Passage

by Connie Willis

  “Ninety over sixty,” someone said, she couldn’t see who. There were all kinds of people around her, hooking things up and drawing blood. How funny, Joanna thought. Why do they need more blood? There’s already more than enough.

  “Get a cardiac surgeon down here,” the resident snapped, “and get me two more units of blood. Vielle, go get some direct pressure on that hand of yours,” and Joanna was afraid Vielle would leave and let go of her hand, but she continued to kneel next to Joanna.

  “Don’t try to move, honey,” she said, looking worried. “Just lie still.” Joanna had always wondered whether Vielle’s worried expression frightened her patients, but it didn’t. It was comforting.

  I wonder why, she thought, and tried to see what it was in her face that was reassuring, but she couldn’t see it. She could only see the top of Vielle’s head and the resident’s, both in their green scrub caps, and the top of the security guard’s head, standing over the boy in the Avalanche jacket. The boy lay sprawled on his face on the tile floor, and she could see the blue-and-white logo on the back of the maroon jacket, and maroon under the boy’s face, too, where the guard had shot him.

  The top of the guard’s head was bald and shiny, reflecting the overhead fluorescent light as Joanna looked down on it. “Just hang on, Joanna!” Vielle said, holding her hand, which was funny, because Joanna was up here, and Vielle was down there.

  But she was down there, too. They all were, the intern and the resident and she couldn’t tell who else because all she could see was the tops of their heads, as they worked over her, taking her blood pressure and hooking up IVs. “Seventy-five over fifty,” one of them said.

  “She’s bleeding out. It must have hit the aorta,” someone else said, she couldn’t see who, he was too far below her.

  I’m up near the ceiling, Joanna thought. She would be able to look down and see the ledge outside. She wondered if there was a red tennis shoe on it, and then thought, I’m having an out-of-body experience. Finally. I have to tell Richard.

  Richard, she thought with a kind of panic. I have to tell Richard the NDE’s an SOS.

  “Clear,” the resident said, and then, “Where the hell is that surgeon? Did you page him?”

  Not Carson, Richard, Joanna thought, looking at the resident, and now she could see his face, not at all worried, calm and impassive, and that was comforting, too.

  “Page Richard. It’s important,” she said, but nothing came out, her lips had not moved, and a nurse was trying to put something in her mouth, trying to force it down her throat.

  “No,” she said, twisting her head to get away from her, looking for Vielle.

  “I’m right here, honey,” Vielle said, holding Joanna’s hand, and somebody must have bandaged her hand, it was white, and so bright she could hardly look at it.

  “Page Richard,” Joanna said, but she couldn’t tell if Vielle had heard her. There was a funny beeping sound. One of the nurses must have hit the code alarm. “Page Richard and tell him I found out what the NDE is. It’s an SOS,” she said, louder, but the beeping was drowning out her voice.

  “What the hell is that?” the resident said, doing something to her chest.

  “Her pager,” Vielle said.

  “Well, shut the damn thing off.”

  It’s Richard, Joanna thought. I told him to page me. Tell him the NDE’s a distress signal. Tell him he has to figure out the code. For Maisie, she tried to say, but now there was another sound drowning her out. A ringing. A buzzing. “He’s in the lab.”

  “Sixty over forty,” the nurse said.

  “She’s bleeding out,” the resident said.

  “Hang on, Joanna,” Vielle said, holding tight to her hand. “Stay with me,” but she wasn’t there. She was on the Titanic.

  But not in the passageway. On the Grand Staircase. And a crush of passengers was all around her, jammed onto the stairs, dressed in dinner jackets and dressing gowns and lifejackets. They were pushing up the marble stairs, carrying her along with them. To the Boat Deck, Joanna thought. They’re all trying to get up to the Boat Deck.

  “I have to get back down to C Deck,” Joanna said, trying to turn around, but people were jammed next to her, around her, behind her, wedging her so she couldn’t move. “I have to tell Richard I found out the secret,” she said to them. “I have to get back to the passage.”

  No one heard her, they continued to push her up the white marble stairs. She looked over at the gilt-and-wrought-iron banisters, thinking, If I could reach the railing and hold on to it, I could work my way back down, against the crowd.

  With a great effort, she turned sideways, struggling to move her arm, her torso, and set out across the flow of passengers toward the railing like someone wading through deep water. She reached it, grabbing for it as if it were a life preserver. But this was worse. People were using the railing to push themselves along as they climbed, they refused to let go to let Joanna pass. They shoved upward as if she weren’t even there, carrying suitcases and steamer rugs, pushing Joanna back against the step she was on, nearly knocking her down.

  “Just let me—” she said to a woman carrying a Pekingese and a furled umbrella, and stepped toward the middle of the step, trying to get out of the woman’s way. She raised her arm, trying to reach around—

  The umbrella caught her sharply in the ribs, and she gasped and grabbed for her side. She let go of the railing, and the crowd swept her up past the cherub, past the angels of Honour and Glory Crowning Time, through the etched-glass doors, and out onto the Boat Deck.

  Joanna stood there a moment, holding her side, as they poured past her, and then started back through the crowd to the doors. “Excuse me,” she said, squeezing past the uniformed man in the door, and saw it was the clerk from the mail room. He had a canvas mail sack over his shoulder, and it was dripping on the flowered carpet of the foyer. She stepped back, looking down at the carpet, at the dark drops.

  “You’d better get into a boat, miss,” the clerk said kindly.

  “I can’t. I have to go back the way I came,” she said, trying to get past him without stepping in the damp spot, without touching the dripping sack. “I have to tell Richard what I found out.”

  He nodded solemnly. “The mail must go through. But you can’t go down that way. It’s blocked.”

  “Blocked?”

  “Yes, miss. There are people coming up. You’ll need to take the aft staircase, miss.” He pointed up the Boat Deck. “Do you know where it is?”

  “Yes,” Joanna said, and ran toward the stern, past the band getting out its instruments, setting up its music stands. The violinist set his black case on top of the upright piano and snapped the latches open.

  “ ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band,’ ” the conductor said, and the bass viol player sorted through a sheaf of sheet music, looking for it.

  Past Lifeboat Number 9, where a young man was saying good-bye to a young woman in a white dress and a veil. “It’s all right, little girl,” he said. “You go, and I’ll stay awhile.” Past Number 11, where the mustached man she had seen in the writing room and in the lounge, dealing out hand after hand of cards, was lifting two children into the boat. Past Number 13, where an officer was calling, “Anyone else to go in this boat? Any more women and children?”

  Joanna shook her head and hurried past. And into a man in a denim shirt and suspenders. “No need to panic, folks,” he said, herding people toward the bow. “Just walk slowly. Don’t run. Plenty of time.”

  Joanna backed away from him. And into the officer. He took her arm. “You need to get into a boat, miss,” he said, leading her back toward Number 13. “There isn’t much time.”

  “No,” she said, but he was gripping her arm tightly, he was propelling her over to the davits.

  “Wait for this young lady,” he called to the crewman in the boat.

  “No,” Joanna said, “you don’t understand. I have to—”

  “There’s nothing to be afraid of,” he said, and his grip
on her arm was like iron, it was cutting off her circulation. “It’s perfectly safe.”

  “No!” She wrenched free of him and ran down the deck, past the officer, as if he were still chasing her, past the band and into the foyer of the Grand Staircase, thinking, The elevator. The elevator will be faster.

  She pushed the gold-and-ivory button. “Come on, come on,” she said, and pushed it again, but the arrow above the door didn’t move. She abandoned it and ran over to the head of the staircase, down the stairs to B Deck, C Deck, thinking, What if it’s blocked like he said?

  It wasn’t. It was clear. “Again. Clear,” the resident said, and Joanna was in the emergency room and Vielle was holding her hand.

  “I’ve got a pulse.”

  “Vielle,” Joanna said, but Vielle wasn’t looking at her, she was looking at the aide who had come out in the hall that day they had the fight, she was telling her, “If he doesn’t answer his page, go get him. He’s in 602.”

  “Vielle, tell Richard the NDE’s a distress call the dying brain sends out,” Joanna tried to say, but there was something in her mouth, choking her.

  “He’s coming, Joanna,” Vielle said, holding tight to her hand. “Just hang on.”

  “If Richard doesn’t get here in time, tell him the NDE’s a distress signal. It’s important,” Joanna tried to say around the choking thing in her throat. They’ve intubated me, she thought, panicked, and tried to pull it out, but it wasn’t an airway, it was blood. She was coughing it up and out of her, gallons and gallons of blood. “Who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?” It was pouring out of her, and all over Vielle and the resident and the nurse, choking her, drowning her.

  “Help,” she cried, “I have to tell Richard. It’s an SOS,” but it wasn’t Vielle, it was the man with the mustache and she was back on the Boat Deck. The band was playing “Goodnight, Irene,” and the officer was loading Number 4.

  “I want you to do something for me when you reach New York,” the mustached man was saying to Joanna, putting something in her hand.

  She looked down at it. It was a note, written in a childish round cursive. “If saved,” it read, “please inform my sister Mrs. F. J. Adams of Findlay, Ohio. Lost. J. H. Rogers.”

  “Please see that my sister gets this,” he said, closing her fingers over the note. “Tell her it’s from me.”

  “But I’m not going to—” Joanna said, but he had already melted into the crowd, and the officer was headed toward her, calling, “Miss! Miss!” She jammed the note into her pocket and ran down the deck toward the aft staircase, darting between couples, past a pair of cheerleaders in purple-and-gold pleated skirts, between families saying good-bye.

  “But he’s going to be all right, isn’t he?” a woman in a white coat and white knitted cap said to an officer.

  The officer looked pityingly at her. “We’re doing everything we can.”

  Joanna pushed past the woman, but the way to the aft staircase was mobbed with people in kerchiefs and cloth caps, fighting to get into the boats, and sailors trying to free the boats, trying to lower them. “You can’t get through this way!” the sailor who had worked the Morse lamp called to her. He jerked his thumb back toward the stern. “Try the second-class stairway,” and she turned and ran past the empty davits of the boats that had already been lowered, to the second-class stairway.

  The door to the second-class stairway was standing open, her red tennis shoe lying on its side on the threshold. Joanna leaped over it and pelted down the stairs, past the A La Carte Restaurant, down the next flight, around the landing. And stopped.

  Two steps below the landing, tied to the railings on either side, stretched a strip of yellow tape. “Crime Scene,” it said. “Do Not Cross.” And below it, submerging the stairs, pale blue, shiny as paint, the water.

  “It’s underwater,” Joanna said, and sat down, holding on to the railing for support. “The passage is underwater.”

  Maybe it’s just the stairway, she thought, maybe it hasn’t reached the passage, but of course it had. The second-class stairway was all the way in the stern, and the ship was going down by the head. And below the tape water was pouring in everywhere, drowning the mail room and Scotland Road and the swimming pool, the squash court and the staterooms and the glass-enclosed deck. And the way out, the way back.

  There has to be another way out, Joanna thought, staring blindly at the pale blue water. The Apaches cut the wires, but Carl was still able to get the mail through. There has to be another way out. The lifeboats! she thought, and scrambled to her feet, tore up the stairs and back along the Boat Deck.

  The boats were gone, the deck deserted except for the band, which had finished “Goodnight, Irene.” They were searching through their music for the next piece, arranging the sheet music on their stands.

  Joanna ran to the railing and leaned far over it, trying to see the lifeboat the sailor had been loading. It was miles below her, almost to the water. She couldn’t make out anything in the darkness but the pale gleam of the sailor’s white uniform. It was too far for her to jump, but maybe not too far for them to hear her. “Hello!” she called down, cupping her hand around her mouth. “Ahoy! Can you hear me?”

  There was no movement of the white uniform, no sound. “I need you to deliver a message for me,” she shouted, but the band had struck up a waltz, and her voice was lost in the sound of the violin, of the piano.

  They can’t hear me, she thought. She needed to drop a message down to them. She fumbled in her pockets for a pen and paper. She came up with the mustached man’s note, but no pen, not even a stub of pencil. “Just a minute!” she called down to the boat. “Hang on!” and ran down the deck to the aft staircase and down to the writing room on the Promenade Deck, praying, “Don’t let it be flooded, don’t let it be flooded.”

  It wasn’t. The Reading and Writing Room sat empty, the yellow-shaded lamps still burning on the writing desks. Joanna grabbed a sheet of stationery out of the rack, dipped a pen in the inkwell, and scribbled, “Richard, the NDE is a distress signal the brain sends as it’s dying—”

  “What’s going on?” a voice said. Joanna looked up. It was Greg Menotti. He was wearing jogging shorts and a Nike T-shirt. “Somebody told me the ship’s sinking,” he said, laughing.

  “It is,” Joanna said, writing, “—and you have to find out what neurotransmitter it’s trying to activate.” She scrawled her name at the bottom, snatched up the sheet of paper, and ran out onto the deck.

  “What do you mean?” Greg said, jogging up beside her. “It’s unsinkable.”

  She leaned over the railing into the darkness. “Ahoy!” she called, waving the sheet of paper. “Lifeboat!”

  No answer. No gleam of white. Only the fathomless blackness.

  She flung herself away from the railing and along the deck to the first-class lounge.

  “But it can’t be sinking,” Greg said, sprinting after her.

  She yanked open the stained-glass door of the lounge. “If it’s sinking,” Greg said, “we’d better get in one of the boats.”

  She ran over to the mirrored mahogany bar. “The boats are all gone.”

  “They can’t all be gone,” he said, panting, holding his arm. “There has to be a way off this ship.”

  “There isn’t,” she said, grabbing a bottle of wine off the bar.

  He snatched at the wrist of her hand holding the bottle. “I work out at the health club three times a week!”

  “It doesn’t matter. The Titanic had sixteen watertight compartments, she had the latest safety features, and it didn’t matter. An iceberg gashed her side and—” she said, and remembered her blouse and the little ooze of blood.

  “It doesn’t look like a very bad cut,” Maisie had said, scrutinizing the diagram of the Titanic. And it wasn’t, but below-decks, inside, water was pouring into the watertight compartments, spilling over into the engine room and the chest cavity and the lungs. “How bad is it?” Captain Smith asked,
and the architect shook his head. “It’s nicked the aorta.”

  “What is it?” Greg asked, letting go of her wrist. “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing,” she said, thinking, You have to get the message to Richard. “I need something to open the wine bottle with.”

  “There isn’t time. We have to get up to the Boat Deck,” he said, and his face was furious, frantic, like the face of the boy in the Avalanche jacket, whirling toward her . . .

  “I have to do this first,” Joanna said, and began opening drawers, digging through silverware.

  “I found this,” Greg said, and held out a knife to her. A knife. He had had a knife. But when she looked down, she hadn’t been able to see it. Because it had already gone in. “We’ve got a stab wound here,” the resident had said. “Get a cross match.” But it was too late. Belowdecks it was roaring out, into the staterooms and staircases, putting out the boiler fires, flooding the passages. Flooding everything.

  “Give it to me,” Greg said and wrenched the wine bottle out of her hand. He pried the cork out with the point of the knife, clumsily. The wine spilled on the flowered carpet, dark red, soaking into the carpet and her cardigan and Vielle’s scrubs.

  “We’ve got a stab wound here,” the resident had said to Vielle, but it wasn’t Vielle’s blood, it was hers. She sank against the bar, holding her side.

  Greg was bending over her, holding the open bottle out. “Now can we go up to the Boat Deck?” he said.

  The boats are all gone, she thought, staring dully at the bottle. There’s no way off the ship. “I’m going,” Greg said, and put the bottle in her helpless hand. “There have to be boats on the other side. They can’t all be gone.”

  But they are, Joanna thought, watching him run out. Because I’m the ship that’s going down. I’m dying, she thought wonderingly, he killed me before I could tell Richard, and remembered why she had wanted the bottle.