In tandem, they looked at him as Georgia finished: eyes wide, flared nostrils, teeth clamped in feral ferocity. He whipped his head from side to side. “Where exactly are we right now? Can we land?” she asked.
In answer, the attendant gestured to the flight-tracker screens in the galley. They were heading northeast along the great circle route between the eastern seaboard of the United States and Frankfurt, Germany, currently placing them over the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Landing was obviously not an option.
“Okay,” Georgia said, hoping she sounded more confident than she felt. “Treatment for anticholinergic poisoning is largely supportive. Although I think there is some kind of antidote. I’m not a toxicologist, of course, but I’m hoping he’ll do much better now that the patches are removed.”
She took what action she could: after a discussion with a physician on the ground, she cobbled together a treatment plan, systematically proceeding through a checklist of available options. She stayed in the back with him; he was dead weight, so snowed that he’d sprawled out diagonally across the galley floor, limbs flung akimbo with the confident, space-snatching thoughtlessness common to most men and all small children. He snored, too: throaty reverberations that shook his entire body.
By now, the plane had gone dormant; overhead lights out, engines droning, no one moving. Georgia sat on the galley floor, her back pressed against the metal of a cabinet, feeling the soothing mechanical vibrations of the plane’s innards through the floor. After what felt like an eternity, she’d almost fallen asleep when something jarred her into full consciousness.
Her patient’s snores had stopped. As she watched, he rolled onto his side, facing her, and opened his eyes.
4
FELIX CULPA
MARK
Mark McInniss looked up to find the proportions of the world had shifted in some fundamental way: sizes blown out of whack, angles off-kilter, surfaces entirely wrong. He blinked and looked again. An institutional-appearing gray cabinet stretched above his head toward a distant ceiling. He could not figure out where he was: in a bunker of some kind? A . . . jail cell? His head throbbed as if he’d awoken from a world-class bender, so this last thought, though frightening, was not impossible.
As his vision began to resolve, he realized he must be on an airplane, although his position, lying supine, seemed to indicate a problem. Confusion swamped him, along with a dawning awareness that he must have somehow made an ass of himself. He whipped his head to the side and then relaxed. He must be in first class, in a reclining seat. A very uncomfortable, very hard seat.
A light hand gripped his forearm. “Are you thirsty?” said a woman. Right away, he liked her voice; if her words had been script, they’d be one of those looping, artistic fonts you see on placards and memes. A warm voice, musical and smart and slightly hoarse. He stretched his neck to see who it belonged to, but an alien object in his mouth distracted him: a baked rock, etched with salty, hardened cracks, had replaced his tongue. He tried to speak but could manage only a raspy bark.
The hand retreated from his forearm and returned bearing a cup. It was exquisite; nothing in the history of humanity had ever felt as good as the sensation of this cool liquid rolling down his tongue and along the sandblasted gorge of his throat. He raised his head to guzzle it, not minding as it splashed down the sides of his face. As his thirst abated and the water puddled in the hollows of his collarbones, it occurred to him he must not be wearing a shirt. He looked around, discovering he was stretched out along the floor of the galley, his shirt and pants and shoes missing.
So. Quick summation of his circumstances: he was lying half-naked and groggy on the floor of an airplane. What the hell was going on?
He wanted to ask the water-bestowing angel, but before he could force the words past his newly restored tongue, his head lolled back, felled by an immense gray mist of fatigue.
* * *
—
The next time he opened his eyes, things were marginally clearer. He was flying back to Europe from the United States. He knew he hadn’t been feeling well as the flight took off, but he couldn’t quite remember why. Apparently he’d done something stupid, assuming, of course, that whatever had happened to him was personal in nature and not the result of having been conked on the head by a terrorist or hit by a suitcase during a cabin depressurization or some other random event beyond his control. For a hopeful moment he considered these scenarios, but quickly rejected them. As best he could tell, the rest of the plane was behaving normally, which would be unlikely in the face of a major disaster.
None of this mattered now, however, because a woman’s face hovered into view just above him, riveting his attention. It was an arresting face, not quite beautiful, from the apex of her wide jaw to her small, slightly rounded nose to her curved forehead. It was also an animated face, the wide amber eyes alight with intelligence and curiosity and energy, rimmed with a beautiful band of brown, complementing her coloring: dark red hair, skin dotted with light brown freckles. He resisted the absurd urge to reach up and trace the swell of her cheekbone.
“Hi,” he said, trying to mask his confusion with an air of confidence.
The woman smiled. “Hi.”
A long while passed and Mark realized he must have dozed off. Absently, he wiped a crust of drool off his lower lip with his shoulder. “Wazz—whass your name?”
“Georgia. What’s yours?”
“Mark,” he said. At least there was one thing he could answer. Emboldened, he picked up her hand. “Not married,” he observed. What? Where had that come from?
“That’s right,” she said, in a slightly cooler tone.
With some effort, he heaved himself up onto his forearms so their faces were level. “What are you doing later?”
A tinkly laugh burst out of her. “Are you hitting on me?”
“No,” he said automatically, before honesty forced him to reconsider. “Yes.”
“Well, this is . . . unexpected.”
This was a good beginning, especially considering that he’d been unconscious a few minutes ago, but progress stalled as he tried to think of what to say next. Flopping his head back down, he noted a few more details of her appearance: the flat, almost imperceptible glint of a tiny nose ring, unadorned fingernails, a blue bandana wound around the cloud of rust-colored hair. A few minutes passed in peaceable silence while he tried to puzzle out why this woman in particular would have been assigned to mind him.
“What happened to me?” he managed, finally.
She perked up. “Anticholinergic poisoning,” she said, sounding pleased. “You’ve been out of it for many hours.”
“What? What the hell is that?”
Her gaze was intent. “Where did you get the patches you were wearing on your back? They have instructions on them, but they’re not in English.”