Passage

by Connie Willis

  Richard picked up the phone and then put it down again. It was too late to call her, but as soon as he got to the hospital the next morning, he got her on the phone and said, “When you come to pick up the transcripts, can you bring me an account of the sinking of the Titanic?”

  “Yes, but I’ve got a problem. Eldercare can’t send anyone over till this afternoon, and I really wanted to get started on the transcripts.”

  “I could bring them over to your house,” Richard offered.

  “No, I don’t want you to have to do that. Look, I can bring Uncle Pat with me, I just can’t leave him in the car by himself. Could you meet us in the parking lot at ten with the transcripts?”

  “Sure,” he said, but, looking at the transcripts, he knew there was no way he could get them all down to the parking lot in one trip. He needed a box. He went down to Supplies to get one.

  They didn’t have any. “Records might have one,” the pretty clerk said, smiling winsomely at Richard. “They go through a lot of computer paper.”

  He went over to Records and told an imperative-looking woman with “Zaneta” on her nametag, “I need a box—” but she had already swiveled in her chair to a rack of forms.

  “A box of what?” she said, her hand poised to pluck the correct form from its slot.

  “Just a box. An empty box,” and amazingly, she handed him a requisition form.

  “Fill out the size and number of boxes you need,” she said, pointing to a square on the form, “and your office number. It’ll take a week to ten days.”

  “All I want is an empty computer box,” he said, and his pager went off. He switched it off. Zaneta pushed the phone toward him.

  “I’ll call from my office,” he said and went down the hall and out a back door to the Dumpsters, found an empty IV-packs box, and took it back upstairs. Back in the lab, he filled it with the transcripts, keeping a close eye on the clock, and started down to the parking lot. At the elevator, he remembered he hadn’t answered his page, and lugged the heavy box all the way back to the lab on the off-chance it was Vielle who had called.

  It wasn’t. It was Mrs. Haighton, asking if she could reschedule. He didn’t call her. He glanced at his watch and started down again, glad he already knew the quickest route to the parking lot and thinking he needed to add it to his map. Kit’s car was already pulled up next to the handicapped entrance, its motor running, when he got there. “Sorry I’m late,” Richard said, leaning in the window Kit rolled down.

  “Do you have an excuse from your first-period teacher?” a man’s voice demanded, and Richard looked across her at the graying man he’d seen at the funeral. Joanna’s Mr. Briarley.

  “Don’t just stand there,” Mr. Briarley said. “Sit down. We’re on page fifty-eight, ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.’ ”

  “Uncle Pat,” Kit said, laying her hand on his arm, “this is Richard Wright. He—”

  “I know who he is,” Mr. Briarley said. “When are you going to marry this niece of mine?”

  “Richard’s just a friend, Uncle Pat,” Kit said. “I need to talk to him for a minute. You just stay here, all right?”

  “ ‘It is an ancient Mariner, and he stoppeth one of three,’ “Mr. Briarley said. “ ‘ “By thy long grey beard and glittering eye, Now wherefore stopp’st thou me? The Bridegroom’s doors are opened wide, And I am next of kin.” ’ ” His hand scrabbled at his door, looking for the handle.

  “No, you stay here,” Kit said, reaching across him and pushing the door lock down. “I’ll just be a minute. I have to put something in the trunk. You stay here.”

  Mr. Briarley let his hand drop into his lap. “That’s what history is, and science, and art,” he said waveringly. “That’s what literature is.”

  “I’ll be right back,” Kit said, opening the door. Richard stepped back, and Kit got out and went around to the back of the car to open the trunk. “What did Mrs. Davenport say?” she asked.

  “A lot of nonsense,” Richard said.

  “Had Joanna been to see her?” Kit pulled the trunk lid up.

  “No.” He set the heavy box in the trunk. “What about the textbook? Did you find anything?”

  “ ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,’ ” she said ruefully, “but nothing about the Titanic.” She shut the trunk and came around to open the back door. She leaned in and came up with a stack of books. “Here’s the stuff on the Titanic,” she said, handing them to him. “I’ve got more if you need them.”

  “These should keep me busy for a while,” he said, looking at the books.

  “Ditto,” Kit said, gesturing toward the trunk. She got back in the car and started it. “I’ll call you if I find anything.”

  “ ‘He holds him with his skinny hand,’ ” Mr. Briarley said. “ ‘ “There was a ship,” quoth he.’ ”

  “A ship?” Richard said.

  Kit switched off the ignition and turned to face Mr. Briarley. “Uncle Pat,” she said, “did you and Joanna talk about a ship?”

  “Joanna?” he said vaguely.

  “Joanna Lander,” Kit said gently. “She was a student of yours. She came to see you. She asked you what you said in class. About the Titanic? Do you remember?”

  “Of course I remember,” Mr. Briarley said gruffly.

  “What did you tell Joanna?” Kit asked, and Richard waited for his answer, afraid to move, afraid to breathe.

  “Joanna,” he said, staring at the windshield. “ ‘Red as a rose was she.’ ” He turned and looked at Richard. “It’s a metaphor,” he said. “You need to know it for the final.”

  And that was that. Dead end. Try something else, Richard thought, carrying the books back up to the lab. He started in on the scans, comparing the frontal-cortex patterns with the presence of different neurotransmitters and then with the core elements, looking for correspondences.

  There weren’t any, but when he graphed the NDEs for length, he saw that Joanna had awakened spontaneously after her third session, and that was one in which theta-asparcine was present. I wonder if that’s the one where she turned and started back down the passageway, he thought.

  It was. He checked the accounts of the other two with theta-asparcine. The one where she had kicked out and the one where she had stepped from the elevator into the passage. But not the one where she had run headlong down the stairs and into the passage. And she had been under for nearly four minutes in the one with the elevator.

  He worked until twelve-thirty and then went down to the cafeteria, got a sandwich, and started through the books Kit had given him. He checked their indexes for the entry “elevator,” not really expecting to find it, and he didn’t. He was going to have to read the books.

  He started with a coffee-table book called The Titanic in Color, with detailed drawings of the smoking lounge, the gymnasium, the Grand Staircase. “At the head of the William-and-Mary-style staircase was a large clock carved to represent Honour and Glory Crowning Time.” Glory, which Joanna had underlined. But no sign of an elevator.

  The Untold Titanic didn’t mention one either. It concentrated on the area belowdecks and the crew, hardly any of whom had survived: the officers who’d loaded the boats, the wireless operator, the engineers who had stayed at their posts, working to keep the dynamos for the wireless and the lights going till the very end. Assistant Engineer Harvey, who’d gone back into a flooded boiler room to rescue a crewman with a broken leg. And all the firemen and trimmers and postal clerks who’d stayed at their posts long after they’d been released from duty.

  Richard read till he couldn’t stand it anymore and then went down to the ER to see if Vielle had found anyone else who’d seen Joanna. “Nobody,” she said, bandaging a little girl’s elbow. “I talked to a taxi driver who picked up a woman without a coat, but he couldn’t remember what she looked like, so it may not have been Joanna.”

  “Did he say where he took her?”

  She shook her head. “They’re not supposed to give out that information except to the poli
ce. There’s a guy on the force I’m going to call to see if he can help.”

  Richard went back upstairs through the main building, noting down the locations of the elevators and stairways as he did. When he got back to the lab, Kit was waiting outside the door. “What are you doing here?” he asked.

  “I found something,” she said, “and I was going to call you, but the Eldercare person came—I forgot to call them back this morning and tell them not to come—so I thought it would be easier if I showed you.”

  He unlocked the door, and they went inside.

  “I found a couple of odd transcripts. Most of them are in a question-and-answer form,” she handed him three stapled sheets, “but this one’s a monologue, and the name on it, Joseph Leibrecht, isn’t on her interview list.”

  Joseph Leibrecht. The name sounded familiar. He looked at the transcript. A whale, apple blossoms. “This isn’t an interview,” he said. “It’s an account of the NDE a crewman on the Hindenburg had.” He wondered what it was doing in with the transcripts. He thought she’d said it had been recorded too long after the fact to be useful, but she had highlighted the words sea and fire. The fire again.

  “You said you found a couple of odd transcripts?” he asked Kit.

  “Yes, I made a list of patients Joanna interviewed during the last few months, and there’s one who comes up several times.”

  “What’s his name?” Richard asked, grabbing for a pencil.

  “Well, that’s just it,” Kit said, taking a transcript out of her bag. “The name on the transcript is Carl, but I don’t know if that’s a first or a last name. All the other patients are listed by a first initial and a last name, and the transcripts are different from the others, too.” She pointed to a section. “The other ones are all in the form of questions and answers, but this one’s just phrases and single words, and it doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

  Richard looked at the line she was pointing at. “Half? . . . red . . . patches . . . ” it read. “When were these interviews, or whatever they were?” he asked.

  Kit consulted her list. “The first one’s dated December fourth, and the last one’s the eighteenth of this month.”

  “Then whoever he is, there’s a chance he was still in the hospital that day,” Richard said.

  “Or she,” Kit said. “If Carl’s the last name, it might be a woman.”

  “You’re right,” Richard said and picked up the phone. “Let’s see if Vielle knows who it is.” He dialed the ER, expecting he wouldn’t be able to get through and would have to page her, but a nurse’s aide answered and said she’d get her, and after a short interval, Vielle came on the line. “Did you ever hear Joanna mention a patient named Carl?” he asked her.

  “Yes,” Vielle said, “but that can’t be who she went to see.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because he wasn’t in a position to tell her anything. He was in a coma.” A coma. “He muttered things sometimes,” Vielle explained, “and she had the nurses write down what he said.”

  And that explained the disjointed words and phrases, the question marks after the words. They represented a nurse’s best guess at what Carl had mumbled. “Did you talk to your friend on the police force?”

  “No,” she said, “but I talked to the crash team coordinator, and there were no codes that morning, so if she went to see an NDEer, it must have been one she’d interviewed befo—what?” she said to someone else, and then, “Shooting accident, gotta go.” She hung up.

  “Dead end,” Richard said, putting down the receiver. “Carl’s in a coma.”

  “Oh,” Kit said, disappointed. “Well, anyway, here are the names of the patients.” She started to hand the list to him and then took it back. “And one of them . . . ” she ran her finger down the list, “mentioned fog. I thought that might be the source of her asking me if it had been foggy the night of the Titanic.” She found the name. “Maisie Nellis.”

  Maisie.

  “I think I know where Joanna went,” he said, starting for the door, and then stopped. He didn’t even know if Maisie was still in the hospital. “Hang on,” he said to Kit and picked up the phone and called the switchboard operator. “Do you have a Maisie Nellis listed as a patient?” he asked her.

  “Yes—”

  “Thanks,” he said and jammed the receiver down. “Come on, Kit,” he said.

  He told her about Maisie on the way down to four-west. “She told me she’d seen fog in her NDE the first day I met her, and Joanna told me she saw fog in her second NDE, too.” They reached Peds.

  The door to 422 was standing open. “Maisie?” he said, leaning in. The room was empty, the bed stripped, and folded sheets and a pillow at the foot of it. The tops of the nightstand and the bed table had been cleaned off, and the door to the closet stood open on emptiness.

  She’s dead, he thought, and it was like Joanna all over again. Maisie’s dead, and I didn’t even know it was happening.

  “Hi,” a woman’s voice said, and he turned around. It was Barbara. “I saw you go past and figured you were looking for Maisie,” she said. “She’s been moved. Up to CICU. She coded again, and this time there was quite a bit of damage. She’s been moved to the top of the transplant list.”

  “The top of the list,” he said. “She gets the next available heart?”

  “She gets the next available heart that’s the right size and the right blood type. Luckily Maisie’s Type A, so either a Type A or a Type O will work, but you know what a shortage of donors there is, particularly of children.”

  “How long before a heart’s likely to become available?” Kit asked.

  “There’s no way to tell,” Barbara said. “Hopefully, no more than a few weeks. Days would be better.”

  “How’s her mother taking all this?” Richard asked.

  Barbara stiffened. “Mrs. Nellis—” she started angrily and then stopped herself and said, “It’s possible to carry anything to extremes, even positive thinking.”

  “Can Maisie have visitors?” Richard asked.

  Barbara nodded. “She’s pretty weak, but I’m sure she’d love to see you. She asked about you the other day.”

  “Do you know if Joanna was down here to see Maisie on the day she was killed?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. I wasn’t on that day. I know she’d been down to see her or called her or something the day before because Maisie was all busy looking up something for her in her disaster books.”

  “You don’t know what it was, do you?”

  “No,” Barbara said. “Something about the Titanic. That was Maisie’s latest craze. Do you know how to get to CICU?” She gave them complicated instructions, which Richard jotted down for his map, and they started toward the elevator.

  “Dr. Wright, wait,” Barbara said, hurrying after them. “There’s something you need to know. Maisie doesn’t—” she said, and then stopped.

  “Maisie doesn’t what?”

  She bit her lip. “Nothing. Forget it. I was just going to warn you she looks pretty bad. This last episode—” she stopped again.

  “Then maybe I shouldn’t—”

  “No. I think seeing you is just what she needs. She’ll be overjoyed.” But she wasn’t. Maisie lay wan and uninterested against her pillows, a daunting array of monitors and machines crowded around her, nearly filling the room. Her TV was on, and the remote lay on the bed close to her hand, but she wasn’t watching the screen, she was staring at the wall below it. Her breath came in short, shallow pants.

  There were at least six bags hanging from the IV pole. The tubing ran down to her foot, and when he looked at her hand, he could see why. It looked like she had been in a fight, the whole back of it covered in overlapping purple and green and black bruises. A metal ID tag hung around her neck.

  “Hi, Maisie,” Richard said, trying not to let any of the horror he felt into his voice. “Remember me? Dr. Wright?”

  “Uh-huh,” she said, but there was no enthusiasm in her voice.

/>   “I’ve got somebody I want you to meet,” he said. “Maisie, this is Kit. She’s a friend of mine.”

  “Hi, Maisie,” Kit said.

  “Hi,” Maisie said dully.

  “I told Kit you’re an expert on disasters,” Richard said. He turned to Kit. “Maisie knows all about the Hindenburg and the Hartford circus fire and the Great Molasses Flood.”

  “The Great Molasses Flood?” Kit said to Maisie. “What’s that?”

  “A big flood,” Maisie said in that same flat, uninterested tone. “Of molasses.”

  He wondered if this was what Barbara had started to warn him about. If it was, he could see why she had changed her mind. He would never have believed it, that Maisie, no matter how sick she was, could be reduced to this dull, passive state. No, not passive. Flattened.

  “Did people die?” Kit was asking Maisie. “In the Great Molasses Flood?”

  “People always die,” Maisie said. “That’s what a disaster is, people dying.”

  “Dr. Wright told me you were friends with Dr. Lander,” Kit said.

  “She came to see me sometimes,” Maisie said, and her eyes strayed to the TV.

  “She was a friend of mine, too,” Kit said. “When was the last time Dr. Lander came to see you, Maisie?”

  “I don’t remember,” Maisie said, her eyes on the screen.

  “It’s important, Maisie,” Kit said, reaching for the remote. She clicked off the TV. “We think Dr. Lander found out something important, but we don’t know what. We’re trying to find out where she was and who she talked to—”

  “Why don’t you write and ask her?” Maisie said.

  “Write and ask her?” Richard said blankly.

  Maisie looked at him. “Didn’t she leave you a forwarding address either?”

  “A forwarding address?”

  “When she moved to New Jersey.”

  “Moved to—? Maisie, didn’t anybody tell you?” Richard blurted.

  “Tell me what?” Maisie asked. She pushed herself to a sitting position. The line on her heart monitor began to spike. Richard looked appealingly across the bed at Kit.