Passage

by Connie Willis

  “You can tell me later. After you rest. Put your oxygen cannula on,” and Joanna made it to the door.

  But not out. “When are you coming?” Maisie demanded.

  “This afternoon,” she said, “I promise,” and went up to her office.

  Halfway there she ran into Tish. “I asked Dr. Wright if we could move your session up to one, and he said to ask you,” she said. “I’ve got a dentist appointment.”

  Or a hot date, Joanna thought. “Sure,” she said. “Is he in the lab?”

  “No, he was just leaving to go see Dr. Jamison,” Tish said, “but he said he’d be back by noon. Doesn’t it drive you crazy that he’s so oblivious?”

  Oblivious, Joanna thought. Something about being oblivious to something terrible that was happening.

  “Of course it doesn’t drive you crazy,” Tish said disgustedly,“because you’re exactly the same. Did you hear anything I just said?”

  “Yes,” Joanna said. “One o’clock.”

  “And he said to ask you if you’d been able to reach Mrs. Haighton yet,” Tish said.

  Mrs. Haighton. “I’ll go try her right now,” Joanna said and went on to her office to spend what was left of the morning leaving fruitless messages for Mrs. Haighton and staring at her Swedish ivy, trying to remember where she’d seen the tunnel.

  Something about being oblivious, and Richard’s lab coat and the way the floor met the bottom of the door. And cohorts gleaming in purple and gold. And high school. It had wooden floors, she thought. She saw in her mind’s eye the long second-floor hall, the waxed wooden floor. There was a door at the end of that hall, she thought. The assistant principal’s office, where Ricky Inman spent half his time. And was that what she was remembering—a memory from high school? Complete with a nice authority-figure judgment image?

  It made sense. Those halls were long and lined with numbered doors. The lab coat could be the one the chemistry teacher—what was his name? Mr. Hobert—wore, the sound could be the passing bell, which sounded like both a ringing and a buzzing, and the door to the assistant principal’s office—

  But it wasn’t a door to an office. The door in the tunnel opened onto the outside. I need to open that door and see what’s outside it, Joanna thought. When I do, I’ll know where it is.

  And at one-fifteen, lying sleepily under the headphones and the sleep mask and waiting for the dithetamine to work, she thought, The door, the answer lies through the door—

  And was in the tunnel. The door was shut. Only a knife-blade-thin line of light showed at the bottom of the door. Joanna had to feel her way along the pitch-black tunnel toward it, her hand on one wall.

  The line of light was too narrow for any shadows, and she could not hear even a murmuring of voices. The tunnel was utterly silent, like Coma Carl’s room after the heater shut off. No, not a heater. Some other quiet, steady sound you didn’t notice till it had stopped. “—stopped,” a voice said softly from beyond the door, and Joanna waited, listening.

  Silence. Joanna stood there in the darkness a long minute, and then began feeling her way toward the door again, thinking, What if it’s locked? But it wasn’t locked. The knob turned easily, and she pulled the door open onto a blast of brilliant light. It hit her with an almost physical force, and she reeled back, her hand up to shield her face.

  “What’s happened?” a woman’s frightened voice said, and Joanna thought for a moment she meant the light and that it had burst on all of them like a bomb when Joanna opened the door.

  “I’m sure it’s nothing, miss,” a man’s voice said. As Joanna’s eyes adjusted, she could see the man in the white jacket. He was talking to the woman with her hair down her back.

  “I heard the oddest noise,” she said.

  Noise, Joanna thought. Then it was a sound, after all.

  The white-jacketed man said something, but Joanna couldn’t hear what it was, or what the woman answered. She moved forward, up to the door, and instantly she could see the people more clearly. The young woman had a coat on over her white dress, and the man’s white jacket had gold buttons down the front. The woman in the white gloves was wearing a short white fur cape.

  “Yes, miss,” the man said, and Joanna thought, He’s a servant. And that white jacket is a uniform.

  “It sounded like a cloth being torn,” the young woman said and walked over to the man with the white beard. “Did you hear it?”

  “No,” he said, and the woman with the piled-up hair inquired, “Do you suppose there’s been an accident?” She had her white-gloved hand at her throat, holding her fur cape closed, as if she were cold, and Joanna thought, That’s because they’re outside, and tried to look around at their surroundings, but the light was behind them, and she couldn’t see anything except the white wall against which they stood. She looked down at the floor they were standing on. It was wooden, like the floor in the hallway, but unwaxed. Some sort of porch, Joanna thought, or patio.

  “It’s so cold,” the young woman said, pulling her coat more tightly around her. No wonder she’s cold, Joanna thought, looking at her dress under the open coat. It was made of thin muslin, much too thin for this weather, and hung full and straight to her feet like a nightgown.

  “I shall see what’s happened,” the bearded man said. He was in evening clothes, with a stiff-fronted white shirt and a white bow tie. He jerked his chin imperiously at the servant, and he hurried over.

  “Yes, sir?” he said.

  “What has happened? Why have we stopped?”

  “I don’t know, sir. It may be some sort of mechanical difficulty. I’m sure there’s nothing to be alarmed about.”

  “Go and find Mr. Briarley,” the bearded man said. “He’ll be able to tell us.”

  “Yes, sir,” the servant said. He disappeared into the light.

  “Mr. Briarley will be able to explain things,” the bearded man said to the ladies. “In the meantime, you ladies should go back inside where it’s warmer.”

  Yes, Joanna thought, back inside where it’s warmer, and was back in the lab, with Tish working reproachfully over her. “You were under forever,” Tish said, taking her blood pressure. She entered Joanna’s vitals on the chart, removed her electrodes, took out her IV, looking at her watch every few minutes.

  “Okay,” she said finally. “You can sit up.”

  Richard came over. “There definitely was a noise,” Joanna told him. “One of the women heard it. She said it sounded like cloth tearing.”

  “Can you put the rest of this stuff away?” Tish said, stowing the IV equipment. “I’m already late.”

  “Yes,” Richard said. “What about duration? How long were you there?”

  “Ten minutes maybe,” Joanna said, “while the people outside the door talked, and it was outside. The man with the white beard said, ‘You ladies need to go back inside.’ They talked about the noise and then the bearded man told the servant to go find out what had happened.”

  “The servant?” Richard asked.

  “I’m off,” Tish said. “What time tomorrow?”

  “Ten,” Richard said, and Tish went out. “One of them was a servant?”

  “Yes,” Joanna said. “I could see the gold buttons on his uniform and the embroidery on the woman’s white dress, only it wasn’t a dress. It was a nightgown. She had a coat on over it . . . ” She frowned, remembering the woman pulling it tighter around her. “No, not a coat, a blanket, because—”

  She stopped suddenly, breathing hard. “Oh, my God,” she said. “I know what it is.”

  “Do you think death could possibly be a boat?”

  —TOM STOPPARD, ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD

  “Vancouver! Vancouver! This is it!”

  —LAST RADIO MESSAGE FROM VULCANOLOGIST DAVE JOHNSTON ON MOUNT ST. HELENS

  YOU KNOW WHAT IT IS?” Richard said blankly, thinking, Joanna can’t possibly know. Temporallobe feelings of recognition were just that, feelings, with no content behind them. But she clearly thought
she knew. Her voice was full of suppressed excitement.

  “It all fits,” she said, “the floor and the cold and the blanket, even the feeling that I shouldn’t have shut off my pager, that something terrible had happened I should have known about. It all fits.” She looked up at Richard with a radiant expression. “I told you I recognized it but had never been there, and I was right. I told you I knew what it was.”

  He was almost afraid to say, “Well, what is it?” When he did, she would look bewildered or angry, or both, the way she had for the last two weeks whenever he’d asked her. It was amazing how strong the conviction of knowledge was with temporal-lobe stimulation, even in someone like Joanna who understood what was causing it, who knew it was artificially induced.

  “I told you the sound wasn’t a sound,” she said, “that it was something shutting off, and it was. That was what woke them up, the engines shutting off. Hardly anyone heard the collision. And they went outside on deck to see what had happened—”

  “On deck?”

  “Yes, and it was bitterly cold. Most of them had just thrown a coat or a blanket on over their nightclothes. It was after midnight and they’d already gone to bed. But not the woman with the piled-up hair. She and her husband must still have been up. They were wearing evening clothes,” she said thoughtfully, as if she were puzzling all this out as she spoke.

  “That’s why she was wearing white gloves.”

  “Joanna—”

  “The third-floor walkway is recessed, with a step at the end that makes it look like it’s curving up,” she said. “And your lab coat.”

  “Joanna, you’re not making any sense—”

  “But it does make sense,” she said. “A stoker came up behind Jack Phillips and tried to steal his lifejacket right off him, and he didn’t notice. He was so intent on sending the SOSs, and—”

  “SOS? Lifejackets?” Richard said. “What are you talking about, Joanna?”

  “What it is,” she said. “I told you I knew what it was, and I did.”

  “And what was it?”

  “I knew the word palace had something to do with it. That’s what they called it, a floating palace.”

  “What they called what?”

  “The Titanic.”

  He was so surprised by the answer, by any answer, that he simply gaped at her for a moment.

  “I told you it was someplace I recognized but had never been,” she said.

  “The Titanic.”

  “Yes. It’s not a hall, it’s a passageway, and the door’s the door that opens out onto the deck. After the Titanic hit the iceberg, they stopped the engines to see how much damage had been done, and the passengers went out on deck to see what had happened. The cold should have been a clue. The temperature had dropped nearly twelve degrees during the evening because of the ice. I should have realized what it was when the woman in the nightgown said, ‘It’s so cold.’ ”

  The Titanic. And he had called her an island of sanity. He had told Davis there was no way she would ever turn into R. John Foxx.

  “It all fits,” she said eagerly. “The feeling I had in the walkway of being oblivious while something terrible was happening. That was the Californian. It turned its wireless off for the night five minutes before the Titanic sent its first SOS, and then sat there, fifteen miles away all night, completely unaware that the Titanic was sinking.”

  Davis had said that everybody who studied NDEs went wacko sooner or later. Maybe he was right. Maybe it was some sort of infectious insanity. But surely not Joanna, who saw right through Mandrake and his manipulations, who knew the NDE was a physical process. There must be some mistake. “Let me get this straight,” he said. “You’re saying you were there? On board the Titanic?”

  “Yes,” Joanna said eagerly. “In one of the stateroom passages. I don’t know which one. I think it may have been in second class because of the wooden floor—it was the curve of the deck that made the passage look longer than it was. First class would have been carpeted, but the people outside on the deck looked like first-class passengers, so it might have been in first class. The woman with the piled-up hair was wearing jewels, and white gloves. I wonder who she was,” she murmured. “She might have been Mrs. Allison.”

  “And who were you?” Richard asked angrily. “Lady Astor?”

  “What?” Joanna said blankly.

  “Who exactly were you in this previous life?” Richard said. “The unsinkable Molly Brown?”

  “Previous life?” Joanna said as if she had no idea what he was talking about.

  “Were you Shirley MacLaine? Wait, don’t tell me,” he said, holding up a warning hand. “You were Bridey Murphy, and she came over from Ireland on the Titanic.”

  “Bridey Murphy?” Joanna said, and her chin went up defiantly. “You think I’m making this up?”

  “I don’t know what you’re doing. You said you were on the Titanic.”

  “I was.”

  “Who else was on board? Harry Houdini? Elvis?”

  She stared at him. “I can’t believe this—”

  “You can’t believe this? I can’t believe that you’re sitting here telling me you had some past-life regression!”

  “Past-life—”

  “ ‘You should send me under,’ you said. ‘I’ll be an impartial scientific observer. I won’t fall prey to thinking I see Angels of Light.’ Oh, no, you saw something even better! Do you have any idea what Mandrake will do when he gets hold of this, not to mention the tabloids? I can see the headlines now.” He swept his hand across the air. “ ‘Near-Death Scientist Says She Went Down on Titanic.’ ”

  “If you’d just listen—I didn’t say it was a past-life regression.”

  “Oh? What was it?” he said nastily. “A time machine? Or were you teleported there by aliens? I believe that first day I met you, you said that fourteen percent of all NDEers also believed they’d been abducted by UFOs. What you should have told me was that you were part of that fourteen percent.”

  “I don’t have to listen to this,” she said and flung herself off the examining table, clutching at the back of her hospital gown, and stomped, stocking-footed, over to the dressing room.

  He started after her. “I should have stuck with Mr. Wojakowski, the compulsive liar,” he said. “At least the only ship he was on was the Yorktown.”

  “Fine,” she said, and slammed the door in his face.

  She opened it again immediately and came out, buttoning her blouse, yanking on her cardigan. “Mr. Mandrake’s the one you should have asked to be your partner,” she said, pushing past him. “You two would make a perfect couple. You both want to hear what fits your preconceived theories and nothing else.”

  She halted at the door. “For your information, it wasn’t time travel or a past-life regression. It wasn’t the Titanic. It was-oh, what’s the use? You won’t listen anyway.” She yanked the door open. “I’ll tell Mr. Mandrake you’re looking for a new partner.”

  It wasn’t the Titanic? “Wait—” he said, but the door had already slammed behind her.

  He wrenched it open. She was already at the elevators. “Joanna, wait!” he shouted and sprinted down the hall after her.

  The elevator dinged. “Wait!” he shouted. “Joanna!”

  She didn’t so much as glance at him. The doors slid apart, and she stepped on. She must have pushed the “door close” button because the doors immediately began to slide shut.

  “Joanna, wait!” He forced the doors apart and shoved onto the elevator. The doors closed behind him. “I want to talk to you.”

  “Well, I don’t want to talk to you,” she said. She reached for the “door open” button.

  He blocked her from reaching it. The elevator started down. “What did you mean, it wasn’t a past-life regression?”

  “Why are you asking me? I’m Bridey Murphy, remember?” She made another try for the buttons, and he grabbed the red emergency button and turned it. An unbelievably loud alarm went off, and the elevator lu
rched to a stop.

  Joanna looked at him disbelievingly. “You’re crazy, you know that?” she shouted over the alarm. “And you accuse me of being a nutcase!”

  “I’m sorry,” he shouted back. “I jumped to conclusions, but what am I supposed to do when you tell me you’ve been on board the Titanic?”

  “You’re supposed to let me at least finish my sentence,” she shouted. “Turn that off.”

  “Will you come back to the lab with me?”

  She glared at him. The alarm seemed to be getting louder by the minute. “I promise I won’t jump to conclusions,” he bellowed over it. “Please.”

  She nodded reluctantly. “Just stop that thing!” she yelled, her hands over her ears.

  He nodded and pushed the emergency button. It kept ringing. He pushed “door open.” Nothing. He twisted the emergency button again, and then the floor buttons, one after the other. Nothing. He tried turning the emergency button the other way, but that only seemed to make the alarm louder. If that were possible.

  Joanna reached past him to press the “door open” button again, and the elevator moved upward, though the ringing still didn’t stop. Richard yanked at the emergency button again, and the noise abruptly shut off, leaving an echoing ringing in his ears.

  “Whoa, was it a ringing or a buzzing?” he said, hoping she’d smile.

  She didn’t. She pressed “six,” and the doors slid open. Richard had half-expected a crowd of anxious rescuers, or at least someone who’d come out to see what all the noise was, but the hall was empty. Joanna stalked off the elevator and down to the lab ahead of him, her chin in the air. Inside, she turned to face him, her arms folded across her chest.

  “Do you realize we could have been trapped in there forever,” Richard said, trying to break the ice, “and nobody would ever have come to rescue us?”

  Nothing.

  “Look,” he said. “I’m sorry I flew off the handle like that. It’s just that—”

  “—you thought I’d turned into one of Mr. Mandrake’s nutcases,” she said. “How could you think that?”