Connie Willis: Passage

“Why?”

“Heart attack weather,” she said and, at Joanna’s blank look, pointed toward the emergency room entrance. “It’s been snowing since nine this morning.”

Joanna looked wonderingly in the direction Vielle was pointing, though she couldn’t see the outside windows from here. “I’ve been in curtained patient rooms all morning,” she said. And in windowless offices and hallways and elevators.

“Slipping on the ice, shoveling snow, car accidents,” Vielle said. “We should have lots of business. Do you have your pager turned on?”

“Yes, Mother,” Joanna said. “I’m not one of your interns.” She waved good-bye to Vielle, and went up to first.

The cafeteria was, amazingly, still open. It had the shortest hours of any hospital cafeteria Joanna had ever seen, and she was always coming down for lunch to find its glass double doors locked and its red plastic chairs stacked on top of the Formica tables. But today it was open, even though a hair-netted worker was dismantling the salad bar and another one was putting away a stack of plates. Joanna snatched up a tray before they could take those away and started over to the hot-food line. And stopped short. Maurice Mandrake was over by the drinks machine, getting a cup of coffee. Nope, thought Joanna, not right now. I’m liable to kill him.

She turned on her heel and walked swiftly down the hall. She dived in the elevator, pushed “Close Door,” and then hesitated with her finger above the floor buttons. She couldn’t leave the hospital, she’d promised Vielle she’d be within reach. The vending-machine snack bar was over in the north wing, but she wasn’t sure she had any money. She rummaged through the pockets of her cardigan sweater, but all she turned up besides her minirecorder was a pen, a dime, a release form, an assortment of used Kleenex, and a postcard of a tropical ocean at sunset with palm trees silhouetted blackly against the red sky and coral-pink water. Where had she gotten that? She turned it over. “Having wonderful time. Wish you were here,” someone had written over an illegibly scrawled signature, and next to it, in Vielle’s handwriting, Pretty Woman, Remember the Titans, What Lies Beneath. The list of movies Vielle had wanted her to get for their last Dish Night.

Unfortunately, she didn’t also have the popcorn from their last Dish Night, and the cheapest thing in the vending machine was seventy-five cents. Her purse was up in her office, but Dr. Wright might be camped outside, waiting for her.

Where else would have food? They had Ensure in Oncology, but she wasn’t that hungry. Paula up on five-east, she thought. She always had a stash of M ,M’s, and besides, she should go see Carl Aspinall. She pressed the button for five.

She wondered how Coma Carl, which was what the nurses called him, was doing. He’d been in a semicomatose state ever since he’d been admitted two months ago with spinal meningitis. He was completely unresponsive part of the time, and part of the time his arms and legs twitched, and he murmured words. And sometimes he spoke perfectly clearly.

“But he’s not having a near-death experience,” Guadalupe, one of his nurses, had said when Joanna had gotten permission from his wife to have the nurses write down everything he said. “I mean, he’s never coded.”

“The circumstances are similar,” Joanna had said. And he was one subject Maurice Mandrake couldn’t get to.

Nothing could get to him, even though his wife and the nurses pretended he could hear them. The nurses were careful not to use the nickname Coma Carl or discuss his condition when they were in his room, and they encouraged Joanna to talk to him. “There have been studies that show coma patients can hear what’s said in their presence,” Paula had told her, offering her some M&M’s.

But I don’t believe it, Joanna thought, waiting for the elevator door to open on five. He doesn’t hear anything. He’s somewhere else altogether, beyond our reach.

The elevator door opened, and she went down the corridor to the nurses’ station. Paula wasn’t there. A strange nurse with blond hair and no hips was at the computer. “Where’s Paula?” Joanna asked.

“Out sick,” the pencil-thin nurse said warily. “Can I help you, Dr…” She looked at the ID hanging around Joanna’s neck. “Lander?”

It was no use asking her for food. She looked like she’d never eaten an M&M in her life, and from the way she was staring at Joanna’s body, like she didn’t approve of Joanna’s having done so either. “No. Thanks,” Joanna said coolly, and realized she was still carrying the tray from the cafeteria. She must have had it the whole time in the elevator and never been aware of it.

“This needs to go back down to the kitchen,” she said briskly, and handed it to the nurse. “I’m here to see Com—Mr. Aspinall,” she said and started down the hall to Carl’s room.

The door was open, and Guadalupe was on the far side of the bed, hanging up an IV bag. The chair Carl’s wife usually occupied was empty. “How’s he doing today?” Joanna whispered, approaching the bed.

“Much better,” Guadalupe said cheerfully, and then in a whisper, “His fever’s back up.” She unhooked the empty IV bag and carried it over to the window. “It’s dark in here,” she said. “Would you like some light, Carl?” She pulled the curtains open.

Vielle had been right. It was snowing. Big flakes out of a leaden gray sky. “It’s snowing, did you know that, Carl?” Guadalupe said.

No, Joanna thought, looking down at the man on the bed. His slack face under the oxygen tubes was pale and expressionless in the gray light from the window, his eyes not quite closed, a slit of white showing beneath the heavy lids, his mouth half-open.

“It looks cold out there,” Guadalupe said, going over to the computer. “Is it building up on the streets yet?”

It took Joanna a moment to realize Guadalupe was talking to her and not Carl. “I don’t know,” she said, fighting the impulse to whisper so as not to disturb him. “I came to work before it started.”

Guadalupe poked at icons on the screen, entering Carl’s temperature and the starting of the new IV bag. “Has he said anything this morning?” Joanna asked.

“Not a word,” Guadalupe said. “I think he’s boating on the lake again. He was humming earlier.”

“Humming?” Joanna said. “Can you describe it?”

“You know, humming,” Guadalupe said. She came over to the bed and pulled the covers up over Carl’s taped and tubed arm, over his chest. “Like a tune, only I couldn’t recognize it. There you are, all tucked in nice and warm,” she said and started for the door with her empty IV bag. “You’re lucky you’re in here and not out in that snow, Carl,” and went out.

But he’s not in here, Joanna thought. “Where are you, Carl?” she asked. “Are you boating on the lake?”

Boating on the lake was one of the scenarios the nurses had invented out of his murmurings. He made motions with his arms that might have been rowing, and at those times he was never agitated or cried out, which was why they thought it was something idyllic.

There were several scenarios: The Bataan Death March, during which he cried over and over, “Water!,” and Running for the Bus, and one each of the nurses had a different name for—Burned at the Stake and Vietcong Ambush and The Torments of Hell—during which he flailed wildly at the tangled covers, yanked out his IV. Once he had blacked Guadalupe’s eye when she tried to restrain him. “Blanked out,” he had screamed over and over, or possibly “placket!” or “black.” And once, in a tone of panicked dread, “Cut the knot.”

“Maybe he thinks the IV lines are ropes,” Guadalupe, her eye swollen shut, had said helpfully when she gave Joanna a transcript of the episode.