Connie Willis - Passage

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.”