Connie Willis - Passage

I need evidence, she thought. The testimony of witnesses, but there weren’t any—except herself—and Richard had already rejected that. Amelia refused to testify, Mrs. Troudtheim refused even to go under, and Carl Aspinall was in a coma. There was Mr. Briarley, but why on earth would Richard believe the ramblings of an Alzheimer’s patient, even if she could get Mr. Briarley to repeat them? There must be some outside confirmation she could get, like the facts about Midway and the Coral Sea that she had used to prove Mr. Wojakowski was lying.

As if she had conjured him up, or, worse, was hallucinating, she saw Mr. Wojakowski coming toward her across the cafeteria, carrying his baseball cap in his hand and smiling broadly. “Hiya, Doc, what are you doing here?” he said. “Ain’t you supposed to be at the hospital?”

“What am I doing here?” Joanna said. “What are you doing here?”

“Art show,” he said and grimaced. “Damn modern stuff made out of wires and toilet seats. Aspen Gardens brought a bunch of us over in a van to see it.” He waved his cap in the direction of the serving line, where Joanna saw several blue-haired ladies getting coffee. “Did you get that schedule worked out yet?”

“No,” Joanna said. “Not yet.”

“I figured that. I been calling you and the doc all week. I was starting to feel like Norm Pichette. Thought I was going to have to get me a machine gun.”

Joanna looked at him, startled, but he was grinning amiably at her.

“I guess I never told you about how he got accidentally left behind when we abandoned the Yorktown. He was down in sick bay, and when he wakes up, there’s nobody on board but him and George Weise, who’s got a skull fracture and who’s out cold. Well, everybody’s already been transferred to the Hammann and the Hughes.”

He can’t be making it up, Joanna thought all over again. Not with all these details. Part of it has to be true.

“He calls over to us, but we can’t hear him, we’re too far away. Well, he tries everything—he hollers and waves his arms.” Mr. Wojakowski demonstrated, waving his arms over his head like a semaphore. “He even gets a stew pot out of the galley and bangs on it, but we’re too far away and there’s too much going on. So there he is, on a ship that’s going down and no way to get a message to anybody.”

“Mr. Wojakowski—” she said, but he was off again.

“So what does he do? He takes a machine gun and fires it into the water. We’re too far away to hear it, but Meatball Fratelli sees the splashes in the water and shouts, ‘Sub!’ and everybody looks, but we can’t figure out what it is. It’s not a sub, and it doesn’t act like a depth charge, and then I look up, and there he is, standing on the port catwalk. Pretty smart of him, huh, figuring out a way to get a message to us like that?”

“Mr. Wojakowski, I have a question I need to ask you.”

“Ed.”

Why am I asking this? she thought. It will just remind him of another Yorktown story, and even if he did answer it, Richard would hardly believe someone who was a compulsive liar.

“Go ahead, Doc, shoot,” Mr. Wojakowski said.

“Mr. Wo—Ed,” she said, “during your interviews, you talked a lot about World War II. Was there something in your NDEs that made you think of your war experiences?”

“On the Yorktown, you mean?” He took off his baseball cap and scratched his freckled head. “Not that I can think of.”

The one time I want him to come up with a story, she thought, and he lets me down.

“Nothing in particular, Doc,” he said. “Sorry.”

“That’s okay,” she said and gathered up her belongings. “I just wondered.”

He put his baseball cap back on. “You mean besides that I was on a ship, right?”

“You were on a ship?” Joanna said carefully. “What ship?”

“I don’t know,” Mr. Wojakowski said. “Not the Yorktown. I knew every inch of her, and this was an alleyway I’d never seen before. And the door wasn’t like the ones we had. It was more like the door you’d see on the captain’s cabin. Which reminds me of the time I went to ask the captain somethin’, and who do I see coming out of his cabin but Stinkpot Malone. Now, Stinky can’t be up to anything but no good, he’s the biggest stool pigeon in the whole U.S. Navy, and that’s going some. So, anyway, Stinky sees me and he says—”

“What makes you think it was a ship?” Joanna cut in.

“You ever been on board?” he said. “Once you have, you can’t mistake that feeling for anything else. You’d know it even if you was blindfolded and had earplugs on. Which, come to think of it, I guess I was.”

“But you couldn’t tell what ship?”

“Nope,” he said. “It was a navy ship, that’s all I know, ’cause I could see sailors outside the door.”

“You could see sailors?”

“People, anyway. I thought they were sailors. The light was too bright to make out much, but I could see they had their dress whites on, so I figured they must be sailors.”

A ship, and people outside the door, dressed all in white.

“You said it felt like you were at sea. Were the engines going?”

“The engines?” he said, surprised. “No,” and the blue-haired ladies came up, looking determined.

“The van is waiting, Edward,” one of them said, glaring at Joanna.

“Be right with you,” Mr. Wojakowski said. “You gals go on. I gotta say good-bye to my girlfriend here.” He winked at Joanna. The ladies moved off a few steps and then stood there, waiting impatiently. “What other questions you got, Doc?”

“Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

“Well, I’ll tell ya, I didn’t want to just yammer on like Edgewise Eggleton. Did I ever tell you about him? We called him that ’cause when you were around him you couldn’t ever get a word in edgewise, and—”

“You’d better go,” Joanna said, indicating the ladies, who looked like they were about to have a stroke. “You don’t want the van to go without you.”

“I’d never hear the end of it,” he said and sighed. “You call me as soon as you get that schedule set, Doc. I can come in anytime.” He sauntered over to the women and then came back. “I just got to thinking. It might’ve been the Franklin. I don’t know how she went down, though.”

“Went down?”

“No, come to think of it, it couldn’ta been the Hammann, because her back got broken. And not the Wasp because she went belly up, and the Lexington was clear over on her side, and this ship, whatever she was, was going down by the head.”

And there it was, her outside confirmation. It wouldn’t convince Richard. It wouldn’t convince anyone, not with Mr. Wojakowski’s record, but it was still evidence that she was on the right track. And where there was some evidence, there was more. She just had to find it.

She drove back to the hospital and spent the rest of the day and all of the next barricaded in her office, going through the transcripts. She switched her pager off, but kept the phone on and let the answering machine pick up, mostly so she could keep track of Mr. Mandrake.

He called at two-hour intervals, becoming more and more irritated that he couldn’t corner her. “If you can’t make time to return my calls,” he huffed and puffed, “you should at least go hear what Mrs. Davenport has to say about the visions she’s been having. They prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that messages can be sent from beyond the grave.”

Joanna erased the message, taped black paper along the bottom of the door so light couldn’t be seen from the outside, and went back to reading transcripts: