“Five—”
“—seven, because my grief has extra stages, I find that you are not abducted and killed, you are just ghosting me. You are ghosting me while you party down in freaking Amsterdam in somebody’s mega-posh apartment.”
“I can explain. And also you have to tell me how you found me. I didn’t even know I was going to be staying here.”
“I called the office and asked your PA for your address.”
“Liar. He has no idea where I am.”
“Geo-tagging in social media?”
“Not possible. I haven’t opened my Facebook account once since I’ve been here.”
“I knew it.” Jonah fanned himself with both hands.
“And Instagram. And Twitter. I told you: I’m off the grid. So stop lying. How did you find me?”
Jonah’s outraged expression battled with a sly smile. “You spill first, babe.”
She beckoned toward a mohair-covered daybed, strewn with cashmere throws in various flaming colors: fuchsia, orange, lime. “This could take a while. Why don’t you join me on the divan? I’ll make cocktails.”
“This thing looks like a crayon factory vomited on a cotton ball,” he said, but, obediently, he removed his suit jacket and flopped onto the mohair concoction. “Oh, that’s nice,” he admitted. Propping himself up on an elbow, he surveyed the apartment again as she bustled around the kitchen preparing drinks.
“Okay. Spill it. How did you find this place?”
“It belongs to the head of some business group in California,” she said, handing Jonah a Kentucky Mule in a copper cup. He gulped it down and handed it right back, so she went to make another. “I met their CFO, Mark, on the plane.”
In a petulant voice: “Mark?”
She settled next to Jonah on the divan. “I’ll tell you about him in a minute. He’s letting me stay here. I’m really sorry for ghosting you, Jones.” A swell of shame rose in her gut: with all his debt, Jonah could not afford the exorbitant expense of traipsing across the globe after her. Not to mention she’d left him in the midst of whatever evil shit was going down at work.
“Jonah, I’m sorry,” she said again, despite the inadequacy of the words. She lay her head in his lap. “Do you want to fill me in about the clinic?”
“No, bitch.” Jonah stroked her hair lovingly. “Not right now.”
“I mean it. I am melting in remorse for being so hard to reach.”
“Well,” said Jonah, validated. “Go on.”
“You suffered through no fault of your own, despite being the finest friend, and the, the . . . handsomest individual ever to grace the planet. If you’ll find it in your heart to forgive me, I swear I’ll mend my ways. I’ll be the most devoted, the most grateful—”
“Okay, I forgive you,” whispered Jonah. He leaned forward to plant a kiss on her forehead. “Just please don’t ever do this again, G. I’ve never felt as bad in my life as I did when I thought you were dead.”
“I won’t,” she said, adding softly, “Are you okay?”
He leaned across the divan to seize an orange mohair-covered pillow and tucked it under her head. “That’s better,” he said, flexing his legs. “You have an absurdly heavy brain.”
“I know,” she said immodestly. She reached up and poked the underside of his chin. “I’m serious. Are you okay? I keep hearing weird things.”
Jonah directed a baleful stare at the wall. “Look,” he said. “Let’s talk about this later, okay? I’m only here for a long weekend, and I want to forget about everything and have some fun.”
“Okay, babe,” she said. “I know you spent a fortune to get here. Can I float you some of it back?”
“Absolutely not, George. This is worth a little more debt. Let’s go party.”
“Look,” she said, seized by sudden awkwardness. “About tonight. It seems I am, somehow, sort of involved with someone. I know that’s a lame excuse, so I’m not even going to . . .” She paused for a second as she debated how to describe Mark. A hookup? A love interest? The most intriguing man she’d met in years?
Jonah, meanwhile, had fixated on the middle of her sentence. “What did you just say? Involved with what?”
“Involved. With a man. I met a man. I know this seems abrupt, but we really hit it off. I haven’t been to the conference as much as I should have.”
Jonah sat upright, dislodging her. “What?”
“First you tell me how you found me,” she said, “and then I’ll tell you about him. I met him on the plane on the way over.”
“Were you sitting next to him?”
“No, there was an emergency and I saved his life.”
Jonah’s mouth fell open. “Somebody had a urologic emergency on an airplane?”
“No, you dope. I possess other medical knowledge beyond urology. As a matter of fact, this man had been poisoned. Oh, and he’s handsome and smart and rich.”
Jonah nearly choked in an effort to get out too many words at once. Georgia held up a firm hand. “You first.”
Jonah flung up his arms in surrender. “I used Find My Phone,” he admitted. “You have the world’s stupidest iCloud sign-in, George, it took me thirty seconds to guess it. I didn’t think of it until you’d been dead—until you’d been gone—for a day or two, but then I did, and I watched your phone. It kept coming back to this address.”
Georgia blinked, impressed at his resourcefulness, but then checked that: Jonah had mad computer skills. She wondered if he’d been reading her email.
“I am NOT reading your email,” said Jonah, reading her mind.
“Okay.”
“I’m not. Or I’d already know you’d found love.”
She’d better cough up some information. “I didn’t say I’d found love, exactly,” she offered, launching into the bizarre story of how she’d met Mark, when, right on cue, her phone rang. For a beat neither of them reacted, and then they both lunged for it; Georgia because she knew it would be Mark, and Jonah because he saw Georgia perk up and came to the correct conclusion about who the caller might be. She moved first but Jonah’s sprightlier physique got him there a fraction of a second before her.
“Hello!” he crowed into the phone. “This is Georgia’s friend Jonah. And who might this be?”
Leaping off the divan, he crossed the room in a couple paces, planting himself on the other side of the partition dividing the bed area from the living area. Georgia feinted to one side and then flung herself in the opposite direction, but Jonah wasn’t fooled; he scooted around his side of the divider, staying a few feet ahead of her. He mmm-hmm’ed and grinned as Mark spoke, at one point erupting into a small but excited shriek.
“Gimme the phone,” Georgia hissed.
“Oh really?” drawled Jonah, bounding away from her. “Oh really? Tonight?” He trilled in delight. “I’m wide open.”
“Mark!” she shouted. “Mark, can you hear me?”
“Bahahahah,” said Jonah. He snickered at her, merrily skidding out of reach again. She plunked herself back down on the divan in capitulation, battling a moronic, creeping smile as she listened to him talk. After several more minutes, he handed over the phone.
“So, that was Jonah,” she said.
“So I gathered,” said Mark. “He’s charming.”
“You have low charm standards, apparently.”
“Nonsense. I can see why you like him. He thought you were dead, you know.”
“Don’t you start too.”
“Sorry. Listen: my meeting is running long. I’m going to be another couple of hours. But I’d love to meet you for a nightcap if I can.” His voice betrayed a hint of uncertainty. “Is that okay?”
“As long as you don’t mind Jonah joining us. I’ll make reservations and text you.”
“I’ve been hoping I’d get to meet him.”
S
he hung up and looked at Jonah. “Well,” she said, “looks like you’ll be meeting Mark tonight.”
8
BADASS GANGSTA AMNESIAC
Jonah’s eyes glittered. “I can’t wait to meet him. Congrats on finally renouncing this abstainal shit.”
“What are you talking about? I was just seeing somebody.”
Jonah raised a fist and dramatically extended his fingers, one by one. “Kari. Lazaro. Jackie. Biff. The hot Scottish one who proposed to you, what’s his name, Ian?”
“Angus.” Georgia paused; her relationship with Angus had ended right around the time she met Jonah, and it was possible she had understated the impact the implosion of her engagement had had on her. “And you’re just making stuff up. There was no one named Biff.”
“Angus! George, I’ve seen pictures and Angus was en fuego! You could have settled down with that guy and instead you squashed him like a grape. I’m feeling like I should try to establish some solidarity with Mark so he doesn’t go into this thing ignorant of the trail of prospective spouses littering your past.”
“Jones, forget Angus. He was a pig. And Ryan dumped me, not the other way around. I’m not exactly the runaway bride.”
“You drove him away.”
Wisely, she chose to ignore the bait. She hadn’t consciously done anything to run Ryan off—it wasn’t her fault if he couldn’t sustain an interesting conversation—and if anyone had deserved to be squashed like a grape it was Angus, but getting into that now would be pointless. If you engaged him head-on, Jonah was as tenacious as a viper, but she knew how to handle him. Like a wayward toddler, he responded well to redirection.
“Hungry?” she asked brightly, not bothering to wait for a reply. Jonah was always hungry. Feeling energized, almost zippy, she grabbed her cell phone to make a reservation at a restaurant in the next neighborhood that came highly recommended by locals.
“We have some time until they can seat us, but we can grab a drink on the way,” she said. “Go for a walk?”
“Coffee bar,” whooped Jonah. “I’ll freshen up!” He ran to the bathroom and returned a few minutes later with his black hair resculpted, his dark eyes obscured by metallic aviators, his top three shirt buttons undone, and his jacket tossed over one shoulder.
“You are so gorgeous, Jones.”
“Stop fawning. You know I’ve had a lifelong wish to visit a coffee bar in Amsterdam.”
“Leading the way,” she said. In truth, she felt a little frightened of the coffee shops, having heard some horror stories. Coffee shops in Amsterdam, as tout le monde knew, served not coffee but weed. Pharmaceutical-grade weed, from the warnings she’d received: every American expat in the country had a graphic tale of bumbling into a coffee bar expecting a mild appetite enhancer à la the marijuana of the 1990s, only to awaken three days later in the red-light district with vicious rugburn and shaved eyebrows. She’d just have to be very careful about what she ordered, and more to the point, what Jonah ordered. They both had a tendency to overdo things.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” she asked as they neared the closest coffee shop to the apartment, an unobtrusive green-paneled storefront with absolutely no signage indicating what it was, other than the name, written, thankfully, in English: BOTANICAL DEFENSE LAB. “They’re not allowed to advertise,” she added, as Jonah doubtfully side-eyed the exterior.
“When in Rome, George! I’m all in. It’s legal and it’s no worse than a couple Kentucky Mules, n’est-ce pas? Do you think they were aiming for the color of bud with all this drab paneling?”
They stood in the front of the shop, intimidated, as their eyes adjusted to the dim interior. A few people sat at little metal tables, their posture languid, pecking with desultory interest at laptops. Some kind of frenetic music—it sounded like Swedish hip-hop—pounded in the background. A wide bar ran the length of the back wall, behind which stood a scrawny guy in an apron. He was the antithesis of languidity, hammering away at the air as though he was under attack from a flock of invisible biting insects. After a moment, Georgia realized he was playing the air drums; either that, or he was having some sort of unusual seizure. In any case, he didn’t appear to be stoned.
“Where’s the menu?” whispered Jonah.
“I think you have to ask for it,” Georgia whispered back.
“Menu, please,” said Jonah to the seizing weed dispenser, who whirled sideways, lurching himself over to a shelf under the counter, where he extricated a plasticized piece of paper. They studied it, bewildered; nothing on the menu—hundreds of items—had a comprehensible description.
“I think it must be like the Kentucky Derby,” said Jonah, “you just pick a horse based on the name.” To the counter guy: “I’ll have some Badass Gangsta Amnesiac. Please.”
After a confusing interlude in which the counter guy kept pointing to something written in Dutch on the back of the menu, they finally understood they needed to specify a delivery route: rolled or bong. They opted for bong, afraid the Dutch guy would expect competence at rolling a joint, which neither of them possessed, and then realized after they’d been handed a baggie full of drugs and an oddly shaped blue plastic contraption that they would need to purchase a lighter. Adjourning to a small metal table, they messed with the bong until they figured it out.
“I feel nothing,” Jonah said. “I think we just got ripped off. He could probably tell we were tourists who can’t tell the difference, so he gave us a forty-dollar bag of oregano and kept all the ganja for himself.”
“No, that’s—”
“Do you feel anything?”
Georgia eyed the empty bong. “Not really,” she admitted.
“Okay,” said Jonah, standing, “let’s bolt. I don’t feel baked but I do feel hungry.”
He held the door, ushering her back out onto the street. She stepped onto the curb, alert for any change in perception, but the curb remained reassuringly solid. “Which way do we head to get to the restaurant?” asked Jonah, both hands splayed against his flat stomach.
“I think it’s that wa—yahhhhh.” A percussive thwoomph echoed through her body, signaling some seismic change in her temporal-spatial awareness. The world suddenly went cattywampus, everything slightly askew. Also, she had the dizzying sense that her head was very, very large.
She peered anxiously at Jonah, who peered back at her, equally concerned. Oh God, it must be true. Her head had exploded. By contrast, Jonah’s head seemed to have shrunk to tragically small proportions, cemented on the end of his stalky neck like a nearly consumed lollipop. She reached out to touch him and flinched backward as a bike whizzed by.
“WHAT WAS THAT?” shrieked Jonah, grabbing her. He whipped his diminutive head in the direction of the departed bicycle, the whites of his eyes showing underneath his irises. Some clinical portion of her brain whirred to life to diagnose his condition: Microcephaly with Thyroid Storm. Also possible dementia. Damn, she was smart. She reverted to layman’s terms, preparing the explanation she’d offer him: Crazy Shrunken Head with Associated Glandular Problem. Not good, she’d say wisely, not good. She looked at him again. Something about the way he was tossing his little head around reminded her of Mark; for a second, she was awash in nostalgia. Lovely, lovely Mark, with his terrible poisoning problem on the galley floor. So helpless.
A daisy chain of bikers blurred by. “INCOMING,” screamed Jonah, cowering with his hands above his head. “WE HAVE TO GET OUT OF THE LINE OF FIRE.”
Georgia was the picture of calm. “Sure,” she said. “We’ll just go to the restaurant, as planned. We can regroup there.”
“FALL OUT,” barked Jonah. He marched off in one direction as she drifted in the other. He pivoted, coming after her. “This way,” he hissed, looking over his shoulder.
She stared at him in surprise. “How do you know?”
“Keep your head down,” he said. “Or I’ll notify the r
elevant authorities.” Embarrassed, she reached up to her giant balloon head, but there was no containing it as it floated along. She cringed. She could feel the webby vascular supply of her central nervous system glowing with the raw energy required to maintain such pure intelligence. Her worries and inadequacies disintegrated in a puff of smoke, subsumed by her brilliance.
They headed off, Jonah skulking and Georgia alternating between a dreamy traipse and a nervous lurch. After they’d walked for an indeterminate amount of time—minutes? hours? eons?—it occurred to her that Jonah, their leader, could not possibly know where he was going, since she’d never told him the name of the restaurant. Also he did not speak Dutch—nor did she—and furthermore, Jonah, who tended to get lost even on the familiar streets of Charleston, had never been to Amsterdam before. She reached for his arm and he instantly whirled around.
“WHAT WAS THAT?”
She recognized, with her fearsome intelligence, that this was a phrase she might shortly find wearisome. However, it was important to stay unified. “We need to regroup,” she said.
They found a doorway and huddled, clutching one another desperately, peering out at the closest street sign. The rain had started again, pelting sideways in bullety little bursts that were not conducive to Jonah’s mental stability. “If only we had a map,” she said, forlorn. “I don’t want to die in this doorway.”
Jonah smacked his tiny head. “A taxi!” he shouted. “They’re usually conflict-neutral and they’ll recognize the name of the rendezvous.” He marched out to the edge of the street and stuck out a confident hand. A bike raced by and he screamed, running back to the doorway. “I’m afraid we’re gonnahaftahoofit,” he said, panting.
She narrowed her eyes, suddenly suspicious. Was that a street name? Or Dutch slang for about to die? Since when did Jonah speak Dutch?
“We are going to have to hoof it,” he said, enunciating each word exaggeratedly.
“Well . . .” Georgia didn’t want to admit she had no idea where they were; Jonah was relying on her. “Right.” She nodded, hoping to look knowledgeable. “By any chance, did you pick up a map at the place?”
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