Passage

by Connie Willis

  “She falls out of a tree later,” Joanna said.

  “Really?” Maisie said, perking up. “Do you want to hear a neat thing about the Hartford circus fire? The Flying Wallendas, they were this acrobat family, they were up on the high wire, and they heard the band play the duck song, and—”

  “Not right now,” Joanna said. “Maisie, I need a map of the islands in the Pacific Ocean. Do you have one in one of your disaster books?”

  “Uh-huh,” she said, starting to get out of bed.

  “You stay there,” Joanna said. “I’ll get it. Do you know which book it’s in?”

  “I think Best Disasters of All Time,” Maisie said. “In the part about Krakatoa. It’s the one with the Andrea Doria on the cover.”

  Joanna pulled it out of the bag and brought it over to the bed, and Maisie began searching through it. “Krakatoa was the biggest volcano ever. It made these red sunsets all over the world. Blood red. Here it is.”

  Joanna leaned over her shoulder. There was a map, all right, but it was no more than a pale blue square with the outlines of India and Australia in black and a red star labeled “Krakatoa.” “You had a book with a map on the cover,” Joanna said.

  “Yeah, Disasters of the World,” Maisie said. “But it’s not a very good one either.” She kicked off the covers. “I think there’s one in Earthquakes and Volcanoes.”

  “Maisie,” Joanna protested, but Maisie had already gotten out of bed and extracted the book from the pile.

  “It blew the whole island apart. Krakatoa,” she said, flipping through the book. “It made this huge noise, like a whole bunch of cannons.” Maisie turned pages. “I knew there was one,” she said triumphantly and dumped the book on the bed. “See? There’s Krakatoa.”

  And there were Hawaii and the Solomon Islands and the Marshalls, scattered across an expanse of blue. “Do you see Midway Island anywhere?” Joanna asked, bending over the map.

  Maisie pointed eagerly. “Right there. In the middle.” Of course. That’s why it was called Midway Island. And there was Pearl Harbor. Where was Malakula? She peered closer, trying to read the tiny print. Necker Island and Nikoa and Kaula, and a bunch of unnamed dots. It would be no proof of anything if Malakula wasn’t on the map. There were dozens of minuscule islands between Midway and Hawaii.

  “What are you looking for?” Maisie demanded, breathing hard.

  Joanna looked at her. Her lips were lavender. “Back in bed,” Joanna ordered, pulling back the covers.

  “I want to help you look.”

  “You can look in bed.”

  Maisie dutifully clambered in and lay back against the pillows. “What are you looking for?” she repeated.

  “An island named Malakula,” Joanna said, laying the open book on Maisie’s knees so they could both see it. “And the Coral Sea.”

  “The Coral Sea . . . ” Maisie murmured, poring over the map, her short hair swinging forward over her puffy cheeks. They had less color than the last time Joanna had seen her, and there were violet smudges under her eyes. It was easy to forget just how sick she was.

  “Here it is,” Maisie cried.

  “Malakula?” Joanna asked, following Maisie’s finger.

  “No. The Coral Sea.”

  Joanna’s heart sank. The Coral Sea was all the way down by Australia. There was no way Mr. Wojakowski could have covered it in a native dugout. Or in a motorboat, for that matter. It was hundreds—no, thousands, she corrected, looking at the map’s scale—of miles away.

  He had made it up—the coconuts and the jammed machine guns and the Katzenjammer Kids. Maybe there’s an explanation, she thought, bending over the map again. Maybe he meant another island, with a name like Malakula. Marakei. Or Maleolap. But neither of those was any closer to Midway than Malakula, and Midway was the only island for hundreds of miles in every direction that began with an M. But you said yourself there were dozens of unnamed islands. And it’s been sixty years since World War II. Maybe he got the names mixed up. I need to talk to Mr. Wojakowski, she thought.

  She closed the book and stood up. “Thank you. You were a lot of help. You’re a very good researcher.”

  “You can’t go yet,” Maisie said. “I have to tell you about the people at the circus. They all tried to go out the main entrance, but they couldn’t, ’cause of the animal run, and the Wallendas—”

  “Maisie, I really have to go,” Joanna said.

  “I know, but I have to tell you this one thing. The Flying Wallendas and everybody tried to get them to go out the performers’ entrance, but—”

  “I promise I’ll come back so you can tell me all about the tent and the Flying Wallendas. Okay?” She started for the door.

  “Okay,” Maisie said. “Does she die?”

  Joanna stopped cold. “Who?”

  “Pollyanna. When she falls out of the tree.”

  “No,” Joanna said. She came back around the bed, picked up the remote, and turned the TV back on. She hit “play.” “It’s a Disney movie.”

  “Oh,” Maisie said, disappointed.

  “But she hurts her back and can’t walk,” Joanna said. She handed Maisie the remote. “And she’s very crabby about it.”

  “Oh, good,” Maisie said. “Did somebody have an NDE about the Coral Sea?”

  “No more questions,” Joanna said firmly. “Watch your movie,” and went back up to her office to listen to the tape again. He had definitely said Malakula and the Coral Sea. She called him and left a message for him to come in at three, and then went through the transcripts again, looking for some definitive discrepancy that would make the interview unnecessary. And, reading through his accounts, she became more and more convinced there had to be some mistake.

  The naval terms—hatches, islands, flight decks—and the gratuitous details—not just a canoe, but a dugout, not just a soda fountain, but one that made cherry phosphates. Surely he couldn’t have made up the Katzenjammer Kids and the neighbor lady two doors down and the newsreel about Pearl Harbor. He had even known the name of the movie that was playing.

  But he couldn’t have been on the Yorktown and in his hometown when Pearl Harbor was bombed. And the Norfolk story was full of believable details, too, from the PA system to Woody Pikeman asking, “Who’s the wiseguy?” I have to talk to Richard, she thought.

  The phone rang. She picked it up, hoping it was him. It was Mrs. Haighton. “I got your message,” she said. “I’m afraid neither Tuesday nor Thursday will work. I’ve got a hospital board meeting Tuesday, and Thursday’s my afternoon to volunteer at the crisis center.”

  We’ve got a crisis right here, Joanna thought. “How would Wednesday afternoon work?” she said. “Two? Four? Or we could do this in the evening.”

  “Oh, no, evenings are even worse,” she said and launched into a litany of board and organizing committee meetings.

  “Earlier then,” Joanna said doggedly. “I really need to schedule you this week, if possible. It’s important.” But this week was absolutely impossible. Maybe next week. No, that was the Women’s Center fundraiser. The week after.

  And by then, we’ll have no volunteers at all, Joanna thought. She printed out the transcripts, and took them and the tapes to the lab to show Richard. “Hiya, Doc,” Mr. Wojakowski said. He was standing outside the door in the exact spot where she’d left him.

  “What are you doing here?” Joanna asked, turning hastily away to open the door so he couldn’t see the stricken expression on her face.

  “I figured I’d stick around till you got done with your meeting,” he said, following her into the lab. “I remembered what you said about talking about the stuff you saw while it was still fresh in your mind, and I didn’t have anyplace to go, so I thought, I’ll just wait till she comes back, so we can get it all down before my memory gets mixed up.” He sat down in the chair and leaned forward, his ruddy face eager, smiling, waiting for her to begin asking questions, and she thought again, there must be some mistake.

  But how could
she find out what it was? She couldn’t ask him directly, “Why did you tell me two different stories about where you were when Pearl Harbor was bombed?” or, “Do you have any proof you served on the Yorktown?” Not with him sitting there, his face eager and open.

  “I was telling you about the peaceful feeling I had in the tunnel, like something was going to happen,” he said, “so I walked a little ways till I come to a door, and all of a sudden there was this bright light, and I mean bright. The only time I ever saw something that bright was when a bomb from an Aichi-99 went right through the hangar deck and blew up Repair 5. She took three hits that day.”

  “Was that at the Battle of the Coral Sea?” Joanna asked, feeling like a traitor, like a Nazi grilling a spy, trying to trap him into a mistake, an inconsistency. And if he told her a different version this time, named a different island, a different kind of canoe, what would it prove? Only that his memory was fuzzy. The Battle of the Coral Sea had happened sixty years ago, and confabulations multiplied over time.

  “One of the depth charges hit her in the port-side oil tanks,” Mr. Wojakowski was saying, “and oil was gushing out of her side. She woulda bled to death if we hadn’ta gotten her back to Pearl when we did. Boy, were we glad to see Diamond Head—”

  “You went with the Yorktown back to Pearl Harbor?” Joanna blurted.

  “Yep,” Mr. Wojakowski said, “and helped patch her up myself. We worked straight through, welding her boilers and patching up her hull. I worked on the crew fixing her watertight doors. We worked seventy-eight hours straight and were still working on ’em when we left Oahu. I tell ya, I was so tired when we got done, I slept all the way back to Midway.”

  “Mother never reached me. If . . . anything

  happens . . . you must be prepared. Remember the message: Rosabelle, believe. When you hear those words . . . know it is Houdini speaking . . . ”

  —HARRY HOUDINI’S WORDS TO HIS WIFE ON HIS DEATHBED, PROMISING TO COMMUNICATE WITH HER FROM THE AFTERLIFE

  HE MADE THE WHOLE THING UP?” Richard said. “Even being on the Yorktown?”

  “I don’t know,” Joanna said, pacing back and forth, her hands jammed in her cardigan pockets. “All I know is that he couldn’t have been in Pearl Harbor repairing the Yorktown and adrift at sea thousands of miles away at the same time.”

  “But does it have to mean he’s lying?” Richard said. “Couldn’t it just be a memory lapse? He’s sixty-five, after all, and the war was over fifty years ago. He may have forgotten exactly where he was at a given time.”

  “How do you forget being shot down and losing your copilot and your gunner? You heard him tell that story. It was the best damned day of his life.”

  “Are you sure he said he was in Pearl Harbor while the ship was being repaired?” Richard asked. “Maybe he was just speaking generally—” but she was shaking her head violently.

  “He also told me he was on board the Yorktown when he heard Pearl Harbor was bombed,” she said, “and that he was reading the funny papers back home. ‘The Katzenjammer Kids,’ ” she added bitterly. “You can’t tell me he doesn’t remember where he was when he heard about Pearl Harbor. An entire generation remembers where it was when it heard about Pearl Harbor!”

  “But why would he lie about something like that?”

  “I don’t know,” she said unhappily. “Maybe he’s trying to impress us. Maybe he’s listened to so many war stories over the years he’s gotten them all confused. Or maybe it’s more serious than that, Alzheimer’s, or a stroke. All I know is—”

  “That we can’t use him,” Richard said. “Shit.”

  Joanna nodded. “I went back and checked the transcripts and then the tapes. They’re full of discrepancies. According to Mr. Wojakowksi, he was” —she pulled a piece of paper from her pocket and read from it—“a pilot, a gunner’s mate, a pharmacist’s mate on burial detail, a semaphore flagman, and an airplane mechanic. I also checked the movie he said was playing the Saturday night before Pearl Harbor was bombed. The Desperadoes wasn’t made until 1943.”

  She wadded up the paper. “I feel so stupid I didn’t catch this sooner. Being able to tell whether people are telling the truth or confabulating is what I do for a living, but I honestly thought—his body language, the irrelevant details . . . ” She shook her head wonderingly. “I am so sorry. You hired me to spot this kind of thing, and I was completely fooled.”

  “At least you caught it when you did.” He looked at her. “Do you think he lied about what he saw in his NDEs, too?” and, at the look on Joanna’s face, “Don’t worry, I know he has to go. I just wondered.”

  “I don’t know,” Joanna said, shaking her head, “and there’s no way to tell without outside confirmation. Some of the stories he told about the Yorktown were true. I checked them out before I came to talk to you. There really was a Jo-Jo Powers who ‘laid his bomb right on the flight deck’ and was killed doing it, and they really did repair the Yorktown and get it back to Midway in time for the battle. It was what saved the day, because the Japanese navy thought it had been sunk.”

  “But there’s no way to get outside confirmation on an NDE,” Richard finished. “Except the scans, which can’t tell us what the subject saw.”

  “I am so sorry,” Joanna said. “All I’ve done since I joined this project is decimate your subject list, and then, when I should have caught—”

  “You did catch it,” Richard said. “That’s the important thing. And you caught it in time, before we published any results. Don’t worry about it. We’ve still got five subjects. That’s more than enough—” He stopped at her expression.

  “We only have four,” she said unhappily. “Mr. Pearsall called. His father died, and he has to stay in Ohio to arrange the funeral and settle his affairs.”

  Four. And that was including Mr. Sage, who even Joanna couldn’t get anything out of. And Mrs. Troudtheim.

  “What about Mrs. Haighton?” he said. “Have you been able to set up an interview yet?”

  She shook her head. “She keeps rescheduling. I don’t think we should count on her. We’re just one item on her very long list of social activities. How’s the authorization on the new volunteers coming?”

  “Slowly. Records said six more weeks,” he said, “if the board votes to continue the project.”

  “What do you mean?” Joanna said. “I thought you had funding for six months.”

  “I did,” he said. “I got a call from the head of the institute this morning. It seems Mrs. Brightman has been telling everyone what high hopes she has for the project, that we’ve already found indications of supernatural phenomena.”

  “Mr. Mandrake,” Joanna said through gritted teeth.

  “Bingo,” he said. “So now the head of the institute wants a progress report that he can use to reassure the board we’re doing legitimate scientific research.”

  “Didn’t you tell him—?”

  “What? That half our subject list turned out to be cranks, plants, and psychics? That there’s something wrong with the process that keeps our best subject from responding?” he said bitterly. “Or did you want me to tell him about the imaginative Mr. Wojakowski? I didn’t know about him when the head called.”

  “How long do we have?” Joanna said. “Before we have to file this progress report?”

  “Six weeks,” he said. “Oddly enough.”

  “You’ve got Amelia’s scans,” she said, “and Mr. Sage’s, and one set of Mr. Pearsall’s. Maybe it won’t take him very long to settle his father’s affairs.”

  “Right, and, having just buried his father, he would definitely be an impartial observer,” Richard said, and then felt ashamed of himself. It wasn’t Joanna’s fault. He was the one who’d approved a list of unreliable people.

  “I’m sorry.” He raked his hand through his hair. “I just . . . maybe I should go under.”

  “What?” Joanna said. “You can’t.”

  “Why not? One, it would give us one more set of scans and o
ne more account for comparison. I’d have to be at least as good an observer as Mr. Sage,” he said, ticking reasons off on his fingers. “Two, I’m not a spy or a crank. And three, I could go under right now, today, instead of waiting for authorization.”

  “Why wouldn’t you have to be authorized?”

  “Because it’s my project, so it would qualify as self-experimentation. Like Louis Pasteur. Or Dr. Werner Forssmann—”

  “Or Dr. Jekyll,” Joanna said. “Talk about something that would jeopardize the credibility of the project. Dr. Foxx experimented on himself, didn’t he?”

  “I am not going to suddenly announce I’ve found the soul,” Richard said, “and there’s a long, legitimate tradition of self-experimentation—Walter Reed, Jean Borel, the transplant researcher, J. S. Haldane. All of them experimented on themselves for precisely the same reason, because they couldn’t find willing, qualified subjects.”

  “But who would supervise the console? You’d have to train someone to monitor the dosage and the scans. Tish can’t do it.”

  “You could—” he started.

  “I won’t do it,” she said. “What if something went wrong? It’s a terrible idea.”

  “It’s better than sitting around for the next six weeks trying to pry two words out of Mr. Sage and waiting for our funding to be cut,” he said. “Or do you have a better idea?”

  “No,” she said unhappily. “Yes. You could send me under.”

  “You?” he said, astounded.

  “Yes. If one of us is going to go under, I’m the logical choice. One, I don’t need authorization either, since I’m part of the project. Two, I’m not going to see a bright light and assume it’s Jesus. Three, Mr. Mandrake can’t convert me,” she said, ticking off reasons just like he had. “Four, I’m not indispensable during sessions like you are. All I do is hold my tape recorder. I can just as easily turn it on before I go under. Or Tish could turn it on. Or you.”

  “But what about afterward? The interview—”

  “Five,” she tapped her thumb, “I don’t need to be interviewed. I already know what you want to know. And I’m sure I can do better than ‘It was dark,’ or ‘I felt peaceful.’ I could describe what I saw, the sensations I was feeling.”