Connie Willis - Passage

“I was telling you about the peaceful feeling I had in the tunnel, like something was going to happen,” he said, “so I walked a little ways till I come to a door, and all of a sudden there was this bright light, and I mean bright. The only time I ever saw something that bright was when a bomb from an Aichi-99 went right through the hangar deck and blew up Repair 5. She took three hits that day.”

“Was that at the Battle of the Coral Sea?” Joanna asked, feeling like a traitor, like a Nazi grilling a spy, trying to trap him into a mistake, an inconsistency. And if he told her a different version this time, named a different island, a different kind of canoe, what would it prove? Only that his memory was fuzzy. The Battle of the Coral Sea had happened sixty years ago, and confabulations multiplied over time.

“One of the depth charges hit her in the port-side oil tanks,” Mr. Wojakowski was saying, “and oil was gushing out of her side. She woulda bled to death if we hadn’ta gotten her back to Pearl when we did. Boy, were we glad to see Diamond Head—”

“You went with the Yorktown back to Pearl Harbor?” Joanna blurted.

“Yep,” Mr. Wojakowski said, “and helped patch her up myself. We worked straight through, welding her boilers and patching up her hull. I worked on the crew fixing her watertight doors. We worked seventy-eight hours straight and were still working on ’em when we left Oahu. I tell ya, I was so tired when we got done, I slept all the way back to Midway.”

“He made the whole thing up?” Richard said. “Even being on the Yorktown?”

“I don’t know,” Joanna said, pacing back and forth, her hands jammed in her cardigan pockets. “All I know is that he couldn’t have been in Pearl Harbor repairing the Yorktown and adrift at sea thousands of miles away at the same time.”

“But does it have to mean he’s lying?” Richard said. “Couldn’t it just be a memory lapse? He’s sixty-five, after all, and the war was over fifty years ago. He may have forgotten exactly where he was at a given time.”

“How do you forget being shot down and losing your copilot and your gunner? You heard him tell that story. It was the best damned day of his life.”

“Are you sure he said he was in Pearl Harbor while the ship was being repaired?” Richard asked. “Maybe he was just speaking generally—” but she was shaking her head violently.

“He also told me he was on board the Yorktown when he heard Pearl Harbor was bombed,” she said, “ and that he was reading the funny papers back home. ‘The Katzenjammer Kids,’ ” she added bitterly. “You can’t tell me he doesn’t remember where he was when he heard about Pearl Harbor. An entire generation remembers where it was when it heard about Pearl Harbor!”

“But why would he lie about something like that?”

“I don’t know,” she said unhappily. “Maybe he’s trying to impress us. Maybe he’s listened to so many war stories over the years he’s gotten them all confused. Or maybe it’s more serious than that, Alzheimer’s, or a stroke. All I know is—”

“That we can’t use him,” Richard said. “Shit.”

Joanna nodded. “I went back and checked the transcripts and then the tapes. They’re full of discrepancies. According to Mr. Wojakowski, he was”—she pulled a piece of paper from her pocket and read from it—“a pilot, a gunner’s mate, a pharmacist’s mate on burial detail, a semaphore flagman, and an airplane mechanic. I also checked the movie he said was playing the Saturday night before Pearl Harbor was bombed. The Desperadoes wasn’t made until 1943.”

She wadded up the paper. “I feel so stupid I didn’t catch this sooner. Being able to tell whether people are telling the truth or confabulating is what I do for a living, but I honestly thought—his body language, the irrelevant details…” She shook her head wonderingly. “I am so sorry. You hired me to spot this kind of thing, and I was completely fooled.”

“At least you caught it when you did.” He looked at her. “Do you think he lied about what he saw in his NDEs, too?” and, at the look on Joanna’s face, “Don’t worry, I know he has to go. I just wondered.”

“I don’t know,” Joanna said, shaking her head, “and there’s no way to tell without outside confirmation. Some of the stories he told about the Yorktown were true. I checked them out before I came to talk to you. There really was a Jo-Jo Powers who ‘laid his bomb right on the flight deck’ and was killed doing it, and they really did repair the Yorktown and get it back to Midway in time for the battle. It was what saved the day, because the Japanese navy thought it had been sunk.”

“But there’s no way to get outside confirmation on an NDE,” Richard finished. “Except the scans, which can’t tell us what the subject saw.”

“I am so sorry,” Joanna said. “All I’ve done since I joined this project is decimate your subject list, and then, when I should have caught—”

“You did catch it,” Richard said. “That’s the important thing. And you caught it in time, before we published any resuits. Don’t worry about it. We’ve still got five subjects. That’s more than enough—” He stopped at her expression.

“We only have four,” she said unhappily. “Mr. Pearsall called. His father died, and he has to stay in Ohio to arrange the funeral and settle his affairs.”

Four. And that was including Mr. Sage, who even Joanna couldn’t get anything out of. And Mrs. Troudtheim.

“What about Mrs. Haighton?” he said. “Have you been able to set up an interview yet?”

She shook her head. “She keeps rescheduling. I don’t think we should count on her. We’re just one item on her very long list of social activities. How’s the authorization on the new volunteers coming?”

“Slowly. Records said six more weeks,” he said, “ if the board votes to continue the project.”

“What do you mean?” Joanna said. “I thought you had funding for six months.”

“I did,” he said. “I got a call from the head of the institute this morning. It seems Mrs. Brightman has been telling everyone what high hopes she has for the project, that we’ve already found indications of supernatural phenomena.”

“Mr. Mandrake,” Joanna said through gritted teeth.

“Bingo,” he said. “So now the head of the institute wants a progress report that he can use to reassure the board we’re doing legitimate scientific research.”

“Didn’t you tell him—?”

“What? That half our subject list turned out to be cranks, plants, and psychics? That there’s something wrong with the process that keeps our best subject from responding?” he said bitterly. “Or did you want me to tell him about the imaginative Mr. Wojakowski? I didn’t know about him when the head called.”

“How long do we have?” Joanna said. “Before we have to file this progress report?”

“Six weeks,” he said. “Oddly enough.”

“You’ve got Amelia’s scans,” she said, “and Mr. Sage’s, and one set of Mr. Pearsall’s. Maybe it won’t take him very long to settle his father’s affairs.”

“Right, and, having just buried his father, he would definitely be an impartial observer,” Richard said, and then felt ashamed of himself. It wasn’t Joanna’s fault. He was the one who’d approved a list of unreliable people.