Passage

  Denial, and then worry. The doctor’s scheduled an exploratory, the CAT scan shows progressive degeneration of cortical nerve cells, the deck is starting to list. But there’s still no indication that it’s really serious. There’s certainly no need for your brother to come, no need to put on a lifejacket or draw up a will, not with the decks still lit and the band still playing.

  More denial, and then a frantic rush for the lifeboats, for chemotherapy, for a clinic in Mexico, and then, with the boats all gone, good-byes and a desperate clinging to deck chairs, religion, positive thinking, Mr. Mandrake’s books, a light at the end of the tunnel. But nothing works, nothing holds, because the whole ship is coming apart, breaking up, crashing—that’s why they call it a crash cart, Joanna thought suddenly—the body’s crashing, going under, going down, and the Titanic isn’t just a mirror image of dying, but of what happened to the body, because it didn’t die all at once any more than the person did, but by stages, the breathing coming to a stop, and then the heart and the blood in the veins, one watertight compartment after another flooding and spilling over into the next: cerebral cortex, medulla, brain stem, all faltering and flickering out, and in their final moments seeing their own end. The ship going down by the head.

  But taking forever to sink, the eyes’ pupils dilating even as they dulled in a doomed effort to keep the lights on. Some cells surviving for hours, the liver still metabolizing, the bones still manufacturing marrow like stokers down below in the engine room still working to fire the boilers, to keep the dynamos going, unaware that the ship has already foundered. Sinking slowly at first and then faster, the body growing darker by degrees, and colder.

  “I shall never forget it, the darkness and the cold,” Joanna thought, shivering. She was sitting in her car in the hospital parking lot, her hands numb on the steering wheel. She wondered how long she had sat there, staring unseeing at the hospital, at the gray sky.

  A long time. It was getting dark out, the gray of the sky deepening, closing in, and lights had come on in nearly all the hospital windows. At some point she must have turned off the engine because the car was icy. She couldn’t feel her feet. You’ll catch your death, she thought, and got out of the car and went into the hospital. It was bright inside, the fluorescents making her squint as she opened the door. At the far end of the hall, framed in the blinding light, she could see a woman in a white coat and a white knitted cap and a man in a dark suit.

  Mr. Mandrake, Joanna thought. She had forgotten all about him.

  “But he’s going to be all right, isn’t he?” the woman asked, a quaver in her voice.

  “We’re doing everything we can,” the man said.

  A doctor, not Mr. Mandrake, but Joanna ducked into the nearest stairway anyway and started up to the lab.

  “We’re doing everything we can,” the doctor had said, but there wasn’t anything anybody could do. Only now that all hope of it was gone, did Joanna realize how badly she had wanted the NDE to be a physical phenomenon, a survival mechanism, how badly she had wanted to present Richard triumphantly with the solution to the puzzle. How badly she had wanted to tell Maisie, “We’ve got a new treatment.”

  But that had always been wildly unlikely. Medical discoveries and actual treatments were years, sometimes decades,apart, and the person who had inspired the research hardly ever benefited from it. She, of all people, should know that. After the Titanic, legislation had been passed shifting the shipping lanes farther south, mandating twenty-four-hour wireless operation, requiring lifeboats for everyone on board. All too late, too late for the fifteen hundred lost souls.

  And even if the NDE had been a survival mechanism, there had been no guarantee that a treatment could have been developed from it. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t any kind of evolutionary defense mechanism at all, and her persistent feeling that it was, that she was on the verge of some significant medical discovery, had been wishful thinking, confabulation, chemically induced.

  It wasn’t a defense of the body against death. It was the reverse. It was coming face to face with death with no defenses at all, recognizing it in all its horror. And no wonder Mr. Mandrake and Mrs. Davenport and all the rest had opted for lights and relatives and angels. The real thing was too terrible to contemplate.

  She had arrived at the sixth floor. She put her hand out to open the stairway door and then let it drop. I can’t do this, she thought. There was no way she could stand by and watch Richard intentionally send Mr. Sage under. Into the mirror image of death.

  But if she told him that, he’d ask her what was wrong. And she couldn’t tell him. He’d be convinced she’d turned into a nutcase, like Seagal and Foxx. He’d accuse her of having been converted by Mr. Mandrake.

  I’ll make some excuse, she thought. I’ll tell him . . . but she couldn’t let him see her. Like Kit, he would take one look at her face and ask, “What’s wrong? What’s happened?” She would have to call him from her office. I’ll tell him I have a headache and am going home, she thought, heading back down the stairs. I’ll tell him we have to reschedule.

  There was a scrawled note taped to her office door. “Mr. Sage had to cancel,” Joanna read and felt a rush of relief. “He has the flu. Went to see Dr. [unintelligible] over at St. Anthony’s . . . ”

  The rest of the note was illegible. She couldn’t make out what Richard had gone over to St. Anthony’s about, or whether he was the one who had gone. Mr. Sage might have been the one who’d gone to see Dr. [unintelligible] about his flu. The only word she could make out was “Richard,” scrawled at the bottom of it. But it didn’t matter. All that mattered was that she’d had a reprieve.

  Down the hall behind her, the elevator dinged. Richard, she thought, or Mr. Mandrake. She fumbled for her keys, got them out. She could hear the elevator doors swoosh open. She got her key in the lock, turned it, put her hand on the knob.

  “Joanna,” Vielle called, and there was nothing for it but to turn around, smile, hope all Vielle wanted was to discuss Dish Night.

  No such luck. “Are you all right?” Vielle asked. She was wearing the worried expression she always had in the ER. “Did something happen? I saw you leaving the hospital in a taxi. I called to you, but you didn’t hear me, I guess. Where were you going?”

  Joanna looked anxiously down the hall. They shouldn’t stay out here talking. “I went over to Kit’s,” she said, opening the door and going into her office.

  “In a taxi?” Vielle said, right behind her. “Did your car break down? You could have borrowed mine.”

  “Mr. Mandrake was after me,” Joanna said and tried to smile lightly. “He had the parking lot staked out.”

  Vielle appeared to accept that. “How come you went over to Kit’s?”

  “I had to pick up a book,” Joanna said. Which she clearly didn’t have with her.

  “I got worried about you when I saw you weren’t wearing a coat,” Vielle said.

  “I told you, Mr. Mandrake was after me. I couldn’t even go back to my office to get my bag. It’s getting so he stalks me constantly. We’re going to have to start holding Dish Night underground,” she said, trying to change the subject. “Speaking of which, what night do you want to have it?”

  It didn’t work. “Are you sure you’re okay?” Vielle said. “The last couple of weeks you’ve seemed so distracted.”

  “I have been,” Joanna said. “My best friend’s still working in the ER, even though a drug-crazed maniac nearly shot her arm off.” She looked pointedly at Vielle’s bandaged arm. “How’d it go today? Any attempted murders?”

  “Okay, okay,” Vielle said, raising her hands in a gesture of surrender. “How about tomorrow night? For Dish Night? You tell Richard, and I’ll call Kit.”

  And Kit and Vielle will compare notes, will ask me why I left in such a hurry and what Mr. Briarley said. “I can’t,” Joanna said. “I’m swamped with interviews I’ve got to transcribe.” She sat down at her desk and switched on her computer to make the point. “There’s no way
I’m going to get home before ten any night this week. How about Saturday?”

  “Perfect. That way I can tell Harvey the Ghoul I’m busy. Did you know morticians inject mastic compounds in the corpse’s cheeks to make him look healthier?”

  “Saturday then?” Joanna asked, picking up a tape and sticking it in her minirecorder.

  “Well, I’ll let you get busy,” Vielle said, looking worried again. “I just wanted to make sure nothing was wrong.” At the door she turned. “I know this dithetamine is supposed to be harmless, but everything has side effects, even aspirin. Have you told Richard about-whatever it is that’s been worrying you?”

  I can’t tell Richard, Joanna thought. I can’t tell anybody, not even you. Especially not you. You deal with people dying every day. How could you bear it if you knew what happened to them afterward? She looked brightly up at Vielle. “There’s nothing worrying me,” she said, “except how I’m going to get all these tapes transcribed.”

  “I’d better let you get started on them then,” Vielle said, and smiled at her. “I just worry, you know.”

  “I know,” Joanna said, and as she went out the door, “Vielle—”

  But Vielle had already turned and was pulling the door sharply to behind her. “Mr. Mandrake just got off the elevator,” she whispered. “Lock the door and shut off your lights,” and ducked out, shutting the door behind her.

  Joanna dived for the light switch and then the lock. “She’s not here,” she could hear Vielle say. “I was just leaving her a note.”

  “Do you know when she’ll be back?” Mr. Mandrake’s voice said.

  “I sure don’t.”

  “I have something very important to tell her, and she does not answer her pages,” Mr. Mandrake said disapprovingly. “Did you say you left her a note? I think I’d better leave her one, too.”

  There were shuffling sounds, as if Vielle were trying to block his getting to the door, and then the knob rattled.

  “I must’ve accidentally locked it when I shut it,” Vielle said. “Sorry,” and then, from farther down the hall, “I’ll tell her you want to see her,” and the faint ding of the elevator.

  Joanna stood by the door, listening for the sound of Mr. Mandrake’s breathing, afraid to turn on the light for fear he was still waiting out there, ready to pounce, and then, after a while felt her way over to her desk and sat down, trying to think what to do.

  I’ll have to quit the project, she thought, make up some excuse, tell Richard I’m too busy, the project’s interfering with my own work. Quit and go back to—what? Interviewing people who had coded, knowing what she knew? Talking to Maisie, who was going to die before she got a new heart? To Kit, whose fiancé had gone down on the Titanic, whose uncle was trapped on it, sending up rockets no one could see? I can’t, she thought. She would have to leave the hospital altogether, go someplace else, get away. Like Ismay, she thought, sneaking off in a lifeboat. Leaving the women and children to drown. “He was such a big coward,” Maisie had said contemptuously, and Maisie certainly knew something about courage. She had been looking death squarely in the face for a long time and had never tried to run away.

  Only because she can’t, Joanna thought, but that was a lie. Look at Mr. Mandrake and Mrs. Davenport. And Maisie’s own mother. And Amelia.

  That’s why Amelia quit, Joanna thought, and it was like another revelation. She had thought at the time Amelia’s story of being worried about her grades wasn’t the whole truth, but she had assumed her quitting had had something to do with her crush on Richard. But it hadn’t. Amelia had recognized death, had murmured, “Oh, no, oh, no, oh, no,” and resigned from the project.

  But Amelia was only twenty-two. She was only a volunteer, not a partner. She hadn’t signed on to try and find out what NDEs were, and then, when she found out, panicked, lost her nerve, bolted for the nearest lifeboat. “ ‘Where I come from, we’d string you up on the nearest pine tree,’ ” Joanna murmured.

  But even if she stayed, even if she told Richard, what would that accomplish? Richard wouldn’t believe her. He’d think she’d turned into Bridey Murphy. He’d tell her she was having temporallobe delusions.

  All right then, make him believe you, she thought, and went over to the door, cracking her knee on the file cabinet, and switched on the light. Prove your theory. Collect evidence. Get outside confirmation. Starting with Amelia Tanaka.

  Joanna called Amelia that night and again the next morning, and asked her to come in. “I’m not in the project anymore,” she said, and Joanna thought she was going to hang up on her.

  “I know you’re not,” Joanna said quickly. “I just have a few questions I need to ask you about your sessions for our records. It’ll only take a few minutes.”

  “I’m really busy right now. I have three tests this week, and my biochem project’s due. I won’t have any time till after the end of the semester,” Amelia said, and this time did hang up.

  And did Joanna really need any more proof than that? Fear and reluctance had been in every word. Joanna went and got Amelia’s file out of the cabinet. On the questionnaire, Joanna had made her list not only her address but her class schedule, complete with buildings and room numbers. She had biochem tomorrow afternoon from one to two-forty.

  One o’clock tomorrow. And until then . . . Joanna stuck Amelia’s disk in the computer and started through her transcript,looking for clues. There weren’t any. Warmth, peace, a bright light, nothing at all about water or an up-curving floor or people standing out on the deck.

  No, wait. She had said, when Joanna asked her if the light had been there all the time, “ . . . not till after they opened the door.” Later, she had amended it to, “I just assumed somebody had opened a door because of the way the light spilled in,” but Joanna wondered if the first version was the true one.

  She read the rest of it. When she had asked Amelia her feelings, she had said, “Calm, quiet,” which might be a reference to the engines stopping, and she had complained after each session of being cold. All of which proved exactly nothing, except that you could find anything you tried to look for in an NDE, just like Mr. Mandrake.

  She took out Amelia’s disk, put in one of last year’s interviews, printed out half a dozen files, and started through them with a yellow marker, highlighting words and phrases. “I was lying in the ambulance, and all of a sudden I was out of my body. It was like there was a porthole in my body, and my soul just shot out of it.” Joanna highlighted the word porthole in yellow.

  “I felt like I was going on a long voyage.”

  “ . . . light all around,” Kathie Holbeck had said, looking up at the ceiling, and spread her hands out like a flower opening. Or a rocket going off. Ms. Isakson had done that, too. Joanna looked up her file. “All spangled,” she’d said. Like the starburst of a rocket.

  “My father was there, and I was so glad to see him. He was killed in the Solomons. On a PT boat.”

  Joanna tapped her marker thoughtfully on that one, thinking about Mr. Wojakowski and all his Yorktown stories. Could he have been reminded of them because he’d been on a ship?

  Mr. Wojakowski wasn’t reminded of anything, she thought. He made it all up. And even if he had been, it was hardly the sort of proof she could offer to Richard. She continued through the transcripts:

  “I heard a sound, but it was funny, like not really a sound at all, you know what I mean?”

  “It sounded exactly like something rolling over a whole bunch of marbles.” Marbles. She found Kit’s notes of the engines stopping. And there it was. “It was as if the ship had rolled over a thousand marbles,” passenger Ella White had said when asked what the iceberg sounded like.

  Joanna started through the transcripts again. “I was traveling through the tunnel, very fast, but smooth, like being in an elevator.”

  “I knew I was crossing the River Jordan.”

  She hadn’t lied to Vielle when she’d said she wouldn’t get home before ten. At half-past nine she was still only
halfway through the set of interviews. She shut the computer off, pulled on her coat, and then sat down, still in her coat, and switched it on again.

  She saved all of her interviews from the past two years onto a single file and then typed in “water” and hit “global search” and “display,” and watched them come up.

  “I felt like I was floating in the water.”

  “The light was warm and glimmery, like being underwater.”

  “ . . . being at the lake” (this from Pauline Underhill’s description of her life review), “where we used to go when I was little. I was in our old rowboat, and it was leaking, the water was coming in the side . . . ”

  Rowing on the lake, Joanna thought, and called up Coma Carl’s file, with its long list of isolated words and (unintelligible)’s.

  “Water,” and “placket” or “blanked out” or “black.” Or “blanket,” Joanna thought. She read through the rest of his file. “Dark” and “patches” and “cut the rope.” Cut the rope. The men up on top of the officers’ quarters, trying to cut the collapsibles loose as the water came up over the bow. She read on. “Water . . . cold? code? . . . oh, grand.” The Grand Staircase.

  She quit at one o’clock, went home, and read The Light at the End of the Tunnel till she fell asleep, dog-earing pages that had NDEs that mentioned “water” and “voyage” and “darkness.”

  In the morning, she went to see Coma Carl, hoping he might have begun talking again, but he had a feeding tube in and an oxygen mask. “He’s not having a very good day,” Mrs. Aspinall whispered, which was putting it mildly. He was a corpselike gray, and his thin chest, his skeletal arms and legs, seemed to be sinking into the bed, into death itself.

  “They can’t seem to keep his temperature down,” Mrs. Aspinall said, sounding near tears. She looked terrible, too. Dark gray shadows under her eyes and a general look of exhaustion. A pillow and a hospital blanket were stacked neatly on the windowsill, which meant that she was sleeping in the room. And getting no sleep at all.