The Antidote

The chapter consists of letter correspondence and memos between Cleo Allfrey—a photographer for the federal government’s Resettlement Administration—and Ray Stryker, a government official who is her boss. Allfrey has been sent to Nebraska to gather photographic documentation of the practice of “dry farming.” In the final correspondence of the chapter, Allfrey explains that she will delay her return to Washington, DC, so that she can “continue to document an inexplicable occurrence” (114) in Uz. She mails five boxes of photographs to Stryker, two of them taken in Uz.

A customer knocks on the Antidote’s door, and she tells Dell to hide in the closet. The customer, John Boyet, has been her client for 15 years. He is on his way out of town with his family—relocating to Sacramento—and wants to withdraw his deposits before leaving. The process of withdrawing a memory requires the customer to recite a deposit number backward; the Antidote then enters a trance state and repeats the memory back to the customer.

Boyet recites his number, but the Antidote is unable to enter the trance.

From the closet, Dell hears John Boyet choking the Antidote. Armed with knowledge of an extramarital affair Boyet had with a woman who later died of pneumonia (information Dell gleaned from the Party Line), Dell shouts out to Boyet, pretending to be the ghost of his deceased lover.