Passage

  Joanna looked at the cardplayers. “And play acey-deucey?”

  “Naw, none of them were ever in the navy. All they know how to play is hearts. I been trying to talk ’em into poker, but they’re all too cheap. Say, I heard one of the docs down in the ER got shot. You know anything about that?”

  That must be what the two nurses by the elevator had been gossiping about. “No.”

  “I hope it’s nothing serious. Did I ever tell you about the time on the Yorktown when I got shot right in the—well, it ain’t polite to say where—and I start yelping and Big Bunion Pakigian says—”

  “Mr. Wojakowski?” a lab-coated technician with a clipboard said from the door.

  “Be right there,” Mr. Wojakowski said. “Well, anyway, Doc, you see you don’t go getting shot. And if you need me on your project, you just go ahead and schedule me. Like I say, all we do’s sit around. I got plenty of time to do your project and this one both.”

  “Mr. Wojakowski,” the technician said disapprovingly.

  Mr. Wojakowski leaned close to Joanna and whispered, “4-F.” Joanna had to laugh. The technician looked even crabbier. “See ya, Doc,” Mr. Wojakowski said jauntily, handed his cards to one of the volunteers, and disappeared through the door.

  She looked at her watch and went back up to the surgical ward. Mr. Ortiz’s door was shut. “One of his drains came out,” the sub nurse told her. “It’ll be another twenty minutes at least.”

  Joanna thanked her and went up to see Maisie. Mrs. Nellis was just coming out of the room, smiling brightly. “Maisie’s on a new drug and it’s working wonders. She’s stabilized, and it’s completely eliminated the fluid-retention problem. If this keeps up, I’ll be able to take her home before you know it.”

  She was right. Maisie’s arms and legs weren’t as puffy, but, because the swelling had gone down, you could see how pitifully thin she’d gotten. Her hospital ID bracelet dangled loosely from her birdlike wrist. At least she can stop worrying about them having to cut it off, Joanna thought.

  “I’ve been reading about the Titanic so I’d be ready to help you with your research,” Maisie said eagerly, reaching immediately in the bedside drawer for her tablet and pencil. “So, what do you want me to look up?”

  “Are you sure you shouldn’t be resting?” Joanna asked. “I just saw your mom, and she said you’d just started on a new drug.”

  “It’s not new,” Maisie said. “It’s nadolal, the same one I was on before I was on the amiodipril.”

  The one that couldn’t keep her stabilized, Joanna thought. The one she was on when she coded.

  “And all I do is rest. Looking up stuff doesn’t make me tired. It’s a lot more fun than watching stupid videos.” She waved her hand at the TV, where Winnie the Pooh was playing soundlessly.

  “All right. I need to know the names of all the ships the Titanic sent SOSs to,” Joanna said. That should be safe, and, according to Kit, time-consuming.

  Maisie frowned at her. “You don’t send SOSs to anybody. You just send them out and hope somebody hears you.”

  “That’s what I meant,” Joanna said, “the names of the ships the Titanic’s wireless contacted.”

  Maisie wrote “ships” in her childish round hand. “I bet there’s a lot of them ’cause the wireless operator kept sending right up till it sank.”

  “Maisie—”

  “His name was Jack Phillips, and the captain told him he could stop. ‘At a time like this, it’s every man for himself,’ he said, but he just kept on sending.”

  “Maisie,” Joanna said seriously, “if you’re going to help me, you can’t tell me things about the Titanic, just the answers to my questions. Not anything else. It’s important. Do you understand?”

  “Uh-huh,” Maisie said. “Because of confabulation, right?”

  She is entirely too smart, Joanna thought. “Yes. Telling me things could contaminate the project. Do you think you can do that? Just tell me the answers and nothing else?”

  “Uh-huh. Can I tell you stuff not about the Titanic?”

  “Of course,” Joanna said. “Is that why you called me, because you had something to tell me?”

  “Well, ask you, really,” Maisie said, and Joanna braced herself. “What if Mercy General burned down?”

  And where did this come from? Joanna wondered. “The alarms would go off, and we’d get all the patients outside,” Joanna said. “And there’s a sprinkler system that comes on automatically.”

  “No, I know that,” Maisie said. “I mean, what about their ID bracelets? They’re plastic. If the hospital burned up, they’d melt and nobody would know who they are.”

  The hospital bracelet again. This has to do with Little Miss 1565, Joanna thought. Maisie’s afraid she’ll die and no one will identify her. But everyone in the hospital knew her, she was surrounded by family and friends. Why was she worried about that? Was she taking a small and manageable worry and making it stand for the things that were really worrying her, a metaphor for fears she was too frightened to face? Like loss of identity?

  Which is the thing everyone’s afraid of when it comes to death, Joanna thought. Not judgment or separation or the fires of hell, but the idea of not existing. That’s why everyone likes Mr. Mandrake’s Other Side, Joanna thought. It isn’t because it promises light and warm, fuzzy feelings. It’s because it promises that, even though the heart has stopped and the body shut down, you won’t suffer the fate of Little Miss 1565. That the people gathered at the gate will know who you are, and so will you.

  “Your doctor ID would burn right up, too,” Maisie was saying. She pointed at Joanna’s hospital ID hanging from its woven lanyard. “They should be metal.”

  Like dog tags, Joanna thought.

  “So, what else do you want me to find out?” Maisie said, as if the matter had been settled. “Do you want me to write down the wireless messages he sent to the different ships?”

  “No, just the name of the ships,” Joanna said and then thought of something. “And the call letters of the Titanic.”

  “I don’t have to look that up. I already know. It’s MGY, because—” she said, and then stopped.

  “Because why?” Joanna asked, but Maisie didn’t answer. She folded her arms and stared belligerently at Joanna.

  “Maisie?” she asked. “What’s the matter?”

  “You told me I was supposed to tell you the answer and not anything else.”

  “You’re right, I did. That’s just what I wanted.” Only what I really wanted was the call letters to be CQD, not MGY.

  “Okay, what else?” Maisie said.

  “That’s all, just the call letters and the names of the ships,” Joanna said.

  “That’s hardly anything,” Maisie protested. “It’ll take me about five minutes. Don’t you have anything else you want me to find out?”

  It was tempting to ask her about the Morse lamp. She’d have the answer more promptly even than Kit, and Joanna knew Maisie could keep a secret. She was a master at it. But she also wouldn’t be able to resist saying, “Did you know . . . ?” “I need to know about the Carpathia,” Joanna said, deciding. The Carpathia hadn’t shown up on the scene until well after the Titanic had gone down, so information about it couldn’t contaminate her NDEs, and there was a ton of information on the Carpathia. It should keep Maisie occupied for days.

  “Car-pa-thia,” Maisie said, writing it down. “What do you need to know?”

  “Everything,” Joanna told her. “Where it was, when it found out the Titanic was in trouble and what it did, and how it picked up the survivors.”

  “And who they were,” Maisie said, writing busily. “I know who one of them was. Mr. Ismay.” Her tone conveyed contempt. “He was the owner guy, but he didn’t even try to save people, he just climbed in one of the lifeboats even though the men weren’t supposed to, it was supposed to be women and children first, and saved himself, the big coward. Everybody else was really brave, though, like—”

  “Mai
sie,” Joanna warned. “Only the answers I asked for.”

  “Okay,” Maisie said. “Can I tell you what Molly Brown said to Mr. Ismay? She was on the Carpathia when she said it.”

  “All right,” Joanna said, thinking, Maybe I should have picked the Californian. It didn’t have any contact with the Titanic at all. “What did Molly Brown say?”

  “She went up to Mr. Ismay,” Maisie said, putting her hands on her hips, “and said, ‘Where I come from, we’d string you up on the nearest pine tree.’ And I think they should’ve. The big coward.”

  “Maybe he was afraid,” Joanna said, thinking of her own panicked flight down the slanting stairs and into the passage.

  “Well, of course he was afraid,” Maisie said. “He still should have tried to save Lorrai—” She bit off the word. “I was going to say somebody’s name,” she said virtuously, “but you said just the answer, so I didn’t.”

  “Good girl,” Joanna said, looking at her watch. It was nearly two. “I have to go.” She stood up.

  “I’ll page you when I find out stuff,” Maisie said, pulling The Child’s Titanic out from under the covers.

  “No,” Joanna said, envisioning Maisie paging her every fifteen minutes. “Don’t page me till you know all the ships.”

  “Okay,” Maisie said, opening her book, and, amazingly, didn’t try to stop Joanna from leaving.

  I need to get down to see Mr. Ortiz, she thought, going through Peds, but instead she went back down to the hearing center. The group of volunteers had dwindled to four, but Mr. Wojakowski was still there. Joanna had the feeling he stayed for the company even when he was no longer needed.

  “Well, hiya, Doc,” he said when he saw her, sounding genuinely surprised and pleased, and she wondered, ashamed, if he realized how she tried to avoid him.

  I have no business asking him a favor, she thought, but this was for Maisie, and if he didn’t know, he could just say so. And how can he know? she thought. He probably wasn’t even in the navy. He made all this up, remember?

  “Ed, you were in the navy. Do you know where I could get a set of dog tags made? It’s for a friend of mine.”

  “Well, now, that’s a tough one,” he said, taking off his baseball cap and scratching his head. “During the war you got ’em when you signed up. They stamped ’em out with a hand press, looked like a cross between a typewriter and a credit card machine, and hung ’em around your neck straight out of the showers, before they even issued you your uniform. I says to the CO, ‘Don’t we need pants more’n dog tags?’ and he says, ‘You might get killed before you get your pants on and we’d need to know who you are,’ and Fritz Krauthammer says, ‘Hell, if I’m killed without pants on, I don’t want anybody to know who I am!’ Fritz was a card. One time—”

  “Do you know where I could get dog tags nowadays? They wouldn’t have to be real ones.”

  “You used to be able to get ’em made at the dime store or the train station.” He scratched his head again. “I’ll have to give it some thought. What would you want on ’em?”

  “Just a name,” she said, taking her notebook out of her cardigan pocket. “And it wouldn’t have to look like dog tags. Just a name tag on a chain that goes around the neck. Metal,” she added. She printed Maisie’s name, tore the sheet out of the notebook, and handed it to Mr. Wojakowski.

  “I’ll ask around,” he said doubtfully. “You sometimes can find stuff you never thought you could. Did I ever tell you about the time I had to ditch my Wildcat and ended up on Malakula?”

  Yes, Joanna thought, but she had just asked him a favor. She owed him one, and she knew what it was like when no one would listen to your stories, or believe you. So she sat down on one of the plastic chairs and listened to the whole thing: the escape in a dugout canoe, the drifting at sea for days, the Yorktown steaming up, flags flying, sailors hallooing, to save him, “just like Jesus Christ Himself, raised from the dead,” and she had to admit that, true or not, it was a great story.

  Mr. Wojakowski walked Joanna to the elevator. “I’ll see what I can do about these dog tags. How soon do you need ’em?”

  “Soon,” Joanna said, thinking of Maisie’s thin wrist, her blue lips.

  “It’s too bad Chick Upchurch isn’t still around. Did I ever tell you about Chick? Machinist’s mate on the Old Yorky, and he could make anything, and I do mean anything,” Mr. Wojakowski said, and she had to practically shut his hand in the elevator to get away from him, though he didn’t seem put out.

  Neither did Mr. Ortiz, even though he had three drains in him, two of which had already had to be replaced. “I don’t care. I feel better than I have in two years,” he said. “They should’ve thought of this before.”

  He was happy to talk to Joanna. “It’s still as real to me today as it was two years ago,” he said, and described it for her in detail: floating near the ceiling of the operating room, tunnel, light, the Virgin Mary radiating light, dead relatives waiting to welcome him to heaven.

  Maybe Mr. Mandrake’s right, Joanna thought, listening to him describe his life review, and what I’m seeing isn’t a real NDE at all. Certainly no one else has seen a postal clerk dragging a sack of wet mail up a carpeted staircase.

  “And then I had this feeling like it was time to go back,” Mr. Ortiz said, “and I went back down the tunnel, and at the end of it was the operating room.”

  “Can you be more specific?” Joanna said. “About the feeling?”

  “It was like a tug,” he said, but the gesture he made with his hand was of a shove. “I can’t describe it.”

  Joanna consulted her notes. “Can you tell me how the Virgin Mary looked?”

  “She was dressed in white. She had this light radiating from her,” he said, and this time the gesture matched his words,“like diamonds.” She asked him several more questions and then shut off the recorder and thanked him for his time.

  “I’m not really all that interested in near-death experiences,” he said. “My real interest is in dreams. Is your project involved with dream imagery at all?”

  “No,” Joanna said and stood up.

  Mr. Ortiz nodded. “Most scientists are too hidebound and narrow-minded to believe in dreams. Analyzing the images in your dreams can cure cancer, did you know that?”

  “No.”

  Mr. Ortiz nodded wisely. “If you dream of a shark, that means cancer. A rope means death. If you want to tell me one of your dreams, I can analyze it right now.”

  “I have an appointment,” Joanna said, and escaped.

  Is everybody a nutcase? she wondered, going back up to her office. Dream imagery. But once in her office, going over the transcripts of the multiple NDEs, she began wondering if dream imagery might be the key. Not Mr. Ortiz’s brand, of course, where images were assigned arbitrary meanings: a snake means sex, a book means an unexpected visitor. That was only a kind of glorified fortune-telling.

  And Freudian dream analysis wasn’t much better. It tried to reduce everything to basic sexual desires and fears when dreaming was actually much more complex. Some imagery in dreams was lifted directly from the events of the day before, some from underlying worries and concerns, some from outside stimuli, like an alarm clock, and some from the neurochemicals generated during REM sleep, most particularly acetylcholine, which Richard had said was elevated during NDEs.

  It was acetylcholine that made connections between the inputted data and long-term memory, connections the dreaming mind expressed sometimes directly and sometimes symbolically, so that the alarm clock’s ringing was transformed into a siren or a scream, and it, the Pop-Tart you had for breakfast, and the patient you were worried about all became incorporated into a single dream narrative. And it was possible, taking all those things into consideration, to analyze the content of the dream. Which was what Richard had been doing when he’d said the acetylcholine made the Titanic as likely an association as a hospital walkway, but he had been talking about the NDE as a whole, not the individual images within it.


  Joanna hadn’t thought of analyzing those in terms of dream imagery, partly because the NDE didn’t feel like a dream and partly because some of the imagery—the light and the tunnel—was obviously direct manifestations of the stimuli. But that didn’t mean all of them were. What if some of them were symbolic interpretations of what was happening in the NDE?

  Could that be why she kept remembering Mr. Briarley’s lecture on metaphors, because the images in the NDE were metaphors? She had focused all her attention on trying to find out what Mr. Briarley had said, but maybe the connection was in the NDE itself, hidden in what she was seeing and hearing.

  She called up the transcript of her last time under and began going through it line by line. Some things were obviously direct representations of temporal-lobe stimuli. The lights from the Morse lamp and the deck lights and the light spilling out from the gymnasium and bridge obviously were, and she wondered if all the instances of white clothing—gloves, nightgown, steward’s white jacket—weren’t, too.

  Some of the images were clearly taken directly from the Titanic—the lifeboats, the passengers out on deck, the deck chairs—and still others from her waking life—Greg Menotti and the red sneaker, and maybe even the blanket, though that could also be from the illustration on the cover of A Night to Remember.

  Which left the details that couldn’t be attributed to the Titanic or the temporal lobe and therefore might be significant: Jack Phillips’s tapping out CQD instead of MGY, the mail clerk dragging the wet sack of mail up the stairs, the stairs themselves, similar to the Grand Staircase and yet lacking the cherub and Honour and Glory, the location of the gymnasium, the mechanical camel. If they were symbols, they were much more subtle ones than “snake equals sex.”

  If they were symbols. There was no point in trying to decipher them if in fact they were something that had come from her memories of the Titanic. She needed to have Kit find out. She made a list of things she needed to know and then called Kit. Mr. Briarley answered. “Do you have a hall pass?” he demanded, and when she told him she needed to speak to Kit, “ ‘He cut a rope from a broken spar and bound her to the mast.’ ”