Darby closed her eyes. “The word at the hospital is that he overdosed on the medicines he’d taken from the Pyxis.”
“He overdosed on Tylenol. He didn’t steal those medicines, Darby.”
“But the video,” she said uncertainly. “It shows him taking them.”
“It doesn’t, though,” Georgia said. “It only shows him standing at the door. The clinic was desperate to get rid of him and didn’t want to risk a big discrimination lawsuit. So maybe faking the video was their way out.”
“I can’t believe it,” Darby said. She closed her eyes. “How could anyone do that?”
Georgia started moving toward the door when it occurred to her, suddenly, that if she walked through the exit from the ICU, it might be the last time she ever did so. This might have been the last time she’d see Jonah alive. She hadn’t touched him, hadn’t whispered encouragement to him, hadn’t fixed his face in her memory as anything other than an unfolding medical catastrophe. She slowed, feeling pulled by some deep-seated force to go back and fling her arms around him, to tell him she loved him.
To tell him goodbye.
She kept walking, knowing they couldn’t disrupt the medical team again. Something in her chest sharpened until it hurt to breathe, but she continued to put one foot in front of the other, making her way toward the exit and then the stairwell and then down the stairs. Both she and Darby were in excellent physical shape, but you’d never know it to hear them descending the stairs; they were breathing so heavily they sounded like they’d both been shot in the chest. They passed through the main floor toward the main entrance. Georgia took a few more steps before realizing Darby had stopped behind her.
“Georgia,” she said, “I have an idea. Will you come with me?”
Georgia turned. She wasn’t overly familiar with this hospital, but Darby, who’d gone to medical school here, probably knew every inch. She followed Darby outside and down the length of Ashley Avenue until they reached the corner of Bee Street. Darby stopped.
“Do you know where you are?”
“Sure,” Georgia said, baffled. She might not know every corner of the medical center, but she knew her way around this section of Charleston.
“I mean,” said Darby patiently, “do you know what that is?” She gestured toward the building on the corner: steep, narrow gables, warm bricks, a courtyard framed with palm trees and old oaks dripping Spanish moss.
“A church.”
“Right,” she said. “St. Luke’s Chapel.”
“Darby, I don’t—”
Darby interrupted, her eyes intent. “You know who St. Luke was, right?”
“He wrote the Gospel that’s named for him.”
“What else?”
Georgia considered for a moment. “Also, I think he’s the author of the Acts of the Apostles. He was Greek, maybe; educated for sure. They called him . . .” She trailed off. “Oh.”
Darby nodded. “They called him the physician. He’s the patron saint of doctors.”
They walked closer. Darby made her way to a side door and turned the handle.
The lights were off but Georgia could see it was a narrow, lovely room, with dark-stained pews and rafters. Three simple stained-glass windows graced the wall behind the pulpit, casting streams of colored light onto the floor. Darby knelt at the entrance to a pew and then seated herself, making a space next to her. She plucked a Bible from its slot in the pew in front of her and fluttered its pages.
“But God has shown me,” she read, “that I should not call any man impure or unclean.” She reached for Georgia’s hand. “So says the writer of Acts.”
Behind Darby glowed an arched window made of elongated hexagonal panes of red and yellow and blue glass. Georgia wondered how old it was: decades? Centuries? So much of Charleston was ancient by American standards, the city having been founded in the early 1600s. Then she remembered this church had been nearly demolished in Hurricane Hugo. It had been rebuilt on the same foundation, but with stronger, more enduring beams and beautiful new windows. Maybe this was a metaphor, both for the church and for humanity: as they aged, they should hope to grow stronger and more enlightened.
“Darby,” Georgia said. Her heart pounded, almost audibly. “He did mean me.”
Darby released her hand, startled. “He stole those drugs for you?”
“No! No, I promise, that’s not what happened. But I did ask him to do something else for me.” She stopped, honesty compelling her to add, “I did more than ask. I may have manipulated him a little bit.”
Darby regarded Georgia for a moment, her face solemn and contemplative in the blue light from the window. Finally, she said, “Do you want to tell me?”
“It’s better if you don’t know.”
“Is it . . . are you saying this was something illegal?”
“Jonah did nothing illegal, no.” Georgia ran a hand along the back of the pew, feeling the smooth solidity of the wood. “But I think I made a terrible decision.”
Darby bowed her head. After a beat, Georgia bowed hers too. Darby reached for her hand again without speaking aloud, but Georgia knew what she was doing: praying, in this church named for a healer, for God to spare the life of her friend.
26
I DON’T WAVE
Georgia rolled out of bed, already awake when her alarm went off. She made herself run, sticking to her routine, pounding the predawn pavement of the city. This was the only tolerable part of the day, where focusing on the repetitive thrum of her footfalls and the rhythmic hush of her breathing sent her into a mindless trance.
The last week since the chapel with Darby had passed in a haze. It was the week before Thanksgiving—a holiday she normally spent with Jonah—and everyone around her was preoccupied. She went to work. She went to the hospital. She spoke, every night, to Mark, who’d left for North Carolina. She slept, barely. She kept it together, taking care of her patients, fulfilling her responsibilities.
Jonah did not wake up.
Back at the house after her run, she unleashed Dobby and gave him his breakfast, which he gobbled with delighted abandon. She showered, standing under the hot water until she pruned up, then staggered out and discovered there were no clean towels in the bathroom. There were no towels of any kind in the bathroom, actually, so after a moment of hesitation, she dried herself off with a small, ratty washcloth. Her hygiene had deteriorated significantly since Jonah’s hospitalization: she was out of both deodorant and toothpaste, but between work and ICU visits there was no time to shop, and she kept forgetting to order anything online. She brushed her teeth with baking soda, and after a moment’s consideration, spritzed perfume onto her armpits.
She’d gotten into a pattern of waking an hour earlier than usual so she could swing by the ICU before heading to the clinic. Today the ICU doc, a guy named Augustine Blitzer, called her name as she passed the workstation. She’d gotten to know most of the intensivists a bit. Each of them texted her from time to time; whether they were driven by a sense of professional courtesy or whether they extended this level of compassion to all the families of their patients, she didn’t know. Dr. Blitzer, who was finishing up the late shift, was a stout guy who looked like he’d sprout a full beard the instant he finished shaving. He sat hunched forward on his round stool, his chin resting in both huge hands, staring at the computer screen in front of him. A dart of fear pierced her at his blank expression. Was he going to tell her Jonah had died?
“No, no,” he said, looking up and correctly reading her face. “Jonah’s okay.” He caught himself. “Not okay; you know what I mean. He hasn’t changed.” He waved a tired hand at himself. “Bad night.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, with genuine sympathy. When an ICU doctor said he’d had a bad night, it usually referred to a mighty effort to save someone who died anyway. Or sometimes, it was just an unending cascade of misery: complex new pati
ent after complex new patient, all of them requiring urgent intervention and careful thought.
“I stopped you because he’s not here. He went to the scanner. Just left.”
“Oh,” she said, flooded with disappointment. She’d miss him this morning.
“They were supposed to scan him last night but emergencies kept rolling in. We’re checking for any new cerebral edema.”
She nodded; they were looking for brain swelling. Being on a transplant list was a delicate balancing act; the sicker you were the more you moved up the list, but eventually you crossed a line and became irredeemable. At some point in the last few days, she’d stopped wearing her doctor hat around Jonah, afraid that if she probed the status of his labs and his tests too extensively, she’d recognize that final line as it receded in the rearview mirror. She no longer asked questions; if any decisions needed to be made, they’d ask her. Instead, she’d started focusing on the gift of time. She stroked his hands and whispered in his ears. She skimmed his cheeks with the backs of her hands and brushed his floppy hair from his face. She told and retold all the funniest and most beloved stories from their friendship, emphasizing all the things that made him vain: his handsomeness, his wit, his bright mind.
His kindness.
He never responded to any of this. No movement, no change in his vital signs, no flash of sentience behind the mask. But she talked to him anyway.
“Who’s coming on today?” she asked Dr. Blitzer.
“Stephanie,” he said, referring to Dr. Levin. “I know she’ll call you the minute there’s anything new to tell.”
“Thank you,” she told him.
She made her way back through the hospital to the parking lot and to her car, which, like her, had grown grimy and disheveled during the crisis, littered with empty water bottles and discarded changes of clothing. As she hit the highway, she rolled the window down in time to feel the warmth of the sun on her arms as it cracked the horizon over the ocean.
* * *
—
Stewart called en route. “Anything?” he inquired, unable to hide his hope.
He’d taken to checking in with Georgia every day. She was touched by his anxiety. Surely some of it related to the increasingly likely conclusion that he’d been gifted that most elusive of clients—a truly innocent man, martyred by villains—but it also stemmed from an appreciable personal concern. He liked Jonah.
“Nothing,” she said. “They were scanning him again. I should hear more later.”
“Keep me posted.”
“What’s new on your end?” she asked. Strangely, the sicker Jonah had become, the less she’d cared about the public developments in his case.
Stewart’s voice kicked up a notch. “Quite a bit, actually. Have you seen the paper today?”
“Not yet. I’m in the car.”
“Read it as soon as you get wherever you’re going. And call me.” He hung up.
She hadn’t bothered to grab her copy of the paper when she’d left home, so as soon as she parked the car at work she scurried inside to snag the copy from the lounge. She was earlier than she’d expected to be, and she was in luck: the paper was lying unmolested in its plastic sleeve on a table. No one looked up as she scooped it up and bolted.
Skulking down the hall to the clinical wing of the compound, she let herself into her still-dark practice and then into her office. There it was: an article on the third page. The headline read Developments in Physician Discrimination Case, which she took as a positive: they were no longer framing the story as something Jonah might have done wrong, but as something that had been done wrong to him. She scanned it hungrily, absorbing the gist, and then read it again more slowly to focus on the nuances. The reporter made note of the fact that Jonah had been hospitalized but didn’t out him as an overdose, either out of some sense of decorum or, more likely, because she didn’t know. Or maybe it violated privacy laws to report medical information. In any case, she mentioned he was said to be lingering in critical condition but didn’t provide any specifics. Unlike the TV station, however, this time there was no speculation regarding alleged drug use as the cause of his malady.
Over the last few days, more information had come out. First, and most interesting, Stewart claimed he could prove the original evidence—the video showing Jonah accessing the medicine storage area—had been doctored. Computer experts, he said, had examined it and concurred: it had been altered to show Jonah’s face.
Second, Stewart said, the clinic had been unable to provide any corroborating evidence to bolster their claim to the police that Jonah had been using drugs. No one else had made similar allegations. No one reported Jonah having sold them drugs. No one reported any wild parties. Even after all the speculation and trollish comments online, no one had come forth with any declarations that they’d been abused or harmed as a patient. And, in fact, patients of Jonah’s had started contacting Stewart with their support.
Georgia called him. “This is stunning.”
“There’s more.” He made a small hacking sound, somewhere between a laugh and a cough. In the background, she could make out a hum of voices and a clattery sound like a printer.
“Stewart? Are you at work?”
He made the sound again. “Excuse me. No, I’m at a TV station. There are some people—hold on, I’m just about to—okay, hold on.” He must have placed his hand over the phone or put it in his pocket, because for the next moment or two she could only make out a dull woh-wah sound. Then the sound cleared and his voice returned. “I’m waiting to go on the show and they just showed me on the air in some sort of holding area and they wanted me to wave at the camera.” He cleared his throat again. “I don’t wave.”
“What channel are you on? I’ll watch you.”
He told her the channel, adding: “I’m on in the next five minutes.” His voice dropped. “Georgia, you’re going to be shocked by some of the things I’ve uncovered. We need to talk after I’m finished here.”
“Of course,” she said. She swallowed. “I’ll call you before I step into the OR.”
She hung up. She booted up her desktop computer and clicked onto the livestreaming morning news show. Not a minute too soon: the newsfeed came up with a video of Stewart, sitting in a studio in front of a big fake window displaying an image of the Ravenel Bridge at dawn. He faced a smooth-skinned female reporter in a pale blue suit.
“. . . can you tell us about the new evidence in the case?” she was saying.
Stewart nodded. He looked much better—more dignified and lawyerly—on camera today than he had the day they’d interviewed him outside. “My office received an anonymous communication instructing us to review the image captured by the video camera.”
The reporter interjected, her voice audible over a series of still images from the video, showing Jonah’s face just before he punched a code into the keypad. “These are the images from the video showing Dr. Tsukada entering the medication area?”
“Correction,” said Stewart. “They appear to show Dr. Tsukada entering the medication area. This isn’t a high-quality image, but in any case, his face is clearly identifiable.”
“So if his face is identifiable, how does it only ‘appear’ to show him?”
“Because the images have been altered,” said Stewart. “Or rather, the video itself was altered. When we had it examined by computer forensic experts, they determined Dr. Tsukada’s features had been superimposed on someone else’s form. It wasn’t a particularly sophisticated attempt either: it took the forensics people only a quick glance to determine the video had been doctored.” Stewart paused, as if examining the irony of this last bit of terminology, adding, “So to speak.”
“Did the clinic have their own experts perform a similar analysis?”
“Not to my knowledge. But I’m sure they will now.”
“But it is their video, correct?”
“Actually, no,” said Stewart. He looked directly at the camera and then immediately looked away, as if remembering he’d been instructed to avoid it. A buoyant glow lit his face. “The clinic does not have surveillance cameras in any location that would capture the entrance to the medication room. This was probably filmed on an individual’s phone.”
“How did the clinic become aware of it?”
“I’ve inquired as to that but haven’t received a reply yet.”
“And in any case, you are convinced the video was altered?”
“I am convinced.”
The reporter leaned forward, the picture of animation. “If it wasn’t Dr. Tsukada, were these experts able to determine who was actually in the video? And how they did it?”
“We can’t tell who was in the video,” said Stewart. “I have an idea as to who is responsible but I can’t share it publicly yet. But it’s no mystery how it was done: through a digital video-editing program.”
“Does that require special skills?”
“Not in this case,” said Stewart. “Anyone could do it. The way these programs work is interesting. They utilize artificial intelligence algorithms by training the machine to recognize an image—say, a person’s face—by showing it hundreds of images of that face. Then the program is able to transfer the face to a video image of someone else. It’s the same technology that allows people on Reddit to make fake porn movies of celebrities, or to portray politicians saying things they’ve never actually said.”
“What they call deepfakes,” said the reporter.
“That’s correct. We live in a time where it’s very difficult to discern what’s real and what isn’t.”
“So whoever did this would need hundreds of images of Dr. Tsukada?”
“That’s a very good question. Yes. Dr. Tsukada’s phone—and maybe his computer—would contain a digital file like that. There’d be hundreds of his own images, assuming he kept pictures of himself. Regular photo apps have facial recognition software that automatically groups images of a particular person together.”
The Antidote for Everything Page 28