Connie Willis: Passage

“I’m looking for Dr. Lander,” he said to her.

The nurse shook her head. “We paged her earlier, but she hasn’t come up yet.”

Shit. “But she is coming?”

“Uh-huh,” a voice from down the hall piped, and a kid in a red plaid robe and bare feet appeared in the door of one of the rooms. The—boy? girl? he couldn’t tell—looked about nine. He? she? had cropped dark blond hair, and there was a hospital gown under the plaid robe. Boy. Girls wore pink Barbie nightgowns, didn’t they?

He decided not to risk guessing. “Hi,” he said, walking over to the kid. “What’s your name?”

“Maisie,” she said. “Who are you?”

“I’m Dr. Wright,” he said. “You know Dr. Lander?”

Maisie nodded. “She’s coming to see me today.”

Good, Richard thought. I’ll stay right here till she does.

“She comes to see me every time I’m in,” Maisie said. “We’re both interested in disasters.”

“Disasters?”

“Like the Hindenburg,” she said. “Did you know there was a dog? It didn’t die. It jumped out.”

“Really?” he said.

“It’s in my book,” she said. “Its name was Ulla.”

“Maisie,” a nurse—not the one who’d been at the desk—said. She came over to the door. “You’re not supposed to be out of bed.”

“He asked me where Joanna was,” Maisie said, pointing at Richard.

“Joanna Lander?” the nurse said. “She hasn’t been here today. And where are your slippers?” she said to Maisie. “You. Into bed,” she said, not unkindly. “Now.”

“I can still talk to him, right, though, Nurse Barbara?”

“For a little while,” Barbara said, walking Maisie into the room and helping her into the bed. She put the side up. “I want you resting,” she said.

“Maybe I should—” Richard began.

“What’s an Alsatian?” Maisie asked.

“An Alsatian?” Barbara said blankly.

“That’s what Ulla was,” Maisie said, but to Richard. “The dog on the Hindenburg.”

The nurse smiled at him, patted Maisie’s foot under the covers, and said, “Don’t get out of bed,” and went out.

“I think an Alsatian’s a German shepherd,” Richard said.

“I’ll bet it is,” Maisie said, “because the Hindenburg was from Germany. It blew up while it was landing at Lakehurst. That’s in New Jersey. I have a picture,” Maisie said, putting the side of the bed down and scrambling out and over to the closet. “It’s in my book.” She reached in a pink duffel bag— there was Barbie, on the side of the duffel bag—and hauled out a book with a picture of Mount St. Helens on the cover and the title Disasters of the Twentieth Century. “Can you carry it over to the bed? I’m not supposed to carry heavy stuff.”

“You bet,” Richard said. He carried it over and laid it on the bed. Maisie opened it up, standing beside the bed. “A girl and two little boys got burned. The girl died,” she said, short of breath. “Ulla didn’t die, though. See, here’s a picture.”

He leaned over the book, expecting to see a picture of the dog, but it was a photo of the Hindenburg, sinking in flames. “Joanna gave me this book,” Maisie said, turning pages. “It’s got all kinds of disasters. See, this is the Johnstown flood.”

He obediently looked at a photo of houses smashed against a bridge. A tree stuck out of the upstairs window of one of them. “So, you and Dr. Lander are good friends?”

She nodded, continuing to turn pages. “She came to talk to me when I coded,” she said matter-of-factly, “and that’s when we found out we both liked disasters. She studies near-death experiences, you know.”

He nodded.

“I went into V-fib. I have cardiomyopathy,” she said casually. “Do you know what that is?”

Yes, he thought. A badly damaged heart, unable to pump properly, likely to go into ventricular fibrillation. That accounted for the breathlessness.

“When I coded I heard this funny sound, and then I was in this tunnel,” Maisie said. “Some people remember all kinds of stuff, like they saw Jesus and heaven, but I didn’t. I couldn’t see hardly anything because it was dark and all foggy in the tunnel. Mr. Mandrake said there was a light at the end of the tunnel, but I didn’t see any light. Joanna says you should only say what you saw, not what anybody else says you should see.”

“She’s right,” Richard said. “Mr. Mandrake interviewed you, too?”

“Uh- huh,” Maisie said, and rolled her eyes. “He asked me if I saw people waiting for me, and I said, ‘No,’ because I couldn’t, and he said, ‘Try to remember.’ Joanna says you shouldn’t do that because sometimes you make up things that didn’t really happen. But Mr. Mandrake says, ‘Try to remember. There’s a light, isn’t there, dear?’ I hate it when people call me ‘dear.’ ”

“Dr. Lander doesn’t do that?”

“No,” she said, her emphaticness making her breathe harder. “She’s nice.”

Well, there was a reference for you. Dr. Lander clearly wasn’t a researcher with a preset agenda. And she was obviously aware of the possibilities of post-NDE confabulation. And she had brought a book to a little girl, albeit a peculiar book for a child.

“Look,” Maisie said. “This is the Great Molasses Flood. It happened in 1919.” She pointed to a grainy black-and-white photo of what looked like an oil slick. “These huge tanks full of molasses—that’s a kind of syrup,” she confided.

Richard nodded.

“These huge tanks broke and all the molasses poured out and drowned everybody. Twenty-one people. I don’t know if any of them were little kids. It would be kind of funny to drown in syrup, don’t you think?” she asked, beginning to wheeze.

“Didn’t the nurse say you were supposed to stay in bed?” he said.

“I will in just a minute. What’s your favorite disaster? Mine’s the Hindenburg,” Maisie said, turning back to the photo of it, falling tail first, engulfed in flames. “This one crew guy was up on the balloon part when it blew up and everybody else fell, but he hung on to the metal things.” She pointed to the metal framework visible among the flames.

“Struts,” Richard said.

“His hands all burned off, but he didn’t let go. I need to tell Joanna about him when she comes.”

“Did she say when she was coming?” Richard asked.

She shrugged, bending over the picture, her nose practically touching it, as if she was looking for the hapless crewman amid the flames. Or the dog. “I don’t know if she knows I’m here yet. I told Nurse Barbara to page her. Sometimes she turns her pager off though, but she always comes to see me as soon as she finds out I’m here,” Maisie said, “and I have lots more Hindenburg pictures to show you. See, here’s the captain. He died. Did you know—”

He interrupted her. “Maisie, I’ve got to go.”

“Wait, you can’t go yet. I know she’ll be here pretty soon. She always comes just as soon as—”

Barbara poked her head in the door. “Dr. Wright? There’s a message for you.”

“See,” Maisie said as if that proved something.

“I thought I told you to get back in bed,” Barbara said, and Maisie hastily climbed up into it. “Dr. Wright, Tish Vanderbeck said to tell you that she’d gotten in touch with Dr. Lander and asked her to come up to Medicine.”

“Thank you,” he said. “Maisie, I’ve got to go meet Dr. Lander. It was nice talking to you.”

“Wait, you can’t go yet,” Maisie said. “I haven’t told you about the girl and the little boys.”

She looked genuinely distressed, but he didn’t want to miss Dr. Lander again. “All right,” he said. “One quick story and then I have to go.”