Connie Willis - Passage

“Of what?” Richard asked.

“Of failing,” she said, and he could hear the fear in her voice. “Of the final.”

She wasn’t on the Titanic, he thought, trying to take this in. She was in her biochem lab. “What happened then?” he managed to ask.

“I started to look for the key. I had to find it. I had to get into the cabinet and find the right chemical. I looked under the lab tables and in all the drawers,” she said, her voice tightening, “but it was dark, I couldn’t see—”

The connection wasn’t the Titanic. And that was what Joanna had realized when she talked to Carl Aspinall.

“—and the labels on the drawers didn’t make any sense,” Amelia was saying. “There were letters on them, but they weren’t words, they were just letters and numbers, all strung together, like code. And I was so frightened… and then I was back in the lab, so I guess I found it and I guess I passed. I don’t know what grade I got.” She laughed embarrassedly. “I told you it sounded crazy.”

“No,” he said. “No, you’ve been very helpful.”

She nodded, unconvinced. “I have to go to my anatomy lab, but—” she took another deep breath, “—if you want me to, I’ll go under again. I owe it to Dr. Lander.”

“That may not be necessary,” he said, and, as soon as she was gone, called Carl Aspinall.

He was afraid Mrs. Aspinall would be the one to answer the phone, but she didn’t, and when Carl said, “Hello, Aspinalls’ residence,” Richard said, “Mr. Aspinall, this is Dr. Wright. No, wait, don’t hang up. I understand that you don’t want to talk about your experience. I just want you to answer one question. Did your experience take place on the Titanic?”

“The Titanic?” Carl said, and the astonishment in his voice told Richard all he wanted to know.

He hadn’t been on the Titanic. And that was the revelation that had sent Joanna on her plunge down to the ER. It wasn’t what he’d told her about his NDE, it was the fact that he hadn’t seen the Titanic, and Joanna, realizing that that wasn’t the connection, that she had been on the wrong track, had seen what the real answer was, and run to tell him.

He had to make sure. He called Maisie. “When you had your NDEs, Maisie, were you on a ship?” he asked her when the nurse finally let him talk to her.

“A ship!” she said, and he could see the face she was making. “ No.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I know,” Maisie said. “It didn’t feel anything like a ship.”

“What did it feel like?”

“I don’t know,” she said thoughtfully. “I told Joanna I thought it was inside, but I think it was outside, too. Someplace both inside and outside,” and the carefulness of her answer convinced him more than anything else that if she’d been on a ship she would have known it, and the answer lay elsewhere.

But where? It had to lie somewhere in the NDEs, in some common thread they all shared, even though neither Amelia’s nor Maisie’s, nor, presumably, Carl Aspinall’s, were anything like Joanna’s. “But it has to be there,” he told Kit on the phone, “because as soon as Joanna realized Carl hadn’t been on the Titanic, she knew what it was.”

“And it has to be something that’s in all of them,” Kit said. “Did you record what Amelia said just now?”

“No,” he said. “She was too nervous. I’ve transcribed everything I remember, though.”

“What about your own?” Kit said. “Have you transcribed it?”

“My own?” he said blankly. “But it was—”

“Related to the Titanic,” she said. “I know, but there might be a clue in it. I think you’re right. I think there’s got to be a common thread, and the more NDEs we have, the more apt we are to find it.”

She was right. He wondered if, if he called Carl Aspinall back and explained that his nightmares, whatever they were, were purely subjective, if he’d be willing to talk to him. He doubted it.

Which left Amelia’s NDE, and his own, and Maisie’s. And the vision of the crewman on the Hindenburg. He made a list of the elements in each of them. Joseph Leibrecht had seen snow fields, whales, a train, a bird in a cage, and his grandmother, and heard church bells and the scream of tearing metal. Amelia had seen enzymes, lab drawers, and her professors. Joanna had seen stairways and stationary bicycles, and he hadn’t seen any of the above.

Joseph’s was clearly dreamlike, with disconnected images rapidly succeeding one another, and completely unlike Joanna’s. Amelia’s was somewhere in between. There were no time or image jumps, but there were logic gaps, whereas in his own—

He realized he didn’t know whether there were incongruities, except for the toy zeppelin, in his own or not. He’d assumed it was real, that Joanna’s were real, and later, going through Kit’s uncle’s books, he’d focused on the Titanic itself.

He hauled the books out again. People had in fact gathered at the White Star offices and at The New York Times building, but not inside. They had milled around in the streets outside, waiting for news from the Carpathia. When it finally came, there had been no public reading of the list of survivors. A list had been posted at the Times—Mary Marvin’s mother, there with her son-in-law’s mother, had yelped joyfully when she located her daughter’s name on it, and then stopped, aghast, when she realized Daniel’s wasn’t next to it—but for the most part, relatives had gone into the White Star building one by one to inquire. John Jacob Astor’s son had come back out immediately, his face buried in his hands.

And there hadn’t been a wireless room in the White Star building. There had been one at the Times, but it was up on the roof. The wireless operator had put the deciphered messages in a box attached to a rope, shaken the rope against the metal walls of the shaft to signal the reporters below, and dropped the box down the shaft.

Which told him what? That he hadn’t really been in the White Star offices? He already knew that. That he’d confabulated his NDE out of images from the movies and Joanna’s NDEs. But not why. Not what the connection was.

He listed all the elements—his pager, the woman in the high-necked blouse speaking into the telephone, the man bent over the wireless, the clock on the wall, the stairs, the man with the newspaper under his arm—and then called Amelia and asked her to come over. “Are you sending me under again?” she asked, and he could hear the fear in her voice.

“No,” he said. “We just need to ask you some questions. Will tomorrow morning at nine work?”

“No, I have a psych test.” She’s making excuses, he thought, like she did that last time Joanna tried to schedule her before she quit, but after a pause, she said, “Would eleven o’clock work?” and, amazingly, showed up on time.

He had asked Vielle to sit in on the session. “Amelia, we want you to tell us everything you can remember about your NDEs, starting with the first one,” he said, and Vielle switched on Joanna’s minirecorder.

Amelia nodded. “I promised you I’d do anything you asked,” she said and launched into a detailed account, made even more detailed by his and Vielle’s questions.

“How many of your professors were in the office?” Vielle asked her.

“Four,” Amelia said. “Dr. Eldritch and my director and Mrs. Ashley, my high school English teacher, and my freshman chem lab professor. He wasn’t really a professor. He was a graduate student. I hated him. If you asked him a question, all he’d say was, ‘It’s something you need to figure out yourself.’ ”