THE M.D. A Horror Story

by Thomas M. Disch

  “You all right? Why’s Ben sitting there in the car by himself?”

  “Because he’s dead. He died while we were driving here.”

  “No shit.”

  There was something almost Buddhist in his lack of affect, something one might rather envy than pity. But then she was not evidencing much overt feeling herself. Nothing settles the nerves and staunches hurt like the need to cope. She’d had to drive the length and breadth of Willowville with Ben still strapped in the driver’s seat, her puppet. She’d stopped at every traffic light and stop sign (her foot could barely reach the brake), scanning the cross streets at every corner, with no idea of which way to turn to reach William’s house (always in the past she’d been a passive visitor, letting her hosts do the driving), certain any time Ben’s head dropped forward to his chest that a passerby would notice and phone the Public Health Authority. She would pull his head back by a lock of hair and continue steering with her right hand, and no one had noticed anything, because there were no passersby except the other drivers on the street.

  “He died in the driver’s seat? Then how’d you get here?”

  “I’m sorry, I can’t explain all that now. Is William in the house?”

  “No, I’m here by myself. Lisa sent the kids and their nanny on the airplane to see her folks in the East. Then she followed on a later flight. But I don’t know where William’s gone to. He hasn’t been home for a few days now. Sometimes he stays at MDS or else at Madge’s place in St. Paul. So I wasn’t worried.”

  Judge had that shifty look he always got when he was lying, but Judith knew better than to confront him head on.

  “What you figuring to do with…?” Judge nodded discreetly in the direction of Ben’s corpse. “Ain’t we supposed to call the Public Health number any time someone dies?”

  “Ben was just released from a PHA detention center. It’s quite likely we’d both be put in quarantine if we went by the rules and reported his death. So what I suggest is that you open the garage door and I drive the car in there. After that, William will know the best course to take, once he gets home. Do you have any idea where he might be?”

  “Not if he ain’t where I said first—MDS or Madge’s.”

  “When was the last time he was actually home?”

  “Monday night was when he didn’t get home to dinner. Since then.”

  “And Lisa set off?”

  “Next day.”

  “You’ve been here by yourself since then?”

  “Where’m I going to go with this damn thing on my ankle?” He tugged at the cloth of his jeans, lifting the frayed cuff high enough to reveal the bulge of the parole band beneath his stocking. “Anyhow, I’m not alone. I can talk to Brother Orson any time I need to, and God is always right beside me. He is my buckler and the horn of my salvation.”

  She almost laughed out loud, not so much at his absurdity as at her own in having come all this way in the hope of having some effect on him. In just this little time she knew (she remembered) that there was nothing she could say that he would hear. Knowing that was oddly liberating.

  “Something funny?” he asked with his usual alertness to being looked at askance.

  “The situation—our standing about like this, chatting, while a corpse is waiting to be disposed of. It’s a little macabre, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Uh-huh. Well, I’ll get the garage open. You can handle the car?”

  “That’s what I’ve been doing most of the afternoon.”

  She got back into the car and did the maneuvering needed to ease the car into the center space of the garage, next to Lisa’s Volvo.

  Judith turned off the ignition as the garage door rumbled closed. She repositioned her father’s head against the headrest and tried, without exerting much pressure, to make his eyelids close.

  “Here,” Judge said, reaching in through the open window of the car. “Let me do that.” She looked away, and when she looked back Ben seemed at rest.

  “You want to leave him in here?” Judge asked. “Or what?”

  “I think so. For now.”

  Judith followed Judge along a hallway hung with Lisa’s bright, innocuous watercolors and prints—floral close-ups and rudimentary landscapes that wanted to be Matisses but wound up looking like greeting cards and record sleeves for easy listening music. Judith was glad that Lisa had spared them the effort of trying to be civil to each other by her early departure.

  When they entered the dining room, the smell that had been only a faint sickliness in the hallway became an outright stench.

  “Goodness! What in the world—?”

  “I guess I should of thrown out all these flowers.”

  There were vases of dead and dying roses anywhere there was a level surface to put them, whole bushes torn from their beds and sagging despondently in the room’s curtained twilight. The carpet was strewn with petals.

  “It’s the roses that smell so bad?” Judith marveled.

  “When there’s a whole lot of them like this it can smell pretty bad.”

  “It smells more like something that’s gone bad in the refrigerator.”

  “You can go check the icebox if you want. Thing is, a smell builds up gradual and you don’t notice if you’re always there where the smell is. People visiting at Starke used to complain about how we all smelled, but we couldn’t smell it. Didn’t you have a suitcase?”

  “I left it at the station.”

  “I thought it might be at your hotel.”

  “I’m not staying at a hotel, John,” she said firmly. “I’m staying here.”

  He scowled. “Lisa didn’t say anything about that to me.”

  “I suppose she took it for granted.”

  “And don’t call me John! In the baptism of the Gospel my name is Judge.”

  “I know,” she said. “One of the last things your grandfather talked about was to remind me you were touchy about your name.”

  “I am not touchy!”

  This time she really couldn’t help it, though she pressed her lips together and lowered her eyes to the petal-strewn carpet. The laughter welled up from inside like carbonation fizzing up from a bottle the moment it’s uncapped. And not just a snort or a chortle but hard, muscular laughter.

  Judge, of course, swelled up with indignation, and that was even funnier. He glowered at her as she went on laughing, but at last, defeated, he turned on his heel and left her alone in the dining room with the rotting flowers. There was the sound of loud, reproachful footsteps mounting the stairs and the slamming of a door.

  At once she stopped laughing.

  It seemed as though someone had entered the room at that moment, not as though someone had left it. It was her sorrow, and as soon as she had recognized it, she was able to welcome it with the first tears she’d shed since Ben had died.

  75

  Finally, after wasting one whole day trying to go through the official channels, William had been able to get someone to listen to him—a black teenager named Larry who was in charge of the food tent where William got his meals. Larry had been living in the camp over a year and was well enough connected with its clandestine hierarchy that he was able to send a message to a woman named Lorine, who would be able, according to Larry, to sneak William into the old Midway area, which housed the PHA offices and living quarters. From there, William would be able to phone anywhere in the Twin Cities, and if he was who he claimed he was, he’d be able to contact someone who could vouch for him.

  Lorine appeared at three-thirty. A squat, blond woman who must have been at least ten years his senior, Lorine still wore the traditional uniform of teenage rebellion—leather jacket, jeans, and lots of junk jewelry. She smoked nonstop, sucking at the cigarettes as though she were fighting to draw a breath of air from a faulty respirator.

  William went through the story again. Lorine listened with selective inattention. She seemed to have no interest in how he’d been shanghaied into the camp or in whether or not he had ARVIDS. It did
n’t take medical training to see that she did. Her fingers had a telltale tremor every time she lifted a cigarette to her lips. Tears leaked, unheeded, from the corners of her eyes, tracing lines of melted mascara down her cheeks. And the sour smell of the disease came off her like the smell of a caged animal in the zoo. Even the stink of her Salems couldn’t mask it. But strangely, on Lorine these marks of imminent death seemed less to be symptoms of disease than badges of defiance, like her leather jacket and the haze of her cigarette smoke.

  Lorine was interested, essentially, in only one thing—how much William might be able to pay for his release.

  “In cash,” she emphasized. “For obvious reasons”—she had a brief fit of coughing, recovered, blinked away tears, and took a drag on her cigarette—“it’s got to be cash. Gold is okay, too. Not jewelry, just the kind of gold that looks like candy bars.”

  “I’ve got money in various bank accounts. If I wrote out a check to cash…?”

  “Yeah, but who’s going to take it into a bank? That’s the problem. See, how could we trust you not to try to turn us in once you’re out of here?”

  “If I did that, I’d put myself in danger of being sent back here myself.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. If you’re the big shot you say you are, and if you don’t test positive, once you’re out, you’re out. And as soon as you’re out you’ll forget the reasons you had to be grateful to me and my friends. That seems to be human nature.” She took in a lungful of smoke and grimaced philosophically.

  “If you want money, I can get you money. I keep a reserve of cash in my safe. If I can get through to someone on the phone, I can tell them how to open it.”

  “Now you’re cooking. How much you think is in the safe?”

  “Ten thousand, maybe more.”

  “You’ll need to come up with more than that if you want exit papers, but that ought to set the wheels in motion. No, don’t tell me—I’m telepathic—you’re going to say, ‘That’s blackmail!’”

  William tried to echo her smartass tone. “No, more like ransom for a kidnapping.”

  She nodded approvingly. “Right. This is your own personal hostage crisis. So, since we’re agreed on that, let’s head to the trailer.”

  Lorine led him on a zigzag path through the fairgrounds, stopping along the way to confer with other unofficial figures of authority: the bouncer outside a big merry-go-round (which had become a crack house, according to someone William had stood in line with the day before in Pioneer Hall); an old woman selling frayed paperbacks and used magazines from a Pronto-Pup stand.

  The sidewalks were crowded with people, mostly dressed in the pajamas supplied by the camp, but few of them were going anywhere. They stood in clusters, or sat along the curb, a few speaking, most silent, all with an air of aggrieved resignation, as though they had been waiting hours for a parade that would never appear. At intervals one of the green and white PHA service vehicles would crawl by, like a police car cruising a high-crime neighborhood.

  “So, Larry says you’re some kind of doctor.”

  William nodded. “I run a research facility.”

  “Researching what exactly?”

  “Various aspects of immune response.”

  Hearing Lorine’s wheezy laugh was like looking at an X-ray of her damaged lungs. “Meaning you specialize in ARVIDS?”

  “Someone has to, if there’s ever going to be a cure.”

  She stopped in front of a boarded-up concession booth and squinted at him through a twisting veil of cigarette smoke. “What did you say your name was?”

  “Michaels.”

  “William Michaels—the guy on the news?”

  “From time to time.”

  “You’re the one who’s got this plan for turning some whole country up north into another plague camp like this?” She didn’t wait for confirmation. “Shit,” she said, dropping her cigarette to the pavement and grinding it out. She looked at him with candid, gloating calculation.

  William felt reassured. Now that he’d been recognized for who he was, it would only be a matter of time until he was released. The size of the ransom demanded was a matter of indifference to him.

  Lorine developed a sense of urgency, and they headed directly to the Midway with no more side stops, entering through a secondary gate, where the guards weren’t uniformed in PHA green. The trailer they went to was located behind the main Ferris wheel, which was still operational, being run for the entertainment of PHA personnel and for its value as PR. From a distance, the sight of the revolving Ferris wheel gave the fairgrounds an air of business-as-usual cheeriness. It served the same purpose, though on an immensely larger scale, as the bouquet beside a sickbed.

  The trailer was furnished sparely with two desks and a few office chairs. Supplies of liquor, chocolate, and cigarettes—the unofficial currency of the camp—were arrayed in cabinets with padlocked doors of steel mesh.

  Lorine unlocked one of the cabinets, took out a phone, and plugged it into a wall jack. “So tell me, what do I dial?”

  He gave her Ben’s home number first, and when no one answered there, his number at MDS. When Ben’s secretary answered, Lorine refused to relinquish control of the phone. “All she could tell me,” she summarized, when she’d hung up, “was that he wasn’t there now and she didn’t know when he would be. So who do I call next?”

  He gave her the general number for MDS and told her to try and be put through to the administrative director, Valerie Bright. After being shunted about to various extensions, Lorine hung up. “It’s the same with her as with that Winckelberger guy: she’s not there, and no one can say where she is or when she’ll be back. Strike two.”

  There was no recourse but to have Lorine dial his number at home. He hadn’t wanted to involve his wife in his difficulties any more than he could help. Lisa did not cope well with unexpected demands. He also did not want to give her the combination of his safe. She didn’t even know there was a safe in his study.

  William was already figuring whom to call next when someone answered the phone after just two rings. “Hello,” Lorine said, “is this Mrs. William Michaels?” And then, after a pause, “Well, is Mrs. Michaels there? I’d like to speak to her.” And then, after a longer pause, in a tone of exasperation, “Shit. Hung up.”

  “But someone was there,” William insisted.

  “A woman. She had the same last name as the first person you had me call.”

  “Winckelmeyer. Judith Winckelmeyer?”

  “Right.”

  “Judith wouldn’t just hang up, that isn’t like her.”

  Lorine snorted derision and dug into the zippered pocket of her jacket for a pack of Salems. “You’d be surprised how many people hang up their phones when they hear where the call is coming from. I got a brother in Edina. You think he’s happy to have me call up? You think if I ask to talk with one of my nieces they are ever there? Once you’re inside this fence, you are already considered dead by the people outside. And they don’t like to be visited by ghosts, even over the phone. Welcome to hell, Dr. Williams.”

  “But Judith didn’t know who was calling. Let me use the phone. I know she won’t hang up on me.”

  Lorine lighted a cigarette. “Help yourself.”

  Just feeling the beige plastic of the receiver in his hand was like catching hold of a lifeline. He had only to dial the right seven digits and, like a lottery winner, all his problems would be over.

  He dialed his home number and Judith answered at once with a questioning “Hello?”

  “Judith? Judith, it’s William—please don’t hang up again. This is very important.”

  “William! I didn’t hang up, the line just went dead for some reason. Where are you? Ben said you were picked up by the PHA.”

  “That’s where I am now. At the fairgrounds. It’s been a nightmare, but I can’t go into it now. Is Lisa there?”

  “Lisa had already left before I got here.”

  “Left for where?”

  �
�To visit her brother in the Berkshires. She left on Tuesday with the boys and your au pair. I’m alone here with Judge. William, are you all right?”

  The question seemed to act like a karate chop right to the root of his pain. It flared through his nervous system like magnesium, a blast of pure white agony obliterating everything else.

  Lorine pried the phone from his fingers with the schooled indifference of a nurse to whom another person’s pain is only a symptom to be dealt with, like fever or incontinence. “Hello, Miss Winckelberger?” she said into the phone. “Your friend is experiencing some temporary distress. The reason he called is that he wanted someone at that number to open his office safe and take some money from it. And then be ready to bring the money to… at this point it hasn’t been decided where. So if you could get the money and wait for us to call again later… do you think you could do that?”

  William could not hear Judith’s reply, but it seemed to satisfy Lorine.

  “What is the combination of the safe?” Lorine asked him.

  He couldn’t answer at once. The aftershock of the pain and fear that it might return made it hard to think of anything else.

  “Dr. Williams?” Lorine insisted, squeezing her eyes into slits.

  When he had told her the combination of the safe, he felt a strange and humbling helplessness.

  “And where is the safe, your friend wants to know.”

  “In the wall to the right of my desk. Behind my medical degree.”

  Lorine passed on the information to Judith with her own commentary: “He says it’s in the first place anyone would look, behind the degree on the wall of his office. Maybe there’s even an arrow pointing to it and a sign saying, ‘Safe Here.’” After a pause, she said, to herself, “I don’t believe it,” and then, looking up, to William, “She hung up again. You think I said something to offend her?”

  But William wasn’t thinking at all. The pain had returned, not at full force, only a dull pain, bearable if it didn’t get worse.

  Lorine dialed the number again, and reported, “Busy.” She returned the receiver to its cradle. “Just out of curiosity, is that Judith someone you know real well? I mean she isn’t likely to just take the money and run, is she?”