The Antidote for Everything

by Kimmery Martin

  In the early days of their friendship, Georgia’d once seen him, an hour after his office hours ended, walking with a man through the exit to outdoors. Curious, she’d followed them. Dressed in an assortment of ill-fitting garments, the man gave off the emaciated, matted air of someone down on his luck; with his grimy skin and his ratty coat still damp from an earlier rain shower, he hardly seemed like the kind of company she’d have expected a fastidious, fashionable man like Jonah to keep.

  They passed the porticoed entrance and then the parking lot, heading for a small natural area adjacent to the hospital dotted with a few hydrangeas and a solitary bench. By now, a frisson of worry struck her; was Jonah being coerced somehow? But his body language didn’t reflect alarm. He ambled along with unmistakable ease, making animated hand gestures, even once placing a light hand on the man’s shoulder. She came to the conclusion that she should stop spying. This must be a relative or something personal. It was no concern of hers.

  Just as she turned, though, Jonah and the man took a seat on the bench and Jonah raised his arms to draw a series of rectangles in the air, his slight chest rising and falling with each exaggerated inflation and exhalation. Perplexed, Georgia turned back. After a moment of watching, she got it.

  Jonah was teaching the man breathing techniques to manage anxiety.

  Much later, she’d asked him about it, and he’d responded that the man was a homeless Army veteran. He had panic attacks, Jonah said, bad ones; and he’d taken to coming to the ER on a regular basis when they got overwhelming. Jonah, who’d encountered the guy during a volunteer shift at a free medical clinic, started meeting with him once a week to teach him meditation techniques.

  Shaking her head at the absurdity of someone trying to imply that Jonah was a bad physician, she returned her attention to the document. She’d had only a brief moment to view it—long enough to read the first paragraph—when footsteps sounded in the hall immediately outside Beezon’s door. She shoved herself backward from the computer, grabbing and opening an HR manual off the desk as if she were reading it.

  One of Beezon’s underlings stuck her head in the door. She wore a timid expression and profoundly unattractive glasses, steel-framed and masculine, like Georgia’s dad used to wear in the 1980s. Right away Georgia felt compelled to put her at ease.

  “Hi there,” she said, surreptitiously lowering the manual under the table. “I’m Dr. Georgia Brown. Are you looking for Mr. Beezon?”

  “No,” the mouse squeaked. “I was looking for some paperwork.”

  “Well.” Georgia opened her arms in welcome. “Here’s his stuff.”

  The woman crossed to the desk, prompting an awkward moment of reshuffling as Georgia scooted out of her way so she could access a desk drawer. Her intimidated expression didn’t alter, even though she could not have failed to notice that Beezon’s computer monitor was still on and displaying a document Georgia had no business seeing. She kept her eyes averted, both from the screen and from Georgia. Working as an administrative assistant for Beezon must wreak havoc on the nerves.

  The mouse found whatever she’d been seeking and straightened up. Beezon’s computer chimed with an email and it belatedly occurred to Georgia that perhaps Jonah had run into him elsewhere.

  “Have you seen Dr. Tsukada?”

  Georgia expected her to say Who? Instead, she grimaced. “I’m sorry, I haven’t.”

  “What about John Beezon?”

  On this score, she looked more relaxed. “I think he’s left for the day.”

  Georgia looked at the computer’s clock: it was five thirty. Outside the room, she could hear the unmistakable sound of things winding down: the thud of chairs being shoved under desks, voices murmuring, heels tapping down the hallway. Retrieving her phone from her bag, she sent a text to Jonah: Where are you?

  No answer.

  The mouse, hovering near the door, was looking at Georgia expectantly but could not seem to work up the gumption to kick her out. She wanted to stay and root through Beezon’s computer, but that would require lying to this poor soul, not to mention the questionable ethics involved. Reluctantly, she stood.

  “Okay, thanks,” she said. “I’ll try him later.”

  The mouse nodded, grateful that she was leaving without a fuss. She checked her phone again. Nothing. Where was Jonah?

  Suddenly it came to her: perhaps they were in one of the conference rooms. A long corridor, carpeted in an industrial-grade shade of barf, led to a set of double doors opening to the outside. For reasons no one fully understood, all the conference rooms were housed in a small annex across the patient parking lot, necessitating a slog across the scorching pavement whenever anyone called a meeting, which, with this many doctors and administrators milling around, was hourly. The mouse followed Georgia as she zipped across the lot toward the employee parking garage.

  Halfway across, something caught Georgia’s attention. She slowed and squinted against the angled sunlight: two people were turtling their way across the black tarmac toward the boatlike grandeur of an ancient maroon Oldsmobile. It took a moment longer than it should have to recognize them since something seemed to be off in their pacing, but eventually she got it: it was a patient of hers named Frieda Myers Delacroix and her companion, a much younger man whom she knew only by his first name, Andreas.

  Frieda Myers Delacroix—everybody called her by her double first name, Frieda Myers—was an aging Southern queen who’d reached a point in life where she felt perfectly content to be her most authentic self in public. In Frieda Myers’s case, being her most authentic self meant using feminine pronouns, even though her physical anatomy at birth had been male. The nature of her urologic issues was such that she saw Georgia often, but she sought out Jonah, her primary care physician, even more frequently. Known around town for her impeccable manners, she sent thank-you notes in beautiful cursive, hand-delivered by courier after each appointment.

  Her face vacant, Frieda Myers appeared to be mustering her dignity as she plodded with straight-backed stiffness toward her car. Andreas trailed her with uncharacteristic reticence, his hands wrung together in front of him. They reached the car and Frieda Myers fumbled a bit as she tried to manipulate the key into the lock, her hands visibly shaking even at that distance. Still trailed by the woman from Beezon’s office, Georgia had just taken a step toward them when Andreas looked up and saw her.

  She faltered at the raw fury on his face. He opened his mouth as if to speak, but instead of saying anything, he sliced his hand across the air in her direction in an unmistakable gesture of disgust. His movement must have caught Frieda Myers’s attention; now she looked up and spied Georgia too. In contrast to Andreas, Frieda Myers appeared depleted: an old balloon of a person. For a moment her gaze locked with Georgia’s before some reserve of control within her shifted and a single sound escaped her: a hoarse, abbreviated gulp. She turned back toward the Oldsmobile.

  Wincing at the sound, Georgia started toward her but once again was felled midstep by the death rays emanating from Andreas. “Miss Delacroix,” she called. “Is everything okay?”

  Andreas raised a trembling finger at Georgia. “You leave us alone.”

  After another futile attempt at unlocking the car, Frieda Myers, her shoulders hitching, opened her hand and allowed her keys to drop to the pavement. Andreas, his handsome face distorted with distress, stood behind her whispering something into one of her wattled old ears, and eventually she bent and retrieved her keys and Andreas opened the door for her and they got in and drove away, very slowly, as if the car had transformed into a motorized wheelchair.

  Georgia turned to the mouse, wide-eyed. “What in the world was that about?”

  Her eyes darted. “I don’t know.”

  You didn’t need to be a psychologist to recognize the tell of a lie. “You do know,” Georgia said. She concentrated on her voice: firm, but nonthreatening, persuasive.
“What’s going on?”

  The mouse capitulated, her shoulders lowering as she released the information. “I think a lot of Dr. Tsukada’s patients have decided to leave the clinic.”

  “What? Why?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I heard there have been problems with his care.”

  3

  THE PRECIPICE DIVIDING THE LIVING FROM THE DEAD

  The next morning dawned clear and cloudless, one of those sensational autumn mornings when it was neither too warm nor too cool. Still slick and salty from her run, Georgia eased into the kitchen to fire up the French press, letting the coffee brew as she showered. She missed Dobby: the house felt sterile without his happy panting and the prancing click of his toenails against the floor.

  Jonah had canceled their karaoke plans last night, texting her a few minutes after she’d left the clinic to say he’d changed his mind about going out. Concerned at the brusque tone of the text—so different from his voice a few minutes earlier—she’d driven to his house, way out in Folly Beach, but he hadn’t been home.

  This was not unprecedented. Jonah had a habit of going dark when something big was going down, but usually this related to the throes of a new relationship. Occasionally, however, it portended something more ominous: a plunge into depression. Jonah suffered from periods of depression, from time to time falling into an unforeseen pit of black misery. When it happened—sometimes triggered by actual events, but sometimes without warning—his characteristic resilience and chipper personality vanished, replaced by a grim fatalism. He could not see that he’d ever return to normal. He could not even appreciate that there had ever been a normal to which he might return. He saw only darkness and hopelessness, a world robbed of light and meaning and purpose.

  Lately, however, he’d been happy. He’d had a string of months—a year or two, probably—without depression. It had been long enough that the memory of the last time had faded, relegated to some washed-out corner of her mind. Things had been so good for him, she could almost convince herself those episodes had never happened at all.

  Almost.

  She took her coffee to the front porch, a pleasant space just large enough for two wicker chairs on one end and a hanging daybed on the other. As the sky lightened, she stared up at the pale blue porch ceiling, almost mandatory in this section of Charleston. Haint blue, the Victorians had called it, convinced the watery color would deter unruly spirits from entering the home. Vengeful specters from the afterworld ranked low on her current list of worries, however. She needed to start packing. Gulping the rest of the hot coffee, she stood and walked back into the house to find her suitcase.

  Converted from an old carriage house, her little dwelling was comprised of one all-purpose room with a sleeping loft. As you might expect, the kitchen/living area space was compact, the kitchen tucked neatly under the loft, which vaulted up to a tall, arched ceiling. The short walls in the loft were lined with bookshelves, separated by both genre and color, so she could easily identify and reach her science books, her well-worn Bible, her biographies and histories and geopolitical texts, along with a smaller contingent of steampunk science fiction and a clandestine smattering of literary romances. It was like sleeping in the middle of a crowd of friends.

  The distance between the couch and the kitchen was four steps. When the space was renovated, the designers had inserted all sorts of clever little storage areas and space-saving hacks, basically providing Georgia with a grown-up version of the childhood hidey-holes she’d inhabited all over the college campus in Kentucky where her father had taught. She came home each night to the safest, coziest, most perfect space in all of Charleston. Flowers and potted plants dotted a small, enclosed garden off the back of the house, next to her workshop; Dobby had a dog door so he could zip in and out while she was at work; one wall in the living room was entirely covered with blown-up photographs of Georgia and Jonah and Dobby, all of them—including, seemingly, the dog—appearing young and carefree. She pulled her suitcase from the closet, taking in her perfect little haven, and not for the first time wondered if maybe she should cancel her trip.

  * * *

  —

  Charleston was a world-class city, thronged with five million visitors a year, but it didn’t boast an extensive international airport. Georgia’s flight to Europe was scheduled to depart early in the afternoon from Charlotte, North Carolina. After a three-and-a-half-hour drive to the airport, the second leg—a flight to Frankfurt, Germany—was scheduled to be in the air for eight hours and forty minutes, followed by a train to the Netherlands. After a last gulp of coffee, Georgia finished dressing, loaded up the car, and hit the road.

  Midmorning, she pulled over at a gas station deep in the backwoods of South Carolina. The day was clear and breezy and sunshiny, enhanced by flowering trees and chirping birds and all manner of glorious wildlife. Even the acres of pestilential sorrel weeds surrounding the station looked pretty in the morning light, rippling in red waves across a series of barren cotton fields. As she waited for the gas tank to fill, Georgia grabbed her phone, and its screen lit up with an accusatory stack of blue rectangles: texts from Jonah.

  Heaving a sigh of relief, she opened the first one and saw an empty blue bubble. Clicking through all of them in rapid succession, she discovered they were all the same. She’d be baffled, except Jonah had done this before. It was his version of a butt dial: he sat on his phone while it was open in text mode.

  At least she knew he was alive.

  She immediately texted back, to no avail. Possibly he had fallen asleep on top of his phone. She tapped out a message asking him to call her just as a shiny car pulled alongside hers on the other side of the gas pump. A man got out, dressed in an incongruous business suit, his gaze flitting across the island to check her out. After a lingering glance at her breasts, he strode off into the station, ostentatiously clicking the lock button on his Mercedes. Well, really: did he think she was going to burgle his car? Humph-ing to herself, she plunked the nozzle back in the gas pump, jumped in the car, and drove off.

  Ten minutes down the road, she found herself stopped at the world’s longest traffic light, inexplicably set at the juncture of two potholed roads in the middle of nowhere. At one corner, a giant Confederate flag crackled in the wind. Both sides of the road were double-laned, although there wasn’t another car to be seen for miles. She’d no sooner made this observation than the car from the gas station roared up beside her, its eight-cylinder engine shrieking in dismay at the abrupt stop. The driver had a cell phone wedged between his shoulder and ear, his steering hand occupied with a cigarette. He barked something into the phone and leaned in the direction of the driver’s-side door. The window glided down and the stump of his cigarette, still glowing red, flew out of the car, pinging off the side of her car before hitting the road. As an afterthought, the man, still talking, tossed a crumpled white paper bag after it.

  This was too much. Without thinking, she banged open the door, flew around the back of the car, scooped up the cigarette butt and the trash, and tossed it back through his open window. “You lost something,” she shouted helpfully. The man, his mouth hanging open, stared at her for a moment. This provided a critical few seconds for her to return to her senses. Belatedly, it occurred to her: the kind of person with no qualms about using the world as his personal ashtray might not have any qualms about shooting an obnoxious eco-do-gooder in a Prius. She’d better haul ass.

  He decided not to shoot, thankfully, although he did tailgate her for a couple miles before honking away in a cloud of angry fumes. She grinned sheepishly to herself; she hadn’t even left the state of South Carolina and already she’d broken a promise to Jonah not to piss anyone off while she was gone.

  * * *

  —

  The plane began a slow taxi forward as it turned to align with the runway before thrusting itself aloft, engines roaring. “We’re blasting off!” a child s
hrieked happily.

  They ascended to cruising altitude, the ground beneath them transforming from an urban tangle of roadways and buildings to a soothing patchwork of green circles and rectangles. Around her, everyone settled into their routines: high-maintenance types blowing up their little inflatable neck pillows, businessmen retrieving laptops and headphones, moms doling out Cheerios and electronic games encased in bright plastic covers. Opening her computer, Georgia connected to the plane’s Wi-Fi, thinking she’d watch a movie, but then changed her mind and decided to read. She opted for Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson, which she’d been longing to read for months despite its imposing length.

  She was several hundred pages in and had lost all track of time when a faint electronic crackle issued through the air. A woman’s voice echoed through the cabin.

  “Is there a doctor on the plane?”

  Seven otherwise innocuous words, striking fear into the heart of every physician. Like “Quick, can you bring me a whole bunch of paper towels” and “Omigod, where’s the plunger,” the implication was obvious. Some phrases just herald disaster. When you thought about it, it was surprising there weren’t more medical disasters on planes; certainly it was surprising there weren’t more psychological ones. Sealing yourself in an aluminum tube and zooming up to the outer reaches of the troposphere and the lower reaches of the stratosphere, sailing through the jet stream at speeds of six hundred miles per hour, where the temperature might be -60 degrees Fahrenheit and the windchill might be -120 degrees Fahrenheit—well, that was not natural.

  As the call for a doctor went out again, Georgia allowed herself a few furtive glances around in case a random ER doc was about to spring to the rescue. She was a passionate believer in helping your fellow man—or woman, as the case might be—but she had to admit, chances were slim this would be an issue related to her specialty. How many people had a urologic emergency on an airplane?