THE M.D. A Horror Story

by Thomas M. Disch

  “I should of said before that Madge ain’t home. She’d already gone out for the night with a friend of hers when I called. The old lady had to let me in.”

  Judge slid his right arm under William’s knees and his left arm under the shoulders and lifted his father, with a grunt of effort, from the car. Then he toed the car door shut and carried his sagging burden across the lawn toward the front porch. William felt each footstep Judge took as a shudder in his body’s core. When Judge stumbled, mounting the porch steps, there seemed a kind of inevitability to it.

  For some time after this, William was in a state of confusion. He did not lose consciousness; rather, he lost control of its direction, so that at first, lying on the wooden boards of the porch, his attention was fixed on the overhead light bulb as fat June bugs circled it and battered themselves against it. Then he was again being carried upstairs, and he remembered the remark a medical lecturer at the U had made concerning hospital care, that it is a ritual of infantilization: the bland foods, being bathed by other hands, the regulated bedtime, the steady erosion of one’s personal authority. And here he was, in his son’s arms as once he’d been in his father’s, being carried up the same staircase, and placed in the same bed he’d slept in as a child. There could be a strange comfort, the lecturer had argued, in being treated so, but William couldn’t remember the reason he’d put forward. It had something to do with fear.

  He remembered why he had demanded to be brought to this house. He must have the caduceus, which was hidden in the attic. But he could not go there himself, nor could he ask to be carried up another flight of stairs and left alone there, even if he’d have had the strength to uncover the caduceus himself, which was doubtful. Yet for some reason he did not want Judge to look for it for him. Better to ask Judith.

  He cleared his throat, and Judge bent down over him, and he was able to ask, “Is your mother here?”

  Judge shook his head, offering no explanation.

  “Or Lisa?”

  Again he shook his head.

  There was no help for it. “There is something in the attic I must ask you to get for me.”

  Judge nodded.

  “A kind of good luck charm. A superstition. But if I could have it now, I’d feel much better.”

  “What does it look like, and where should I look?”

  “It’s a kind of stick with, uh, a dead bird tied to it.”

  “Where exactly in the attic?”

  “Under the loose insulation… in the floor.”

  “What part of the floor?”

  He hesitated, for answering the question seemed tantamount to a confession. But what choice was there? “Just above Ned’s room, I think. About where his bed would be.”

  “I’ll get it right now.”

  The moment Judge left the room, William felt he should be called back and told not to summon any kind of medical assistance. There was no doctor he knew whom he could trust not to insist on his being taken to a hospital, and there were PHA personnel screening every admissions room. But there seemed no need to caution Judge. Somehow he had understood without having to be told.

  Tentatively, as much from weakness as from self-solicitude, William fumbled at the buttons of his bloodstained pajama top. When the last one had been undone, he discovered to his horror that the fall on the porch steps had caused the threads of the suture to rip through the soft dermal tissues through which they’d been inexpertly sewn, and the long incision in his abdomen gaped wide, exposing pink coils of intestines. He felt like one of the fabled victims of the guillotine—aware, however briefly, as the executioner holds his head aloft, that he has been decapitated. A doctor would have to be called in now, whatever the consequences. The caduceus could not perform surgery.

  “That don’t look too good,” Judge said in level tones. He stood in the doorway, holding the caduceus raised before him, as one might hold the stem of a wineglass.

  William lifted a blood-smeared hand to accept the precious talisman, but when Judge did not proffer it, the remaining strength ebbed from the muscles of his arm, and his hand collapsed on the bedspread.

  “I know what this is,” Judge said. “It’s one of those things like you had the sculpture made at MDS, a caduceus. And I know lots of what you’ve done with it. I even know how to use it myself. Brother Orson explained how you got to spell out what you want it to do so that it rhymes.”

  “Please, Judge… I need it.”

  “Oh, you will get what you need. But this”—he twirled the caduceus wineglass-fashion—“this ain’t yours anymore. It’s mine now, and the first thing I aim to do with it is touch it to this big toe of yours.” He tapped William’s toe with the caduceus. “Till I tell you otherwise, you’ll just lie there paralyzed.”

  Judge stood back to see what effect he had produced. William glared back defiantly. But no, it was rather a glare of helplessness, the canceled stare of a person stopped cold at the moment he realizes every exit has been sealed.

  “Shit,” Judge marveled. “You really can’t move, can you? Even if I was to…” He advanced to the side of the bed and dipped the caduceus down to prod the intestines coiling from the surgical wound. “Do this?” He waited for an answer, and added, as an afterthought, “You can answer questions when I ask. Only you can’t lie to me. In fact, you got to answer truthfully.”

  Whether Judge had intended the rhyme or it was fortuitous, it was there, and William replied, truthfully, “No, I cannot move, no matter what you do.”

  Judge smiled and placed the caduceus on the bedspread a scant inch from William’s paralyzed fingertips. He stepped back from the bed, confident of his power. “You can’t even reach ahead that bitty bit and grab hold of it. Can you?”

  He exerted his entire will, effectlessly. “I can’t.”

  “You’re like old Ned was all that time laying there in his bed. Helpless. And anything I do… anything the Lord may require of his servant… you’ll just have to sit there and take it. I could cut off your pecker and you’d just have to smile.”

  Judge hooked his forefinger under a loop of the extruded intestine and tugged at it gently. It seemed to obey his bidding like a living thing, a large pink snake sliding out of the dark hole in which it lived.

  “You’re like old Jehoram who had a daughter of Ahab to wife. You know what happened to Jehoram?”

  “No.”

  “The Lord smote him in his bowels and they fell out. Second Chronicles, chapter twenty-one. Only difference is he couldn’t get crem-ated. Whereas with you the Lord will smell a sweet savor and his nostrils will be pleased. I see the flames of the burnt offering already right now. Don’t you?”

  “I see only what’s here.”

  “The flames are all around us, everywhere, bright as him standing there by your bed. You see him, don’t you?”

  “There’s only you beside this bed.”

  “Then he has struck you blind! But blindness cannot save you. Your crimes are set down on Brother Orson’s scorecard. And you will testify and bear witness to them. I know some of it already. I know you used this stick here a long time ago against your brother in the other room. And you probably used it on me and all the rest of your family to keep us so healthy we don’t any of us even get a cold. And when you want to use it to make patients get well, you do that too. Am I right?”

  “Yes.”

  “But the plague—thousands and thousands of people you’ll never even see—maybe millions before it’s all over—I can’t understand why you would do that. Unless you thought you was acting for the Lord. I might do that, I might have to someday as part of a larger judgment against the iniquities and sins of the world. Because I am an instrument of the Lord. But you? Why did you want to make a plague?”

  “So I could become rich, and for the power.”

  “Power?”

  “The power of life and death. Finally that is the hinge of all power, but it is most nakedly the power a doctor possesses. Except that medicine is so iffy. With the
best of care patients may die. But with the caduceus I was like God.”

  “I can understand you’d want to be able to cure people. But why hurt people you don’t know? Why a plague?”

  “The caduceus can be used to cure only in proportion as it has already been used to afflict. Say I’d set out to be the next Dr. Salk and had developed a wonder drug that cured Alzheimer’s disease. I would have been able to reduce the suffering of my patients only by enlarging suffering in some other sphere. I might have set up, in a limited way, on that basis, becoming a cancer quack in Mexico, or some kind of faith healer. But I didn’t want to become a one-man Lourdes. I had no wish to be a celebrity, my every action scrutinized. I wanted another kind of power, the kind I got by running, and owning, MDS.”

  “So how did you get the money to build MDS? That was before ARVIDS.”

  “The caduceus was effective against AIDS, but the cost of each cure was exorbitant. A matter, literally, of having to kill Peter to save Paul. But even a glimmer of hope in those days could bring enormous research grants, and Ben Winckelmeyer could write better grant applications than anyone in the business. I killed enough Peters and saved enough Pauls to suggest promising avenues for research. And the research that was funded was the genuine article. Likewise the vaccine.”

  “So why did you start another plague?”

  “In a way it was like planting a garden. I would reap only what I’d sown, and so would always possess a surplus of healing capability.”

  “You thought this all out in advance?”

  “I figured out the final details at just the age you are now, when I gave a grocer who’d annoyed me a sty, and later removed it. The important thing was to figure out a vector for the disease that could never be traced back to me, and it never has been.”

  “And what was it, your ‘vector’?”

  “American Pride.”

  Judge took this to be a taunt and in reprisal pulled out another loop of intestine from the open wound. “You got to tell the truth!” he insisted.

  William could make no reply, for no question had been put to him. But Judge was not familiar with the computerlike literalness of the caduceus’s operation. He felt that William was defying him. He grabbed up a handful of guts and shook them in front of William’s face. “Answer my question, damn it, or I’ll tear all this shit out of you. What was the fucking vector?”

  “A bull that was exhibited at the State Fair, part Charolais, part beefalo, and registered under the name of American Pride. He was two years old that summer, and his sperm was said to be worth its weight in plutonium. I decided to make American Pride—or rather, his offspring—the bearer of my plague. The wording of the curse was framed to make its dissemination both widespread and untraceable. I also built in a time-delay factor of ten years so that by the time the shit finally did hit the fan, I would be in a plausible position to ‘discover’ a cure.”

  Judge let the guts in his hand fall to William’s side. “And that curse? How did it go?”

  William recited the words:

  “Let the meaty steers you breed

  At the end of ten full years

  Infect with plague, infest with fears

  One-half percent of those they feed.

  Once this contagion has occurred

  May it only be wholly cured

  By my hand, my work, my word

  Upon receipt of the fee agreed.

  Now to your task, and breed, bull, breed!”

  There he stopped, unable to say more. It was like finding himself at the end of a plank with only the sea and the sharks below. Judge, he was sure, would soon kill him, led by the wiles of his Brother Orson, who was surely the god of the caduceus in another of his disguises. William felt himself to be a fool for never having suspected.

  There was still so much he wanted to explain—not really to his mad son but to some imagined jury of his peers. Chiefly he wanted to insist that he was, despite the uses to which he’d put his powers, a basically good person. Not a saint, by any means, but a man with a sound conscience and decent instincts. When he listened to Mozart or Mahler or Bach, he understood what their music was saying. At the sad moments in movies he cried. His soul had not withered or atrophied through the exercise of his power. What he had done through the caduceus was something that had taken place in a separate moral realm. It was as though he’d been a pilot assigned to bomb a country whose language he could not speak, whose ruins he would never visit. It all seemed so clear to him, so expressible—if only he had not been made mute by the caduceus’s power.

  Off in another room a bell began ringing and didn’t stop.

  “Shit,” said Judge, using the bedspread to wipe the blood from his hands. “It’s the smoke alarm. I forgot all about the microwave.”

  82

  It was as though a chain had been removed, an immense chain of weighty links wound round so tightly and completely that chain and flesh had come to seem one, as sometimes a tree’s bark fuses with the chain meant to support a hammock. But at the moment Judge took the caduceus from its hiding place the chain was shattered and Ned Hill was free. He raised his hand, obedient to his will, and made the living fingers flex almost into a fist.

  He turned his head toward the door of his room, which stood slightly ajar. He felt as though he were operating an enormous and untrustworthy piece of machinery, a derrick that has stood rusting out of doors for years. Some of the muscles in his neck seemed too weak to support the unsteady mass of the cranium, much less to control its complex motions. But it was wonderful that the machinery worked at all, for which the credit was surely owed to Madge’s patient patterning exercises.

  Raising his torso to a sitting position proved to be almost beyond his powers, since it was the muscles of his abdomen and lower back that had been exercised the least. At last, by raising his knee up and letting it fall sideways across the other leg, he got into a sideways position in the bed from which he could use his arms’ larger strength to tug at the sheets and prod and leverage himself into an upright position.

  Then he planted his feet on the carpet by the bed and, keeping a careful grip on the maple spindles of the backboard, he stood up. He took a tentative, shuffling step forward, toward the door, not daring to flex his knees for fear the whole contraption of bone and muscle would collapse into a helpless heap. His feet were baffling in the constant adjustments and readjustments they required. He wondered how people think of anything else when they were walking than simply how it was done, and then he remembered, dimly, that when he’d been alive and a schoolboy at OLM, there’d been a joke more or less to that effect.

  And he smiled, not so much at the joke as at the memory of a world where jokes might be made.

  It was then that the smoke alarm went off in the kitchen, followed a moment later by a confident clattering down the stairs, great thudding hoofbeats that Ned somehow knew posed a danger to his own safety and to a purpose still unformed.

  But if unformed, quite clear even so. Each step he took now, each small shift of weight, seemed to be guided toward that necessary and inevitable goal. The silent opening of the door, his passage across the corridor and entry into his brother’s room. It more surprised Ned to find Billy grown into a man than to see that he was partially disemboweled, even though in a rational way he knew that they had both become adults. But that was by the mere passage of time, while the disembowelment was an act of fate, something ordained and large with justice. Ned did not reason so, but he felt its necessity with a penetrating gratitude. He even found the strength to reach down and take the gluey warmth of the uncoiled intestine in his hand. As he did so more of it unraveled from the bleeding abdominal cavity.

  His brother did not stir. It seemed fitting to Ned that if he were now released from his long paralysis that the agent of his torments should take his place. It is every prisoner’s most fervent prayer to witness such a moral symmetry, to hold a knife to the throat of the guard he most detests and trace a line of blood across th
e flesh.

  Then he saw, just inches from his brother’s fingertips, the cause of all these events, the caduceus he’d made himself from a twisted stick and the withered corpse of a sparrow and a bit of twine. His for the taking. Grasp it firmly, and with the whisper of the wish he would be strong again, nor need he fear (as he knew he must) whoever it was who’d gone hurtling down the stairs.

  Yet he saw as well that if he did take up the caduceus and use it, it would be as though he’d become just the thing he hated, as though he’d caught hold of an endless bowel spilling out of an eternal wound and could not release it. He would be glued to its evil until it became part of him, intrinsic and invisible.

  He did not take the caduceus, but instead, with wonderful dexterity, slipped his brother’s sticky intestines into his own unresisting fingers.

  He left the room and returned to his own just in time to escape the attention of the young man now returning to William’s bedside—bearing (Ned only had a glimpse of it) a large roast of meat steaming on a platter.

  But the glimpse was enough: Ned knew now clearly what he must do. He must burn down the house with William—and the caduceus—in it.

  Which meant that he must make his way downstairs. There had always been a box of matches on the mantel above the fireplace.

  The stairs posed a greater physical challenge than he’d foreseen. To throw his foot into the void before him and expect his knee not to collapse at the moment of impact on the tread below seemed a feat as much beyond his present powers as walking a tightrope. After some long time poised on the brink of this impossibility, he came to the same solution every arthritic octogenarian reaches. He turned round and, with the banister’s help, got down the stairs backwards, as down a ladder.

  There was an arrangement of dried flowers in the fireplace, and no longer any box of matches on the mantel above.

  On the kitchen table he found the smoke detector, its battery ripped out to silence it. The air reeked of burnt meat. For a little while he regarded a large dark boxlike appliance on the Formica counter, which seemed, from the mess all about it and crusted to it, to have been used to cook the meat. A kind of miniature oven.