Connie Willis - Passage

“No,” she said, but he was gripping her arm tightly, he was propelling her over to the davits.

“Wait for this young lady,” he called to the crewman in the boat.

“No,” Joanna said, “you don’t understand. I have to—”

“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” he said, and his grip on her arm was like iron, it was cutting off her circulation. “It’s perfectly safe.”

“No!” She wrenched free of him and ran down the deck, past the officer, as if he were still chasing her, past the band and into the foyer of the Grand Staircase, thinking, The elevator. The elevator will be faster.

She pushed the gold-and-ivory button. “Come on, come on,” she said, and pushed it again, but the arrow above the door didn’t move. She abandoned it and ran over to the head of the staircase, down the stairs to B Deck, C Deck, thinking, What if it’s blocked like he said?

It wasn’t. It was clear. “Again. Clear,” the resident said, and Joanna was in the emergency room and Vielle was holding her hand.

“I’ve got a pulse.”

“Vielle,” Joanna said, but Vielle wasn’t looking at her, she was looking at the aide who had come out in the hall that day they had the fight, she was telling her, “If he doesn’t answer his page, go get him. He’s in 602.”

“Vielle, tell Richard the NDE’s a distress call the dying brain sends out,” Joanna tried to say, but there was something in her mouth, choking her.

“He’s coming, Joanna,” Vielle said, holding tight to her hand. “Just hang on.”

“If Richard doesn’t get here in time, tell him the NDE’s a distress signal. It’s important,” Joanna tried to say around the choking thing in her throat. They’ve intubated me, she thought, panicked, and tried to pull it out, but it wasn’t an airway, it was blood. She was coughing it up and out of her, gallons and gallons of blood. “Who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?” It was pouring out of her, and all over Vielle and the resident and the nurse, choking her, drowning her.

“Help,” she cried, “I have to tell Richard. It’s an SOS,” but it wasn’t Vielle, it was the man with the mustache and she was back on the Boat Deck. The band was playing “Goodnight, Irene,” and the officer was loading Number 4.

“I want you to do something for me when you reach New York,” the mustached man was saying to Joanna, putting something in her hand.

She looked down at it. It was a note, written in a childish round cursive. “If saved,” it read, “please inform my sister Mrs. F. J. Adams of Findlay, Ohio. Lost. J. H. Rogers.”

“Please see that my sister gets this,” he said, closing her fingers over the note. “Tell her it’s from me.”

“But I’m not going to—” Joanna said, but he had already melted into the crowd, and the officer was headed toward her, calling, “Miss! Miss!” She jammed the note into her pocket and ran down the deck toward the aft staircase, darting between couples, past a pair of cheerleaders in purple-and-gold pleated skirts, between families saying good-bye.

“But he’s going to be all right, isn’t he?” a woman in a white coat and white knitted cap said to an officer.

The officer looked pityingly at her. “We’re doing everything we can.”

Joanna pushed past the woman, but the way to the aft staircase was mobbed with people in kerchiefs and cloth caps, fighting to get into the boats, and sailors trying to free the boats, trying to lower them. “You can’t get through this way!” the sailor who had worked the Morse lamp called to her. He jerked his thumb back toward the stern. “Try the second-class stairway,” and she turned and ran past the empty davits of the boats that had already been lowered, to the second-class stairway.

The door to the second-class stairway was standing open, her red tennis shoe lying on its side on the threshold. Joanna leaped over it and pelted down the stairs, past the A La Carte Restaurant, down the next flight, around the landing. And stopped.

Two steps below the landing, tied to the railings on either side, stretched a strip of yellow tape. “Crime Scene,” it said. “Do Not Cross.” And below it, submerging the stairs, pale blue, shiny as paint, the water.

“It’s underwater,” Joanna said, and sat down, holding on to the railing for support. “The passage is underwater.”

Maybe it’s just the stairway, she thought, maybe it hasn’t reached the passage, but of course it had. The second-class stairway was all the way in the stern, and the ship was going down by the head. And below the tape water was pouring in everywhere, drowning the mail room and Scotland Road and the swimming pool, the squash court and the staterooms and the glass-enclosed deck. And the way out, the way back.

There has to be another way out, Joanna thought, staring blindly at the pale blue water. The Apaches cut the wires, but Carl was still able to get the mail through. There has to be another way out. The lifeboats! she thought, and scrambled to her feet, tore up the stairs and back along the Boat Deck.

The boats were gone, the deck deserted except for the band, which had finished “Goodnight, Irene.” They were searching through their music for the next piece, arranging the sheet music on their stands.

Joanna ran to the railing and leaned far over it, trying to see the lifeboat the sailor had been loading. It was miles below her, almost to the water. She couldn’t make out anything in the darkness but the pale gleam of the sailor’s white uniform. It was too far for her to jump, but maybe not too far for them to hear her. “Hello!” she called down, cupping her hand around her mouth. “Ahoy! Can you hear me?”

There was no movement of the white uniform, no sound. “I need you to deliver a message for me,” she shouted, but the band had struck up a waltz, and her voice was lost in the sound of the violin, of the piano.

They can’t hear me, she thought. She needed to drop a message down to them. She fumbled in her pockets for a pen and paper. She came up with the mustached man’s note, but no pen, not even a stub of pencil. “Just a minute!” she called down to the boat. “Hang on!” and ran down the deck to the aft staircase and down to the writing room on the Promenade Deck, praying, “Don’t let it be flooded, don’t let it be flooded.”

It wasn’t. The Reading and Writing Room sat empty, the yellow-shaded lamps still burning on the writing desks. Joanna grabbed a sheet of stationery out of the rack, dipped a pen in the inkwell, and scribbled, “Richard, the NDE is a distress signal the brain sends as it’s dying—”

“What’s going on?” a voice said. Joanna looked up. It was Greg Menotti. He was wearing jogging shorts and a Nike T-shirt. “Somebody told me the ship’s sinking,” he said, laughing.

“It is,” Joanna said, writing, “—and you have to find out what neurotransmitter it’s trying to activate.” She scrawled her name at the bottom, snatched up the sheet of paper, and ran out onto the deck.

“What do you mean?” Greg said, jogging up beside her. “It’s unsinkable.”

She leaned over the railing into the darkness. “Ahoy!” she called, waving the sheet of paper. “Lifeboat!”

No answer. No gleam of white. Only the fathomless blackness.

She flung herself away from the railing and along the deck to the first-class lounge.

“But it can’t be sinking,” Greg said, sprinting after her.

She yanked open the stained-glass door of the lounge. “If it’s sinking,” Greg said, “we’d better get in one of the boats.”

She ran over to the mirrored mahogany bar. “The boats are all gone.”

“They can’t all be gone,” he said, panting, holding his arm. “There has to be a way off this ship.”