Connie Willis - Passage

Joanna had no idea how to answer that, but Kit didn’t seem to require an answer. “Let me go get the book,” she said, and went into the library. She was back out in less than a minute, quietly closing the door behind her. “Uncle Pat’s dozing,” she whispered, motioning Joanna to follow her down the hall to the kitchen. “He’ll wake up again in a few minutes. I want to let him sleep if he can. He had a bad night last night.”

A bad night. He had dismantled the kitchen again, more completely than before. Dishes and silverware were everywhere, and the entire contents of the refrigerator sat on the floor. A full roll of paper towels was draped over, under, among the canisters and cookie sheets and china. A smashed bottle of ketchup lay on the counter, leaking red into the sink. A dustpan of broken glass sat on the table, and the wastebasket was nearly full of it.

“Uncle Pat was looking for the book,” Kit said, taking two teacups off a tottering stack. “I think he must have had a vague memory of having put it somewhere in the kitchen, and that’s why he kept doing this.”

She stepped over a head of lettuce to the sink to fill the two cups. “I’m so glad you were able to come over. I’m positive this time it’s the right book. It’s blue, just like you said, and it’s got all the things you said it had on it.” She put the cups in the microwave and punched buttons. “They’re inside these gray panels that I think are supposed to be mirrors—”

Mazes and Mirrors, Joanna thought, and could see the mirrors, set at an angle, with different pictures in each one—a bottle of ink and a quill pen, and Queen Elizabeth, whom Ricky Inman had drawn a mustache and glasses on, and the carved prow of the caravel, plowing through the blue water.

Kit said, looking under a pile of potholders, “One of them has a ship, just like you said, and a—”

“—castle and a crown on a red velvet pillow,” Joanna said. “It’s definitely the right one.”

“Oh, good!” Kit clapped her hands. “Now, if I can do as good a job finding the teabags…” She looked under an unsteady tower of cereal boxes and spices.

“How far away was the Carpathia from the Titanic?” Joanna said.

“The ship that came to the Titanic’s aid?” Kit asked. “I don’t know. I’ll look it up.” She set a tin of cinnamon down and started for the door, stepping over a broiler pan, a jar of olives, and a carton of eggs. “Be right back.”

She pattered down the hall and up the stairs and back down almost immediately, carrying a stack of books. “I checked on Uncle Pat. He’s still asleep,” she said, clearing a space on the table to set the books down. “Let’s see,” she said, opening the top book to the index. “ Carpathia, Carpathia. Here it is, fifty-eight miles.”

“Are you sure?” Joanna said. And of course she was sure. You knew it the minute Maisie said it. You were kidding yourself that you needed outside confirmation.

“It’s right here,” Kit said. “ ‘Fifty-eight miles southwest of the Titanic when she received its first SOS,’ ” she read, “ ‘the Carpathia came at full steam, but arrived too late to take passengers off the ship.’ ” She closed the book to look at the cover. “That’s The Titanic: Symbol for Our Time. Do you want me to double-check it in something else?”

“No,” Joanna said. “No.”

“What is it? Are you all right, Joanna?”

“No.”

“This has something to do with your NDE,” Kit said anxiously, “doesn’t it?”

“No,” Joanna said. “With somebody else’s.”

She told her about Greg Menotti’s last words, and the nagging feeling that she should know what they meant, about Maisie telling her. “He was talking about the Carpathia,” she said.

“And so you think that means he was seeing the Titanic in his NDE, too?”

“Yes. But why would he see the same imagery I saw?” Joanna asked. “The RIPT scans show that the NDEs get their imagery from long-term memory. Those memory patterns are different for every subject. So why would the two of us have identical NDEs? Why would he see the Titanic?”

“Are you sure he did?” Kit said. “I mean, fifty-eight could mean lots of different things. Addresses, PIN numbers—how old was he?”

“Thirty-four,” Joanna said. “It wasn’t his blood pressure or his cell phone number or his locker combination. It was miles. He said, ‘Too far for her to come.’ He was talking about the Carpathia. I’m sure of it. He was on board the Titanic, just like I was.”

“Or—there’s another possibility, you know,” Kit said thoughtfully. “You said he had the same NDE as you. Maybe that’s not right. Maybe it’s the other way around.”

“The other way around?” Joanna said. “What do you mean?”

“Remember how you told me everybody sees tunnels and lights and relatives because that’s what they’ve been programmed to expect? And how Mr. Mandrake influences all of his subjects to see the Angel of Light?”

Joanna nodded, unable to see where this was going.

“Well, what if, when you heard this patient say, ‘Fifty-eight,’ your subconscious connected it to the Titanic, because of all the stories Uncle Pat told you, and that was why when you went under, you saw the Titanic? Because he’d influenced you. He could have been talking about anything, but you connected it to the Carpathia.”

It made perfect sense. She had been steeled against seeing the relatives and angels and life reviews everyone else reported. But that didn’t mean she hadn’t had expectations. She’d spent the last two years watching her subjects’ expressions, and their body language, trying to find out what their near-death experiences were like. “Oh, no, oh, no, oh, no,” Amelia had said, and Mrs. Woollam had held her Bible to her frail chest and said, “How can it not be frightening?”

And during the period right before she’d gone under, she had been thinking about Greg Menotti, worrying over what he’d said, trying to make sense of it. She had thought “fifty-eight” sounded familiar. Her subconscious mind must have remembered that was how far away the Carpathia had been and triggered the other memories, triggered the NDE and the reference to Mr. Briarley, and it wasn’t the engines stopping that was the connection she’d been trying to remember, it was Mr. Briarley saying, “The Carpathia was fifty-eight miles away, too far for her to come in time.”

“That has to be it,” Joanna said. “It makes perfect sense.”

“But how does the book fit into it?” Kit asked. “I’ll bet it has a poem or something in it about the Carpathia and if it does, that will prove it,” she said excitedly. “This is just like a detective story.” She put down the book and began threading her way through the pans and groceries. “I’ll go get it.”

“I don’t want you to disturb Mr. Bri—”

“I’ll be quiet. Be right back,” she said and went down the hall.

Joanna picked up The Titanic: Symbol for Our Time and looked at the picture of the half-sinking ship with a rocket bursting above it. If Greg Menotti had been the influence for her NDE, then that would explain why he was in it. And Mr. Briarley—

“Oh, no!” Kit said from the study, and Joanna stood up quickly, knocking her knee against the table leg as she did. A stack of plates slid toward the edge, and a half-dozen dinner knives went onto the floor with a clatter.

Joanna dived for the plates and moved them back from the edge. “What’s wrong?” she called to Kit, maneuvering the maze of pans and salad-dressing bottles between her and the door.