Madge?”

  Mrs. Obstschmecker read off the number, which was written on a piece of adhesive tape taped to the phone.

  Judith thanked her and hung up. She hadn’t paid attention to a single word Mrs. Obstschmecker had said. She hadn’t even asked a polite how-are-you. Where did young people learn their manners?

  71

  Since the last time she’d come here in ‘93, when she’d brought John (at age eleven he wasn’t “Judge”) to visit William and his grandfather, downtown Minneapolis had become a nightmare. But that was true of almost any downtown area nowadays. First the recession and then the plague, and Hennepin Avenue was as dead as Nineveh. There were no shoppers and little to shop for. Except for the
bus depot and a Salvation Army thrift shop, the street-level stores were either boarded up or gaped at the desolated streets through broken windows. One such shop, the Shoe Tree, with a sign in its single intact window saying LAST DAYS—BIG BARGAINS, had become a kind of dovecote, all full of coos and flutterings when Judith stopped in the doorway to admire the effect. In its own way it was as romantic as a ruined chapel.

  A few blocks east of Hennepin there still were functioning office buildings and a few restaurants and shops that connected to them along the second-story skywalks, but even here the city gave the impression of a genuine ghost town, at least at street level and at eleven A.M. In an odd way, Judith felt personally responsible for what she saw, for it hadn’t been that long ago that she’d been a believer in deep ecology and in the absolute necessity of trimming the human race back to a sustainable, preindustrial-era size before people simply poisoned the planet with their waste products, all the pollutants and gases and radioactive sludge that were laying the foundations for an otherwise unavoidable ecological catastrophe. In a sense, these desolated streets were what she had been wishing for, since you couldn’t reduce the size of the human race so drastically without dooming a lot of prime real estate to abandonment—and, more to the point, sentencing millions of people to death. In her deep ecology days she’d never worried much about the means that would be required to put man and nature back in the right proportions, probably because she hadn’t believed it would ever happen. Now it was happening all around her. The figures on ARVIDS were appalling, and there didn’t seem to be any upward limit to the harm it might still do. In some areas, nearly ten percent of the population had been killed, and there was no end in sight. During the Black Death of 1350, half the population of Europe died; according to some authorities, three-quarters. For years that plague had raged, and then, for no known reason, it had stopped. It was not a comforting precedent.