THE M.D. A Horror Story

by Thomas M. Disch

  Anyhow, sometime or other you’ve got to be told, because one day soon—assuming you get this when you turn eighteen—you’ll be thinking of having kids. And maybe you should think twice. I wish I could think of a positive note to end this letter on, but there isn’t any pony in this shitpile, kid. I’m sorry.

  I luv ya!

  Dad

  After Judith had finished reading the letter, she pretended for a while longer still to be reading it in order to avoid having to speak with Dr. Sackuvich.

  At last he took the initiative. “I would have spared you having to read that until some later time, but the police insisted that both yourself and the Schechners, as the two boys’ new parents, be informed as soon as possible.”

  “Because you think they’re also… at risk?”

  “Definitely, yes, they are at risk.”

  “But if the information in the letter is correct…”

  “Essentially, it is, yes. Quite a good account for a layman to have written. Ordinarily it would not be appropriate to become… unduly alarmed. Both Dr. Michaels and his father, the writer of the letter, died without having shown any sign of the disease. However…” The doctor swiveled his chair sideways to avoid Judith’s questioning gaze. “Let me be blunt, Ms. Winckelmeyer. Your son Judge’s, um… breakdown—please hear me out, I realize this is a painful subject. Such bizarre behavior is an almost classic manifestation of a variety of Huntington’s chorea that strikes in adolescence rather than later in life. In such cases dementia can be sudden and acute. And violent.”

  Dr. Sackuvich forced himself to look directly at Judith. “I hate to have to ask you this, Ms. Winckelmeyer, and it need not become a part of the official record, but was William Michaels the father of your son?”

  “It would be pointless for me to deny it, wouldn’t it?”

  “I’m not asking this question from mere curiosity, Ms. Winckelmeyer, I hope you understand that. But this is a matter that has an important bearing on the future lives of Dr. Michaels’s sons.”

  “Their chances, then, are…?”

  “As the letter states: fifty-fifty.”

  Judith closed her eyes and tried to pray, but there were no prayers left. Her heart was like the ruins of that burned house, fenced round, with nothing left for flames to consume.

  “I’m sorry to have to tell you this. But I must add, for what little it’s worth, that the situation today with regard to medical knowledge is not quite what it was when Dr. Michaels’s father wrote that letter. There has been no cure for Huntington’s chorea, and no immediate prospect of one, but the genetic mechanism by which it is transmitted is now better understood, and there are diagnostic tests available that can indicate with fair certainty whether an individual at risk does or does not bear the gene for the disease.”

  “Do you mean that those two boys, now, at their age, could know with certainty that some day—But that’s worse! That’s a nightmare!”

  “In some ways, yes, I have to agree. Medicine did not create Huntington’s chorea, Ms. Winckelmeyer; it can only investigate it. We draw the map, you might say.”

  “I won’t allow it!”

  Dr. Sackuvich nodded solemnly. “No doubt it would be premature to administer such tests at this point. But when Dr. Michaels’s sons are older, they should be told. At what age precisely is for you and Mr. and Mrs. Schechner to determine amongst yourselves. Then each boy can decide whether he wishes to be tested.”

  Judith stood up. “Doctor, if you don’t mind, I’d really rather not continue this discussion.”

  “As you choose, Ms. Winckelmeyer,” the doctor said without any change in his businesslike demeanor. “Thank you for having come in. I’ll see that your lawyer receives the appropriate papers for you to sign. Again, you have my apologies for having imposed on you at a time of such stress.”

  Judith murmured an apology for her outburst, though she might more candidly have thanked the doctor for having relieved her of the immense burden of the guilt she’d felt as the mother of the monster who committed such unthinkable crimes. The gene had come from William, and so the fault was in no way hers, neither as his biological mother nor for having failed in his upbringing. With such an assurance, she might begin to feel a sorrow that was not mere bitterness and enfeeblement.

  While the doctor hesitated whether to offer his hand for a parting handshake, Judith hurried back into the waiting room and there evaded her lawyer’s questions by telling him that Dr. Sackuvich was waiting to discuss the papers that had to be signed. Then she excused herself and took Henry by the hand and led him out of the hospital and to the car in the parking lot.

  “Did the doctor say you were better?” Henry asked, as he was buckled into the seat.

  “Yes, he did. I’m fit as a fiddle.”

  “Can we go see the house now?”

  “Oh, Henry, you don’t want to do that. There’s nothing to see. The part that didn’t burn down has been torn down. There’s nothing but a hole in the ground.”

  “You said!” With the marvelous facility for tears some six-year-olds still possess, Henry began to cry.

  “When did I say that?”

  “When Jason got to go to the funeral and I had to stay home. You said you’d drive me to see where the fire was before we went away to Florida.”

  “But it’s at least an hour’s drive from here.”

  “You promised!”

  She had, in fact, made such a promise, and it would not be an auspicious way to begin their life together if she were to renege in a matter of such symbolic significance. Besides, she was curious herself to see the result of the fire.

  During the drive she played a cassette of Couperin’s Leçons de Tenebre that must have been the last piece of music Ben had listened to in the car. Henry continued to work the puzzle cube with what seemed an abnormal attention span for a six-year-old. For the rest of their lives together, she realized, she would be assessing everything he did in terms of normality and abnormality, sane and insane.

  The Couperin and the September weather helped settle her nerves, and by the time they’d reached the corner of Calumet and Ludens (with only one wrong turn, as they exited the thruway), Judith was feeling much steadier on her pins.

  An eight-foot-high cyclone fence had been constructed around the property, and the demolition work on the charred shell of the house had been completed, leaving only the gaping L-shaped cavity of the basement and the stumps of the fireplace and of the backyard elm, also a victim of the fire. Already the front lawn, never well cared for, was thick with waist-high weeds.

  “If the fence wasn’t there, we could go over and look right inside the basement,” Henry noted respectfully.

  “Yes, but the fence is there. So we can’t.”

  “How long did it take for the fire to burn down the house?”

  “I don’t know, but probably not very long or the people wouldn’t have been caught inside.”

  “I’ll bet there was a big explosion, like when a bomb goes off. Jason says if you turn on the stove but don’t light it, the house fills up with the gas, and then if someone lights just one match, boom!”

  Henry seemed to take such satisfaction from this explanation that she did not undermine it by pointing out that the stove in the Obstschmecker kitchen had been electric. Her own imaginings of what had happened that day were no more informed, finally, than his.

  “Jason says they all must’ve gone to sleep first, from breathing in the smoke, and they never felt themselves being burned. That’s what Uncle Jason told him. But I think he just said that to keep Jason from crying all the time.”

  “It’s impossible to say exactly what happened, Henry. If Jason wants to think that, there’s no point arguing with him.”

  “It was Jason who started the argument. I’m glad it’s him who’s going to live with Mr. Schechner and not me. He treats you like you’re a baby.” Henry glanced sideways to see if this had registered, as it was intended, as a declaration of loyalty to Judith
.

  She knew that this would be the proper moment to give the boy a hug, a kiss, some better assurance than words that he was loved and protected. But the knowledge was mere administrative reflex from years of social work and crisis management. It sprang from no deeper source. In any case she didn’t have the energy to deal with the seat belts. It was all she could do to shift from park and steer the car along Ludens. At Brouwer she turned right and drove the six blocks to Brosner Park. There she parked again.

  “Would you like to play in the park for a bit?” she suggested to Henry. “I just want to sit and think for a while before we drive back to Willowville. Okay?”

  “Okay,” he agreed sullenly.

  He popped open his seat belt and took up his knapsack with the puzzle cube and a follow-the-dots book and other time-passing toys. “How long?” he asked, standing outside the car.

  “Five minutes?”

  He looked at his wristwatch. It was not quite three-thirty. “Okay, I’ll be back in five minutes.”

  He set off into the park, steering clear of the area around the swings and teeter-totters, which were securely in the possession of a bunch of older black kids. He looked around for somewhere shady to sit, where he could just go on twisting the puzzle cube till he got at least two sides to be the same color, but all the trees seemed to have disappeared.

  Then the far-off sound of a chain saw explained what had happened to the trees. They were being cut down! At the other end of the park was a green truck with ladder on it, like a fire engine, and a man on the ladder was sawing off the branches of one of the few trees that was still left.

  Ordinarily Henry would have gone over to watch such a process, but that would have meant walking through the playground area with all the black kids. So instead he went in the other direction, up the hill to where the lopped-off limbs of three other trees had already been piled into big stacks. The tree trunks were still in place, like arms reaching up and the fingers of their hands cut off at the knuckle. Henry considered climbing up one of the stacks of wood, but without Jason or someone daring him to, there didn’t seem to be much point.

  Then something on the ground beside the nearest woodpile caught his attention. A stick. There were a lot of sticks all round the woodpile, of course, but somehow this one seemed different. Partly it must have been its twisty shape. Partly something else he couldn’t figure out.

  He picked it up and looked at it more closely. It was about as long as a ruler and almost as straight, and right where his finger would have felt the trigger if it were a ray gun was a knob.

  Someday (although Henry had never told this to anyone yet, not even to Jason), when he grew up, he was going to be a fighter pilot in the air force. He’d fly a jet with four laser cannons.

  Like this one: he pretended the stick was his cannon and the knob its trigger. Then he aimed it, with one hundred percent accuracy, at another fighter jet (actually at a robin that had alighted on top of the woodpile) and pulled the trigger, and made a machine-gun sound and told the robin it was dead.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Thomas M. Disch was born in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1940 and grew up in Minnesota. He was educated at New York University and currently lives in New York City.