The Antidote for Everything

by Kimmery Martin

  “So,” said the reporter, “who would have had access to Dr. Tsukada’s phone?”

  * * *

  —

  Georgia called him as soon as the interview was over. “Stewart,” she said. “If Jonah—if Jonah survives, they would have to offer him his job back, wouldn’t they? Nothing could possibly support firing him now.”

  “I would hope so,” said Stewart. “Especially as there was more information than I could share on the air.”

  A dramatic pause.

  “Yes?”

  “The clinic was able to determine the code used to access the room. The machine time-stamps them, so it was a matter of looking at all the recordings from after-hours access. Then we asked the clinic to identify the individual to whom the code belonged.”

  “And?”

  With the air of someone imparting a blow Stewart said, “Jeannie Solomon.”

  Georgia had no idea what to make of this. “Jeannie Solomon? She’s a nurse anesthetist, is that right?”

  “Correct,” said Stewart. “So my first action was to ask the clinic if Ms. Solomon could be the person responsible for the drug theft. But the clinic had already checked their records and she was on vacation that day. So someone—presumably someone close to Ms. Solomon—used her access code.”

  “Oh,” Georgia said slowly. This made no sense at all. “What do you think?”

  “I couldn’t say this on the air, obviously,” said Stewart, “but my first thought was to wonder if it may have been Dr. Wright who entered the room. He oversees Ms. Solomon.”

  A flash of unease jolted through her at this speculation. Much as she’d have loved it to be Donovan who’d broken into the room, she couldn’t picture anyone believing a scenario in which he was using or selling ketamine. She just couldn’t. She detested the guy, but he was as vanilla and pedestrian as they came, aside from his nasty little habit of molesting coworkers. If he was going to develop a drug habit, Special K was an unlikely candidate. Opioids were different—everyone knew opioids could hook anyone, even the least likely people—but none of it made much sense in Donovan’s case.

  Another thought occurred to her. “Why did you tell the reporter you had an idea who was behind it? Did you mean Donovan?”

  “Not exactly,” said Stewart, “But I know how the clinic obtained the video.”

  “You do?”

  “Oh yes,” said Stewart. She could hear footsteps over the line, as if he was clomping down a stone hall. “Thank you,” he called to someone. To her he said, “Let me correct that statement. I’m not certain, but I have a good idea how they obtained the video.”

  “How?”

  “They stole it from Jonah,” he said.

  27

  AN INFINITE FRACTAL OF SMALLER DROPLETS

  There was a pause as she tried to collect her thoughts. “What do you mean?”

  “Jonah’s work email account is still active—it has an automated reply that he’s left the clinic. But he also had a habit of checking his personal email on his work computer, and it looks like someone at the clinic was accessing that account too. And continued to do so after he was fired.”

  “Okay . . .”

  “Someone emailed Jonah the video in what seemed like a crude attempt at blackmail.”

  “So,” she said, “you’re saying whoever was reading his private email correspondence saw the video too and decided to use it.”

  “That’s what it looks like.”

  “You think it was the clinic who faked the video?”

  “No,” said Stewart, “I don’t think the clinic faked it, unless it was a rogue individual. There would be no reason for them to manufacture a video clip and then email it to him if their intention was to use it to justify his firing.” He paused. “Unless they hoped to scare him into dropping his attempts at arbitration.”

  Before she could reply, Stewart went on. “I don’t have independent confirmation of this, so it has to remain confidential. But I’m hearing something compromising was found on John Beezon’s computer. I’m wondering if it could be the video-editing software.”

  Georgia’s breath escaped in a whoosh. “What?”

  She could hear the slam of a car door, then the muted sound of an engine catching. “Hang on,” said Stewart, “I’m transferring to Bluetooth.” A pause, and then his voice resumed, slightly echoey. “Can you hear me?”

  “Yes,” she said. “How do you know the clinic was monitoring Jonah’s private email?”

  “An anonymous tip.” She could feel Stewart’s smile through the phone line. “Apparently Dr. Tsukada has a friend or two at the clinic. And now that we’ve had access to the video, we were able to tell that it has been altered.”

  “So why didn’t you say all that on the show just now?”

  “An abundance of caution,” said Stewart. “I want to be able to tie all of this together before making a public allegation against the clinic. Once we know more, I’m planning a press conference to lay out the whole situation.”

  Georgia sat up straight. “Can you make them offer Jonah his job back?”

  There was a pause. “Perhaps,” said Stewart. “I don’t think Jonah ever wanted to go to court. Initially I’d hoped to persuade him to pursue it to the fullest legal extent, but I’ve changed my mind.”

  An inarticulate noise escaped her: did this mean Stewart thought Jonah had no chance of recovery?

  Correctly interpreting this, Stewart answered her unspoken question. “Yes,” he said gently, “I know he can’t make decisions. First, I want to honor his wishes, and I know Jonah had no real desire to be a legal pioneer. If he doesn’t recover, the only thing left will be his reputation. Salvaging it in the media as quickly as possible is the best gift I can offer him now, but I don’t want to jump to conclusions. We need to wait a little longer.”

  Her phone had been steadily beeping for the last five minutes, but she didn’t take it away from her ear to look at it. She knew what it was: the OR calling and texting, wondering why she hadn’t shown up to scrub for her first case.

  “What’s the second reason?”

  “What?”

  “You said ‘first.’ First, you wanted to respect Jonah’s wishes.”

  “Oh. Yes.” A slight whistling sound issued through the phone: Stewart was sighing. “The second reason. As much as I’d love to see all laws allowing people to refuse basic human services to others overturned, it’s probably a futile effort.”

  “But people are becoming more accepting,” said Georgia. “This isn’t the 1950s.”

  “Maybe,” said Stewart, “but at the same time the judiciary is changing. Even if social acceptance of a gay person’s right to obtain housing or a job is increasing, the legal climate of the country is changing with every new federally appointed judge. Religious freedom laws are increasing in many places, not decreasing.” He paused, adding in a softer tone, “Last year, the government stopped enforcing nondiscrimination protections for transgender people who’ve been denied healthcare.”

  “Stewart, I . . .” She stalled out. What could she possibly say to a gay man who’d had to battle his whole life for the things she took for granted?

  “We’ll get there, Georgia,” he said. “Someday, we’ll get there.”

  * * *

  —

  As soon as she left her office, she encountered a swarm of men in suits heading in the direction of the clinic’s main administrative hallway. Striding alongside them in stony-faced silence was the CEO of the main hospital, a leonine man in his sixties whom she recognized from various frowny photographs in the media.

  The men passed without making eye contact. She’d have liked to have followed them, but she was now late for her first case. She took off in a brisk trot. As soon as she entered the OR suite, a wall of gossip nearly knocked her off her feet, echoing up from the halls and ce
ntral scheduling desk, where several separate knots of people stood arguing.

  “—heard they placed the Cheerio on administrative leave—”

  “—haven’t seen it myself but—”

  “—told you the first time I heard it there was no way that guy could’ve—”

  Rumors abounded: an arrest—or multiple arrests—were imminent. The person entering the medication area on the video had been John Beezon. No, it had been an anesthesiologist. There had never been any medication missing at all. The medications had been stolen by a drug ring consisting of administrators. No, the ring consisted of gay anesthesiologists. An enraged union of gay patients was planning a mass lawsuit against the clinic and soon everyone would be working for them.

  Bypassing the sound and fury, Georgia set up at the scrub sink in front of the OR. She whaled at her hands and arms with frenetic determination, elbows flying, as if she were a character in a sped-up old film. Holding her dripping hands aloft, she bumped her way into the OR butt-first.

  All conversation in the room ceased. She looked from the circulator to the scrub nurse to the nurse anesthetist, all of whom wore similarly guilty expressions and all of whom she’d heard chatting a moment ago. “Was it something I said?” she asked.

  “Hah!” honked the scrub tech, a guy named Chuck. Great beauty had been bestowed upon Chuck by whichever deity handed out physical appearance, granting him soulful black-rimmed green eyes and an exquisitely carved jawline and waves of thick black hair. Unfortunately, however, as she’d discovered after one date with him five years ago, the same deity had skimped when it came to brainpower. Beautiful Chuck was as dumb as a bag of hammers. “Hah! Hah!”

  She looked at the nurse anesthetist, her friend Debra. She peered back at Georgia though her thick glasses, blinking. She shrugged her shoulders in apology. “We were talking about Jonah.”

  “As chief surgeon in the room,” Georgia said, thrusting her arms into the billowing blue gown Beautiful Chuck held in front of her, “I’m setting conversational limits today. No talking about Jonah or the clinic or anything related to any of that.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Beautiful Chuck. “What should we talk about?”

  “Whether Damien Hirst should have won that Turner Prize way back when,” she said firmly. “How to best flood-proof urban areas in advance of escalating weather events. The decimation of honeybees. The second revolution of quantum mechanics. Anything of cultural or historical or scientific significance; use your imagination. Take it away.” She waved a gloved hand expansively in Beautiful Chuck’s direction.

  Total silence.

  She glanced at the table, where her patient lay sleeping, his eyelids taped to his cheeks to prevent his corneas from drying out during the operation. He looked like an angel.

  She sighed. “Okay, then.” She nodded to Nancy, the circulator. “How about some Led Zeppelin?”

  * * *

  —

  By the time she made it to her car that evening, it was obvious a profound shift had occurred. Levers rose and cogs churned and mysterious machine parts whirred in the great mechanical beast of public opinion until a critical mass had been achieved. Suddenly, everyone was convinced Jonah had been done wrong. As Georgia exited the clinic, Gretchen Nease, a pediatrician who a few days ago had sidled out of her path as if she were a leper, now fell all over herself to throw her glances of warm sympathy. The radio opened the hourly news broadcast with a story of possible malfeasance on the part of the clinic. Several coworkers were quoted, claiming close friendship as they praised Jonah’s personality and medical skills. Georgia felt her eyebrows shoot skyward; she could have sworn at least one of them had been dissing Jonah in the newspaper mere days ago.

  The entrance to Jonah’s hospital across town was abuzz with reporters talking earnestly into handheld microphones. Fragments of their sentences drifted into her ears as she barreled past: wrongfully accused . . . issued an apology . . . fired not for his job performance but for his . . .

  The ICU nurses buzzed her in with their usual brisk cheer. Georgia thought she detected curiosity on the face of the ward clerk, but no one flagged her down as she made her way down the hall to Jonah’s room.

  Aside from Jonah, immobile on his puffy mattress, the room was empty. She pumped hand sanitizer from a dispenser on the wall, applying it to her already-roughed hands and arms as hums and beeps filled the air from the machines tasked with keeping Jonah alive. She listened to each surge from the ventilator, sending oxygen in and ushering carbon dioxide out in its alien, monotonous rhythm. Yellow fluid fell, one drop at a time, from a bag on an IV pole through a transparent polyvinyl tube and into a large central vein on the side of Jonah’s neck. A blink, and the numbers on his monitor updated: heart rate, respiratory rate, oxygen level, blood pressure.

  She dragged a chair to Jonah’s bedside and picked up his hand. “Hey, babe, it’s me,” she said softly.

  No response.

  She leaned forward and forced her voice into a ridiculously upbeat tone. “Big news today, Jones: you’re a celebrity. If—if you were feeling better, you’d probably be fielding calls from screenwriters and Hollywood agents. I’m serious. I even saw your picture on CNN this afternoon.” A wry smile creased her face at the thought of the photo CNN had shown. Jonah would have considered it a full-blown catastrophe: an old black-and-white of him in which he’d been laughing so hard you could see straight up his nose. He’d also been rocking a flippy Bieberesque haircut, à la the mid-2000s. He looked about twelve.

  Now for the hard part. Even though they were alone in the glass-walled room, she glanced over her shoulder. Outside, at the long central counter, people typed on computers and talked; no one was looking in her direction. She leaned in farther.

  “And the clinic: it’s a mess. People are sorry about what happened to you, Jones. Everyone wants you to come back. They want—” She stopped; she couldn’t keep the positive tone going. Her throat felt like it was filled with sand. “They just want you to be okay,” she whispered.

  In a movie, this would be the moment. She’d close her eyes and hang her head, overcome with grief and the terrible futility of it all as a single tear rolled from her eye, tracked by the cameras on a close-up slo-mo of its path over the soft downy fuzz of her cheek and out into the immensity of space. It would land, finally, on the rise of Jonah’s cheekbone, splashing into an infinite fractal of smaller droplets before it vanished. Her shoulders would heave. She’d turn away.

  And Jonah’s eyes would open.

  She waited, full of perverse hope, as her eye obligingly discharged a tear, but Jonah did not play his part. His eyes remained stubbornly shut; his face did not twitch in the throes of imminent consciousness. His chest rose and fell, steadily, evenly, in the measured breaths allotted to him by the machine.

  Her vision blurred and, blindly, she reached for her handbag. Her packet of tissues must have settled in a crevice at the bottom of the bag; despite pawing through its contents two or three times, she couldn’t find them. She’d just resigned herself to a trip to the bathroom, when her fingers curled around a piece of paper. She pulled it out, sending the bag skittering to the floor.

  Ignoring her damp face, she ran her fingers along one edge of the paper, soft and fringy where she’d torn it from Jonah’s journal. The words were hard to distinguish through the film of her tears, little clumps of black against the moon-white glow of the page, but once she squinted and blinked a few times she could make them out. She blotted her face in the crook of her elbow, thinking of Jonah alone in his house the night he’d taken the pills, his brain bubbling and boiling until he’d grabbed pencil and paper and produced the words on this paper.

  THE WRAITH

  I know I knew I went I came

  I turned the corner and called your name

  I searched for fire, for love, for life

  I heard your
voice through blackest ice

  I looked for you in grime and grit

  through heaping hills of counterfeit

  I hunted hope on VR screens

  in fairy tales and cryptic dreams

  through desert sand and arctic floes

  on eyelashes of embryos

  in dying stars and Georgian clay

  atomic dust and cabernet

  I thrust my soul toward sweet vibration

  not you, they said: Abomination

  and still I bowed before the noble

  ever wandering ever hopeful

  through circuit boards and dazzling towers

  I tracked your scent for countless hours

  I scoured the earth till it degraded

  wizened wretched sick and aged

  and all the while I could not see

  you are whole; the wraith is me.

  She closed her eyes again, defeated, and eased her face down to his chest. She rubbed it against the rough fabric of his hospital-issued gown until she could feel the pulsation of Jonah’s heart, like a hyper little frog under his skin. “Jones,” she whispered through the clog in her throat. “I’m so sorry about what I suggested you do.”

  “Georgia.”

  Her eyes flew open. It wasn’t Jonah, of course; people on ventilators could not speak. She leapt back from him, ashamed of her heedlessness of the germs she could be transferring. “I’m sorry,” she squawked to Dr. Levin. “I just . . .”

  The doctor moved swiftly toward Georgia just as she stood up. She turned from Dr. Levin, trying to swipe her face on her sleeve without being obvious about it. She turned back, and for a hideous moment, she thought the doctor was coming to slap her away from her patient.

  “Ah, there, now,” Dr. Levin said and opened her arms. Georgia fell into them, trying not to smear her scrubs with her tears. Everything fell away: Jonah, the room, the hospital, the universe. She clung to the back of Dr. Levin’s slight shoulders, swaying feebly, until a semblance of self-possession returned. “Oh shit,” she said, wiping away a last rogue tear. “Getting slimed by distraught urologists is surely not in your job description.”