Passage

by Connie Willis

  Thud. It was impossible to hear the tapping with this thudding going on. She went outside on deck to tell Greg to stop, but the sound wasn’t coming from the gymnasium, it was coming from the stairway.

  Joanna opened the door to the stairwell and went in. Thud. The sound was coming from below. She leaned over the railing and looked down but she couldn’t see past the first turning of the stairs. “Hang on!” a man’s voice said. Joanna recognized it as the voice of the officer who had ordered the sailor to use the Morse lamp. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  There was no answer except a thud and then another one. Joanna went down to the first landing. A man in a dark blue uniform was dragging something heavy up the stairs. It looked like a body.

  The officer was at the bottom of the flight and climbing up toward the man, looking angry. “You can’t bring that up here.”

  “It’s the only way up that’s not flooded,” the man in the uniform said, and dragged the body up one step, then another, till he was only five steps below Joanna. It wasn’t a body. It was a big canvas sack with a crest stenciled on it. A mailbag, Joanna thought.

  “There’s water all over the mail room,” the man, who must be a postal clerk, said. He opened the neck of the bag, reached in, and pulled out a handful of sodden letters. “Look at that!” he said, waving them in the face of the officer. “Ruined!” He brandished them at Joanna. She flinched back. “How’m I supposed to deliver that?” he demanded. He jammed it back in the bag, cinched the neck shut, humped the mailbag up over another step.

  “Then you’ll have to bring it up some other way,” the officer said, stepping in front of him. “You’ll ruin the floors.” He pointed down at the carpet. Where the bag had rested, the rose carpet was wet.

  “Can’t be helped,” the postal clerk said, heaving the bag up another step. “It’s got to get through. I have to get it into the boats. Give me a hand here,” he said to Joanna, but she was looking down at the wet carpet. The water had soaked into it, staining its rose a dark, disturbing red, like blood.

  “How bad is it?” the officer asked.

  “All the way up to the saloon deck,” the postal clerk said. “She doesn’t have much longer.”

  “What does he mean, she doesn’t have much longer?” Greg Menotti said from behind her. She turned around. He was on the step above her, watching the postal clerk hoist the mailbag up another step. “Why is he doing that?”

  “Because she’s sinking,” the postal clerk said, and to Joanna, “You’d better get into a boat, miss.”

  “Which deck is the saloon deck?” Joanna asked him. “Is it C Deck?”

  “What does he mean, sinking?” Greg said. “This isn’t a ship. It’s a health club.” He took hold of Joanna’s arm. “I thought you wanted to see the rest of the facilities.”

  “There isn’t time,” Joanna said, trying to free her arm. “Is the saloon deck C Deck?”

  “You have to make time,” Greg said, pulling her up the stairs. “Your health is the most important thing there is. We’ve got a full program of squash, racquetball, tennis—”

  He was going too fast. She lost her balance and nearly fell. “Steady, looks like you could use some stair-walking exercise,” he said, pulling her to her feet, but she couldn’t get her balance. The stair was angled oddly, her foot kept sliding off it—

  Oh, God, she thought, it’s beginning to list. “I have to go,” she said, tugging frantically to free her arm from Greg’s hand. “The saloon deck—”

  “I work out here three times a week,” he said, remorselessly gripping her arm. “A regular exercise regimen is essential to—”

  Joanna wrenched free and ran toward the stairs, stumbling, her arms out for balance, and pushed open the door to the stairway. The mail clerk had dragged the mailbag nearly all the way to the top of the stairs. Joanna ran past him down the steps, skirting the dark, wet stain where the mailbag had lain.

  “You shouldn’t run without warming up first,” Greg called after her. “You’ll get a charley—” The door closed on his voice and she fled down the stairs, around the landings, her hand skimming the polished oak railings as she ran. Down and down, not counting landings or decks or doors, running blindly, blindly, out the door, down the deck, yanking the door open and plunging into the passage, into the dark and the dark—

  And the dark. I’m still in the passage, Joanna thought desperately, and heard Richard say, “You need to remove the sleep mask.”

  She opened her eyes and blinked in surprise at a total stranger. It took her another panicked minute to remember that Tish was out with the flu and this was the sub nurse. “Just rest. Don’t try to talk,” Richard said, and began explaining the post-session procedures to the nurse. He doesn’t want me to say it’s the Titanic in front of her, she thought.

  But it wasn’t the Titanic. The staircase was all wrong and so was the gymnasium. The Titanic had had one. She remembered Mr. Briarley talking about it, telling them how opulent the ship had been, but it would hardly have been up on the Boat Deck. And, even though the Titanic had been a royal mail ship, they wouldn’t have dragged sacks of mail up from the mail room. Fifteen hundred people had drowned that night. They would hardly have been worried about the mail. And Greg Menotti obviously wasn’t on the Titanic, Joanna thought, frustrated.

  Not half as frustrated as Richard, however. “You saw the Titanic again!” he said when the nurse had finished monitoring her vitals and left, and Joanna had told him. “How could you have? Look at these scans.” He’d dragged her over to the console. “The pattern of temporal-lobe activity is completely different, and the acetylcholine level is much higher than before.”

  “That looks the same,” Joanna said, pointing at a redorange patch in the hippocampus.

  “It is, and so’s the activity in the amygdala. They’re the same in all the NDEs, but they don’t have anything to do with producing images.”

  “Was the pattern in long-term completely different, too?” Joanna asked, looking at the shifting reds and blues and yellows.

  “No,” he admitted. “The last few scans match, although they don’t fit any of the L+R formulas. Was the ending of your NDE the same as last time?”

  “No,” she said. She told him about the flight down the stairs and into the passage. “It was the same passage, but this time the door was shut and I had to run a lot farther before I was back in the lab.”

  “You say the same passage? Do you mean it looked the same?”

  “No,” Joanna said. “I mean it’s the same passage. It’s in the same place, it always opens onto the same part of the deck,” she said. “It’s a real place. The doors always open on the same stairways, the Boat Deck’s always the same number of flights up, the lifeboats and the officers’ quarters and the bridge are always in the same relationship to each other.”

  “You said this time there was a gymnasium,” Richard said skeptically.

  “It was always there, but the door was shut before. It’s not like a dream where things shift around and you’re in one place and then another with no transition in between. It’s a real place.”

  “Real,” he said, and all the wariness and skepticism were back in his face. In a minute he’d accuse her of being Bridey Murphy again.

  “I don’t mean real,” she said, defeated. “I mean three-dimensional. I mean linear.”

  He was shaking his head. “There’s no activation of the spatial cortex areas. What about the beginning? Was it the same?”

  “No,” she said. “I came through a little later this time, after the young man came over to investigate the noise.”

  “But the people and what they said were the same?”

  “Basically.”

  “Basically,” he muttered, staring at the screens. “Even though the temporal-lobe and L+R patterns are completely different. What were you thinking about just before you went into non-REM sleep? Maybe your conscious mind is influencing what you see.”

  “The Titanic,” Joa
nna admitted, and Richard looked encouraged. “But last time I was thinking about Pompeii, and the first three times I obviously couldn’t have been thinking about the Titanic, and it’s been the same place every time.”

  “And you hear the same sound as you go through,” Richard said thoughtfully and began to type, absorbed.

  Joanna went down to her office to transcribe her account and check on Vielle. There was no answer, but she had seven new messages. Joanna listened to them, fast-forwarding as soon as she’d established it wasn’t Vielle. Records. Maisie. Guadalupe.

  She must not have gotten the message I left for her, Joanna thought. And she must be back at work, and Tish was right about this flu not lasting long. Maybe Vielle’s back, too, and that’s why she’s not answering. She hit “next message.” Mr. Mandrake. She hit “delete.” Betty Peterson.

  “I found out the title,” Betty’s voice said, and Joanna pulled back the finger she had poised over the “next message” button and listened to the message.

  “You’ll never guess how!” Betty said. “Last night I dug out my old high school yearbook to see who else was in that class with us, and I was going through the section with our pictures-and, oh, my God, the hair! the clothes!-and as I’m looking through them, I saw that Nadine Swartheimer-do you remember Nadine? Wild hair that stuck out all over and Birkenstocks, even in the dead of winter?-well, anyway, she’d signed her picture, and there it was! But that’s not all. I found out something else. You need to call me. ’Bye.”

  I don’t believe it, Joanna thought. After all that, she didn’t tell me the name of the book, and now I’ll have to call her back, and we’ll probably play telephone tag for a week. How did Betty ever get straight A’s?

  She’d have to call her, but not until she’d finished checking to see if Vielle had called. She went rapidly through the rest of the messages. Mr. Mandrake again. Delete. Someone named Leonard Fanshawe.

  But not Vielle. Joanna tried her again, but there was still no answer. I think I’d better go down to the ER and see if she’s back and, if she’s not, go check on her, Joanna thought, and gathered up her coat, keys, and purse, but just as she was starting out the door, the phone rang. Joanna let the answering machine pick up. “Hi,” Vielle said, and Joanna snatched up the receiver.

  “How are you?” she said.

  “Better,” Vielle said, and she sounded better. Her voice was stronger and steadier than the day before. “I’m still going to stay at home for a couple of days, and, no, I don’t need you to bring me anything. I don’t want you getting this.”

  “Okay,” Joanna said, “although I’ve already been exposed. Tish has it, and so does Guadalupe.”

  “Well, you’re not going to get it from me. I’m locking my door, and I’m not letting you in. So don’t even think about coming over.”

  “All right,” Joanna promised, “but you have to promise to call me and tell me how you’re doing and if you need anything,” and, before Vielle could protest, “I can leave it outside your door.”

  “I promise I’ll check in,” Vielle said and started to hang up.

  “Oh, wait,” Joanna said. “What about the you-know-what?”

  “The what?”

  “I don’t know. That was what you called it. You left a message that I was supposed to call you, that you had a you-know-what for me. Yesterday. Before you went home sick. You paged me.”

  “Oh,” Vielle said finally. “Yes. A patient came in with a gall bladder attack and happened to mention he’d had an NDE a couple of years ago. We admitted him for surgery.” Joanna wondered if that was the Leonard Fanshawe who had called her, but Vielle said, “His name’s Eduardo Ortiz.”

  “Who else was there when he mentioned it?” Joanna asked, thinking of Mr. Mandrake.

  “Just me,” Vielle said. “I thought he was a good bet since he wasn’t admitted for anything life-threatening, so he’d be flying below Mr. Mandrake’s radar.”

  Joanna thought so, too. As soon as she got off the phone, she called the switchboard and got his room number, and then called the surgical floor. “He had surgery this morning, and he’s still out,” the nurse said.

  “When does he go home?” Joanna asked.

  The nurse checked. “Tomorrow.” Which is what’s wrong with HMOs, Joanna thought. They’re not in the hospital long enough to tell anyone they’ve even had a near-death experience, let alone describe it. The nurse had thought Mr. Ortiz would probably wake up around noon, which would give Joanna plenty of time to record and transcribe her NDE.

  She did both and then took the transcript to Richard, who was glaring at the screens. “How’s it going?” she asked, handing him the transcript.

  “Terrible. I thought maybe the initial stimulus was what was determining the unifying image, and that was why you continued to see the Titanic, even though the stimuli were different, but in this last NDE there was no activity in the superior auditory cortex at all.” He raked his hand through his hair. “I just don’t have enough data. Have you been able to reschedule Mrs. Haighton yet?”

  “No.”

  “And you haven’t heard from Mr. Pearsall about when he’s coming back?”

  She shook her head.

  “Then I’ve got to find out what’s aborting Mrs. Troudtheim’s NDE-state and fix it. We need her.”

  “I’ll call Mr. Pearsall and Mrs. Haighton,” Joanna said. And go find her at the Spring Fling, or wherever she is, and drag her back here myself, she thought, going back to her office to call, but the housekeeper didn’t know where she was.

  “Some kind of meeting,” she said. “She has so many I get them confused.” And there was no answer at Mr. Pearsall’s number.

  Joanna made a note to try them both again and then listened to the messages she’d fast-forwarded through before. Guadalupe wanted Joanna to call her. Maisie had something important to tell her. Leonard Fanshawe said, “I understand you’re interested in near-death experiences. I had one six months ago, and since then I have discovered I have unusual powers: telekinesis, clairvoyance, distance-viewing, and teleportation. I would very much like to talk with you about this,” and gave his number.

  Joanna called him and gave him Mr. Mandrake’s number. Then she called Mr. Pearsall again. No answer. She called Betty Peterson. Her line was busy.

  She printed out a file copy of the transcript and then sat there staring at the screen, trying to make sense of it. It was the Titanic, she was sure of it, in spite of the staircase and the mailbag and the lack of activity in the auditory cortex.

  She called Kit to ask her what the call letters of the Titanic had been and what deck the gymnasium had been on. And whether it had a mechanical camel. I surely wouldn’t have confabulated a detail that specific, she thought, punching in Kit’s number, and then remembered Mr. Wojakowski and “The Katzenjammer Kids.”

  Kit’s line was busy. Joanna looked at her watch. It was eleven-thirty. She decided to take a chance on Mr. Ortiz’s having come out of the anesthetic early, and went down to the surgical ward. He was awake, but the surgeon was in with him. “And then we’ve got to do his post-op check,” the nurse subbing for Patricia said. “It’ll be about twenty minutes.”

  Twenty minutes. Not long enough to go back up to her office and get anything useful done. She could go see Maisie—Peds was just two floors up and actually in the same wing—but the likelihood of getting away from Maisie in under an hour was nonexistent. I’ll go see Guadalupe instead, Joanna thought, and headed for the elevator.

  A pair of nurses Joanna didn’t know were waiting for it, their heads together, talking. “ . . . and she said, that’s it, I’m not coming to work in that ER one more day,” one of the nurses said, and the other said, “I don’t blame her.” Vielle should be listening to this, Joanna thought, and the elevator door opened.

  Mr. Mandrake was inside. “ . . . evidence which will prove to the skeptic that the near-death experience is real,” he was saying to a man with a copy of The Light at the End of the Tunn
el. “No so-called ‘rational’ explanation is possible.”

  All his attention was on the man, and the two nurses, still gossiping, shielded her for the moment. “ . . . just a flesh wound, thank God,” one of them said, “but still.”

  Mr. Mandrake hadn’t seen her yet. Joanna turned and walked rapidly away, her head averted. I’ll go see Guadalupe later, she thought. I’ll go down and pick up the release forms instead.

  “Joanna Lander,” Mr. Mandrake said.

  Oh, no, he’d seen her. She kept walking, resisting the impulse to look back and see if he was following her.

  “ . . . a colleague of mine,” he said.

  He hadn’t seen her. He was just talking about her. “She’s working on a project that will confirm my findings.”

  A colleague of mine, Joanna fumed, walking faster. It would almost be worth it to turn around and go tell the man she was not Mr. Mandrake’s colleague and their project proved no such thing.

  Almost, she thought and ducked into a stairway. It only went down one flight, but at least she had gotten away from Mr. Mandrake. She could take the service elevator up to the fifth-floor walkway. No, she’d have to go through Medicine. She didn’t want to take the risk of running into Mrs. Davenport. Talk about out of the frying pan into the fire. She’d better take the walkway on second.

  She went down the stairs and along a corridor full of offices. It was usually deserted, but not today. A group of elderly people were sitting in the hall on plastic chairs, playing cards. One of them stood up as soon as he saw Joanna and waved his cards at her. “Hiya, Doc,” he said.

  “Come as quickly as possible, old man. Engine room filled up to the boilers.”

  —WIRELESS MESSAGE FROM THE TITANIC TO THE CARPATHIA

  THIS IS NOT MY DAY, Joanna thought. “Mr. Wojakowski,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

  “Ed,” he corrected. He cocked his thumb at the door behind him. “This is that hearing project I told you about.” He leaned toward her confidentially. “I gotta say, Doc, your project was a hell of a lot more interesting than this thing. All we do is sit around with headphones on and raise our hands if we hear a beep.”