Connie Willis - Passage

Joanna could not make out who they were because of the bluish haze of smoke that hung in the room, but she could see that they were all adults. Maisie’s not here, she thought, relieved, and then, these must be the first-class passengers who sat playing bridge as the Titanic was going down, Colonel Butt and Arthur Ryerson and—

But there were women at the table, too, and the people weren’t playing bridge. They were playing poker. She could see the red chips stacked in piles in front of the players and scattered in the middle. And the table wasn’t one of the oak ones of the smoking room. It was one of the cafeteria’s Formica-topped tables.

Mr. Briarley led her across the oak-paneled room toward them. The players looked up and saw them, and one of them laid down his cards and came to meet them. It was Greg Menotti, dressed in sweatpants and a white nylon jacket. “Where have you been?” he demanded. “There weren’t any lifeboats on the other side. Are there some in second-class?”

“You’ve met Mr. Menotti, of course,” Mr. Briarley said, leading Joanna past him and on over to the table.

“I call,” a man in a white waistcoat said, fanning his cards out in front of him, and Joanna saw it was the mustached man who had given her the note. He began raking in a quantity of red chips.

Mr. Briarley said, “Ms. Lander, may I introduce—,” and the man let go of the chips and stood up, pulling on a dinner jacket.

“J. H. Rogers,” Joanna said. “I put your message in a bottle and threw it over the side.”

He shook his head. He knows it didn’t reach his sister, she thought. “I’m sorry, Mr. Rogers,” she said, and he shook his head again.

“Not J. H. Rogers,” Mr. Briarley whispered in her ear. “Jay Yates. Professional gambler working the White Star liners under a variety of aliases.”

“You were the one who worked so hard loading the boats,” Joanna said. “You were a hero.”

“Loading the boats?” Greg Menotti said, pushing himself between Joanna and Yates. “Where are the others?”

“Others?” Yates said, bewildered.

“The other boats,” Greg insisted.

“There aren’t any others,” one of the women said, and Joanna saw it was the woman who’d been out on deck in her nightgown. She was wearing her red coat and the fox fur stole.

“Miss Edith Evans,” Mr. Briarley whispered to Joanna. “She gave up her place in the last lifeboat to a woman with two children.”

“It can’t have been the last one!” Greg said. “There have to be others!” He whirled to face Yates again. “You were loading the boats. What did they say about them? There were some down in second class, weren’t there? Weren’t there?”

Yates frowned. “I remember there was some mention of lowering the boats to the Promenade Deck and loading them from there,” he said.

“But when they got there, the windows were shut,” Mr. Briarley said, “and they had to send everyone back up to the Boat Deck,” but Greg had already run out, pushing his way through the door to the Promenade Deck.

“Greg!” Joanna called after him and turned to Mr. Briarley. “Shouldn’t we—?” but he was sitting down at the table, and Yates was pulling out a chair for her.

She sat down and looked around the table. W. T. Stead sat on her left, intent on his cards, which he had laid out in front of him on the table like a tarot hand and was turning over one by one. “You know Mr. Stead,” Mr. Briarley said.

Stead glanced impatiently at Joanna, nodded curtly, and went back to turning the cards. “And everyone else I think you know,” Mr. Briarley said, waving his hand around the table.

No, I don’t, Joanna thought, but as Mr. Briarley introduced them, she realized they were NDE patients she had interviewed: Mr. Funderburk, who had been so upset that he had not had an out-of-body experience, and bald, emaciated Ms. Grant, who had been so afraid. “And finally,” Mr. Briarley said, indicating a frail, white-haired woman, “Mrs. Woollam.” Oh, no, Joanna thought, not Mrs. Woollam. She didn’t deserve to be here. She was supposed to be in a beautiful, beautiful garden with Jesus. But the garden’s the Verandah Café, Joanna thought. “Oh, Mrs. Woollam,” she said.

“ ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,’ ” Mrs. Woollam said, “ ‘I will fear no evil,’ ” but as she spoke, she pressed her Bible to her thin chest fearfully.

“Is that what this is?” Ms. Grant said anxiously. “The valley of the shadow of death?”

“No,” Mr. Funderburk said firmly. “That’s nothing like this. I’ve been there. There’s a tunnel, and at the end of it, there’s a light. And a Life Review.” He looked skeptically around the smoking room. “I don’t know what this is.”

“It’s five-card draw,” Yates said. He swept up the cards Stead had been turning over and shuffled them into the deck. “Aces high,” he said, and began to deal the cards.

Joanna picked hers up as he dealt them. A five. An eight. “If it isn’t the valley of the shadow of death,” Ms. Grant said, looking at Joanna, “what is it?”

“I don’t know,” Joanna said.

“Really?” Mr. Stead said, arching an eyebrow at her. “I was given to understand you were an expert on the phenomena of dying.”

“No,” Joanna said. “I thought I was, but I didn’t know anything.” And neither do you, she thought. Nobody knows anything.

“In that case,” Stead said, “I will explain. There is nothing to fear, Ms. Grant. Death is not an end, but a transition. We are but sailing to the Other Side, where wait the spirits of our dear departed. They will greet us on that farther shore, where all is peace and knowledge.”

“And a Life Review,” Mr. Funderburk said.

“And we shall understand all mysteries,” Stead said and picked up his cards.

“Are they right?” Ms. Grant said. She was gazing hopefully at Joanna, and so was Mrs. Woollam. So was Yates.

Joanna glanced at Mr. Briarley, but his face was carefully impassive, like it had been in English class, offering no clue to what the answer was, no help at all. “Are they?” Edith Evans said quietly, and Joanna thought suddenly of Maisie asking, “Will it hurt?” and of her saying, “People should tell the truth, even if it’s bad.”

“No,” Joanna said, and a sigh went around the table, though of relief or despair she couldn’t tell. “This isn’t real. It’s all a hallucination. The dying mind—”

“A hallucination?” Mr. Stead said, arching an eyebrow at her. “Are you saying that this fire, this table, these cards—” he said, plucking two from his hand and pushing them across the table toward Yates. “Two,” he said, and Yates dealt him a pair. He picked them up, arranged them in his hand, “—that these cards—” he fanned them out, face up, “are not real, and we only imagine that we see them?” He stood up and went over to the fire. “We only imagine we feel this fire’s warmth?” he said, spreading his hands out to the flames. “Or are we part of the hallucination as well?”

I don’t know, Joanna thought.

“ ‘All alone, so Heav’n has will’d, we die,’ ” Mr. Briarley murmured beside her. She looked at him, wondering what he was, what they all were. Confabulations? Snatches of memory and sound and color, flickering randomly? Or metaphors? Symbols of her fear and faith and denial?

“The mind tries to make sense of whatever it experiences,” she said, trying to explain. To whom? To Edith Evans and Jay Yates, who had died ninety years ago? Or to herself? “The mind can’t help it. It keeps doing it even when what it’s experiencing is a systems failure. The brain’s shutting down and synapses are firing randomly as the cells die, but the mind keeps trying to make sense of it, even though it can’t.”