The Antidote for Everything

by Kimmery Martin

“There’s no innocent reason anyone would need the name of a black hat.”

  “To be specific,” she mumbled, “I asked for the name of a gray hat, not a full-on black hat.”

  Mark looked at her. “Georgia,” he said, “what did you do?”

  29

  FALSE IN ONE THING, FALSE IN EVERYTHING

  The pressure of Mark’s gaze was unrelenting. Georgia caved and looked away first. It had gotten fully dark in the time since he left to go to the bathroom, so she leaned across him and switched on a lamp she’d fashioned herself from an interesting piece of driftwood. The yellow light washed across him and she studied his expression: there was characteristic calm but also an element of resigned knowledge. He’d figured out what she’d done, or he thought he had. What she couldn’t discern was how he was taking it. She reached for his hand and he allowed her to pick it up, curling it back into hers.

  “So?”

  “Mala in se,” she said, reverting to the language that had bonded them in the first place. Sometimes there was no good equivalent in English for the original Latin.

  He got it: “Inherently wrong. Universally wrong. An act evil in itself, even aside from any laws that might prohibit it.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Exactly. An act almost all people would consider to be immoral. Murder. Rape. Unjustified theft.”

  He nodded, but aside from his understanding of the phrase, she’d puzzled him. “This,” she said, waving her hand to represent the situation, “was a clear case of mala in se. It is inherently wrong—inherently evil—to refuse to provide medical care to a group of people because of their sexual orientation. It is inherently wrong to fire someone from a job because they refuse to discriminate against their patients. It is cruel and harmful and indefensible to place someone else in a true existential crisis—where they cannot have a means of supporting themselves or maintaining their health in order to stay alive.”

  “Yes; okay. I’m with you so far.”

  “So,” she said. “What we did was manipulative. But it”—she thought for a moment, choosing her words carefully—“it wouldn’t have been our first choice or second choice or even third choice of how to handle the clinic’s actions. This fell more into the court of last resort. If we’d been able to think of any other way . . .”

  He waited her out.

  “. . . but we couldn’t. And eventually we came to realize that none of it was going to work. The president and the judges and the courts in this country are on the hospital administration’s side.”

  “But you didn’t need to publicize anything beyond what actually happened. The truth is enough to persuade people that Jonah shouldn’t have been—”

  She was already shaking her head. “No, I wish it were enough, but it isn’t. Someone got fired because they treat transgender people? To most people, that isn’t particularly noteworthy. It isn’t memorable. It isn’t even illegal.”

  She sat back, out of breath. Mark was still regarding her closely, his attention focused on her face. As unnerving as this was, it gave her pause to think. Prior to Jonah being fired, if you had asked her to identify the most useless personal characteristic, she’d have said introspection. She had never been one to turn her mind inward, and consequently she might be unfamiliar with how other people viewed her as well. She didn’t really care how other people viewed her, in fact. She was what she was, and other people were what they were, and the whole idea that there was something to be gained by a preening, self-absorbed, exhaustive study of inner motivations—or whatever—struck her as a waste of time. Few people were that important.

  But she did know this about herself: she was honest. Or—and this was the key—she used to be honest. In the past, it would never have occurred to her to mislead someone else, and if she had misled someone, she’d have been ashamed to lie about it further. Not anymore.

  Now she saw she was living in a house of cards. You’d have to have a hard-core commitment to the philosophy of The ends justify the means in order to absolve her, but it was now her most intense hope that Mark would do exactly that: absolve her for the choices she’d made.

  “Think about it,” she said. “We live in a society where our wrongdoers immediately shift the conversation: blaming the victim, lying, delegitimizing those who are outraged, so the crime becomes condemning the crime, not committing the crime.”

  Mark nodded; he was still trying to understand. “I can’t even tell sometimes,” he said, “what’s reality and what is fiction.”

  “Yes,” she said. “We live in an age of normalized lying.”

  It began during the time she’d been waiting for Beezon, when she’d commandeered his empty office. She noticed he’d enabled a program on his computer to auto-populate his password, or maybe he hadn’t had a password at all. At first, it only served to illustrate Beezon’s hypocrisy: protecting confidential information was a perennial favorite topic featured in the Bulletin, right up there with an insipid monthly “inspirational quote” and generic advice on how to plan for retirement.

  Of course, she had no way of knowing at the time how consequential this would turn out to be. Over the next few weeks she tried to believe reasonable people would overcome unreasonable people and good decisions would outweigh bad ones. This, of course, did not happen. The clinic doubled down on their justification for firing Jonah and turning away certain patients.

  “Listen,” she’d told Jonah; it was a Saturday, the morning after they’d met for their walk at Waterfront Park. They were huddled in a coffee shop near her house, watching an apocalyptic rain sluice against the cafe windows. It was coming down in contiguous sheets, as if some wrathful weather poltergeist were upending a series of cosmically huge buckets of water against the glass. Neither of them wanted to brave the outdoors, so they just kept ordering more lattes until it got to the point where they were so keyed up they almost couldn’t function. Georgia rattled her nails along the table; Jonah was doing some kind of sinuous upper-body dance to the music playing over the cafe’s speakers. They probably looked like a couple of cokeheads.

  “Can you be still for a second? You’re distracting me and I need to focus.”

  “Negative,” he said. “This beat is poppin’.”

  “Okay, fine. Whatever.” She considered the beat for a moment; it actually was pretty good. “Here’s the thing, Jonah: I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the question of what influences public opinion. And it’s unfortunate, but I’ve come to the conclusion facts don’t matter.”

  “So what does matter?”

  “It’s like we said: Spin. Perception. Making it look like the other guy is unfairly attacking us.”

  “The other guy is unfairly attacking us. Mainly me.”

  “Yes, but no one cares. We need to make this be about Beezon.”

  “How?”

  “We need kompromat on him.”

  “You’re not seriously thinking of investigating Beezon, are you? What are you going to do? Blackmail him?”

  “No. I’m thinking a video of you. Of something extremely questionable.”

  “Geez, Georgia, that is definitely going to be NSFW.”

  “No, no; I don’t mean whatever sordid nonsense you’re thinking of. I mean something at work.”

  “I don’t do anything sordid at work. Or anything questionable.” He stopped swaying and sat very straight. “I’d never do anything to compromise my patients’ care.”

  “I understand that. The video is going to be fake. Or rather, it will be real, but it will be a double-fake.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “It’s not going to show something you’d actually do; it’s going to show something you’d never do. And actually, it’s not going to be you in the video at all.”

  His mouth opened slightly. “Why?”

  She leaned forward. “There’ve been plenty of rum
ors that you’re the person behind the drug theft at work. Someone even put that empty bottle of fentanyl in your coat pocket.”

  He stared at the table. “I didn’t do that.”

  “Of course you didn’t! But the clinic is using that to gain sympathy for firing you, and we need to expose that you’ve been framed. So what if we were to film a video that makes it look like I am the person who’s been breaking into the med room?”

  His jaw dropped further. Before he could ask the obvious question, she hurried on.

  “Listen. We’ll start with whatever it shows—let’s say it’s me breaking into the Pyxis to steal drugs. I won’t actually steal the drugs, of course, but there will be this video of me trying to enter the med room or whatever. The first thing that will happen is the clinic will be forced to acknowledge it wasn’t you stealing the drugs.”

  “That still doesn’t help my patients. It won’t even get me my job back, plus you’ll lose yours and be disgraced.” His face was the epitome of confusion. “What am I missing here?”

  “I’m not done. We’ll give it a little time. And yes, there will be an uncomfortable few days for me, but I’m okay with that. Because the next thing to happen is that we will prove the video was faked.”

  “I still don’t get it.”

  “The clinic will run with that video. They’ll love it—they want to fire me anyway; this is the perfect chance to paint the two of us as degenerates. They’ll say: See? These people condone an unnatural lifestyle and they’re criminal drug thieves. They’ll conflate the two things and they’ll conflate the two of us and they’ll be very vocal about it. We’ll give them a chance to bring it up to a boil—and then we’ll out them as liars.”

  She went on: “We’ll be able to show, convincingly, that someone edited the face on the video. I’ll remove my real face from the video and replace it with digitized images of my face, taken from photos. They’ll look real enough at first glance, but it won’t take a genius to uncover that’s it’s altered—people in fake videos don’t blink, for one thing, because the hundreds of images you use to generate the video don’t usually show the person with their eyes closed. It will look like someone framed me. And because the clinic said I’d committed a crime I didn’t commit, they’ll be toxic. It won’t matter what they say after that. Even the most hard-core homophobes out there will back off, because there will be a public outcry. The clinic will be pure poison. They’ll have to acknowledge they were wrong about both of us.”

  Jonah sat, stunned. Finally he angled his head and mumbled something.

  “What?” she asked.

  “It’s that thing; the Latin thing you said in the meeting with Stewart. Falsus in uno, falsus in—whatever the rest of it was. False in one thing, false in everything. That’s where you got the idea.”

  “Oh,” she said, impressed.

  “Georgia, I—” He stopped and closed his eyes. When he opened them, he didn’t look at her. “We can’t lie like this. That makes us no better than them. And it could ruin someone’s life if they get blamed for changing it.”

  “I know.”

  “A thing like that?” he said. “Someone could burn for it.”

  “Well—”

  “And there’s always the chance they figure it out. This has to—sheesh, this could be breaking the law. You could go to jail for real. No way; this is not happening. I won’t let you do it.”

  “Jonah, please,” she said. “Please consider it.”

  “No. You are not doing this.”

  She had a flash of inspiration. “Don’t say no right now. There’s always the possibility I could go back to Donovan and threaten him if he doesn’t help.”

  Jonah’s face paled. “Georgia, no,” he said. “Don’t do that.”

  “That’s the only other thing I can think of.”

  He stood up, walking past the table to the exterior door. Startled, she threw tip money on the table and gritted her teeth as she walked out into the deluge. It hadn’t been raining when they’d walked here; neither of them had so much as a raincoat. She was soaked to the skin in under a second, her hair molded to the sides of her head like a couple of sodden towels. She flipped her hair back, sending two great arcing sprays to the street behind her. “Jonah, wait,” she called just as a huge crack of thunder boomed in her ear. The lightning strike must have been incredibly close to sound that loud—it physically hurt her ears—but she hadn’t seen a strike through the dense rain. Involuntarily, she doubled over, clapping her hands to her head.

  She sensed a presence next to her: Jonah. He’d appeared out of nowhere, also holding his hands to his head. She straightened up and they fell into one another, so wet and traumatized by the ringing in their ears that they didn’t notice they were standing in the middle of the street until a car horn blared. The car passed inches from them, kicking up a gargantuan spray of water. Demoralized and half-drowned, they inched to the sidewalk, clutching one another.

  “I’m in for the plan. The video thing. I’d rather do that than ever have you face that guy again.” Jonah took a huge shuddering breath.

  “Jones, that’s—”

  He cut her off. “On one condition. No, two conditions. I’m the one in the video. It’s going to be me, not you, in case we get caught.”

  “No way.” In truth, she’d thought of this—it would be better, in some ways, because it would lead to a more direct exoneration of Jonah—but she’d nixed the idea on the grounds that Jonah would have to tolerate the public shaming that would ensue before the video was revealed to be a fake.

  “Not negotiable,” he said, his face taking on a mulish cast she knew well. “We do it that way or we don’t do it. I’d never put you at risk.”

  “Jonah,” she said.

  “And the other thing,” he said, ignoring her beseeching look, “we don’t frame anyone. Period. I’ll make the video and I’ll email it to myself. They’ll only see it if they’re monitoring my email.”

  “What if they don’t?”

  “Then, nothing. It doesn’t happen. But I’m pretty sure Beezon reads my personal emails.”

  Another crack of thunder: this one farther away. Suddenly Jonah threw his head back and whooped, a hard-edged, long laugh that ended with him wiping his nose on his already-soaked sleeve. He turned to her. “I love you.”

  “I love you more.”

  “Also,” he said, “you’re not meeting me to do this. I’ll set up a camera and do it myself. I can figure out how to make the deepfake. They can’t see the underlying image, right?”

  “Right, I think, but I’m coming too.”

  He gripped her shoulders. “You’re not understanding me. I’m not involving you. I’ll do this for two reasons and two reasons only: for my patients and to keep Donovan Wright away from you.”

  She shut her eyes, already assaulted by misgivings. The plan had seemed so clear-cut when she’d pictured herself doing it, but the thought of Jonah at risk cast things in a whole new light.

  “Maybe we should think things over a little,” she mumbled.

  “Too late.” Jonah flashed her a parody of an evil smile. “You already unleashed the genie, sweetheart.”

  * * *

  —

  Mark listened without a word. In the twenty minutes or so it had taken her to recount what she’d done, he’d basically become a still life; he hadn’t budged at Dobby’s impassioned whining from downstairs or the frequent buzzing from both their phones or at any facet of her story, even the most shameful parts. She held nothing back, telling him exactly what had transpired up until the point where Jonah agreed to film the video.

  “He drove to the clinic that night,” she said, “and then I guess he went home and altered it right away.”

  Mark finally stirred. “How did he film it by himself?”

  Georgia tried to infer how he was taking this,
but his voice gave nothing away. “I don’t know. Maybe he used a selfie stick taped to the wall.”

  “So he sent the video clip to himself?”

  “He did. From a fake account on the dark web to his regular email account, along with a note making it sound like someone was trying to blackmail him.”

  “So how did the clinic see it?” His face: still carefully neutral. She mimicked his neutrality, hiding her desperation to know what he was thinking.

  “The HR guy at work—John Beezon—was spying on everyone’s computers, even their home email if they’d ever checked it from a work computer.”

  “How did you know that?”

  “Jonah guessed it ages ago, when Beezon made some snarky comment about his personal life.”

  “So he figured Beezon would see this?”

  Georgia nodded. “When he sent the video, Jonah put PERSONAL & CONFIDENTIAL in the subject line, which pretty much guaranteed anyone monitoring the computer would read it. Or at least we hoped he would. It took him longer than we thought. And then—it was out of our hands.”

  Mark didn’t say anything. After a long moment, he rolled to the side. “Do you mind if I get something to drink?”

  “Of course! I mean, of course not.”

  They both crawled to the ladder and descended. Mark stayed at the base of the ladder, patting Dobby, while Georgia retrieved two handblown glasses from the kitchen shelf, along with a bottle of small-batch bourbon. Mark’s eyes widened at the sight of the bottle. “I was thinking water,” he said, “but this is probably a better call.”

  It didn’t seem like an auspicious moment for a toast, so she took a hard swig of the bourbon, letting it burn against the back of her throat before swallowing it. Mark sipped at his, gazing absently at the photo of Jonah on the wall behind them. “It wasn’t really out of your hands at that point, though,” he said, “was it?”

  “I—”

  “Why did you need the name of a hacker from Olin?”

  “I needed advice.”