Connie Willis - Passage

Something about being oblivious, and Richard’s lab coat and the way the floor met the bottom of the door. And cohorts gleaming in purple and gold. And high school. It had wooden floors, she thought. She saw in her mind’s eye the long second-floor hall, the waxed wooden floor. There was a door at the end of that hall, she thought. The assistant principal’s office, where Ricky Inman spent half his time. And was that what she was remembering—a memory from high school? Complete with a nice authority-figure judgment image?

It made sense. Those halls were long and lined with numbered doors. The lab coat could be the one the chemistry teacher—what was his name? Mr. Hobert—wore, the sound could be the passing bell, which sounded like both a ringing and a buzzing, and the door to the assistant principal’s office—

But it wasn’t a door to an office. The door in the tunnel opened onto the outside. I need to open that door and see what’s outside it, Joanna thought. When I do, I’ll know where it is.

And at one-fifteen, lying sleepily under the headphones and the sleep mask and waiting for the dithetamine to work, she thought, The door, the answer lies through the door—

And was in the tunnel. The door was shut. Only a knife-blade-thin line of light showed at the bottom of the door. Joanna had to feel her way along the pitch-black tunnel toward it, her hand on one wall.

The line of light was too narrow for any shadows, and she could not hear even a murmuring of voices. The tunnel was utterly silent, like Coma Carl’s room after the heater shut off. No, not a heater. Some other quiet, steady sound you didn’t notice till it had stopped.

“—stopped,” a voice said softly from beyond the door, and Joanna waited, listening.

Silence. Joanna stood there in the darkness a long minute, and then began feeling her way toward the door again, thinking, What if it’s locked? But it wasn’t locked. The knob turned easily, and she pulled the door open onto a blast of brilliant light. It hit her with an almost physical force, and she reeled back, her hand up to shield her face.

“What’s happened?” a woman’s frightened voice said, and Joanna thought for a moment she meant the light and that it had burst on all of them like a bomb when Joanna opened the door.

“I’m sure it’s nothing, miss,” a man’s voice said. As Joanna’s eyes adjusted, she could see the man in the white jacket. He was talking to the woman with her hair down her back.

“I heard the oddest noise,” she said.

Noise, Joanna thought. Then it was a sound, after all.

The white-jacketed man said something, but Joanna couldn’t hear what it was, or what the woman answered. She moved forward, up to the door, and instantly she could see the people more clearly. The young woman had a coat on over her white dress, and the man’s white jacket had gold buttons down the front. The woman in the white gloves was wearing a short white fur cape.

“Yes, miss,” the man said, and Joanna thought, He’s a servant. And that white jacket is a uniform.

“It sounded like a cloth being torn,” the young woman said and walked over to the man with the white beard. “Did you hear it?”

“No,” he said, and the woman with the piled-up hair inquired, “Do you suppose there’s been an accident?” She had her white-gloved hand at her throat, holding her fur cape closed, as if she were cold, and Joanna thought, That’s because they’re outside, and tried to look around at their surroundings, but the light was behind them, and she couldn’t see anything except the white wall against which they stood. She looked down at the floor they were standing on. It was wooden, like the floor in the hallway, but unwaxed. Some sort of porch, Joanna thought, or patio.

“It’s so cold,” the young woman said, pulling her coat more tightly around her. No wonder she’s cold, Joanna thought, looking at her dress under the open coat. It was made of thin muslin, much too thin for this weather, and hung full and straight to her feet like a nightgown.

“I shall see what’s happened,” the bearded man said. He was in evening clothes, with a stiff-fronted white shirt and a white bow tie. He jerked his chin imperiously at the servant, and he hurried over.

“Yes, sir?” he said.

“What has happened? Why have we stopped?”

“I don’t know, sir. It may be some sort of mechanical difficulty. I’m sure there’s nothing to be alarmed about.”

“Go and find Mr. Briarley,” the bearded man said. “He’ll be able to tell us.”

“Yes, sir,” the servant said. He disappeared into the light.

“Mr. Briarley will be able to explain things,” the bearded man said to the ladies. “In the meantime, you ladies should go back inside where it’s warmer.”

Yes, Joanna thought, back inside where it’s warmer, and was back in the lab, with Tish working reproachfully over her. “You were under forever,” Tish said, taking her blood pressure. She entered Joanna’s vitals on the chart, removed her electrodes, took out her IV, looking at her watch every few minutes.

“Okay,” she said finally. “You can sit up.”

Richard came over. “There definitely was a noise,” Joanna told him. “One of the women heard it. She said it sounded like cloth tearing.”

“Can you put the rest of this stuff away?” Tish said, stowing the IV equipment. “I’m already late.”

“Yes,” Richard said. “What about duration? How long were you there?”

“Ten minutes maybe,” Joanna said, “while the people outside the door talked, and it was outside. The man with the white beard said, ‘You ladies need to go back inside.’ They talked about the noise and then the bearded man told the servant to go find out what had happened.”

“The servant?” Richard asked.

“I’m off,” Tish said. “What time tomorrow?”

“Ten,” Richard said, and Tish went out. “One of them was a servant?”

“Yes,” Joanna said. “I could see the gold buttons on his uniform and the embroidery on the woman’s white dress, only it wasn’t a dress. It was a nightgown. She had a coat on over it…” She frowned, remembering the woman pulling it tighter around her. “No, not a coat, a blanket, because—”

She stopped suddenly, breathing hard. “Oh, my God,” she said. “I know what it is.”

“You know what it is?” Richard said blankly, thinking, Joanna can’t possibly know. Temporal-lobe feelings of recognition were just that, feelings, with no content behind them. But she clearly thought she knew. Her voice was full of suppressed excitement.

“It all fits,” she said, “the floor and the cold and the blanket, even the feeling that I shouldn’t have shut off my pager, that something terrible had happened I should have known about. It all fits.” She looked up at Richard with a radiant expression. “I told you I recognized it but had never been there, and I was right. I told you I knew what it was.”

He was almost afraid to say, “Well, what is it?” When he did, she would look bewildered or angry, or both, the way she had for the last two weeks whenever he’d asked her. It was amazing how strong the conviction of knowledge was with temporal-lobe stimulation, even in someone like Joanna who understood what was causing it, who knew it was artificially induced.

“I told you the sound wasn’t a sound,” she said, “that it was something shutting off, and it was. That was what woke them up, the engines shutting off. Hardly anyone heard the collision. And they went outside on deck to see what had happened—”