Passage

by Connie Willis

  “Because people do it all the time. Perfectly rational people who suddenly announce they’ve seen the light and start spouting nonsense. Look at Seagal. Look at Foxx.”

  “But you knew me,” she said.

  “Like you knew Mr. Wojakowski?”

  “Touché,” she said quietly. “But when he told me about being on the Yorktown during Pearl Harbor, I didn’t just accuse him. I checked my facts first. I got outside confirmation. You didn’t even listen to what I was trying to tell you.”

  “I’m listening now,” he said.

  Her chin shot up again. “Are you?”

  “Yes,” he said seriously. He indicated a chair, and she sat down, looking wary. He sat down, too, and bent forward, his hands between his knees. “Shoot.”

  “All right.” She pushed her glasses up on her nose. “It was the Titanic . . . ” He must have tensed involuntarily, because she said, “I thought you said you were going to listen.”

  “I am. It was the Titanic.”

  “But it didn’t feel like I was in 1912, or like I was seeing the ship that night. It wasn’t like that.”

  “What was it like?”

  She got the thoughtful, inward look she had had when she was trying to identify the noise. “It was the Titanic, but not the Titanic. I knew I wasn’t on board the actual ship, that what I was seeing wasn’t an event from that night. But, at the same time, it was the Titanic.”

  “It didn’t feel real?” Richard asked. “Was it a superimposed vision?”

  “No,” she said. “The vision was substantial and three-dimensional, just like the other times. The illusion that you’re really in that place is complete. I was really there in the passage and standing on the deck, only . . . ” She seemed to draw into herself. “It was as if there was something else behind it, some deeper reality . . . ” She looked curiously at him. “But why would I see the Titanic?”

  “I don’t think you did,” he said. “I think you confabulated it. You didn’t recognize it as the Titanic during the NDE. You concluded that afterward while you were giving your account. You’re familiar with the process. Your conscious mind . . . ”

  “No,” Joanna said. “I recognized it in the passage that very first time. I told you. I knew I recognized it but that I’d never been there. And if it was a confabulation, why would I confabulate the Titanic, of all things? Confabulations are the result of expectations and influences. I’ve never heard of anyone seeing the Titanic in his or her NDE. If I confabulated it, why didn’t I see an Angel of Light or a golden stairway?”

  “There are a couple of possibilities. Come over here a minute,” he said, standing up and going over to the console. He called up four images from her NDE. “Look at this,” he said, pointing to a scattering of orange, red, and yellow points in the frontal cortex of each scan. “Those are random neural firings in the area of the frontal cortex devoted to long-term memory. One of those firings may have been a memory of the Titanic.”

  “But it wasn’t just one memory, it was dozens of memories. The engines stopping and the passage and the passengers standing outside on the deck—”

  “Which may all be confabulations growing out of that memory, the sensations of sound, light, and figures in white you were experiencing, and the same sort of persistence of meaning that causes dreams to be a coherent story rather than a series of separate images.”

  She didn’t look convinced. “But why would a Titanic neuron fire, out of all the—how many are there? Millions, billions of memories?”

  “That’s what random means,” Richard said, “and your remembering something about the Titanic wouldn’t be that statistically unlikely.”

  Now Joanna was looking at him like he was crazy. “It wouldn’t?”

  “No. After all, it’s a disaster, and you spend a lot of time talking to Maisie about disasters.”

  Joanna shook her head. “But not the Titanic. I don’t think I’ve ever heard Maisie mention the Titanic.”

  “She talked about the Lusitania, and I’ll bet you anything there are pictures of the Titanic in those books of hers,” Richard said. “The day I met her she turned every single page, looking for some photo. You could have seen that picture of the Titanic half out of the water,” but Joanna was shaking her head.

  “If it was Maisie, I’d have been more likely to have seen Pompeii, and that isn’t where the memory’s from.”

  That’s interesting, Richard thought. “You know the source of the memory?”

  She got that odd, inward look again. “No. But I know it wasn’t Mr. Wojakowski or Maisie. And it wasn’t random.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because . . . I don’t know,” she said, defeated. “It doesn’t feel random. It feels like it came from something.”

  “It might have,” Richard said. “Frequently accessed long-term memories have stronger neuronal pathways than the average memory, which makes them easier to retrieve.”

  “But the Titanic’s not a frequently accessed memory. I haven’t thought of it since—”

  “The movie came out?” Richard said. “That’s the most obvious source. It even has a scene at the end where the old woman sees herself on the Titanic in a white dress surrounded by a halo of light. You saw the movie—”

  “Five years ago,” Joanna said, “and I didn’t even like it.”

  “Liking wouldn’t have anything to do with it,” Richard said, “and there are references to the Titanic everywhere—TV specials, books. I heard that godawful song of Celine Dion’s on my way to the hospital this morning, and I know for a fact you’ve accessed Titanic-related memories twice recently.”

  “When?” she demanded.

  “The day I met you, you told me about the spiritualist-what was his name? Stead?—going down on the Titanic, and that night at Vielle’s, you said Dish Night was a Titanic-free zone, so the neural pathway would have been not only recent, but reinforced. Your memory of the scene in the movie where the engines stopped and the passengers went out on deck to see what had happened—”

  She was already shaking her head. “That scene, with them standing around out on the deck, wearing nightgowns and evening clothes, wasn’t in Titanic.”

  “All right, then a book or—”

  “No,” she said, but less certainly, “I don’t think it was a book.”

  “Or a conversation—” but she was already shaking her head.

  “Not a conversation. The memory came from somewhere else.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know. You say my seeing the Titanic is determined by the random firing of a synapse—”

  “And temporal-lobe stimulation.”

  “But nearly all the NDEers conclude they’re seeing heaven. If random firings were determining the content, wouldn’t they be reporting a whole variety of places and experiences?”

  “Not necessarily,” Richard said. “The firing of the synapses may be too weak in most cases to produce an image. Or the sense of cosmic significance may override any other images.”

  “Then why didn’t it in mine?”

  “Because you were on guard against those interpretations. As you said when you were trying to talk me into letting you go under, when you saw a radiant figure, you wouldn’t automatically assume it was an Angel of Light.”

  “But why would I assume it was the Titanic, of all things? Why not a railroad tunnel? Just last week Vielle said, ‘What if the light at the end of the tunnel’s an oncoming train?’ And I live in Colorado. There are dozens of tunnels in the mountains. One of them would have been the logical association, not a ship. I’ve never even been on a ship.”

  “You’re thinking logical explanations,” Richard said, “but these synapse firings are random—”

  Joanna was shaking her head again. “It doesn’t feel random. I have this feeling that I saw the Titanic for a reason, that it means something.”

  And here we are, Richard thought, right back at the temporal lobe and the sense of significance.
“This feeling,” he said, “can you describe it?”

  “It has to do with where the memory that triggered the image of the Titanic came from,” she said. “I have this strong feeling that I know where the memory came from, and that if I could just remember—”

  “But you can’t?”

  “No, it’s right . . . ” her hand reached out, as if trying to grasp something, “ . . . on the tip—” She stopped and yanked her hand back to her side. “You don’t think that means anything either, do you?” she said angrily. “You think it’s temporallobe stimulation again.”

  “It would explain why you can’t remember where you got the memory,” he said mildly. “Are you having the feeling now? That you know where the memory came from?”

  “Yes.”

  “Get on the table,” he said, going rapidly over to the supply cabinet. “I want to see if we can catch this on the scan.” He got out a syringe.

  “Do you want me to get undressed?”

  “No, and I’m not going to bother with an IV, since all I’m going to inject is the marker,” Richard said, filling the syringe. “Take off your sweater and roll up your sleeve.”

  Joanna took off her cardigan and got up on the table, unbuttoning the cuff of her blouse and pushing the sleeve up.

  He began positioning the RIPT scan. “You had a feeling of recognition in the first three scans, and in this one you recognized the Titanic. Those two things may have nothing to do with each other.”

  “What do you mean, nothing to do with each other?”

  He swabbed the inside of her elbow with alcohol and injected the marker. “The feeling of recognition you experienced in the walkway and when the heater shut off may have been just that, a feeling, triggered by random stimuli, and unrelated to your recognition of the Titanic.”

  “But they weren’t random,” she said, flushing. “They all fit, your lab coat and the cold and the—”

  “Those could apply to any number of situations.”

  “Name one,” Joanna said.

  “You yourself said the people you saw could have been at a party or a ball.”

  “The woman was in her nightgown!”

  “You concluded it was a nightgown after you realized it was the Titanic. Earlier, you said it was an old-fashioned dress. You originally thought it was an angel’s robe. Lie down.”

  “But what about the curving floor,” she said, lying down on the examining table, “and your lab coat, and—?”

  “Don’t talk,” he said, moving the scan into position. He walked over to the console. “All right,” he said, starting the scan. “I want you to count to five in your head.”

  He looked up at the image on the scans. “Now, I want you to visualize the tunnel. Think about what you saw.”

  A number of frontal-cortex sites lit up, indicating a variety of sources for the memory, both auditory and visual, which might be why Joanna couldn’t remember whether she’d heard or read something about the engines stopping and the passengers going out on deck to see what had happened.

  Or seen it in the movie, he thought. He still considered that the most likely possibility, in spite of Joanna’s protests. The movie had been an enormous hit, and for over a year it had been impossible to turn around without being bombarded with information about it—books, CDs, newspaper articles, TV specials. And a few years before that the same thing had happened with the discovery of the wreck. It was impossible not to know something about the Titanic, and Joanna obviously did. She not only knew that there’d been carpets in the first-class passageways, but that the wireless operator had been Jack Phillips. “All right, now, Joanna, concentrate on the source of the memory,” he said and looked up at the temporallobe area on the screen, expecting it to light up.

  It did, a vivid orange-red. He asked her several more questions and then shut off the scan. “You can get up now,” he said and started graphing the scans.

  Joanna came over to the console, rolling down her sleeve. “I still haven’t recorded my NDE.” She pulled on her cardigan. “I’ll be in my office.”

  “Don’t you want to see your feeling of significance?” He called the scan up. “There it is,” he said, pointing to the temporal lobe. “That’s why you feel seeing the Titanic isn’t random.”

  She looked at it glumly, her hands jammed in her lab coat pockets, as he showed her the areas of activity.

  “But the feeling that I know where the memory came from is so strong . . . ” she murmured.

  “Like the feeling you had in the dressing room and the walkway,” Richard said.

  “Yes,” she admitted.

  He pointed at the red-orange temporal lobe. “Your mind is simply trying to make sense of an irrational feeling by giving it an object, in this case the source of the memory, but it’s only a feeling.”

  She looked like she was going to contradict him, but all she said was, “I still haven’t recorded my account.” She picked up her recorder.

  “When you write it up—”

  “I know,” Joanna said. “Don’t let it fall into enemy hands.”

  “Mandrake would—”

  “I know,” she said. “Have a field day with this.”

  She started out of the lab. At the door she turned and looked back at the scan. “I think I liked it better when you were accusing me of being Bridey Murphy,” she said ruefully and went out.

  “I scorn to answer you such a question!”

  —QUEEN ELIZABETH I,ON BEING ASKED ON HER DEATHBED BY SIR ROBERT CECIL IF SHE HAD SEEN ANY SPIRITS

  RICHARD’S WRONG, Joanna thought, opening the door to her office. It isn’t a content-free feeling. The memory didn’t come from the movie, and it’s not the first thing my long-term memory happened to stumble over. It’s the Titanic for a reason.

  And no doubt he’ll be down here in a minute to tell me my thinking that is yet another symptom of temporal-lobe stimulation, and show me a scan that proves it. I don’t want to see it, she thought, and I don’t want to hear another lecture on what will happen if Mr. Mandrake finds out about this. I’ll record my account somewhere else.

  She yanked her door shut, locked it, and walked quickly down the hall to the stairs. She would go record her account in the cafeteria, if it was open, or in one of the nurses’ lounges. Anywhere where I don’t have to listen to him telling me the Titanic was a random synapse, she thought, clattering down the stairs. It’s not random. I’m seeing the Titanic for a reason. I know it.

  And could hear Mr. Darby’s voice insisting, “I was there. It was real. I know it.” She sounded just like him. And that’s why you don’t want to talk to Richard, she thought, because you know he’s right.

  He’s not right, she thought stubbornly. I know the memory isn’t from the movie.

  Yes, and Mr. Viraldi knew he’d seen Elvis, Mr. Suarez knew he’d been abducted by aliens, Bridey Murphy knew she’d lived a previous life in Ireland. Her psychiatrist had been certain Bridey’s memories were proof of reincarnation, even though it had later been proved they’d been concocted out of folk songs and half-remembered stories her nanny’d told her, and that subjects under hypnosis could be talked into all sorts of false memories. And how do you know this isn’t the same thing? How do you know the memory isn’t from the movie, like Richard said?

  But that scene isn’t in the movie, she thought, and knew it very well might be. Memory had been proved notoriously unreliable in study after study, and she and Vielle had had more than one argument about what was and wasn’t in various movies. After they’d watched A Perfect Murder at Dish Night, Vielle had been convinced that Gwyneth Paltrow had stabbed Michael Douglas to death with a meat thermometer instead of shooting him. Joanna had had to rent the video again and show her the ending to prove it to her. A scene with the passengers standing around asking the steward what had happened might very well be in Titanic, and she’d simply forgotten it. And there was a simple way to prove it, one way or the other. Watch the movie.

  But Richard was already con
vinced her NDE had been influenced by the movie. If she watched it, her memory of her NDE would be hopelessly contaminated by its images, and so would any future NDEs she might have. And no matter what she saw in them, Richard would claim the memory came from the movie.

  I need to have somebody else watch it and see if the scene’s there, she thought. But who? Vielle would have a fit if she told her she’d seen the Titanic. She’d be convinced it was a warning from the subconscious about going under.

  Maisie? She was a disaster expert, but, as Joanna had told Richard, she’d never heard her so much as mention the Titanic, and, anyway, it was unlikely Maisie’s mother would allow her to see the movie. Quite apart from the “negative subject matter,” there was a nude scene and sex in the backseat of a Renault.

  Tish? No, Joanna couldn’t trust her to keep her mouth shut, and Richard was right, Mr. Mandrake would have a field day if he found out about this, which eliminated anybody connected with Gossip General.

  It would have to be Vielle, who, she hoped, wouldn’t ask too many questions. Joanna went down to the basement, past the morgue, and across to the ER.

  It was jammed, as usual, with drugged and dangerous-looking people, though there didn’t seem to be any rogue-ravers on the premises at the moment. The new security guard was looking bored in a chair by the door. Joanna worked her way through the mess to Vielle, who was handing a patient on a gurney over to two orderlies. “She goes up to four-west,” Vielle said to them. “Do you know how to get there?”

  The orderlies nodded uncertainly. Vielle gave them complicated instructions, laid the chart on the patient’s stomach, then turned to Joanna. “You’re too late,” Vielle said. “We had a patient who coded twice. You just missed him.”

  “He died?”

  “No, he’s fine,” Vielle said. “It would have been a case of natural selection if he’d died, though. He electrocuted himself taking down his Christmas lights.”

  “His Christmas lights?” Joanna said. “It’s February.”

  “He said it was the first day it hadn’t snowed.”

  “I thought Christmas lights were shielded.”