The Antidote for Everything

by Kimmery Martin

  He sighed theatrically. “I don’t even want to know.”

  “You’re right, you don’t.”

  Dobby moseyed onto the front porch, aiming a baleful look in her direction, but forgave her ten seconds later when she scratched him behind the ears. Jonah scratched him too, even though Georgia knew he was repulsed by the smell of wet dog. She rested her head against his shoulder. “Tell me about your day. I’ve been out of my mind, worrying about everything.”

  His phone pinged and he glanced at it. “Stewart. Nothing new.” He set it down. “I need to talk to you, but first, as your romantic advisor, I feel compelled to tell you that you need to shower again. Or at least throw on strong perfume and a sexier outfit. The man is crossing a continent to be with you, you know?”

  She glanced down at herself: her wet hair had created two damp trails across her T-shirt and her pants were equally soaked, having fallen victim to her battle with Dobby. “It’s okay. I think he loves me for my mind.”

  Jonah shoved her off the porch swing. “Trust me, he doesn’t.”

  She flung open the door to the porch fifteen minutes later, having dried her hair and donned an orange minidress and boots. “Better?”

  Jonah stood and applauded, but he wasn’t alone: next to him, Mark stood as well. Georgia goggled at them for a moment until Mark stepped forward and swung her up into an embrace. “Hi,” he said into her clean hair.

  “Hi,” she murmured back, inhaling the scent of him in a long greedy gulp. What was this? Had she been struck dumb? Mark set her down and she stood rooted on the porch, grinning, for a long moment before recovering herself. She gestured at the swing. “Please, have a seat.”

  Mark aimed a questioning glance toward the door, no doubt wondering why he wasn’t being invited inside after his daylong transatlantic journey. Since Georgia seemed to be malfunctioning, Jonah helped her out: “We’re decontaminating for a few more minutes before we go inside.”

  “Wha—”

  Suddenly Jonah let out a yelp. He stared at his phone and then waved it in an arc above his head, pacing around the porch. “Stewart!”

  18

  ILLITERATE, BELLIGERENT SOCIOPATHS

  MARK

  “Who’s Stewart?” asked Mark.

  “His lawyer,” Georgia said. She turned to Jonah. “What? What did he say?”

  “He said”—Jonah’s eyes had gone wide—“after an internal investigation, the clinic is planning to report me to the police.”

  “The police?” Mark couldn’t hide his shock. “For what?”

  Jonah stopped walking, turning to search Mark’s face. Not finding whatever he sought, he spun on one foot to face Georgia. “For stealing drugs.”

  The sentence reverberated between the three of them, the air rippling away in concentric rings from the conversational stone of Jonah’s pronouncement. Mark blinked. He opened his mouth and abruptly closed it again.

  Jonah took pity on him. “We have an automated medication storage system in our procedure room,” he said. “It’s full of narcotics and other dangerous drugs.”

  Mark listened as Jonah explained. As a family medicine doc, Jonah did dozens of small procedures a year, most of them performed under local anesthesia. But some cases required stronger medicine—narcotics, or even a kind of twilight anesthesia called moderate sedation, where the patient was not unconscious but was rendered so drowsy and out of it that he could not register pain or form memories. Rather than send these patients to a full-blown operating room, the clinic offered a shared procedure room, used by multiple specialties. The room was sometimes staffed by a nurse anesthetist, who could monitor the patient’s vital signs and breathing as the drugs were administered, freeing up the doctor to perform the procedure more safely. The medicine storage system in this room, called a Pyxis, contained valuable and often abused drugs such as Dilaudid and ketamine. It required a code to open and the contents were carefully monitored by the nursing staff; Jonah, as a doctor, did not have access to the cabinet.

  After a pointed glance at Georgia, Jonah began pacing again. Mark’s head swiveled back and forth between them.

  “Jones,” said Georgia in a voice pregnant with subtext. “How exactly did they phrase it?”

  Jonah shook his head. “It’s very specific. They’re saying I stole someone’s access code and siphoned out little bits of various drugs and then replaced the missing cc’s with saline.”

  “What?” she said. She put her hand on his arm, her face a frozen mask.

  He shook it off. “It gets worse. They’re saying I stole the opiates—fentanyl, all that stuff—to get high, but some of it, like the ketamine, they’re theorizing I kept to sell to people at parties. Who knows where they’ll go from there? Tomorrow are they going to say I molested half of Charleston?”

  He stared at her again, his eyes boring into hers, before they both flicked their eyes toward Mark.

  After a moment of this impasse, Jonah pushed open the door to the house. “I need to call Stewart back,” he said, walking inside. Mark remained silent as they waited for Jonah to return, trying to gauge the undercurrents. Something was going on here beneath the surface; something he didn’t quite understand.

  Through the door they could hear snippets of Jonah’s voice, alternating up and down the scale as he reacted to whatever Stewart was saying. Near the end of the conversation he said very little, responding in a series of monosyllabic grunts until finally he let loose with what was clearly a stream of animated curses.

  He returned to the porch, his shoulders set. Whatever the lawyer had said seemed to have transformed his alarm to ferocity. He paced in wide circles, forcing Georgia and Mark to rotate their necks in synchronized circles to keep him in sight.

  “Jonah? What did Stewart say?”

  He stopped dead in his tracks and let out an evil bark. “Oh, the clinic is absolutely loving this one, George. They’re loving it! If there’s one thing I regret in all this, it’s that I’ve lived my life in a way maximally guaranteed to reinforce every dumbass gay stereotype.” He thrust a hand straight up toward the ceiling and began to count on his fingers as he spoke. “One, I have an extravagant personality AND a fabulous best girlfriend. Can’t get more clichéd than that, am I right? Two, you could make a case that I’m overly fond of certain pop divas. Three, sometimes I wear leather, and when I do, I’m smoking hot. Four, I dance well. Five, as you know, I’m a straight-up sexy beast.”

  “Jonah,” said Mark, still bewildered. “Why does the clinic think you did this?”

  “There’ve been rumors for a long time,” Georgia said, “that Jonah might have been the one to steal drugs from the clinic. It’s not true, of course.”

  Jonah shot Georgia a loaded glance. “Stewart said they have evidence, but he says he doesn’t know what it is yet.” He turned back to Mark. “No one is going to believe I’m innocent, and who could blame them?” He ran a hand through his hair. His eyes were huge, wild.

  Mark reached for Jonah’s shoulder. “I believe you.”

  “Me too.” Georgia looked straight at Jonah. “Of course you didn’t—of course—there’s no way on earth you’d have taken the medicines.” But Mark could see it in her eyes, and so, presumably, could Jonah: for a second, she’d wondered whether he had.

  “This is it, though, George. Even if Stewart gets me off, no matter how many people believe me, some people never will. I’m done. Why did I—”

  She interrupted. “You didn’t steal drugs, Jonah, and they won’t have any evidence to show you did.”

  “Well,” he said. Again, his eyes flitted toward Mark and then back to her. “Stewart says they’ve got something making me look guilty. He just doesn’t know what it is.”

  Mark’s head ping-ponged back and forth between Georgia and Jonah.

  “Okay,” Georgia said. She appeared to be choosing her words with care. “Okay
. There will be an actual investigation—an impartial police investigation. The police won’t just take the clinic’s word for this. That’s what you want.”

  Jonah flung his head down onto his arms and moaned something incoherent.

  “Listen,” she said. A touch of panic seeped into her voice. “Stay here tonight.” She threw a quick quizzical look at Mark, and he nodded: Of course. “We knew something like this was coming, and you’re right; it’s going to be awful until they clear you. Try to lay low. Stewart will take care of this.”

  Jonah raised his head. “I thought about going on the lam”—here, for one shining second, his face returned to normal as he uttered the words going on the lam—“but you forget: I don’t have any income anymore. I’ve been in practice for three years and I owe an amount the size of the national debt from med school and for my Nana’s medical care and I have barely any savings, and what savings I do have, Stewart is going to suck up in about a minute. I can’t leave town. I’m done.”

  “Let me pay for it,” Georgia said. He started to protest but she kept speaking. “I have more money than I need, Jones. I love you. If you love me back, you’ll do this. You’ll get away from this. Promise me.”

  “I—”

  “Please. Don’t say no.”

  “Okay,” he said, sounding defeated. “I’ll stay here tonight and then I’ll go out of town.”

  She got up and stood behind him, breathing deeply into his hair. Even from his distance, Mark could make out its faint evergreen scent. Georgia wrapped her arms around his thin torso and he leaned against her; despite their dramatically different coloring, for a moment, with their eyes closed and their cheeks pressed together, they looked like siblings. “This is all going to be okay. You’ll go back and work out whatever Stewart needs you to do. As soon as he says it’s okay, you’ll go somewhere safe and you’ll take a big stack of beautiful books. Or you can binge-watch every old episode of Mad Men, or you can learn to knit. I don’t care what you do, as long as it’s soothing and mindless, and I know—I know—this will work out.”

  “Okay,” he said again. A shudder went through him. “Okay.”

  * * *

  —

  As romantic evenings went, tonight was not shaping up to be what Mark had had in mind, but witnessing Jonah’s distress had eclipsed whatever disappointment he might have felt. As Jonah went inside again to answer yet another call from Stewart, Mark pulled Georgia into his arms. He kissed the top of her head, gently, with all the passion of somebody’s old grandpa. “I’ll get a hotel,” he said.

  “Mark, you don’t have to. We can all stay here.” She paused, glancing through the open door to the tiny house beyond. “My bed’s on a loft and there’s not much in the way of privacy, but of course you can stay.”

  “No worries,” he said. He should have been irritated to be thrown over for another man, but somehow Georgia’s devotion to her friend only served to heighten his admiration for her. “I don’t mind. I’ll get a good night’s sleep—which I’m certain I wouldn’t have gotten here, even under the best of circumstances. I have to go up to New York tomorrow, but I can be back in a few days and we’ll catch up then.”

  Her eyes were full of guilt. “I’ll make you a reservation at a nice hotel nearby.”

  “Don’t feel bad. I admire your commitment to your friend. Obviously he needs you tonight.”

  “He does,” she agreed, as the sound of Jonah’s conversation with Stewart drifted out to their ears. “Say what?” he was shouting.

  Jonah returned to the porch, running his hands through his hair so it stood straight up in back. “Stewart,” he said, “just told me he knows why they think I stole drugs.” Again he looked at Mark and again Mark had the sense Jonah was dancing around something he and Georgia knew but he, Mark, did not.

  “What—specifically—did they say?” she asked.

  “Specifically”—he looked up, directing a pointed look at her—“he said they have a video that shows me accessing the Pyxis.”

  He flung up a hand, interrupting her before she could get out any words. “Of course I told him immediately it’s a fake. Stewart hasn’t actually seen it yet. He asked me about a hundred times if there is anything I want to tell him, George, and he isn’t accepting ‘no.’ I think he suspects me of actually stealing these drugs.”

  “Don’t lie about anything. You didn’t steal any drugs.” She hesitated. “Isn’t there a law saying they have to show the evidence to you? Stewart should be able to view it soon, right? He’ll prove it’s a fake.”

  He sighed. “I think they have to show it to us if I’m charged with a crime. Which will probably happen any day now. But honestly, whether or not I get arrested is not my only worry right now. I came home today to find this on my door.” He shifted his hip to root around in his pocket, eventually pulling out a tattered piece of paper, which he handed to Georgia, who glanced at it, blanched, and thrust it into Mark’s hand as if it had bitten her. He looked down at it. On one side a picture of Jonah had been printed: dressed in a pink bowtie and a pale lavender shirt, he was smiling broadly, showing all his teeth. It looked like a headshot, possibly from the clinic’s family practice website; either they hadn’t yet taken it down, or someone had printed it prior to him being fired.

  The other side of the paper was a printout of a definition from Urban Dictionary: the term Colombian bow tie. It took him all of five seconds to scan it: it referred to slitting someone’s throat and pulling their tongue through the opening in the neck. Next to it someone had printed the words Faggot fashion.

  Georgia looked as though she could not speak.

  “Jonah,” Mark breathed, appalled. “Did you take this to the police?”

  “No.”

  They stared at him.

  “This is a drop in the bucket. Look at my Twitter account.”

  Georgia found her voice. “Twitter! Who cares about Twitter? Half those people aren’t even people and the other half are illiterate belligerent sociopaths. This is someone local who knows where you live and took the trouble to deliver an actual threat to your doorstep. You have to report this.”

  “I’m avoiding the police, remember? The last thing I want to do is present myself to them.”

  “But—”

  “That’s part of why I came over. Stewart said not to go back to my house yet.” He slumped back against the slats of the swing, sending a fine, twanging tremor through the chains suspending it.

  “What?” Her voice rose. “How will we keep you safe?”

  “Right? I seem to be racking up hostile communications from my fellow citizens on an hourly basis.” He refolded the paper and shoved it back in his pocket. “Exhibit A. In the meantime, Stewart’s arranging for me to have a bodyguard.”

  “So he’s taking these threats seriously.”

  He shrugged, flicking at a firefly by his head. “It’s serious enough, I guess. Plenty of people have reached out to make it clear they think I should be mauled in some form. By far the most common suggestion is to have me emasculated, so to speak. I’m sure ninety-nine percent of them are just mouthing off, but Stewart says better safe than sorry. And I’m in so much debt now, the expense of a bodyguard hardly matters.”

  Georgia’s throat worked, but nothing came out. Jonah reached out and laid a finger across her mouth. “Shush,” he said tenderly, almost whispering. “I already know everything you want to say. I freaked out there for a second, but I’m okay, I promise.” He turned to Mark. “I am so sorry about ruining y’all’s time together. Again.”

  “No apology needed, my friend,” said Mark, feeling hopelessly inadequate. He pulled his phone out of his pants pocket and pecked at his travel app. “I’ll catch a Lyft to a nearby hotel,” he said to Georgia, and then: “I’ll call you in the morning.”

  “I’m sorry,” she mouthed to him. She put her hand to her heart and tilt
ed her head toward him. Even in her current state, her face was compelling: some sort of sizzling energy arcing out of her pores, bolding the lines of her features, giving the impression that she was more visible than other people. He drank her in, a long last glimpse, and then walked to the curb to wait for his car.

  19

  A NEW AND TRIPPIER REALM

  Georgia and Jonah sat together in silence, rocking, as the light grew dimmer. It became harder and harder to hold her head up; finally she surrendered and nestled against Jonah. She’d entered that state of suspended reality right before you fall asleep, where everything was slowed and dreamy and you couldn’t tell reality from the feverish, hypnagogic imaginations of your brain. A dense rumbly sound and a higher-pitched tinkling sound echoed around her head; after listening to them for an indeterminate period of time, she realized the sounds were words, and they were coming from Jonah and someone else. Blearily, she opened an eye.

  “I think I need to get you to bed,” said Jonah, looking down at her.

  “Yes,” she said, and then startled at the sight of a man’s large form, standing stock-still with his legs parted and arms crossed, ten feet away on the sidewalk. Jonah followed her gaze and gestured to the man. “This is Edwin. He’s with the security company.”

  Edwin stood somewhere in the vicinity of six five—Mark’s height—but with at least a hundred extra pounds of muscle on his frame. Clearly the long-lost brother of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Howie Long, he had a giant square head topped with buzzed blond hair—de rigueur for a bodyguard, Georgia imagined—and an expressionless expression. He wore a short-sleeved black T-shirt and black pants of some synthetic material, neither of which did anything to hide the monstrous circumference of his arms and legs. He also wore sunglasses, despite the fact that the sky was darkening by the second. He was perfect.

  “Ma’am,” said Edwin, nodding his huge head. A biceps bulged as he moved a hand to his hip.