Passage

by Connie Willis

  “I’m fine,” he said. “Stop fussing. Why don’t you go make us some tea?”

  “They said they didn’t want any—”

  “Well, I do,” he said. “Go make me a cup of tea and stop fussing over me like a mother hen.”

  Mrs. Aspinall left, still looking anxious, and Carl smiled at Kit and said, “Now what were we discussing?”

  “What you and Joanna talked about,” Kit said.

  “Nothing very important,” he said. “She asked me how I felt. She told me she was glad to see I was awake and said I should get well. And that’s what I’ve been doing, resting, getting my strength back, doing what Dr. Cherikov says. Focus on the present, Dr. Cherikov says. Don’t think about what’s past. That’s over and done with. Think about getting well.”

  “You mentioned being in the coma,” Richard said. “Did Joanna ask you what happened while you were in the coma? About having dreams?”

  “They weren’t dreams.”

  Richard’s heart leaped. “What were they?” he asked, his voice and face carefully impassive.

  Mr. Aspinall looked toward the door, as if willing his wife to come back. “Mr. Aspinall, this is important,” Richard said. “Joanna tried to tell us something as she was dying. We think it has something to do with something you told her, something about what you saw when you were in the coma,” but Carl had stopped listening.

  “I thought she died instantly,” he said accusingly. “The nurses told me she died instantly.”

  Richard looked at him in surprise. What was going on here?

  “You said she talked to you,” Carl said, his voice rising. “You said she tried to tell you something.”

  “She did, but she didn’t live long enough to tell us. She died almost instantly.”

  “There wasn’t anything anyone could have done,” Kit said.

  He ignored her. “How did she die?”

  Richard looked at Kit. She looked as bewildered as he felt. He wondered if they should call Mrs. Aspinall, but if they did, it would be an end to the interview. “How did she die?” Carl demanded.

  “She was stabbed by a patient on drugs,” Richard said.

  “Stabbed?” Carl said, and his hands clenched uncontrollably in his lap. “With what?”

  “A knife,” Richard said, and, surprisingly, the answer was the right one. Carl’s fists unclenched and he leaned back into his chair. “And she died almost instantly,” he murmured. “She was only there a few minutes.”

  “Where, Carl?” Richard said. “Where were you when you were in the coma?”

  Carl’s hands clenched again, and his eyes strayed to the muted TV. Like Maisie’s when she didn’t want to talk. “You said it wasn’t a dream,” Richard said, leaning forward to put himself between Carl and the TV. “What was it? Was it a place?”

  “A place,” he said and looked past them, at the dark, icy stream. What was he seeing, staring out at it? The water, creeping up the deck? Or roaring in through the injured side?

  “You said Joanna was only there a few minutes,” Richard said. “Where? What were you afraid she’d been stabbed with?”

  Carl’s fists tightened, the skin between the bruises white. His face under the tan had gone white, too. It looked sodden, like something pulled out of the water. “Where were you, Carl?” Richard repeated.

  “Richard—” Kit said and put a restraining hand on his arm.

  “Where were you?”

  “I—” Carl said and took a wavering breath. “It—” This is it, Richard thought. He’s going to tell us.

  Brring. The sound of the cell phone exploded into the silence like a bomb.

  No! Richard thought, watching Kit scramble to get it out of her bag. Not now.

  “I’m sorry,” Kit said, trying to shut off the ringing. “I didn’t know this was on.”

  “Quite all right,” Carl said. His color had come back.

  He looks like somebody who’s just heard the bugle call of the cavalry coming to rescue him, Richard thought. “Go ahead,” Carl said. “Take your call.”

  Kit sent Richard an agonized glance and put the phone to her ear. “Hello?”

  It will be Mrs. Gray, wanting to know where the sugar is, Richard thought. Or the mustard.

  “Oh, hello, Vielle,” Kit said. “Yes, he’s here.” She handed Richard the cell phone.

  “Excuse me,” Richard said and walked over to the fireplace. “Vielle—”

  “What’s going on? I got this garbled message from one of the interns. Honestly, you’d think they could deliver a simple message—”

  “I can’t talk now,” Richard said, his hand over the receiver. “I’ll call you back.”

  “You’ll never get through,” Vielle said. “It’s a total disaster here. The fog—”

  Richard switched the phone off. “Good-bye,” he said to the dial tone and handed the phone back to Kit. “Sorry,” he said, turning to Carl.

  “Perfectly all right,” Carl said. “Where were we? Oh, yes, you were asking me what I remember of my coma, and I’m afraid the answer is, nothing at all.”

  Damn you, Vielle, Richard thought. He was going to tell us. “The last thing I remember is my wife putting me in the car to go to the hospital,” Carl said. His hands on the arms of the chair were relaxed, steady. “She was having trouble getting my seat belt on, and the next thing I know this nurse I never saw before is opening the curtains, and this friend of yours comes in and talks to me for a few minutes, maybe five minutes at the most. She asked me how I was and we chatted a little, and then she stood up and said she had to go.” He smiled at Kit again.

  “What did you chat about?” Richard said.

  “I don’t really remember.” Carl shrugged. “I’m afraid there’s a lot I don’t remember about that first couple of days. The medications. I suppose that must be true for the dreams I had while I was in the coma, too.”

  “You said they weren’t dreams,” Richard said.

  “Did I?” Carl said easily. “I meant I didn’t remember having any dreams.”

  You’re lying, Richard thought.

  “Here’s your tea, Carl,” Mrs. Aspinall said, coming into the room. She handed him the mug. “And after you drink it, I think you should lie down. You look pale.” She laid her hand on his forehead. “And it feels like you’ve got a fever. I’m sure Dr. Wright and Ms. Gardiner will understand.”

  “Sorry I couldn’t help you,” Carl said and turned to his wife. “You’re right, I am tired. I think I will lie down.”

  “I’ll show Dr. Wright and Ms. Gardiner out,” Mrs. Aspinall said, “and then I’ll come back and get you settled.”

  They stood up. “If you remember anything,” Kit said, “please call us.”

  “I doubt if I’ll remember anything,” Carl said. “Dr. Cherikov said the more time has passed, the less I’ll remember about the whole thing.”

  “Which is good,” Mrs. Aspinall said. “You need to forget about what’s past and concentrate on the present, and the future. Isn’t that right, Dr. Wright? I want to thank you for coming.”

  End of interview. Mrs. Aspinall led them quickly down the hall to the front door and helped them into their coats, obviously anxious to get rid of them so she could get back to her husband. “It was so nice of you to come all this way,” she said, opening the door.

  They went out onto the porch. “I’m sorry my husband couldn’t be more help,” she said.

  “Maybe you can help us,” Richard said. “Your husband told Joanna something that put her on the right track. Something he remembered from his coma.”

  “He told you, he doesn’t remember. His memory of his time in the hospital’s very hazy—”

  “But he might have said something to you,” Kit said, “after he woke up. Made some reference to what he saw or—”

  Richard interrupted. “Your husband said the things he saw weren’t dreams,” Richard said. “Did he say what they were?”

  Mrs. Aspinall looked uncertainly down the hall towar
d the family room. “Please,” Kit said. “Your husband’s the only one who can help us. It’s so important.”

  “What’s important is my husband’s recovery,” Mrs. Aspinall said. “He’s still very weak. His nerves-I don’t think you understand what a terrible ordeal he’s been through. He was this close to death. I couldn’t bear to lose him again. I have to think of his welfare—”

  “You said Joanna was kind to you—” Richard said.

  “She was,” Mrs. Aspinall said, and took her hand off the door.

  “Did he say anything about where he was?” Richard said rapidly. “Did he mention a Grand Staircase?”

  The loud thump of the walking stick sounded suddenly from the end of the hall. “My husband’s calling,” Mrs. Aspinall said. “I have to go get him settled for his nap.”

  “He said, ‘She was only there for a few minutes,’ and the idea of her having been in the same place obviously frightened him,” Richard said over the thumping. “Did he say where he was or why it was frightening?”

  “I have to go.”

  “Wait,” Richard said, fumbling in his pocket. “Here’s my card. That’s my pager number. If you or your husband happen to remember anything—”

  “I’ll call you. Thank you again for coming all this way,” she said politely, and shut the door in their faces.

  “V . . . V . . . ”

  —LAST WIRELESS MESSAGE FROM THE TITANIC, HEARD FAINTLY BY THE VIRGINIAN

  JOANNA SANK.

  She was suddenly in water and darkness. She couldn’t see, the rain on the windshield was suddenly a downpour, so heavy the wipers couldn’t keep up. She flicked them to high, but it was no use, the rain was turning to sleet, to ice. She was going to have to pull off the road, but she couldn’t even see the shoulder, she couldn’t feel the bottom. Her toes stretched desperately down, trying to feel sand, her head going under. Under. Flailing and gulping for air, swallowing, choking. Drowning.

  “Drowning’s the worst way to die,” Vielle had said, but they were all terrible. Heart attack and kidney failure and beheading, drug overdoses and nicked aortas and being crushed by a falling smokestack. Joanna looked up, trying to see the Titanic, but there was only water above her. And darkness.

  She reached up for the surface, but it was too far above her, and after a while she let her arms fall, and she fell. Her hair fanned out around her like Amelia Tanaka’s had, lying on the examining table, her dead hands drifting limp and open in the dark water.

  I let go of the French bulldog, she thought, and knew that she could not have held on to him or onto his memory, or onto the memory of Ulla or the dog at Pompeii, struggling against its chain, or of the Titanic passenger letting the dogs out of their cages, because the falling was itself a letting go, and as she fell, she forgot not only the dog but the meaning of the word dog and of sugar and sorrow.

  They fell away from her like snow, like ash, memories of saying, “Can you be more specific?” and eating buttered popcorn, of standing in the third-floor walkway, looking out at the fog, and sitting next to Mrs. Woollam’s bed, listening to her read passages from the Bible, “When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee,” and “Rosabelle, remember,” and “Put your hands on my shoulders and don’t struggle.”

  Names fell away from her in drifting tatters, the names of her patients and of her best friend in third grade, of the movie star Vielle’s police officer had looked like and the capital of Wyoming. The names of the neurotransmitters and the days of the week and the core elements of the NDE.

  The tunnel, she thought, trying to remember them, and the light, and the one Mr.—what was his name?—she had forgotten—was so insistent about. The life review. “There’s supposed to be a life review,” he had said, but he was wrong. It was not a review but a jettisoning, events and happenings and knowledge being tossed overboard one by one: numbers and dates and faces, the taste of Tater Torros, and the smell of crayons, Indian red and gold and sea green, the combination of her junior high locker and her Blockbuster password and the best way to get from Medicine to ICU.

  Code alarms and Victory gardens and scraping snow off her windshield, and somewhere a fire, burning out of control, sending up billows of black acrid smoke. And the smell of fresh paint, the sound of Amelia Tanaka’s voice, saying, “I was in a tunnel.” A tunnel, Joanna thought, looking down at the water she was sinking into, the narrowing darkness.

  But there was no light at the end of this tunnel, and no angels, no loved ones, and even if there were, she would have forgotten them, fathers and grandmothers and Candy Simons. Would have left the memory of all of them, relatives and friends, living and dead, behind in the water. Guadalupe and Coleridge and Julia Roberts. Ricky Inman and Mrs. Haighton and Lavoisier.

  She had been falling a very long time. I can’t fall forever, she thought. The Titanic hadn’t fallen forever. It had come finally down to the bottom of the sea and settled into the soft mud, surrounded by chamber pots and chandeliers and shoes.

  Will I be surrounded by shoes, too? she wondered, and could see them in the darkness: the red tennis shoe, jammed in the door, and Emmett Kelly’s huge, flapping clown shoes and the tiny shoe in the Monopoly game, and the abandoned shoes of the sailors, lined up along the deck of the Yorktown. The Yorktown had come to rest, too, and the Lusitania and the Hindenburg, and Jay Yates and Lorraine Allison and Little Miss 1565, having forgotten everything, even their names. Rest in peace.

  What was the Latin for “Rest in peace” ? “Eloi, eloi, lama sabacthani,” she thought, but that wasn’t right. That was the Latin for something else. She had forgotten the Latin for “Rest in peace” and the words to “Nearer, My God, to Thee” and “The Wreck of the Hesperus” and “The Sound of Music.”

  Everything she had learned by heart fell away from her, line after line, unraveling into the dark water like tape from a broken Blockbuster video, “The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,” and “At a time like this, it’s every man for himself.” “Houston, we have a problem,” and “Oh, don’t you remember, a long time ago, there were two little children whose names I don’t know.”

  The words trailed away into the water, carrying memory with them, of trailing electrode wires and lifejacket ties and yellow “Do Not Cross” tape. And yellow afghan yarn, yellow sneakers like the ones Whoopi Goldberg wore in Jumpin’ Jack Flash, Jack in the Beanstalk, Jack Phillips.

  And that was important. There was something important about Jack Phillips. Something about a lab coat, or a blanket. Or a heater, shutting off. They’re shutting off, she thought, the receptors and transmitters and neurons, and this is just a symbol for it, a . . . but she had forgotten the word for metaphor. And for disaster. And for death.

  Had forgotten the taste of Cheetos and the color of blood and the number fifty-eight, forgotten Mercy General and mercy everlasting, zeppelins and kissing, her dress size, her first apartment, where she’d put her car keys, the answer to number fifteen on Mr. Briarley’s final, the sound in the tunnel and her 1040 form.

  My taxes. I didn’t send in my 1040. They’re due April fifteenth, she thought, and remembered that the Titanic had gone down on the night of the fourteenth. All those people, she thought, they didn’t file their income tax returns either. No, that was wrong. They didn’t have income tax back then. That was why they were all so rich. But there were other things they hadn’t done that they had intended to do: meet friends at the dock in New York, send a telegram announcing their safe arrival, marry, have children, win the Nobel Prize.

  I never learned to play the piano, Joanna thought. I didn’t tell Mr. Wojakowski we couldn’t use him in the project, and now he’ll pester Richard. I didn’t transcribe Mr. Sage’s NDE.

  It doesn’t matter, she thought. But I didn’t pay the gas bill, she thought. I forgot to water my Swedish ivy. I didn’t get the book from Kit. I promised I’d go pick it up. I promised I’d go see Maisie.

  Maisie! she thought in horror. I didn’t tell Richard, I have
to tell him, but could not remember what it was she had wanted to tell him. Something about the Titanic. No, not the Titanic. Mr. Briarley had been wrong, it wasn’t about the Titanic. It was something about Indians. And the Rio Grande. And a dog. Something about a dog.

  No, that wasn’t right either. Fog, she thought, and remembered standing in the walkway, looking out at fog. It was cold and diffuse, like the water, like death. It blotted out everything, memory and duty and desire. Let it go, she thought, staring at nothingness. It’s not important. Let it go.

  Progress reports and delivering the mail and regret. They aren’t important. Nothing’s important. Not proving it’s the Titanic or having a hall pass or avoiding Mr. Mandrake. None of it matters. Not Mr. Wojakowski or Mrs. Haighton’s never returning my calls or Maisie.

  That’s a lie, she thought. Maisie does matter. I have to find Richard. I have to tell him. “Richard, listen,” she cried, but her mouth, her throat, her lungs, were full of water.

  She kicked frantically, reaching up with her cupped hands, her arms. I have to tell him, she thought, clutching at the water as if it were the railing of a staircase, trying to pull herself up hand over hand. I have to get the message through. For Maisie.

  She willed herself upward, kicking, stroking with her arms, trying to reach the surface.

  And continued to fall.

  “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

  —JESUS’ LAST WORDS FROM THE CROSS

  BOY, JUST LIKE ISMAY,” Maisie said when they told her what had happened with Carl. “How crummy!”

  Leave it to Maisie to sum things up. Richard wondered if, clambering into the lifeboat, Ismay’s hands had been as white and clenched as Carl Aspinall’s, his face as sodden-looking.

  “So what do we do now?” Vielle asked. She had called them on the way back, demanding to know what they’d found out, and Richard, unable to stand the prospect of telling it twice, had told her to meet them in Maisie’s room.

  “We could talk to the lab technician who saw Carl and Joanna,” Richard said. “He may have heard what they were saying.”