Passage

by Connie Willis

  “No,” Kit said. “If he answers, just tell him you want to talk to me.” She told her the number.

  “And I should ask for Kit?” Joanna asked. “Or is your name Katherine?”

  “It’s Kit. Kit Gardiner. I was named after Kit Marlowe, Uncle Pat’s favorite writer. He was the one who picked my name.”

  And he’s forgotten that, Joanna thought, appalled. “I’ll call you if he says anything about the Titanic,” Kit said.

  “I’d appreciate that.”

  “Kit,” Mr. Briarley said, appearing at the door, “where have you put my Tragical History of Dr. Faustus?” He came out onto the porch.

  “I’ll find it, Uncle Pat,” Kit called, and took off for the porch, hugging the flannel shirt to her thin form. “I’ll call you.”

  “Thank you,” Joanna said.

  “I’ve told you not to move my books,” Mr. Briarley said. “I can never find them.”

  Kit ran back up the walk. Joanna got in the car, watching Kit run up onto the porch, watching her take Mr. Briarley’s arm and lead him inside. She put the car in gear and pulled away from the curb. She drove two blocks and then pulled the car over and turned it off and sat there with her hands on the steering wheel, staring blindly out at the fading winter light.

  He didn’t know what he’d said about the Titanic. The memory was gone, as lost as if he had died. And he had died, was dying, syllable by syllable, a memory at a time, Coleridge and sarcasm and the word for sugar. And the name of his own niece, whom he had christened.

  It had to be torture, forgetting the poems and the people that had made up your life, and torture for Kit, too, watching it happen. And the fact that he couldn’t remember a lecture about the Titanic was the least important aspect of the tragedy she’d just witnessed. But it wasn’t because of Kit or Mr. Briarley that she put her hands to her face, it wasn’t their loss she sat in the cold car and mourned in the fading light. It was her own.

  He couldn’t tell her what he had said about the Titanic. He didn’t know. He didn’t remember. And it was important. It was the key.

  “You go first. You have children waiting for you.”

  —LAST WORDS OF EDITH EVANS TO MRS. JOHN MURRAY BROWN

  I SHOULD GO BACK to the hospital, Joanna thought, I still haven’t finished my account, but she continued to sit in the parked car, thinking about Mr. Briarley. Kit had said he sometimes remembered things he hadn’t been able to the day before. Maybe if she continued to ask him what it was he’d said . . .

  Don’t be ridiculous, she thought. He has Alzheimer’s. The neurotransmitters have shut down and the brain cells are deteriorating and dying, and his memory along with them, and if you ever wanted proof that there isn’t an afterlife, all you have to do is look at a patient in the final stages of Alzheimer’s, when he’s not only forgotten his own niece and the word for sugar, but all words, and how to talk, how to eat, who he is. The soul not only doesn’t survive death, with Alzheimer’s, it doesn’t even survive life. The Mr. Briarley who knew what he’d said in class that day was dead. He could no more tell her what she needed to know than Greg Menotti.

  And I do need to know, she thought. What he said in class is the reason I saw the Titanic. And the reason’s important. It has something to do with the nature of the NDE.

  What had he said? She could see him, perched on the edge of his desk, with the textbook in his hand. Somebody had said something, and he had shut the book with a snap, and said . . . what? She squinted through the windshield at the darkening gray sky, trying to remember. Focusing on extraneous details sometimes triggered memories. What was on the blackboard? Where were you sitting?

  The second row, Joanna thought, by the window, and it was foggy out. So foggy Mr. Briarley had to ask Ricky Inman, who sat by the light switch, to turn on the overhead lights, and then Ricky said something, and he shut the book with a snap, and—

  No, not foggy, overcast. But fog had something to do with it. Or had she confabulated that from Maisie’s having seen fog? or from some other day in class? And how many times had Mr. Briarley perched on the edge of his desk and slapped a book shut for emphasis? It was gray, overcast. Or snowy, and Mr. Briarley said something—

  It was no use. She couldn’t remember. All right, then, who could? Who else had been in that class? Not Ricky Inman. He’d never paid attention in the first place. Candy Simons? No, the only thing she’d paid attention to was her appearance. Joanna could remember her sitting in the desk in front of her, combing her blond tresses and putting on her makeup in the mirror she’d propped against her textbook.

  Who else had been in that class? She’d lost her yearbook in the move to grad school. The high school library would have one, if she could get past security to get up there, but if this afternoon was any indication, even if she did find out who’d been in the class, the school wouldn’t be willing to give out any information regarding their whereabouts, and she’d been very bad about keeping in touch. The only person from high school she ever saw was Kerri Jakes, and that only because she worked at Mercy General, in outpatient surgery, but Kerri had had English fifth period. She might remember who else had been in second period, though.

  I’ll call her when I get home, Joanna thought. There was no point in going back to the hospital now. It must be after five. She glanced at her watch. Good Lord, seven-thirty. She’d been sitting here for hours. Vielle would have a fit. She’d tell her she could have gotten hypothermia sitting there without a coat on in a freezing car—

  In her freezing car. This is Vielle’s car, Joanna thought, horrified. I promised to have it back hours ago. She started the car and pulled out into traffic. Vielle had finished her shift at seven and was probably trying to page her right now.

  She fumbled to get her pager out of her pocket and switched it back on. She had forgotten about someone paging her while she was in the high school library, she had been so eager to hear the young librarian’s directions. It had probably been Vielle, wanting to know where her car was. And what reason could she give her for being over three hours late? My English teacher can’t remember something he said when I was in high school, and it’s the end of the world?

  Maybe there’ll have been a five-car pileup, and Vielle will be too busy to ask me where I’ve been, Joanna thought, pulling into the hospital parking lot, but there were only the usual suspects in the ER waiting room: a Hispanic teenager holding an icebag to his eye, a homeless man muttering to himself, a five-year-old boy holding his stomach, his mother sitting next to him, holding an emesis basin and looking worried. At least Vielle wasn’t standing by the door, tapping her foot in impatience. Maybe she’d caught a ride home with someone.

  Joanna went over to the admitting desk and asked the nurse, “Is Nurse Howard still here?”

  She shook her head. “She’s at the meeting.”

  “What meeting?” Joanna started to ask and then remembered. The meeting about ER safety. “How long do you think it will last?”

  “I don’t know,” the admitting nurse said. “The staff was pretty upset. After that last rogue incident—”

  “Rogue incident?” Joanna said. “I thought it was a gangbanger.”

  “Gangbanger? No,” the nurse said, looking puzzled. “Oh, you mean the nail gun thing. Then you didn’t hear about this last incident.”

  “No,” Joanna said.

  “Well,” the nurse said, glancing at the Hispanic man and the mother and then leaning forward confidentially, “this guy comes in, scared to death and talking about the Vietcong and Phnom Penh, and everybody thinks they’ve got a ’Nam junkie or maybe posttraumatic stress syndrome, and the next thing you know he’s gotten a bloody syringe from someplace and is screaming that he’s gonna take us all with him. This rogue stuff is bad news, a lot worse than angel dust.”

  “When did this happen?”

  “Tuesday. I would’ve thought Vielle would have told you.”

  “So would I,” Joanna said grimly. Of course Vielle hadn’t told her.
She’d known exactly what Joanna would have said. Would say, as soon as she saw her.

  “You borrowed her car, right?” the nurse was saying. “Vielle said to just leave the keys here at the desk.”

  I’ll bet she did, Joanna thought, handing the keys over, but she was nonetheless grateful that she didn’t have to face her tonight. She went up to the lab. The door was shut and locked. Good, she thought. I won’t have to deal with Richard till tomorrow either.

  The answering machine was blinking insistently. She hesitated and then hit “play.”

  “You have eighteen messages,” it said. She hit “stop.” She pulled the minirecorder out of her pocket. She really should record the rest of her account tonight, before any more time elapsed, but she felt too emotionally drained. I’ll do it in the morning, she thought, gathered up her coat, bag, and keys, and locked her office.

  “Oh, good, you’re still here,” Richard said, coming down the hall. “I was afraid you’d gone home. I have something to show you.”

  More scans, Joanna thought.

  “I tried to page you earlier,” he said. “Where were you?”

  “I had to go see someone,” she said. “You tried to page me?”

  He nodded. “I had some questions to ask you, and I wanted to let you know Maisie called.”

  “Maisie?” Joanna said. She’d promised to go see her, and then her NDE and the fight and Mr. Briarley had driven it out of her head. “Is she all right?” she asked urgently.

  “She sounded fine when I talked to her,” Richard said, “at three. And four. And four-thirty. And six. Did you know the inhabitants of Pompeii were suffocated by ash and poisonous gases? With, I might add, very impressive sound effects.”

  “I can imagine,” Joanna said, smiling. “I need to go see her.” She glanced at her watch. Eight o’clock. It was late, but she’d better at least go say hi, or Maisie might insist on waiting up for her. “I don’t suppose she’d be willing to wait till tomorrow morning, would she?”

  “I doubt it. She said she’d been trying to page you all afternoon.”

  That’s who paged me when I was in the library, Joanna thought, and felt a flash of guilt and fear, like the one she’d felt in the walkway with Barbara. Like the one the captain of the Californian must have felt when he realized the Titanic had gone down.

  “She told me to tell you that you were supposed to come see her immediately,” Richard said, “that she had something important to tell you.”

  “Did she say what it was?”

  “No. My guess would be that it has something to do with Mount Vesuvius. Did you know the archaeologists found the body of a dog? It had struggled all the way to the end of its chain before it died, trying to stay on top of the falling ash.”

  “You’d think somebody would have unchained it instead of just leaving it there with a volcano erupting,” Joanna said.

  “Maisie thought so, too,” he said. “She was pretty incensed about it, also that it didn’t have a dog tag.”

  “A dog tag?” Joanna said, frowning.

  “So we’d know what its name was,” he said. “I told her its name was Fido, that all Roman dogs were named Fido.”

  “Did she believe you?”

  “Are you kidding? This is Maisie we’re talking about.”

  Joanna nodded. “I’d better go at least check in with her so she won’t think I’ve forgotten her.” She rubbed her forehead tiredly. She was getting a headache, probably because she hadn’t had anything to eat for hours. I’ll stop by for a minute, and then I’m going home, she thought.

  “Before you go see Maisie, I want to show you something,” Richard said. He led the way up to the lab. “You were right about the Titanic. It wasn’t a random memory.”

  “It wasn’t?”

  “No,” he said, stopping at the door and unlocking it. “I’ve just been up conferring with Dr. Jamison. After you left, I got to thinking about what you said about the NDEs not being varied enough to support a theory of randomness,” he opened the door and switched on the lights, “and I decided I should take another look at the synapse firings in the frontal cortex.” He walked over to the console and switched it on. “And when I did, I noticed something interesting.” He began typing in commands. “Are you familiar with Dr. Lambert Oswell’s work?”

  Joanna shook her head.

  “He’s done extensive research on long-term memory, mapping L+R patterns,” Richard said. “When you ask a subject a straightforward question, like, ‘Who won the Battle of Midway?’ you get a fairly simple L+R pattern.”

  “Unless you’re Mr. Wojakowski,” Joanna said, “in which case it reminds you of a story.”

  Richard grinned. “Or a whole novel. Anyway,” he said, typing, “the pattern looks like this.” He called up a series of scans. “See how the neural firings very quickly become localized? That’s the mind zeroing in on the target, as Mr. Wojakowski would say. Now, no two people would have the same pattern for ‘Who won the Battle of Midway?’ because not only is there no particular storage location for a given memory, but the same memory may be stored in any number of categories: World War II, islands, Pacific Ocean, or words beginning with M, to name just a few. The pattern’s not even always the same for a given question. Oswell asked identical questions at intervals of three months and got different L+R patterns each time. But,” he said, “he was able to come up with mathematical formulas for the patterns that make it possible for us to tell if a pattern is an L+R or something else.”

  He typed some more, and the right-hand scan disappeared and was replaced by another one. “The pattern’s different, and so is the formula, for a question like ‘What is the Yorktown?’ ”

  Or, “What was it Mr. Briarley said that day in class?” Joanna thought, watching the neural pathways wink on and off, red to green, yellow to blue, blossoming like fireworks and then fading out. He had been sitting on the edge of his desk, talking about what? Macbeth? Subjunctive clauses? “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” ?

  “If I ask a question like ‘What is the Yorktown?’-assuming you’re not Mr. Wojakowski-the L+R pattern involves the selection and discarding of possibilities and is much more complex. It’s also broader, since it’s searching through a whole variety of memories for the information. Is it a place? A battle? The name of a movie? A racehorse? The pattern has a much higher degree of apparent randomness.”

  Joanna squinted at the screen, trying to follow what he was saying, her headache getting worse by the minute. “And that’s what the pattern in the scans resembles?”

  “No,” he said. “However, Dr. Jamison reminded me that Dr. Oswell also did a series of experiments on image interpretation. He showed his subjects an abstract—”

  “Do you have any food?” Joanna interrupted.

  Richard turned and looked at her.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “but I didn’t get any dinner. Or lunch, now that I think of it, and I thought maybe you—”

  “Sure.” He was already reaching in his pockets. “Let’s see, I’ve got a Mars bar,” he said, examining the items as he pulled them out, “ . . . some cashews . . . Listen, we could go get some real dinner if you’d rather. I don’t suppose the cafeteria’s open at this hour?”

  “The cafeteria’s never open.”

  “We could run to Taco Pierre’s.”

  “No, I’ve still got to go see Maisie,” she said, taking the Mars bar. “This is fine. You were saying?”

  “Oh, yeah, well, in a separate series of experiments, Oswell showed subjects a scene in which objects and shapes were kept intentionally vague and abstract.”

  “Like a Rorschach,” Joanna said.

  “Like a Rorschach,” Richard said. “The subjects were asked, ‘What is this a picture of?’ Here’s an orange.” He handed it to her. “In most cases the pattern was similar to that of the open-ended L+R with increased activity in the memory cortex, and the subjects described the pattern as being . . . Skittles . . . and a package of cheese crackers
with peanut butter. Nothing to drink, though, so maybe peanut butter’s a bad idea. I could get you a Coke from the vending machine—”

  “I’m fine,” Joanna said, peeling the orange. “They described the pattern as being?”

  “Just what you’d expect,” Richard said. “A big white oblong object on a blue background with a round blob of pink off to the right. However, in some instances, the subjects answered, ‘It’s Antarctica. There’s the ice and the sky. And there’s the sun setting.’ In those cases, the subject had searched through long-term memory to find a scenario that explained not only the separate images, but a metaphor for all the shapes and colors the subject was seeing.”

  A metaphor. Something about a metaphor. That’s what triggered the feeling at Dish Night, Joanna thought, Vielle’s saying something about a metaphor. No, Vielle had called optioning Richard a simile, and she had corrected her, had told her a simile was a comparison using “like” or “as” while a metaphor was a direct comparison. Mr. Briarley taught me that, she thought, and tried to remember exactly what he had said. Something about fog.

  “ . . . with an abstract scene, the scans showed an entirely different pattern,” Richard said, “one that was much more scattered and chaotic—”

  Fog. Ricky Inman, she thought, asking Mr. Briarley about a poem. “I don’t get it,” he’d said, rocking back in his chair. “How can fog come on little cat feet?”

  And Mr. Briarley, picking up an eraser as if he were going to throw it and sweeping it across the blackboard in wide strokes, searching for a stub of chalk, printing the words in short strokes. She could hear the tap of chalk against slate as he printed the words. “Metaphor. [Tap.] A direct or implied comparison. [Tap.] ‘This is a nightmare.’ [Tap.] As opposed to simile. [Tap.] ‘Silent as death.’ [Tap.] Does that help, Mr. Inman?”

  And Ricky, rocking so far back he threatened to overbalance, saying, “I still don’t get it. Fog doesn’t have feet.”

  “The mathematical formula for the frontal-cortical activity is identical,” Richard said. “Your mind was clearly searching through long-term memory for a unifying image that would explain all the sensations you were experiencing-the sound, the tunnel, the light, figures in white. And, as you said, it all fit. The Titanic was that unifying image.”