Passage

by Connie Willis

  “What if you’re not there?”

  “You can leave a message on my answering machine,” he said, and, at her skeptical look, “I promise I’ll come the minute I get the message.” He looked at his watch.

  “We’d better go,” Kit said, standing up. “It’s been two minutes.”

  “You can’t go yet. I don’t have your number,” Maisie said. “In case Dr. Wright’s answering machine doesn’t work.”

  The master staller at work. She wrote down Kit’s number and then Vielle’s. “But you’re not to call the ER,” Richard said sternly. “They’re very busy. You call me.”

  “I will,” Maisie said meekly.

  “Now, you drink your Ensure and rest,” Richard said, and they started for the door.

  “You know what this is just like?” Maisie said.

  “What?”

  “It’s just like the Titanic. They had to figure out what happened to the people, only they were dead, so they had to talk to other people and find out what they did and who saw them and stuff.”

  Piecing together the tragedy, bit by bit, conversations and glimpses and last words. “Joanna was crazy about you, you know,” Richard said, and Maisie nodded solemnly.

  “I knew she wouldn’t just go off and leave me.”

  “Are you going to be all right, Maisie?” Kit asked.

  “Uh-huh,” Maisie said. “It’s almost time for the magazine lady to come. She goes all over the hospital giving people magazines. I bet she might have seen Joanna. Kit, can you fluff up my pillows before you go?”

  It took them another five minutes and Lucille’s finally coming in to get away. “You’re right,” Kit said as they waited for the elevator. “She’s quite a kid.”

  “How did you know I should tell her about Joanna?” Richard asked her.

  “She looked just like my uncle Pat the day he got the diagnosis,” she said, staring at the closed elevator door. “There are worse things than death.”

  “Like letting someone down.”

  Kit looked up at him. “We’re not going to let Joanna down. We’re going to decipher her message.”

  But how exactly? By piecing together bits and pieces and conversations. Kit brought him the list of garden references she’d found in among the transcripts and another one headed “Abrupt NDE Returns.”

  “That’s from several weeks ago. I’ve already seen it,” he told Kit, but when he looked at it again, he noticed Amelia Tanaka’s name on the list, and when he checked her account against that session’s scans, he found she’d come out of the NDE-state on her own, and that theta-asparcine was present.

  He went through all of her NDEs and then started on Mr. Sage’s. Testimony was of no use with Mr. Sage, but when Richard checked the scans, he found that he’d gone straight from the NDE-state to waking twice. Both times theta-asparcine had been present. But it wasn’t present in Mr. Pearsall’s NDEs, or Mr. O’Reirdon’s.

  He worked on the scans until his eyes began to burn, and then walked over to the west wing and mapped the rest of the floors, asking assorted nurses and orderlies, “How can I get up to eight-east from here?” and, “What’s the quickest way down to the ER?,” jotting down the answers, and adding the routes to his map.

  In between, he pored over Maisie’s list of wireless messages. They were almost unbearable to read, a litany of increasing disaster and desperation: “We are on the ice.” “We are putting the women off in boats.” “Require immediate assistance.” “Sinking fast.” “SOS. SOS. SOS.”

  There was a clue here somewhere, a connection. Joanna had had a reason for asking Maisie to look them up, but he was as dense as the ships replying to the Titanic’s SOSs had been. “What is the matter with you?” the Olympic had asked, and then unbelievably, “Are you steering south to meet us?” The Frankfurt had been so clueless that the wireless operator had snapped at him, “You fool, stand by and keep out!” and even the Carpathia’s operator had asked, “Should I tell my captain?” Thick-headed fools, all of them, unable to figure out a perfectly simple message. Like me, he thought.

  Vielle called. “I found somebody else who saw Joanna. Wanda Rosso. She’s a radiologist. She says she saw Joanna on four-west around eleven-thirty.”

  “Where on four-west?” Richard asked, calling up the map of Mercy General.

  “She was getting into an elevator.”

  There were two banks of patient elevators and two service elevators on four-west. “Which elevator?” he asked.

  “She didn’t say,” Vielle said. “I assume the one by the walkway.”

  “Ask her,” Richard said. “Did this Wanda know in which direction Joanna was going?”

  “She couldn’t remember,” Vielle said. “She thinks she remembers the ‘down’ arrow being lit, but she’s not sure. I asked her if Joanna looked excited or happy, and she said she didn’t notice anything except that she seemed to be in a hurry because she kept looking up at the floor numbers and tapping her foot.”

  In a hurry, and going somewhere in the west wing. But where? Third was orthopedics, which didn’t seem likely, and below that it was all administrative offices. And this Wanda had said she wasn’t sure which arrow was lit. Fourth was Peds, and she hadn’t gone to see Maisie. Sixth was cardiac care, a possibility as far as NDEers were concerned, but Joanna hadn’t taken her minirecorder with her.

  “Did she say if Joanna had a notebook with her?”

  “No.”

  “Did you find out about the tape?” he asked. “Do the police have it?”

  “No,” Vielle said, and there was an odd change in her voice. “Her clothes were disposed of.”

  “Disposed of?” he said. “Are you sure? It was evidence.”

  “There’s no case,” Vielle said. “The suspect’s dead, and there were eyewitnesses, so there was no reason to keep it.”

  “But they wouldn’t have disposed of the things in her pockets,” he said. “They’d have returned them to her next of kin. Maybe her sister has the tape. And listen, I’ve been thinking, there may be notes, too. Joanna always took notes when she did interviews, and we know she didn’t have her recorder with her. There may be a notebook, or a piece of paper—”

  “It was all disposed of,” Vielle said, and her voice was clipped, definite. “In the contaminated-waste bin.”

  “The contaminated-waste bi—?” he said and then realized what Vielle had been trying to tell him without coming out and saying it. Joanna’s clothes had been soaked in blood, and anything in her cardigan pockets would have been drenched, too. Ruined. Unreadable.

  “I’m sorry,” Vielle said. “I still haven’t found the taxi driver, but I’ve got a couple of leads. I’ll call you as soon as I’ve got anything.”

  “Yeah,” he said, and went back to the Titanic, looking up “A La Carte Restaurant,” “gymnasium,” “First-Class Dining Saloon.” Jim Farrell, a young Irish immigrant, had rounded up four young girls he’d promised to look after and led them all the way from steerage, through the First-Class Dining Saloon and a maze of passages and decks and stairwells to the Boat Deck, and then stepped back, unable to go in the boat himself.

  He looked up “Boat Deck.” Archibald Butt and Colonel Gracie and a gambler named J. H. Rogers had loaded boat after boat, handing babies and children down as the boats were lowered along the side.

  Maisie didn’t call, which surprised him. He hadn’t really thought she’d be able to find out what Vielle, with all her staff connections, couldn’t, but he hadn’t expected that to stop her from calling him. But there were no messages on his answering machine, no urgent pages. He wondered if she was all right. She had seemed to take the news about Joanna’s death in stride, but with kids, it was hard to tell, and it sometimes took bad news a while to sink in.

  When she still hadn’t called by the next afternoon, Richard ran over to see her. She wasn’t there-she was out having an echocardiogram-but the nurse (not the one who’d shooed them out of the room) assured him she was doing fine. “She�
�s cheered up a lot these last few days,” she said, smiling. “We’ve really had to sit on her to see that she stays in bed.”

  “Tell her Dr. Wright said hi, okay? And that I’ll come see her later,” he said, took a few steps toward the elevator and then turned back, looking appropriately confused. “I need to get down to the ER,” he said. “What’s the easiest way to get there?”

  He repeated the process with a nurse and two orderlies, getting three completely different answers, and went back to the lab to add them to the map. He had all of Main and the west wing done and the top four floors of the east wing, and the map was starting to look as complicated as his diagrams of the scans, and just as intelligible.

  Joanna had left her office and gone down to two-west and then later had gone up to Dr. Jamison’s office, and, from there, down to the ER. And in between? He had no idea. All he could deduce for sure was that it hadn’t been anything on four-west, since she had been heading down—or up—from there, and that she had probably come down to four-west from her office and taken the walkway across. If she had in fact been coming from her office, if she hadn’t gone somewhere else first.

  He worked on the map awhile and then listed the neurotransmitters present in the theta-asparcine scans, looking for commonalities. There weren’t any. But there was a connection somewhere. Joanna had seen it, and the answer lay somewhere in the scans or the transcripts or her NDEs. Or Joseph Leibrecht’s, he thought, and read the crewman’s account that Kit had left. He had seen a whale and a bird in a cage and apple blossoms.

  Richard went back to the scans, trying to determine if there was any similarity among the non-theta-asparcine scans. There wasn’t. He fished the journal Dr. Jamison had left out of the mess on his desk and read the article on theta-asparcine. An artificial version had been produced and was being tested to determine its function, which was still not known.

  It has something to do with NDEs, he thought. But what? Was it an inhibitor, after all? Or was its presence a side effect of the temporal-lobe stimulation or the acetylcholine?

  He worked till he could justify going home, and then called Kit, who hadn’t found anything either. “It definitely has something to do with the Titanic, though,” she said, sounding tired. “All the words she’s highlighted relate to it.”

  “Is that Ms. Lander?” Mr. Briarley said in the background. “This is the second time she’s been late for class.”

  “It’s Dr. Wright, Uncle Pat,” Kit said patiently.

  “Tell her the answer is C, the very mirror image.”

  “I will,” Kit said, and to Richard, “I’m sorry. What I was saying was that everything she’s marked—’elevator’ and ‘glory’ and ‘stairway’—are things she described seeing on the Titanic during her NDEs.”

  “Are there any highlighted references to wireless messages?” he asked.

  “No,” she said, “even though the word message is in nearly every transcript. I’ve gotta go. Have you heard from Maisie?”

  “Not yet,” he said, and started in on the Titanic again, looking for clues. But all he found were more horror stories: the postal clerks going down for more sacks of mail and being trapped by water belowdecks; the steerage passengers being kept in the hold while two crew members led small groups up the second-class staircase to C Deck, through the third-class lounge, across the well deck, into the passage that led to first class and up the Grand Staircase to the Boat Deck; Captain Smith swimming toward one of the boats with a baby in his arms and then disappearing.

  Richard didn’t hear from Maisie the next day either, or the next. Vielle called to say that she’d checked with Wanda Rosso, and it had been the patient elevators next to the walkway. “And she says, now that she’s had a chance to think about it, she definitely remembers seeing Joanna press the ‘down’ button.”

  I’ll bet, he thought, shaking his head. A classic case of confabulation, of filling in a memory that wasn’t there with images of other times, other elevators, and of no use at all. “And you haven’t found anybody else in the west wing who saw her?” he asked.

  “I haven’t had a chance to talk to them. I’m still working on the taxicab thing,” she said and hung up.

  All right then, he’d go ask. But nobody else on four-west, or third, or sixth, remembered seeing her. He did find out something. Fifth was completely blocked off for renovation and had been since January. A sign just outside the elevator said the arthritis clinic had been temporarily moved to the second floor of the Brightman Building.

  He went back to the lab and marked it on the map, grateful he could eliminate something. And at least they had narrowed the place she’d been going to the west wing. Unless she’d been going down to second to the walkway to Main.

  He gave up and went back to the scans. He did a series of superimposes of the scans in which theta-asparcine was present, looking for pattern similarities. There weren’t any, which meant the theta-asparcine was just a side effect. Or the product of a randomly fired synapse.

  And Kit had said, “It definitely has something to do with the Titanic.” The answer was somewhere in the pile of books. He sat down, pulled The Tragic End of the Titanic out of the pile, and began to read, his head propped on his hand.

  “Accounts of those left on board after the last boats were gone are, of course, sketchy,” he read, “though all agree there was no panic. Men leaned against the railing or sat on deck chairs, smoking and talking quietly. Father Thomas Byles moved among the steerage passengers, praying and offering absolution. The deck began to list heavily, and the lights dimmed to a reddish—”

  Richard slapped the book shut and went back over to the mind-numbing monotony of mapping the scans. He graphed the levels of cortisol and acetylcholine, and then got on the Net and did a search on theta-asparcine. There were only two articles. The first was a study of its presence in heart patients, which—

  Someone knocked on the door. He turned around, hoping it was Kit, or Vielle, but it wasn’t. It was a woman in a dressy pink suit and high heels. Could this be Mrs. Haighton, he wondered, finally here, several eons too late, for her first session?

  “Dr. Wright?” the woman said. “I’m Mrs. Nellis, Maisie’s mother.”

  Oh, this is all I need, he thought tiredly. Here it comes. I had no business telling Maisie Joanna died, it’s terribly important for her to have only upbeat, cheerful experiences. Positive thinking is so important.

  “Maisie’s told me so much about you,” Mrs. Nellis said. “I appreciate your taking the time to visit her. It’s hard to keep her spirits up, here in the hospital, and your visit cheered her up no end.”

  “I like Maisie,” he said warily. “She’s a great kid.”

  Mrs. Nellis nodded. She was still smiling, but the smile was a little strained. “She’s all right, isn’t she?” Richard said. “Nothing’s happened to her?”

  “No, oh, no,” Mrs. Nellis said. “She’s doing extremely well. This new ACE-blocker she’s on is working wonders. She tells me you’re a research neurologist.”

  He was surprised. He had had no idea Maisie knew anything about him except that he was a friend of Joanna’s. And what was all this about? If she was going to lecture him over having told Maisie about Joanna, he wished she’d stop smiling and get it over with. “Yes, that’s right,” he said, and, to give her the opening she was apparently looking for, “I’m researching near-death experiences.”

  “So I was told,” she said. “I understand you believe near-death experiences may actually be some sort of survival mechanism. I also understand that you hope to use your research to develop a technique for reviving patients who’ve coded, a treatment for bringing them back.”

  Who had she been talking to? Joanna would never have told her anything like that, especially knowing her tendency to unbridled optimism, and neither would Maisie. Mandrake? Hardly. Who then? Tish? One of the subjects? It didn’t matter. He had to stop this before it went any further. “Mrs. Nellis, my research is only in the very preliminar
y stages,” he said. “It’s not even clear yet what the near-death experience is or what causes it, let alone how it works.”

  “But when you do find out how it works,” she persisted, “and when you do develop a treatment, it could help patients who’ve coded. Like Maisie.”

  “No—Mrs. Nellis—” he said, feeling like someone trying to stop a runaway train, “At some point in the far-distant future, the information that we’re gathering might possibly be put to some practical use, but what that use might be, or whether, in fact, it will even turn out that—”

  “I understand,” she said. “I know how uncertain and time-consuming medical research is, but I also know that scientific breakthroughs happen all the time. Look at penicillin. And cloning. Amazing new treatments are being developed every day.”

  Not a runaway train, a pyroclastic flow, he thought, seeing Maisie’s photo of Mount St. Helens in his mind’s eye, the black cloud roaring unstoppably down the mountain, flattening everything in its path, and wondered if that was where Maisie had gotten her original interest in disasters. “Even if there were a breakthrough in understanding near-death experiences,” he said, knowing it was useless, “it wouldn’t necessarily result in a medical application, and even if it did, there would have to be experiments, tests, clinical trials—”

  “I understand,” she said.

  No, you don’t, he thought. You don’t understand a thing I’ve said. “Even if there were a treatment, which there’s not, there has to be hospital approval and clearance by the research institute’s board—”

  “I know there will be obstacles,” she said. “When amiodipril was approved for clinical trials, it took months to even get Maisie on the waiting list, but my lawyer’s very good at overcoming obstacles.”

  I can imagine, Richard thought.

  “That’s why it’s critical to have Maisie in your project now, so all the problems can be worked out in advance. Of course, it’s all just precautionary. Maisie’s doing extremely well on the ACE-blocker. She’s completely stabilized, and she may not even need the treatment. But if she does, I want everything to be in place. That’s why I came to see you as soon as Maisie told me about your coding cure. If she’s in your project, she’ll already be approved and the paperwork all completed when the treatment becomes available, and there won’t be any unnecessary delays in administering it,” she said, but he had stopped listening at “as soon as Maisie told me.”