Passage

by Connie Willis

  She had wanted to send a message, but it was impossible. The dead couldn’t send messages from the Other Side, in spite of what Mr. Mandrake said, in spite of Mrs. Davenport’s psychic telegrams. It was too far. But Joanna stood up and poured the wine out onto the carpet, looking steadily at the dark, spreading stain. She folded the sheet of White Star stationery into narrow pleats and put it in the bottle, tamping the cork down and then prying it out again and putting in the note to Mr. Rogers’s sister, too.

  She climbed back up the aft staircase to the Boat Deck, holding on to the railing with her free hand because the stairs had begun to slant, and walked over to the railing and threw the bottle in, flinging it far out so it wouldn’t catch on one of the lower decks, straining to hear the splash. But none came, and though she stood on tiptoe and leaned far out over the rail, peering into the black void, she could not see the water below, or the light from the Californian, only darkness.

  “SOS,” Joanna murmured. “SOS.”

  “Oh, Christ, come quickly!”

  —LAST WORDS OF A FRANCISCAN NUN, DROWNED IN THE WRECK OF THE DEUTSCHLAND

  RICHARD CALLED UP the neurotransmitter analysis for Joanna’s first session and scanned through the list. No theta-asparcine, and there hadn’t been any in any of Mr. Sage’s NDEs either.

  He called up her second session. None there either. Theta-asparcine wasn’t an endorphin inhibitor, but it might affect the L+R or the temporal-lobe stimulation. Dr. Jamison had said she had a paper on recent theta-asparcine research findings. He wondered if she was back from her errand, whatever it was.

  He glanced at his watch. Nearly two. Unless Dr. Jamison called in the next fifteen minutes, he wouldn’t be able to meet with her until after Mrs. Troudtheim’s session, and he’d wanted to find out if there was a possibility that it was the theta-asparcine and not the dithetamine dosage that was interrupting Mrs. Troudtheim’s NDEs.

  He called up the third session and stared at the screen, frustrated. There it was, big as life, theta-asparcine, and Joanna had been in the NDE-state for—he checked the exact time—three minutes and eleven seconds.

  Which puts me right back at square one, he thought, and there was no point in going through Joanna’s other sessions. He called up her and Mrs. Troudtheim’s analyses again, looking for some other difference he might have missed, but every other neurotransmitter was present in other scans, including the cortisol.

  Could the cortisol alone be aborting the NDE-state? It was present in other sessions, but only Amelia Tanaka’s had shown similar high levels, and if Mrs. Troudtheim’s NDE-state threshold was lower, less cortisol might be needed to interfere with the endorphins. He’d ask Dr. Jamison.

  And where was she? And where was Joanna? Tish would be here any minute to set up, and he had hoped Joanna would come before Tish did, so he could ask her about her most recent account. She’d said she’d experienced a feeling that Mr. Briarley was dead, which was obviously another manifestation of the sense of significance, but there had only been midlevel temporal-lobe activation in the area of the Sylvian fissures.

  He looked at his watch again. Maybe he should call Dr. Jamison. She had said she’d page him when she got back to her office.

  He thought, You turned your pager off so Mandrake couldn’t page you, and no wonder you haven’t heard from Dr. Jamison. He pulled the pager out of his lab coat pocket and switched it on. It immediately began to beep. He went over to the phone to call the switchboard.

  “Dr. Wright!” a voice said from the door, and a young Hispanic woman in pink scrubs burst into the room. “Are you Dr. Wright?” she said, breathing hard and holding her side. There was blood on her scrubs.

  “Yes,” he said, slamming down the phone and hurrying over to her. “What is it? Are you hurt?”

  She shook her head. “I ran—” she said, panting. “I’m Nina. Nurse Howard—there’s an emergency. You’ve got to come down to the ER.”

  Vielle’s been hurt, he thought. “Did Dr. Lander send you?”

  She shook her head, still trying to catch her breath. “Dr. Lander, she-Nurse Howard sent me. You need to come right away!”

  Maisie, he thought. She’s coded again. “Is this about Maisie Nellis?”

  “No!” she said, frustrated. “It’s Dr. Lander! Nurse Howard said to tell you it’s an emergency.”

  He gripped her shoulders. “What about Dr. Lander? Is she hurt?” Nina gave a kind of whimper. “You said the ER?” Richard said and was out the door and over to the elevator, punching and repunching the “down” button.

  “This guy came into the ER,” Nina said, following him, “and he must have been on rogue because all of a sudden, he pulled a knife—”

  Richard punched the elevator button again, again. He glanced up at the floor lights above the door. It was on first. He took off running for the stairs with Nina on his heels, clutching her side. “—and I don’t know what happened then,” she said, “it was all so fast.”

  “Is Dr. Lander badly hurt?” Richard demanded, plunging down the stairs.

  “I don’t know. There was all this blood. The security guard shot the guy.”

  Down the stairs, through the walkway, across Medicine.

  “Nurse Howard said to page you, and I did, but you didn’t answer, so then she said go get you. I came as fast as I could, but I went to the wrong wing—”

  A metal ladder straddled the hallway, yellow tape barring the way in front of it.

  “We can’t go this way,” Nina said. Richard burst through the tape and ran under the ladder and down the hall, sidestepping paint buckets and trampling the plastic drops.

  “You’re not supposed to walk under a ladder,” Nina yammered right behind him. “It’s bad luck.” Into the service stairs, down to first, along the hall. And what if they’d already taken Joanna upstairs to ICU?

  He burst through the side door, into the ER. Police everywhere, and the sounds of sirens in the distance, coming closer. Two black officers by the door, another officer talking to a man in pink scrubs, two more kneeling on the floor over by the desk, next to a body.

  Not Joanna’s, Richard prayed. Not Joanna’s. She’s in one of the trauma rooms, he thought, and started across the ER. A security guard raised his gun, and a police officer stepped in front of Richard. “No one’s allowed in here.”

  “He’s Dr. Wright. Nurse Howard sent for him,” Nina said. The officer nodded and stepped back, and Nina led the way quickly across the floor and into a trauma room. She pushed open the door.

  He didn’t know what he’d expected to see. Joanna, sitting on an examining table, having her arm stitched up, turning her head to smile sheepishly at him as he came in. Or noise, activity, nurses hanging bags of blood, inserting tubes, doctors barking orders. And Vielle, stepping away from the examining table to explain Joanna’s condition, saying, “She’s going to be fine.”

  Not this. Not a dozen people in blood-spattered scrubs, blood-covered gloves, standing back from the table, stunned and silent, none of them saying anything, no sound at all except the flatline whine of the heart monitor.

  Not the resident, handing the paddles back to a nurse and shaking his head, and Vielle, clinging to Joanna’s limp white hand, saying, her voice rising sobbingly, “No, she can’t be! Hit her again!” Calm, professional Vielle sobbing, “Do something! Do something!”

  The resident pulled his mask down. “It’s no use. We couldn’t save her.”

  Couldn’t save her, Richard thought, and finally, finally looked at Joanna. She lay with her hair fanned out around her head, like Amelia Tanaka’s, but her brown hair was matted with blood, and there was blood on her mouth, on her neck, on her chest, blood everywhere. It stood out black-red against her white skin.

  An airway had been inserted in her mouth, and there was blood on that, too. Her eyes were open, staring at nothing.

  “I brought Dr. Wright,” Nina said inanely into the silence, and the resident turned to look at him, his face solemn.

 
“I am so sorry, Dr. Wright,” he said. “I’m afraid she’s gone.”

  “Gone,” Richard repeated stupidly. The resident was right. She was gone. The body lying there, with its white, white skin and its unseeing eyes, was empty, abandoned. Joanna had gone.

  Gone. Through a tunnel and into the passage, where a golden light shone from under a door. And passengers milled around out on deck in their nightclothes, wondering what had happened. And the mail room was already inches deep in water, the boiler rooms already full, and water was coming in on D Deck, the decks beginning to list, beginning to slant. “If the boat sinks,” Joanna had said, unseeing behind her sleep mask, reaching blindly for his hand, “promise you’ll come and get me.”

  “It’s real,” she’d said. “You don’t understand. It’s a real place.” A real place, with staircases and writing rooms and gymnasiums. And terror. And a way back, if it wasn’t blocked, if he could get to her in time.

  “Start CPR,” Richard said, and Vielle let go of Joanna’s hand and moved forward as if to comfort him. “Vielle, don’t let them unhook anything!” he said, and, to the others, “Start CPR. Keep shocking her,” and took off running.

  “Richard!” Vielle called after him, but he was already through the door, down the hall, up the stairs. Four minutes. He had four minutes, six at the outside, and why the hell couldn’t Mercy General have stairways that went more than two flights, why the hell didn’t it have walkways at every floor?

  He sprinted across the third-floor walkway, thinking, What’s the fastest way up to the lab? Joanna would know. Joanna! He shoved open the doors like a runner breasting a tape and raced through Medicine. Not the elevator. There’s no time to wait for an elevator. I have four minutes. Four minutes.

  He clattered up the service stairs, rounding the landing. Fourth. It would take at least two minutes for the dithetamine to take effect, even using an IV push. There isn’t time, he thought. But once he was under, time wasn’t a factor. Joanna had explored the entire ship in eight seconds. Joanna-Fifth. Thirty seconds for Tish to find a vein, another thirty for her to start the IV and inject the dithetamine. What if Tish wasn’t there? There was no time to find her, no time to—

  He burst through the door to sixth, raced down the hall. Tish had to be there. Mrs. Troudtheim’s session was scheduled for two. She had to be there. “Tish!” he shouted and flung open the door to the lab. “Tish!”

  Tish looked up from where she was hanging the bag of saline. “You need to call the ER. They’ve been calling every two minutes,” she said. “And there’s a message for you from Dr. Lander. You turned your pager off again, didn’t—” She stopped when she saw his face. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  “Start an IV,” he said, striding over to the medicine cupboard. “Saline and dithetamine.”

  “But Joanna isn’t here,” Tish said. “I checked her office, and she’s not there.”

  “She coded,” he said, grabbing a vial of dithetamine and a syringe.

  “Joanna coded?” Tish said blankly, coming over to the cupboard. “What do you mean? Was she in a car accident?”

  “She was stabbed,” he said, filling the syringe.

  “Stabbed? Is she okay?”

  “I told you, she coded,” he said. He walked rapidly back to the examining table. “We’re going to have to use an IV push!”

  Tish looked at him blankly. “An IV push? But—how can she go under if she—” she stopped, horrified. “She didn’t die, did she, and you’re going to record her NDE?”

  “She didn’t die, and she’s not going to,” he said. He wrenched off his lab coat and flung it over a chair. “Because I’m going after her.”

  “I don’t understand,” Tish said bewilderedly. “What do you mean, you’re going after her?”

  “I mean, I’m going to go get her. I’m going to bring her back.” He rolled up his sleeve.

  “But you said the NDEs weren’t real,” she said, looking frightened. “You said they were hallucinations. You said they were caused by the temporal lobe.”

  “I said a lot of things,” he said, laying his arm flat on the examining table with the hand palm-up. “Start an IV.”

  “But—”

  “Start the IV,” he said fiercely, and Tish picked up the length of tubing and wrapped it around his upper arm. He made a fist, and she began probing for a vein.

  “Hurry!” he said. “We’ve only got four minutes.” Tish pushed the needle in, clipped it to the IV line, adjusted the feed. She began taping down the needle. “You can do that later,” he snapped. “Start the dithetamine. IV push.”

  “Dr. Wright, I don’t think it’s a good idea to do this while you’re so upset,” Tish said. “Why don’t I call Dr. Everett or somebody, and—”

  “Because there’s no time,” Richard said. “Never mind. I’ll do it myself.” He grabbed the syringe with his free hand and injected it into the line. “Start the white noise,” he said and reached for the headphones.

  “Dr. Wright—” Tish said uncertainly and then went over to the amplifier.

  Richard picked up the headphones and looked around for the sleep mask. He couldn’t see it anywhere, and there was no time to look for it. He put on the headphones and lay down. “Put the cushions under my arms and legs,” he said, unable to tell if Tish could hear him. He couldn’t hear anything through the headphones. “Put the—” he began, but she must have heard him. She was lifting his left arm and sliding the cushion under it and then under the other.

  She placed the cushions under his legs and then wrapped a blood pressure cuff around his arm. “Don’t bother with that,” Richard said, but Tish wasn’t listening to him. She was putting electrodes to his scalp.

  “I don’t need an EEG,” he said, but she didn’t look up, he was trying to talk to the top of her head. “Tish!” he shouted, and realized he was too far away for her to hear him. He was above her, above the examining table on which he lay, his arm hooked to an IV. He was drifting slowly up to the ceiling. He looked across to the top of the medicine cupboard. It was polished and bare, except for a glint of silver at the very back. He drifted closer, trying to see.

  The silver object was tucked all the way back in the corner, where Joanna had put it, behind the raised edge of the cupboard. Out of sight except for someone having an out-of-body experience. He drifted still closer. It was a toy tin zeppelin.

  Of course, he thought. The Hindenburg. I’ll have to tell Joanna I saw it. But she wouldn’t believe him. She would think he had climbed up on a chair to see what it was. Joanna would—

  “Joanna!” he said, abruptly remembering. This was an out-of-body experience. But there wasn’t any time for it. “Send me through!” he shouted down to Tish. “Send me into the tunnel!”

  He continued to float slowly upward, wafting slowly back and forth, like the Hindenburg drifting in its moorings. “Hurry!” he shouted, and looked down at Tish. She had found the sleep mask and was placing it over his eyes. He lay stiffly under the RIPT scan, his hands clenched tightly at his sides.

  “Let go!” he shouted. The noise echoed loudly, reverberating as if he were in an enclosed space, and then stopped, and everything went dark.

  I’m in the passage, he thought. He put out his hand in the pitch blackness and felt hardness, paint. The wall of the passage. There should be a light at the end of it, he thought, straining to see. Nothing. No light at all. It must be very late, after the lights had gone out. When had they gone out? Only a few minutes before the end.

  It’s because she’s going down, he thought. Because there are only four minutes left. “Joanna!” he called. “Where are you?”

  There was no answer. He fumbled for a book of matches in his lab coat pockets, but they were empty. He reached in his pants pocket. The pager. He drew it out. It was turned off. He fumbled for the switch in the darkness and turned it on. The face lit up—Joanna’s number—but the LED numbers gave no light.

  He began to grope his way along the corridor, feel
ing his way with a hand on each wall, trying to hurry. Because there’s no time. But if it were that late, then the ship should be at a sharp angle, so tilted that he’d be having trouble standing, and he wasn’t. The floor felt perfectly level.

  “Joanna!” he called again, and saw a light ahead of him. It was a thin line of white, from under a door, and that must be what he had heard—the sound of the door slamming shut. He groped his way toward the door and felt for the doorknob, thinking, Don’t let it be locked, don’t let it be locked. He found the rectangular metal plate, found the knob, turned it. And opened the door onto another corridor. A brightly lit corridor, so bright it was almost blinding, and he shielded his eyes and stood there, blinking.

  This wasn’t the passage Joanna had come through. Hers had opened onto the outside, onto a window-lined deck. This was an inside passage, with a series of shut doors and light sconces on the walls between them. The lights had not gone out. They shone strongly all along the corridor, and the wooden floor was dry and perfectly level. It must be much earlier, before anyone realized it was sinking, and maybe the sound he’d heard was the same one Joanna had heard—the iceberg scraping along the side—and it had sounded different because he was in a different part of the ship.

  Which part? Second class? The brass light sconces were elaborate enough for it to be first class, but the walls were unadorned, and there were no windows, no portholes. It must be an interior corridor, or belowdecks. Steerage?

  Where was it? On C Deck, she had said. But where was C Deck? Above this? Below it? Did they count the decks down from the top or up from the bottom?

  He remembered Joanna talking about climbing up to the Boat Deck. How many decks had she said she’d climbed? He couldn’t remember. I should have paid more attention, he thought, starting down the passage at a run. I should have listened to her when she said it was real.

  Because it was real. She had tried to tell him. She had said she saw colors, heard sounds, felt staircase railings under her hand, had tried to describe the reality of the ship, but he had been convinced it was a hallucination, that it was something happening in long-term memory and the temporal lobe, even when she’d tried to tell him, even when she’d said, “It’s a real place.”