Passage

by Connie Willis

  “I’ve got a pulse,” one of the nurses said, and another one asked, “Can you hear me, honey?”

  “I had a near-death experience,” Maisie said, trying to sit up. “I was in a tunnel, and—”

  “There, there, lie down,” the nurse said, just like Auntie Em in The Wizard of Oz. “Don’t try to move. We’re going to take care of you.”

  Maisie nodded. They put her on a gurney and put a blanket over her, and when they did, she saw she wasn’t wearing her turtleneck anymore, and she reached for her dog tags, afraid they’d taken those off of her, too. That was the one bad thing about dog tags, people could take them off of you.

  “Just lie still,” the nurse said, holding her arm, and Maisie saw they were starting an IV and hanging a bag of saline on a hook above her. Her other arm was under the blanket. She reached up real slowly across her chest till she could feel the chain. Good, she still had them on.

  “What’s your name, honey?” the nurse starting the IV said.

  “Maisie Nellis,” she said, even though it was right there on her hospital bracelet and her dog tags. What good was having I.D. stuff if people didn’t read them? “You need to tell Dr. Wright to call Dr. Lander,” she said. “You need to tell him—”

  “Don’t try to talk, Maisie,” the nurse said. “Is Dr. Lander your doctor?”

  “No,” Maisie said. “She—”

  “Is Dr. Wright your doctor?”

  “No,” Maisie said. “He knows Dr. Lander. They’re working on a project together.”

  Another nurse came up. “She’s from Peds. Viral endocarditis. Dr. Murrow’s on his way up.”

  “Jesus,” the man who had shouted, “Awwll riight!” said, and somebody else she couldn’t see, “There’ll be hell to pay for somebody for this.”

  At the same time, the nurse who’d started her IV said, “Ready,” and they started to wheel her really fast back down the hall the way she’d come.

  “No, wait!” Maisie said. “You need to tell Dr. Wright to call Dr. Lander first. He’s in the other wing. Tell him to tell her I didn’t just see fog this time, I saw all kinds of stuff. A light and people and a lady in a white dress—”

  The nurses looked at each other above her head. “Just lie still,” the nurse who’d done her IV said. “You’re going to be fine.”

  “You just had a bad dream,” the other one said.

  “It wasn’t a dream,” Maisie said. “It was an NDE. You have to tell Dr. Wright to call her.”

  The first nurse patted her hand. “I’ll tell her.”

  “No,” Maisie said. “She moved away to New Jersey. You have to tell Dr. Wright to tell her.”

  “I’ll tell him,” the nurse said. “Now just lie still and rest. We’re going to take care of you.”

  “Promise,” Maisie said.

  “I promise,” the nurse said.

  Now she’ll call for sure, Maisie thought happily. She’ll call as soon as she hears I had a near-death experience.

  But she didn’t.

  “It is another thing to die than people have imagined.”

  —LAST WORDS OF ST. BONIFACE, AS BOILING LEAD WAS POURED INTO HIS MOUTH

  JOANNA STOOD at the railing a long time, looking out at the darkness, and then went over to the deck chairs and sat down.

  She clasped her hands around her knees and looked down the Boat Deck. It was deserted, the deck lamps making pools of yellow light, illuminating the empty lifeboat davits, the deck chairs lined up against the wall of the wheelhouse and the gymnasium. There was no sign of the officers who had been loading the boats, or of J. H. Rogers, or the band. Or of Greg Menotti.

  Well, of course not. “ ‘All alone, so Heav’n has will’d, we die,’ ” Mr. Briarley had said, reading aloud from Mazes and Mirrors, and Mrs. Woollam had said, “Death is something each one of us must go through by ourselves.”

  “ ‘Alone, alone, all all alone, alone on the wide wide sea,’ ” Joanna said, and her voice sounded weak and self-pitying in the silence. Don’t be such a baby, she told herself. You were the one who said you wanted to find out about death. Well, now you’re going to. Firsthand. “To die will be an awfully big adventure,” she said firmly, but her voice still sounded shaky and uncertain.

  It was very quiet on the deck, and somehow peaceful. “Like waiting, and not waiting,” Mr. Wojakowski had said, talking about the days before World War II. Knowing it was coming, waiting for it to start.

  She wondered if there was something she was supposed to do. Benjamin Guggenheim and his valet had gone below and changed into formal evening dress, but the staterooms were already underwater. And you can’t do anything, she thought. You’re dead. You’ll never do anything again. You’re not even here. You’re in the ER, on the examining table where you died, with a sheet over your face, and you’re not capable of doing anything at all.

  “Except thinking,” she said out loud to the silent Boat Deck, “except knowing what’s happening to you,” and she remembered Lavoisier, who had still been conscious after he had been beheaded, who had blinked his eyes twelve times, knowing, knowing, she thought, horror rising in her throat, that he was dead.

  But only for a few seconds, she thought, and wondered how long twelve blinks took. “Bud Roop went down, bam! just like that,” Mr. Wojakowski had said. “He never even knew what hit him. Died instantly.” Only it wasn’t instant. Brain death took four to six minutes, and Richard believed there was no correlation between time in the NDE and actual time. That time she had explored the entire ship, she had only been under for a few seconds. “I could be here for hours,” she said, her voice rising.

  But you’ve already been here a long time, she told herself. You went down to the writing room and the First-Class Dining Saloon. You’ve already been here a long time, and the brain cells are dying, the synapses being shut down one by one. Soon there won’t be enough of them to sustain the central unifying image, and it will start to break down. And in four to six minutes, all the cells will be dead, and you won’t be capable of memory, or thought, or fear, and there won’t be anything. Nothing. Not even silence or darkness, or the awareness of them. Nothing.

  “Nothing,” she said, her hands gripping the hard wooden arms of the deck chair. You won’t know it’s nothing, she told herself. There’s nothing to be afraid of. You’ll be unconscious, oblivious, asleep.

  “ ‘To sleep, perchance to dream,’ ” Joanna murmured, but there was no possibility of dreaming. There were no synapses to dream with, no acetylcholine, no serotonin. Nothing. “You won’t exist,” she told herself. “You won’t be there.”

  Not there. Not anywhere. And no wonder people loved Mr. Mandrake’s book—it wasn’t the relatives and the Angels of Light they loved—it was the reassurance that they still existed, that there was something, anything, after death. Even hell, or the Titanic, was better than nothing.

  But the Titanic’s sinking, she thought, and the panic rose like vomit in her throat. Her heart began to pound. I’m afraid, she thought, and that proves the NDE isn’t an endorphin cushion. She looked at her palm, clammy and damp, and pressed it to her chest. Her heart was beating fast, her breathing shallow—all the symptoms of fear. She pressed two fingers to her wrist and took her pulse. Ninety-five. She reached in her pocket for a pen and paper to note it down so she could tell Richard.

  So she could tell Richard. “You still don’t believe it,” she thought, and put her hand to her side. “You still can’t accept that you’re dead.”

  “It’s impossible for the human mind to comprehend its own death,” she had blithely told Richard, and imagined that that would be a comfort, a protection against the horrible knowledge of destruction. But it wasn’t. It was a taunt and a tease, beckoning tantalizingly just out of reach, like the light of the Californian, promising rescue even after the boats were all gone and the lights were going out.

  “Hope springs eternal” isn’t a saying of Pollyanna’s, it’s a threat, Joanna thought, and wondered, horrified, if Lavo
isier had been signaling for help, dot dot dot, dash dash dash, dot dot dot. He had blinked twelve times. SOS. SOS.

  Hope isn’t a protection, it’s a punishment, Joanna thought. And this is hell. But it couldn’t be, because the sign above the gate to hell read, “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.” But that was an order, not a statement, and maybe that was the true torture of hell, not fire and brimstone, and damnation was continuing to hope even as the stern began to rise out of the water, as the flames, or the lava, or the train overtook you, that there was still a way out, that you might somehow be saved at the last minute. Just like in the movies.

  And it was sometimes true, she thought, you were sometimes able to summon the cavalry. “That’s what I was trying to tell Richard,” she said, and remembered trying to move her lips as Vielle’s worried face leaned over her, trying to hear, her hand holding tight to hers.

  I didn’t say good-bye to Vielle, Joanna thought. She’ll think it was her fault. “It was my fault, Vielle,” she said as if Vielle could hear her. “I didn’t stay alert to my surroundings. I was too busy working Cape Race. I didn’t even see it coming.”

  “I didn’t say good-bye to anyone,” she said, and stood up hastily as though there were still time to do it. Kit. She’d left Kit without a word. Kit, whose fiancé and uncle had already left her. “I didn’t even say good-bye to Richard,” she said. Or Maisie.

  Maisie. She had promised Maisie she would come see her. She’ll be waiting, Joanna thought, the dread filling her chest, and Barbara will come in and tell her that I died. She had taken a step forward on the deck as if to stop Barbara, but she could not stop anyone from doing anything, and she had been wrong about the punishment of the dead-it was not hope or oblivion, but remembering broken promises and neglected good-byes and not being able to rectify them. “Oh, Maisie,” Joanna said, and sat back down on the edge of the deck chair. She put her head in her hands.

  “Are you supposed to be out here, Ms. Lander?” a stern voice said. “Where is your hall pass?”

  She looked up. Mr. Briarley was standing over her in his gray tweed vest. “Mr. Briarley . . . what?” she choked out. “Why are you here? Did you die, too?”

  “Did I die?” He pondered the question. “Is this multiple choice? ‘Neither fish nor fowl, neither out nor in.’ ” He smiled at her and then said seriously, “What are you doing out here alone?”

  “I was trying to send a message,” she said, looking over at the darkness beyond the railing.

  “Did it get through?”

  No, she thought, remembering Vielle’s worried voice saying, “Shh, honey, don’t try to talk,” and her own, choking on the blood pouring out of her lungs, out of her throat, the resident’s voice cutting across them, shouting, “Clear. Again. Clear,” and behind it, above it, around it, the code alarm, drowning out everything, everything.

  No, she thought, Vielle didn’t hear me, didn’t understand, didn’t tell Richard, and the knowledge was worse than realizing she was dead, worse even than Barbara telling Maisie she’d died. Worse than anything. “No,” she said numbly. “It didn’t get through.”

  “I know,” he said, looking out past the railing, “I know. I try sometimes. But it’s too far,” and put his hand on her shoulder. She laid her own hand over his, and they stayed like that for a minute, and then Mr. Briarley pulled his hand free and gave hers a brisk pat. “It’s freezing out here.” He pulled her to standing. “Come along,” he said, and started off down the deck.

  “Where are we going?” Joanna said, trying to catch up to him.

  “The First-Class Smoking Room,” he called over his shoulder. “It’s rather smoky, I’m afraid, as its name would indicate, but it’s farther astern, and secondhand smoke is something we no longer have to worry about.”

  Joanna caught up with him. “Why are we going there?”

  “That’s one of the blessings of death, not having to be afraid of dying,” he went on as if he hadn’t heard her. “Having died by one means, you have eliminated all the others. As Carlyle wrote—” He glanced sternly at Joanna. “You do remember Thomas Carlyle? British author of—? He will be on the final.”

  “The French Revolution,” Joanna said, thinking of Lavoisier beheaded, blinking.

  “Very good,” Mr. Briarley said, slackening his pace momentarily. “He also wrote, ‘The crash of the whole solar and stellar systems could only kill you once.’ ”

  He walked rapidly along the deck, as he had before on Scotland Road, so that Joanna nearly had to run to keep up with him. It was hard work. Joanna couldn’t see that the deck was slanting, but it must be. It felt oddly uncertain, and Joanna stubbed her toe against the wooden boards several times.

  “I was always afraid of dying in a plane crash,” Mr. Briarley said. “And of being beheaded, I suppose because of its connection to English literature. Sydney Carton and Raleigh and Sir Thomas More. More told the executioner, ‘I’ll see to my going up, and you shall see to my coming down.’ Witty to the last.”

  He shook his head. “I also feared dying of a heart attack, though in retrospect I see that any of the three would have been a blessing. All of them quick, nearly painless, and the mind functioning fully to the very end.” He opened the door to the Grand Staircase. The band was at the head of the stairs, playing a Gilbert and Sullivan song. “You no longer need fear volcanoes or zeppelin crashes or torpedoes. Or drowning,” he said and started down the curving steps.

  It can’t be the end yet, Joanna thought, stopping to look at the band. They aren’t playing “Nearer, My God, to Thee.” Or “Autumn,” she thought, and then, wonderingly, Now I’ll find out which one they played.

  “Come along,” Mr. Briarley said from below. “They’re waiting.”

  She started down the steps. “Who is?”

  Mr. Briarley was standing in a shadow just above the first landing, and below him the steps curved down into darkness. And water. “Who’s waiting for me?” she said, coming down cautiously.

  “There are all sorts of death you no longer have to fear,” Mr. Briarley said. “Drug overdoses. Gunshot wounds—”

  Gunshot wounds. The teenager with the knife, lying dead on the emergency room floor. Dead. Joanna stopped, holding on to the railing. “Is everyone here?” she asked breathlessly. “Everyone who’s died? On the ship?”

  “Everyone?” Mr. Briarley said. “The Titanic was a great disaster, but she carried only two thousand souls. That’s only a fraction of those who die every day,” he said and continued down the steps.

  “That isn’t what I meant,” she said, and thought, I meant, is he here, somewhere belowdecks, waiting? “I meant, are the people who died when I did here?” she said aloud. “In Mercy General?”

  Mr. Briarley stopped just above the landing and looked up at her. “We’re only going as far down as the Promenade Deck,” he said and pointed at the wide door leading out.

  Joanna clutched the railing. “Were you telling the truth when you said we can’t die more than once?”

  He nodded. “ ‘After the first death, there is no other.’ ” He went down the last two steps and across to the door. “Dylan Thomas. ‘A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child—’ ” he said and, still talking, went out the door.

  “What do you mean, the death of a child?” Joanna said. She let go of the railing and ran down the stairs after him. “What do you mean, by fire?”

  Mr. Briarley was already walking rapidly along the Promenade Deck. “The line ‘there is no other’ has a double meaning. It alludes to the event of another’s death awakening us to our own mortality, and to the Resurrection, but it can also be taken literally. There is no other. Having had our first death, we cannot be killed by lightning or by heart disease—”

  “Is Maisie here?” Joanna said.

  “By tuberculosis or kidney failure, by Ebola fever or ventricular fibrillation.”

  “Did Maisie die?” Joanna said desperately. “When Barbara told her I’d been killed? Did she go int
o V-fib?”

  “You no longer need fear the gallows,” Mr. Briarley said. It was colder down here, even though this part of the Promenade Deck was glassed in. Joanna shivered. “Nor the guillotine.” He touched his neck gingerly. “Nor strychnine poisoning. Nor a massive stroke—” and she was in a dark hallway, groping her way toward the phone that was ringing wildly, wrestling one arm into her robe, feeling for the light switch, and for the phone, nearly knocking the receiver off, her heart jangling, knowing what she was going to hear, “It’s your father—”

  “What was that?” Joanna said. She was flattened against one of the windows, staring into her frightened reflection.

  “What was what?” Mr. Briarley said irritably from halfway down the deck.

  “Something just happened,” she said, afraid to move for fear it would happen again. “A memory or a . . . ”

  “It’s the cold,” Mr. Briarley said. “Come along, it’s warmer in the smoking room. There’s a fire.”

  “A fire?” Joanna said. Smoke and a fire. The death of a child by fire. She turned away from the windows and caught up to him. “Please tell me Maisie isn’t here.”

  “Fire’s another death you don’t have to fear,” Mr. Briarley said. “Nasty, lingering death. Joan of Arc, Archbishop Cranmer, Little Miss-Ah, here we are,” he said, and stopped in front of a dark wooden door.

  “No lying in state anywhere . . . a simple service . . . no speaking . . . the body not embalmed . . . ”

  PART OF FDR’S INSTRUCTIONS FOR HIS FUNERAL, WHICH WERE NOT FOUND UNTIL AFTERWARD AND WHICH HAD BEEN COMPLETELY DISREGARDED

  JOANNA’S FUNERAL wasn’t till Tuesday. Vielle came up to tell him. “The sister doesn’t trust any of the local ministers to conduct the service. She insists on bringing in her own hellfire-and-damnation specialist from Wisconsin.”

  “Tuesday,” Richard said. It seemed an eon away.

  “At ten.” She gave him the address of the funeral home. “I just wanted to let you know. I’ve got to get back down to the ER,” but she didn’t leave.