Passage

by Connie Willis

  “Could Mrs. Troudtheim be one of those people who simply don’t have NDEs?” Joanna asked. “Forty percent of patients who’ve coded and been revived don’t remember anything at all.”

  “No, that’s not it,” Richard said.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because we’ve only got five volunteers,” he said. “I’m going to check her cortisol levels. Maybe the dosage is still too low.”

  But that just made it worse. When Joanna came into the lab for Amelia’s next session, he asked abruptly, “Didn’t you tell me your subjects frequently say the NDE isn’t a dream?”

  “Yes,” Joanna said. “It was one of the things that surprised me when I first started interviewing. One of Mandrake’s big arguments for the reality of the NDE was that all of his subjects said it was real. Of course, subjective experience isn’t proof of anything, as I’ve tried to tell him, and I assumed he’d coached his NDEers into making the comment anyway. But when I started interviewing, I found he wasn’t exaggerating: nearly all of them volunteer that their experience was real, ‘not like a dream.’ ”

  “And have you been able to get them to be more specific?” Richard asked.

  “Do you have any food?” Joanna asked. “I spent my entire lunch trying to track down Mrs. Haighton.”

  “Sure,” Richard said, reaching in his pockets. “Let’s see, V8 juice, trail mix, cheese-and-peanut-butter crackers . . . and an orange. Take your pick.”

  “No, to answer your question,” Joanna said, ripping the crackers’ cellophane. “They just keep repeating that it feels real. I think it may be because the NDE doesn’t have incongruities and discontinuities.”

  “Discontinuities?”

  “Yes, you know,” Joanna said, “you’re in your pajamas taking a final for a class you never had, and then suddenly you’re in Paris, which is somehow south of Denver and on the sea-coast. Dreams are full of places and times that shift with no transition, juxtapositions of things and people from different times and places, inconsistencies.” She took a swig of V8. “None of my NDEers ever report any of those things. The NDE seems to proceed in a logical, linear fashion.”

  She ate a cracker and then said, “There also seems to be a much longer retention of an NDE. The memory of a dream fades very quickly, usually within a few minutes of waking up, but NDEers retain their memories for days, sometimes years. Why all these dream questions?”

  “Because when I checked Mrs. Troudtheim’s cortisol levels against the template, I noticed the acetylcholine levels matched those of REM sleep, and when I checked the other subjects, they had similarly high levels.”

  “So you think the NDE is similar to a dream, in spite of what they say?”

  “No, because there’s no corresponding drop in norepinephrine, which there would be in dreaming. I don’t know what to think. There’s no consistency in endorphin levels, and I found levels of cortisol in all of Mr. Wojakowski’s NDEs, in spite of the fact that he says he doesn’t feel any fear.”

  “But he does talk a lot about Zeroes and people being killed,” Joanna said.

  “I found them in Amelia’s most recent NDE, too. I have no idea what’s going on.”

  Joanna didn’t either. Amelia’s session yesterday had been her most euphoric so far. When Joanna’d asked her to describe her feelings, she’d beamed at Richard, and said happily, “Warm, safe, wonderful!”

  None of the others had showed any signs of anxiety either. Joanna had finally managed to get in touch with Ann Collins, the nurse who’d attended the session at which Mr. Wojakowski had murmured something while coming out. “He said, ‘Battle stations!’ ” Ann reported, which somehow wasn’t a surprise and, when Joanna asked how he had sounded when he said it, had said, “Excited, jubilant.”

  So cortisol didn’t explain Amelia’s saying, “Oh, no.” Or Greg Menotti’s “fifty-eight,” the meaning of which still nagged at her. After her second visit to see Mrs. Woollam (a very short one because she had been scheduled for a chest X ray), Joanna had even gone to the hospital chapel, gotten a Bible, and looked up Psalm 58, but it was about the sins of the wicked, who were going to be melted away “as waters which run continually.”

  Joanna had spent a few guilty minutes flipping through the rest of the Bible and discovered that most chapters didn’t have a verse 58, and the ones that did tended to say something like, “The gates of Babylon shall be burned with fire, and the people shall labor in vain, and the folk in the fire,” which wasn’t exactly helpful. Especially the part about laboring in vain.

  But even though the answer wasn’t in the Bible, it was somewhere. The feeling that she knew what it meant persisted, and sometimes, listening to Mr. Sage’s interminable pauses or ducking into an elevator to get away from Mr. Mandrake, she felt she almost had it. That if she just had an uninterrupted half-hour to concentrate, she could get it.

  But there were no half-hours. Mrs. Haighton called to say Thursday wouldn’t work, and Vielle, and Maisie, to tell Joanna she was back in the hospital. “I went into A-fib again,” she said matter-of-factly. “I’ve been here a whole day. Don’t you ever answer your pages?”

  No, Joanna thought. They were always from Mr. Mandrake, trying to find out from her who their subjects were and what they’d experienced.

  “I need to see you right away,” Maisie said. “I’m in the same room as before.”

  Joanna promised she’d be down right after Mr. Sage’s session. He saw a tunnel (dark), a light (bright), and some people (maybe), which it took an hour and a half to get out of him. It was a positive pleasure to talk to Maisie.

  “You never told me why you wanted to know what a Victory garden was,” Joanna said, trying not to look appalled at Maisie’s badly puffed face. Fluid retention, Joanna thought. A bad sign.

  “Oh,” Maisie said, “because Emmett Kelly, he’s this clown who has a really sad face and raggedy clothes, I’ve got a picture—it’s the big red book with the volcano,” she said. “It’s in my Barbie bag.”

  “I see Ms. Sutterly brought your books,” Joanna said, looking through the bag. 100 Worst Disasters Ever, with the Hindenburg crashing in flames on the cover, Disasters of the World, with a world map dotted with red flags, Great Disasters, with a black-and-white photo of the San Francisco earthquake. Here it was. Disasters of the Twentieth Century, with a garish red-and-black painting of a volcano.

  “What’s this?” Joanna asked, bringing it over to the bed. “Pompeii?”

  “Pompeii’s the city,” Maisie corrected her. “Mount Vesuvius is the volcano. But this is Mount Pelee. It killed thirty thousand people in like two minutes.” She opened the book and began turning pages filled with photos and maps and newspaper headlines. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, the sinking of the Morro Castle, the Galveston hurricane.

  “Here it is,” Maisie said, wheezing a little. With the mere effort of turning pages? Maisie showed Joanna a double-page spread of photos. The one at the top was of Emmett Kelly, with his white-painted downturned mouth, his battered hat and enormous flopping shoes, running toward the circus tent with a bucket of water. There was a look of horror and desperation on his face, visible even under the clown makeup, but Maisie seemed blissfully unaware of it.

  “Emmett Kelly helped get all of these little kids out of the fire,” she said, “and there was this one little girl, he saved her, and after he got her out of the tent, he said, ‘Go over there in the Victory garden and wait for your mother.’ So she’d be out of the way.”

  “Oh,” Joanna said, “and you thought that was some sort of special place they had at circuses back then?”

  “No,” Maisie said. “I thought a victory was a kind of vegetable.” She pushed the book around so the other half of the double page was facing Joanna and pointed at a man in a tall bandleader’s hat, waving a baton. “That’s the bandleader. When the fire started, he made the band play ‘The Stars and Stripes Forever.’ Do you know how that goes?”

  “Yes.” Joanna hummed a few bars
for her.

  “Oh, I know that song,” Maisie said. “That’s the duck song, ‘Be kind to your web-footed friends.’ If you’re at a circus and you hear that song, you need to get out of there fast. It means there’s a fire or a lion loose or something.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  Maisie nodded wisely. “It’s like a signal. Whenever the band plays it, all the circus people know to come ’cause there’s an emergency. Like when somebody codes. How come Emmett Kelly’s clothes are all raggedy?”

  Joanna explained he was supposed to look like a tramp and then, because her humming “The Stars and Stripes Forever” had reminded her of Coma Carl’s humming, went up to see him for a few minutes.

  His wife said he was having a good day, which meant he hadn’t yanked out his IV in his flailings and hadn’t been ambushed by the Vietcong, but Joanna thought he looked much thinner. When she went out to the nurses’ station, Guadalupe gave her an index card of his murmurings, saying, “He hasn’t said much lately.”

  “Does he still row on the lake?” Joanna asked.

  “No,” Guadalupe said.

  Joanna looked at the card. “No,” he had said. “ . . . have to . . . male . . . patches . . . ,” and underneath, scrawled in a different hand, “red.”

  Joanna transcribed the words, entering them onto Carl’s computer file along with “water” and “oh, grand” and Guadalupe’s comments about his movements. Looking through it, she realized she hadn’t transcribed his humming. It must be on one of the dozens of tapes piled in a shoe box she hadn’t gotten to yet and wouldn’t any time soon. The project tapes took precedence, and conducting interviews, and scheduling. And rescheduling.

  Mrs. Haighton couldn’t come on Friday—this time it was the Art Museum Gala—and Amelia needed to reschedule, too. She had another big exam coming up, and her professor had scheduled a review session she couldn’t miss, and no, she couldn’t do it Thursday either. She had a test in statistics that day.

  “How many exams do they have in college these days?” Richard exploded when Joanna told him. “I thought midterms were over. What’s going on? Has she gotten a new boyfriend?”

  It’s more likely she’s given up on you ever noticing her, Joanna thought, because although Amelia was increasingly perky and smiling, Richard was totally preoccupied with his failure to get Mrs. Troudtheim under. “I don’t know what else to try,” he told Joanna, exasperated.

  The worst part of Mrs. Troudtheim was that if they’d had a full slate of volunteers he’d simply have declared her nonviable and gone on to other subjects. But there were no other subjects to go on to. Joanna was obviously never going to get Mrs. Haighton in for an interview, let alone a session, and Mr. Pearsall had called to say that his father, the one who had never been sick a day in his life, had had a stroke, and that he was flying out to Ohio and didn’t know when he would be back. Which left Mr. Sage the Silent, the increasingly hard-to-get Amelia Tanaka, and Mr. Wojakowski. At least he was available. And more than eager to talk.

  “I was in the tunnel,” he said, beginning his fifth account. They were alone in the lab. Richard, eager to get his blood-work analyzed, or maybe unwilling to listen to another of Mr. Wojakowski’s rambling stories, had taken the blood down to the lab himself.

  “It was dark, I couldn’t see anything, but I wasn’t scared. I had a kind of peaceful feeling, like when you know something’s going to happen, but you don’t know what, and you don’t know when. Like the day they bombed Pearl.” I knew he’d find a way to work the Yorktown into this, Joanna thought. “I can still remember that morning. It was a Sunday—”

  Joanna nodded, wondering if she should try to get him back on track, or if that would just send him veering off on some other story. He usually did eventually work his way back to the question she’d asked. She leaned her chin on her hand and prepared to wait.

  “I’m coming back from shore leave in Virginia Beach—the Yorktown was in Norfolk—and I saw this sailor up on the island—” He fished in his pocket and brought out the tattered picture of the Yorktown. “That’s the island,” he said, pointing at the tall tower in the middle of the ship. It had three cross-barred masts that Joanna assumed were radio or radar antennae, and an assortment of ladders.

  “See, that’s the radar mast, and there’s the bridge,” Mr. Wojakowski said, pointing to them. “So, anyway, he looks like he’s going to break his neck, he’s coming down off the island so fast, and he’s got a paper clutched in his right hand.”

  He folded up the picture and put it carefully back in his wallet. “I should’ve known something was up—the only thing up that ladder was the radio shack—but I didn’t even think about that. I just stood there, waiting to see if he broke his neck, and when he didn’t, I went on down belowdecks to change out of my civvies, and then I heard ’em announcing over the PA that the Japs had bombed Pearl Harbor, and I knew what he must’ve been carrying was a telegram.” He shook his head at his own slowness. “I had that same kind of feeling in the tunnel, waiting for something to happen, and not knowing what or when.”

  He looked expectantly at Joanna, but she wasn’t listening. She was trying to remember what he’d said that first day, when she’d asked him about his age. He had told her he’d signed up the day after Pearl Harbor, she was sure of it.

  “Some of the guys didn’t believe it, even when they heard it over the PA,” Mr. Wojakowski said. “Woody Pikeman comes in and says, ‘Who’s the wiseguy?’ meaning the PA announcement. ‘The Emperor Hirohito,’ I says.”

  “Mr. Wojakowski,” Joanna said, “I just remembered a meeting I have to be at.” She stood up and switched off the minirecorder. “If you don’t mind—”

  “Sure, Doc,” he said. “You want me to come back later?”

  “Yes. No. I don’t know how long the meeting will take.” She scooped up the recorder and her notebook.

  “I’ve got lots more to tell you,” he said.

  “I’ll call you and set up another time for us to finish your account,” she said firmly.

  “Anytime, Doc,” he said, and ambled out. As soon as he was gone, she picked up the phone, intending to page Richard, and then changed her mind. She needed to check the transcripts before she made an accusation.

  She set the receiver down and stood there with her hand on it, trying to remember exactly what Mr. Wojakowski had said about enlisting. She had only half-listened to his rambling war stories, but she was positive he’d said he’d enlisted the day after Pearl. None of them had even known where Pearl Harbor was, except his kid sister, who’d seen a newsreel at the movies the night before.

  She went down to her office. She hadn’t transcribed that account yet. She rummaged through the shoe box till she found the right tape, stuck it in the recorder and fast-forwarded to the middle. “Well, after we hit Rabaul . . . ” Too far. She rewound. “Dead before she ever knew it . . . ” Forward again. “ . . . The funny papers.” Here it was: “ . . . in comes the lady from two doors down, all out of breath, and says, ‘The Japs just bombed Pearl Harbor!’ ”

  Joanna skipped forward. Kid sister, newsreel, Desperadoes. “And the very next day, I went downtown to the navy recruiting center and signed up.”

  She put her hand to her mouth, thinking, Oh, my God, he made it up. But which one? Or had he made up both versions? Or all of it? It didn’t matter. If even part of his account were concocted, it meant his descriptions of his NDEs were useless.

  Unless he’d told her the story about signing up after Pearl Harbor to cover up his real age. She’d thought that first time she saw him that he had to be nearly eighty. He might have made up the story to hide his age and then, in the heat of describing the NDE, forgotten and told her the truth. If it was only a matter of lying about his age, everything else he’d told them might be true.

  But how could they be sure? She thought about his other stories, the soda fountain, the Hammann sinking with all hands in two minutes flat, his joyous rescue by the miraculously resurre
cted Yorktown, flags flying, sailors waving their white hats in the air. They had all sounded completely credible. But so had both accounts of December seventh, 1941.

  She needed some kind of outside confirmation. She could call the library and ask them where the Yorktown had been on December seventh, but that wouldn’t prove Mr. Wojakowski had been there. She supposed she could call the Department of Veteran Affairs or the navy and find out if an Edward Wojakowski had served on the Yorktown, but that would take time, and probably bureaucratic red tape. She needed to find out now, before Richard sent him under again.

  She leafed through the transcripts, looking for something that might be independently verifiable. The dive-bomber—what was his name? Here it was, Jo-Jo Powers—who had crashed putting his bomb on the flight deck? No, that might have been in a book, or a movie. There was a movie called Midway, wasn’t there? She remembered seeing it in the action section at Blockbuster. So, none of the Midway stuff. What about his ditching of his plane in the Coral Sea? That story was full of facts that should be independently verifiable—dates and events and place names.

  She scrolled through the transcripts, looking for the account of the rescue. Here it was. He had ditched his plane in the Coral Sea, swum to Malakula, been smuggled by friendly natives to another island, set out in a dugout canoe for Port Moresby. The Yorktown, meanwhile, had limped back to Pearl Harbor for repairs, been refitted in three days, and then sailed straight to Midway.

  She needed a map. Who would have one here in the hospital? Maisie, she thought, remembering the map on the cover of one of her disaster books, and scribbled down the details. Coral Sea, Malakula, Vanikalo. She scribbled down the dates, too, on the off-chance that the sinking of the Yorktown counted as a disaster, and ran down to fourth.

  Maisie was lying propped against pillows, glaring at a video. “Pollyanna,” she told Joanna disgustedly. “All she does is tell people to be glad about stuff. It is so sickening.” She pointed the remote at Hayley Mills, wearing a white dress and a big blue sash, and switched it off.