Connie Willis - Passage

Joanna gave up. Please don’t let it be Mr. Mandrake, she prayed, and called the operator.

“Call the fourth floor nurses’ station, stat,” the operator said. “Extension 428.”

Fourth floor. Coma Carl, she thought, and realized she had known this call was coming.

Zaneta was pushing a memo pad and pencil toward her. Joanna ignored it and punched in the extension. Guadalupe answered. “What is it, Guadalupe?” Joanna said. “Is it Coma Carl?”

“Yes, I’ve been trying to reach you. You haven’t seen Mrs. Aspinall, have you? We can’t find her anywhere,” and her stunned and shaken voice told Joanna all she needed to know.

“When did he die?” she said, thinking of him, all alone out there in a lifeboat, humming.

“Die?” Guadalupe said in that same stunned voice. “He didn’t. He’s awake.”

Guadalupe was at the nurses’ station, talking on the phone, when Joanna arrived. “Is he really awake?” Joanna asked, leaning over the counter.

Guadalupe put a hand up, signaling her to wait. “Yes. I’m trying to reach Dr. Cherikov,” she said into the receiver. “Well, can I speak to his nurse? It’s important.” She cupped her hand over the mouthpiece. “Yes, he’s really awake,” she said to Joanna, “and wouldn’t you know it, we can’t find his doctor. Or his wife. You didn’t happen to see Mrs. Aspinall on your way up here, did you?”

“No,” Joanna said. “Have you tried the cafeteria?”

“I’ve got an aide checking,” Guadalupe said. “Mrs. Aspinall’s been here day and night for two weeks, and she always tells us when she’s leaving. Except today. How long does it take to call his nurse to the phone?” she said impatiently.

“Has Carl said anything?” Joanna asked.

“He asked to see his wife,” Guadalupe said. “And he said he was hungry, but we can’t give him anything to eat because we don’t have any orders, and we can’t find his doctor. He isn’t answering his page.”

“Has he said anything about the coma?”

She shook her head. “Most coma patients—yes,” she said into the phone. “This is Guadalupe Santos over at Mercy General. I need to talk to Dr. Cherikov. It’s urgent. It’s about his patient Carl Aspinall.” There was a pause. “No,” Guadalupe said, and her tone made Joanna think the nurse had asked if he’d died, like she had. “He’s conscious.”

She cupped her hand over the receiver again and said to Joanna, “Paula went in to check his vitals about half an hour ago. She opened the curtains, and he said, ‘It isn’t dark.’ Scared her half to death—I’ve been trying his pager,” she said into the phone. “Do you know where he went?”

She turned back to Joanna. “Most patients have very fuzzy memories of the time they spent in a semicomatose state, if that.”

And those memories will only get fuzzier with every moment that passes, Joanna thought, glancing in the direction of his room. I need to get in there now. “Can he have visitors?” she asked.

Guadalupe frowned. “I don’t know who’s in with—yes,” she said into the phone. “Harvest?” She grabbed a pen and jotted something down on a prescription pad. “Please have him call me as soon as he gets back.”

She hung up. “Dr. Cherikov is at lunch,” she said disgustedly, reaching for a phone book. “At the Harvest or Sfuzzi’s. He has them both written down on his calendar.” She began searching through the phone book. “Carl’s wife probably went to lunch, too. Harvest, Harvest.”

Joanna glanced toward his room again. She had to get in there and talk to him before his wife and Dr. Cherikov descended, but if they had somebody in there with him, and surely they did, a patient who’d just regained consciousness would hardly be left alone—

The elevator dinged, and Guadalupe and Joanna both looked down at where a nurse’s aide was emerging from the open doors. “Did you find her?” Guadalupe asked.

The aide walked toward them, shaking her head. “She wasn’t in the cafeteria. What about paging her?”

Guadalupe shook her head. “We don’t want to scare her half to death. We just want to get her up here.” She picked up the phone.

“What about the chapel?” Joanna asked.

“Corinne’s checking it,” Guadalupe said. She punched in a phone number, looking back and forth from it to the phone book. “Did you check the gift shop?” she asked the aide.

The aide nodded. “And the vending machines.”

“Did you check—This is Nurse Santos at Mercy General. I’m trying to locate Dr. Anton Cherikov. He’s having lunch there.” Pause. “No, I can’t page him.” Pause. “Well, would you please look? It’s an emergency.” She cupped her hand over the receiver again. “Did you check the solarium?” she said to the aide.

Neither of them was paying any attention to Joanna. She stepped away from the nurses’ station and, when Guadalupe glanced up, pointed to her watch and waved slightly. “I’ve checked everywhere,” the aide said. “I’ll bet she went home.”

“We’ve already called,” Guadalupe said. “She’s not there. I left a message.”

“Won’t that scare her, too?” the aide asked.

Joanna walked rapidly down the hall, on past Carl’s room, till she was out of sight of the nurses’ station. She stopped, waited. “You’re sure he’s not there?” Guadalupe said, and there was the sound of a phone being hung up, and a brief silence. “How do you spell Sfuzzi’s?”

“Sfuzzi’s? I don’t know. What is it?”

“A restaurant.”

More silence. Joanna came quietly back up the hall till she could see the nurses’ station. Guadalupe and the aide were both bent over the counter, looking at the open phone book. Joanna ducked quickly, silently across the hall to Carl’s room.

All I need is a minute, she thought, looking in the door. There wasn’t a nurse in the room. She slipped in. All I need is to ask him whether he was on the Titanic, she thought, pulling the door nearly shut. Before he forgets, before—

“Hello,” a voice said from the bed. She turned and looked at the gray-haired man sitting up in the bed, wearing blue pajamas. “Who are you?” he asked.

For a long, heart-pounding minute, she thought, I’ve sneaked in the wrong room, and how am I going to explain this to Guadalupe? How am I going to explain this to Richard?

“Did they find my wife?” the man asked, and she saw, like one of those trick pictures shifting suddenly into focus, that it was Coma Carl.

It was not that he looked like a different person. It was that he looked like a person where before he had been an empty shell. His concave chest, his thin arms looked filled out, as if he had gained weight, even though that was impossible, and his face, covered with the same gray stubble, looked occupied, like a house where the owners have suddenly come home. His gray-brown hair, which the aides had kept neatly combed back off his forehead, was parted on the side and fell almost boyishly over his forehead, and his eyes, which she had always thought were gray through the half-open slits, were dark brown.

She was gaping at him like an idiot. “I…” she said, trying to remember what he had asked her.

“Are you one of my doctors?” he asked, looking at her lab coat.

“No,” she said. “I’m Joanna Lander. Do you remember me, Mr. Aspinall?”

He shook his head. “I don’t remember very much,” he said. His voice was different, too, still hoarse, but much stronger, deeper than his murmurings. “I was in a coma, you know.”