Passage

by Connie Willis

  “I’m sorry to interrupt,” a voice said, and Joanna jerked around. “Mr. Briarley!” she said, relieved.

  “Ms. Lander,” he said disapprovingly. “What are you doing down here?”

  “I need to talk to you,” she said. “It’s about—” but he was shaking his head.

  “I’m afraid we won’t be able to have tea in the Palm Court, after all. Something has come up.” He pulled the steward aside and spoke rapidly to him. Joanna couldn’t hear what either one said, but after a couple of sentences, Mr. Briarley snorted in disgust. “What’s the quickest way there?” he demanded.

  “Back up to E Deck and down Scotland Road to the stairs next to the elevators,” he said, and Mr. Briarley immediately started back down the passage toward the stairway.

  “Mr. Briarley!” Joanna dashed after him. “I need to talk to you,” she said, catching up.

  “What is it?” he said, starting back up the stairs. It reminded her of times she’d caught up to him between classes, on his way to the office, and danced along at his side, asking him how many pages an assignment had to be.

  “I need to know what you said in class,” Joanna said.

  “You know I never give hints of what’s going to be on the final,” Mr. Briarley said, reaching the top of the flight of stairs.

  “I don’t need to know it for the final,” Joanna said. “You said something in class—”

  “I said a good many things in class,” Mr. Briarley said, reaching the top of the flight of stairs. “Can you be more specific?” He pushed open a door and started down a passage. They must still be in the crew section. The walls were painted gray, and there were pipes running along the ceiling.

  “You were talking about the Titanic,” Joanna said, “and you closed Mazes and Mirrors and dropped it on the desk, and then you said something about the Titanic.”

  “Mazes,” Mr. Briarley said thoughtfully, turning another corner. He yanked a metal door open. “After you.” He bowed, and Joanna went ahead of him through the door and into another passage. This one was painted a shiny white and stretched endlessly into the distance. Mr. Briarley set off down it at a rapid pace.

  “And whatever it was,” Joanna said, “when I experienced my first NDE, my subconscious saw a connection, and that’s why I’m here.”

  “Instead of in a tunnel with a light at the end of it,” Mr. Briarley said. He stopped and looked bleakly down the long passage and then turned and looked at her. “And you want me to tell you the connection?”

  “Yes,” Joanna said.

  “Connection. Fascinating word. From the Greek, ‘to send.’ But you must know the connection already,” he said to her, “or how could you have made it?”

  “I don’t know it,” she said. “My conscious mind’s forgotten it.”

  “Forgotten it? You should have paid more attention in class, Ms. Lander,” he said severely and began walking again. “I suppose you’ve forgotten what onomatopoeia is, too,” he said, “and alliteration. And a metaphor.”

  “Mr. Briarley, please! This is important.”

  “Indeed it is. Well?” he said and looked out over the passage as if it were a classroom, “What is a metaphor? Anyone?”

  “A metaphor is a figure of speech that likens two objects.”

  “Wrong, and wrong again,” he said. “The likeness is already there. The metaphor only sees it. And it is not a mere figure of speech. It is the very essence of our minds as we seek to make sense of our surroundings, our experiences, ourselves, seeing similarities, parallels, connections. We cannot help it. Even as the mind fails, it goes on trying to make sense of what is happening to it.”

  “That’s what I’m trying to do, Mr. Briarley,” Joanna said. “Make sense of what’s happening to me. And what you said in class is the connection. It was about the Titanic—” she prompted.

  “There are so many connections,” he said, frowning. “The Titanic symbolizes so many, many things. Promethean arrogance, for instance,” he said, striding tirelessly along the passage, “man challenging Fate and losing.” Joanna trotted beside him, trying to listen and keep up with him. “Or Frankensteinian hubris, man putting his faith in science and technology and getting his comeuppance from Nature for it.”

  The passage was endless. Joanna kept her eyes fixed on the door at the far end. “Or the futility of human endeavor. ‘Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair,’ ” he quoted. “ ‘Ozymandias.’ Percy Bysshe Shelley. Who also ended up at the bottom of the ocean.”

  Water, in a narrow, uneven line, was trickling down the middle of the shiny floor from the end of the passage. “Mr. Briarley,” Joanna said, tugging on the sleeve of his shirt, “look. Water.”

  “Ah, yes,” he said, not even slackening his pace. “Water is a symbol, too.” The thin line of water was growing wider as they neared the end of the passage, becoming two, then three rivulets. “The crossing of water has been a symbol of death since ancient times,” Mr. Briarley said, stepping easily between the rivulets. “The Egyptians journeyed to the Land of the Dead in a golden boat.”

  They were nearly to the end of the passage. He’s going to open the door, Joanna thought, frightened, but at the last minute he turned and went down a dry metal stairway at the side. “Aeneas is rowed across the Styx to the underworld by the boatman Charon,” he said, his voice echoing in the stairwell as Joanna rattled down after him, “and Frodo sets sail for the Blessed Realm.”

  He reached the bottom and started off down a passage. Joanna saw with relief that the floor was dry, though how was that possible, when there was water on the deck above? She looked anxiously up at the low ceiling overhead. Mr. Briarley, unconcerned, was discussing “In Memoriam.”

  “Tennyson’s dead friend sets sail over an unknown sea, to a still more unknown shore.” He opened a door. “And, of course, there’s the River Jordan. After you, Ms. Lander,” he said, bowing, and Joanna stepped across the threshold. And into six inches of water.

  The entire floor was awash. Letters, packages, postcards floated in the ankle-deep water, the ink on the addresses blurring, running down the envelopes in streaks like tears. On the far side of the room a mail clerk in a dark blue uniform and cap was bending in front of a wooden rack of pigeonholes, taking letters, already wet, out of the lowest row and moving them up to the top row.

  It won’t do any good, Joanna thought. The whole room will be underwater in a few minutes. “Mr. Briarley, we all need to get out of here,” she said, but Mr. Briarley, oblivious, was splashing across the room to the mail clerk, pulling a folded piece of paper from his gray tweed vest pocket, and handing it to him.

  The mail clerk shifted the stack of mail to one hand so he could unfold the note. He read it, nodded, and handed Mr. Briarley the sodden mail. Then he reached inside the neck of his uniform and pulled out a ring of iron keys on a chain. He lifted the chain and the keys from over his head and handed them to Mr. Briarley, taking back the mail.

  “Which one is it?” Mr. Briarley asked, but the mail clerk had already begun sorting again, putting the unreadable letters into the pigeonholes.

  Mr. Briarley waded back across the mail room, out the door, and down the passage, the chain swinging from his hand. He started up the stairs. “Where are we going now?” Joanna asked, clambering after him.

  “That is the question,” Mr. Briarley said. “To Hades or heaven? Or to the pharaohs’ Hall of Judgment?” He reached the top of the steps and turned back down Scotland Road, where the water was now a stream flowing down the center of the tiled floor. “And in which boat?” he asked. “Charon’s ferry?” He led her around to the metal stairway and past it, to an elevator with a brass folding grille across it. “Or King Arthur’s funeral barge?”

  He pushed the grille open. “After you,” he said, bowing. Joanna stepped in, and he got in after her and pulled the grille across. “Frodo boarded an elven ship at the Grey Havens.” He pushed an ivory button labeled “up.” The elevator rumbled upward. “And the dead in Outwar
d Bound found themselves on an ocean liner much like this one.”

  The elevator jerked to a halt, and Mr. Briarley shoved the grille open and strode out ahead of Joanna toward the doors that led out on deck. “And then, of course there’s the Ancient Mariner’s ship. ‘ “There was a ship,” quoth he,’ ” he said, and pushed the doors open. They were on the Boat Deck. She could see the lights from the wireless room and the bridge ahead.

  “It’s fitting that that was your favorite poem,” Mr. Briarley said, walking purposefully past the lifeboats toward the wireless room. “It has icebergs in it, you know. ‘And ice, mast-high, came floating by, as green as emerald.’ ”

  “Is that the connection?” Joanna asked. “Is that what you were reading that day?”

  He didn’t answer. He had stopped outside the wireless room, in front of a padlocked metal locker, and was taking the ring of keys from around his neck. “Is it?” Joanna said, clutching at his sleeve.

  He knelt in front of the locker. “No,” he said, trying the long-barreled keys one after the other in the padlock, “though it would be appropriate. Ships figure heavily in it, and water.” He inserted a key. It didn’t fit. He tried another. “And death. ‘Four times fifty living men, they dropped down one by one.’ ” It didn’t fit. He tried another. “The universality of death, is that the symbol you’re looking for?”

  The key fit. He opened the locker, pulled out a wooden box, and carried it across to the railing. “Certainly that was the Titanic. Astors and Irish immigrants, stokers and schoolteachers, perishing together in the icy water.”

  He opened the box, squatted down, pulled out a cardboard cylinder and stood it against the railing, and then stood up again. “Children and debutantes and professional cardsharps, all equally helpless, equally doomed.”

  He patted the pockets of his gray vest as if he were looking for something. “Unless, of course, you were in steerage, where your chances of perishing were somewhat more than equal.” He pulled a book of matches out of his pocket. “In which case—step back.”

  “What?”

  “Step back,” he said, and put out his hand to push her away. He knelt, striking the match as he did so, holding it to the bottom of the cylinder.

  In the last split second before he lit the fuse, she thought, The rockets! He’s setting off the distress rockets! and a stream of flame shot up and burst into a shower of white sparks. Joanna craned her neck, looking up at the falling white stars, and as she did, she had the feeling that it was important, that she was close to the meaning.

  “Would you like me to do that for you, sir?” a man’s voice said, and Joanna looked down and saw an officer in a white uniform standing next to Mr. Briarley.

  “Thank you.” Mr. Briarley handed over the matches to the officer and walked rapidly down the deck to the staircase.

  Joanna ran after him. “Mr. Briarley! Wait!” She caught up with him on the second landing. “In which case, what?”

  “In which case,” he said, hurrying down the carpeted stairs, “the meaning of the Titanic becomes a political one. The evils of a class-structured society, or of plutocracy, or the repression of women.”

  “It wasn’t political,” Joanna said. “It was something important.”

  “Important,” he said, reaching the bottom of the stairs. He strode across the foyer to a door and opened it. “After you,” he said, bowing, and she stepped through.

  And saw too late that it was the passage she had come through in. “No, wait, you haven’t—” she said, and was back in the lab.

  Not yet, she thought. I almost had it. Something about the rockets, about Mr. Briarley—

  “Joanna?” Richard was saying above her. “Joanna?”

  She opened her eyes. Tish had already taken her IV out and was checking her vitals. “Did I kick out again?”

  “No,” Richard said, and he looked as worried as Vielle did in the ER. “Are you all right?”

  I said something coming out, she thought. I made him promise he’d come and get me again.

  “I’m fine,” she said brightly. “How long was I under?”

  “Four minutes and ten seconds,” Tish said, lifting her arm up to remove the foam pads.

  “Were you frightened during your NDE?”

  Leading, she thought irrelevantly. I asked him to come and get me again. He thinks I think it’s real, and he won’t send me under again, and he has to. I almost had it.

  “Frightened?” she said, smiling. “Why? Did I say something?”

  “Yes,” Tish volunteered. “ ‘Elevator.’ ”

  “Elevator?” Joanna said, relieved and surprised. Why had she said “elevator” when it was the rockets—?

  “You have the most boring NDEs,” Tish said, standing over her and looking at her watch as she waited out the monitoring period. “First a post office and now an elevator? Don’t you ever see anything exciting?”

  She checked Joanna’s pulse and blood pressure one last time, noting them on the chart, and then said to Richard, “Can I leave now? I need to go see somebody before Mr. Sage comes at three.”

  He nodded and, as soon as she was out of the room, asked again, “Were you afraid during your NDE?”

  “Why?” Joanna asked. “Did I sound frightened when I said ‘elevator’?”

  “No, but your scans showed an extremely high level of cortisol. What happened during your NDE?”

  “I saw Mr. Briarley again.” She told him about the trip to the mail room, the rockets, the elevator. “And when he opened the door I stepped through it before I realized it was the passage,” she said. “That’s why I was afraid I’d kicked out, because it felt the same as last time.”

  “And you didn’t feel any fear?”

  “I did when I saw the water in Scotland Road and when I saw the mail room was awash,” she said, trying to remember. She had been so intent on finding Mr. Briarley and asking him what the NDE meant, she hadn’t felt much fear, certainly not when compared to what she’d felt when she’d looked at the stain from the mailbag, when she’d looked over the side of the ship down into nothingness.

  “Was my cortisol higher than the last two times?” she asked.

  “I haven’t looked at the neurotransmitter analysis yet, but going by the scans, yes. You were more frightened those times?”

  She thought of her panicked flight down the stairs, along the deck, into the passage. “Yes.”

  “I was afraid of that,” he said and went over to the console.

  Joanna dressed quickly. “I’m going to go record my account,” she said, “I’ll be back at three,” and hurried down to her office before he could ask her anything else. She needed to think about the NDE before she lost the feeling of almost, almost knowing the answer. It was something about the rockets, and Mr. Briarley setting them off.

  She went through the scene again, trying to remember Mr. Briarley’s exact words. “Step back,” he had said, and the rocket had shot up and burst into white stars—

  She recorded the scene and then went back to the beginning and did the whole NDE, trying to hold on to the feeling. Something about the rockets, though they weren’t a discrepancy, unless the ones she’d seen were different from the ones on the Titanic.

  She called Kit and asked her what the emergency rockets had looked like. “White fireworks,” Kit said. “I remember Uncle Pat saying white was the color of the international distress signal, and there was a scene of them being fired in the movie.”

  Of course. She remembered it. The officer had leaned the cylinder against the railing. “Anything else?” Kit asked.

  “Yes. I want to know if there was something called Scotland Road on the ship. It would have been a long passage down on” —she tried to think which deck it was on—“E or F Deck. And also whether there was a library on board. It would have been on the Promenade Deck, next to a bar. And anything about what the rockets looked like and where they were kept.”

  “Scotland Road, library, rockets. Okay,” Kit said.
“Oh, and if you have a minute, I’ve got a list of Ediths who were on board. I’ve found four. I’m not sure that’s all. The crew are only listed by an initial and a last name, and some of the passengers are only down as Mrs. Somebody.”

  “How many were lost? Of the four?”

  “Only Edith Evans.”

  Joanna went back to the NDE. Not the rockets, but something in that part of the NDE. The elevator? That was definitely a discrepancy. They hadn’t had elevators in 1912, and even if they had, they wouldn’t have had one on board a ship. And she had murmured, “Elevator,” when she was coming out.

  She called Kit again. The phone was busy. She glanced at her watch. A quarter past two. Not enough time to run over there before Mr. Sage’s session. But she needed to know now, before she lost the feeling. It would have to be Maisie.

  She ran upstairs, hoping Maisie wasn’t down for tests. She was lying in bed, listlessly watching Winnie the Pooh. As soon as she saw Joanna, she pushed herself up higher against the pillows and said, “I found out about the Carpathia.”

  “Good,” Joanna said. “I need to ask you something. Did the Titanic have an elevator?”

  “Yeah,” Maisie said. “Don’t you remember, in the movie, they were running away from the bad guy and they got in the elevator and went down?”

  “I thought your mother hadn’t let you see Titanic.”

  “I didn’t. My friend that I told you about that saw it, she told me about that part,” she said, and it was a very convincing story, even though Joanna didn’t believe it for a minute.

  “Did your friend tell you what the elevator looked like?”

  “Yeah,” Maisie said. “It had one of those accordion things across it that you pull.” She demonstrated.

  The grille. So the Titanic had had an elevator, and it wasn’t a discrepancy. She could imagine what Richard would say when he found out. She’d have to hope when she did her account, there was some other discrepancy in her NDE, and she’d better go do that now, before she forgot what Mr. Briarley said. “I gotta go, kiddo,” she said, patting the covers over Maisie’s knees.