Connie Willis - Passage

Maisie. She had promised Maisie she would come see her. She’ll be waiting, Joanna thought, the dread filling her chest, and Barbara will come in and tell her that I died. She had taken a step forward on the deck as if to stop Barbara, but she could not stop anyone from doing anything, and she had been wrong about the punishment of the dead—it was not hope or oblivion, but remembering broken promises and neglected good-byes and not being able to rectify them. “Oh, Maisie,” Joanna said, and sat back down on the edge of the deck chair. She put her head in her hands.

“Are you supposed to be out here, Ms. Lander?” a stern voice said. “Where is your hall pass?”

She looked up. Mr. Briarley was standing over her in his gray tweed vest. “Mr. Briarley… what?” she choked out. “Why are you here? Did you die, too?”

“Did I die?” He pondered the question. “Is this multiple choice? ‘Neither fish nor fowl, neither out nor in.’ ” He smiled at her and then said seriously, “What are you doing out here alone?”

“I was trying to send a message,” she said, looking over at the darkness beyond the railing.

“Did it get through?”

No, she thought, remembering Vielle’s worried voice saying, “Shh, honey, don’t try to talk,” and her own, choking on the blood pouring out of her lungs, out of her throat, the resident’s voice cutting across them, shouting, “Clear. Again. Clear,” and behind it, above it, around it, the code alarm, drowning out everything, everything.

No, she thought, Vielle didn’t hear me, didn’t understand, didn’t tell Richard, and the knowledge was worse than realizing she was dead, worse even than Barbara telling Maisie she’d died. Worse than anything. “No,” she said numbly. “It didn’t get through.”

“I know,” he said, looking out past the railing, “I know. I try sometimes. But it’s too far,” and put his hand on her shoulder. She laid her own hand over his, and they stayed like that for a minute, and then Mr. Briarley pulled his hand free and gave hers a brisk pat. “It’s freezing out here.” He pulled her to standing. “Come along,” he said, and started off down the deck.

“Where are we going?” Joanna said, trying to catch up to him.

“The First-Class Smoking Room,” he called over his shoulder. “It’s rather smoky, I’m afraid, as its name would indicate, but it’s farther astern, and secondhand smoke is something we no longer have to worry about.”

Joanna caught up with him. “Why are we going there?”

“That’s one of the blessings of death, not having to be afraid of dying,” he went on as if he hadn’t heard her. “Having died by one means, you have eliminated all the others. As Carlyle wrote—” He glanced sternly at Joanna. “You do remember Thomas Carlyle? British author of—? He will be on the final.”

“The French Revolution,” Joanna said, thinking of Lavoisier beheaded, blinking.

“Very good,” Mr. Briarley said, slackening his pace momentarily. “He also wrote, ‘The crash of the whole solar and stellar systems could only kill you once.’ ”

He walked rapidly along the deck, as he had before on Scotland Road, so that Joanna nearly had to run to keep up with him. It was hard work. Joanna couldn’t see that the deck was slanting, but it must be. It felt oddly uncertain, and Joanna stubbed her toe against the wooden boards several times.

“I was always afraid of dying in a plane crash,” Mr. Briarley said. “And of being beheaded, I suppose because of its connection to English literature. Sydney Carton and Raleigh and Sir Thomas More. More told the executioner, ‘I’ll see to my going up, and you shall see to my coming down.’ Witty to the last.”

He shook his head. “I also feared dying of a heart attack, though in retrospect I see that any of the three would have been a blessing. All of them quick, nearly painless, and the mind functioning fully to the very end.” He opened the door to the Grand Staircase. The band was at the head of the stairs, playing a Gilbert and Sullivan song. “You no longer need fear volcanoes or zeppelin crashes or torpedoes. Or drowning,” he said and started down the curving steps.

It can’t be the end yet, Joanna thought, stopping to look at the band. They aren’t playing “Nearer, My God, to Thee.” Or “Autumn,” she thought, and then, wonderingly, Now I’ll find out which one they played.

“Come along,” Mr. Briarley said from below. “They’re waiting.”

She started down the steps. “Who is?”

Mr. Briarley was standing in a shadow just above the first landing, and below him the steps curved down into darkness. And water. “Who’s waiting for me?” she said, coming down cautiously.

“There are all sorts of death you no longer have to fear,” Mr. Briarley said. “Drug overdoses. Gunshot wounds—”

Gunshot wounds. The teenager with the knife, lying dead on the emergency room floor. Dead. Joanna stopped, holding on to the railing. “Is everyone here?” she asked breathlessly. “Everyone who’s died? On the ship?”

“Everyone?” Mr. Briarley said. “The Titanic was a great disaster, but she carried only two thousand souls. That’s only a fraction of those who die every day,” he said and continued down the steps.

“That isn’t what I meant,” she said, and thought, I meant, is he here, somewhere belowdecks, waiting? “I meant, are the people who died when I did here?” she said aloud. “In Mercy General?”

Mr. Briarley stopped just above the landing and looked up at her. “We’re only going as far down as the Promenade Deck,” he said and pointed at the wide door leading out.

Joanna clutched the railing. “Were you telling the truth when you said we can’t die more than once?”

He nodded. “ ‘After the first death, there is no other.’ ” He went down the last two steps and across to the door. “Dylan Thomas. ‘A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child—’ ” he said and, still talking, went out the door.

“What do you mean, the death of a child?” Joanna said. She let go of the railing and ran down the stairs after him. “What do you mean, by fire?”

Mr. Briarley was already walking rapidly along the Promenade Deck. “The line ‘there is no other’ has a double meaning. It alludes to the event of another’s death awakening us to our own mortality, and to the Resurrection, but it can also be taken literally. There is no other. Having had our first death, we cannot be killed by lightning or by heart disease—”

“Is Maisie here?” Joanna said.

“By tuberculosis or kidney failure, by Ebola fever or ventricular fibrillation.”

“Did Maisie die?” Joanna said desperately. “When Barbara told her I’d been killed? Did she go into V-fib?”

“You no longer need fear the gallows,” Mr. Briarley said. It was colder down here, even though this part of the Promenade Deck was glassed in. Joanna shivered. “Nor the guillotine.” He touched his neck gingerly. “Nor strychnine poisoning. Nor a massive stroke—” and she was in a dark hallway, groping her way toward the phone that was ringing wildly, wrestling one arm into her robe, feeling for the light switch, and for the phone, nearly knocking the receiver off, her heart jangling, knowing what she was going to hear, “It’s your father —”

“What was that?” Joanna said. She was flattened against one of the windows, staring into her frightened reflection.

“What was what?” Mr. Briarley said irritably from halfway down the deck.

“Something just happened,” she said, afraid to move for fear it would happen again. “A memory or a…”

“It’s the cold,” Mr. Briarley said. “Come along, it’s warmer in the smoking room. There’s a fire.”