Connie Willis - Passage

And Mr. Briarley, picking up an eraser as if he were going to throw it and sweeping it across the blackboard in wide strokes, searching for a stub of chalk, printing the words in short strokes. She could hear the tap of chalk against slate as he printed the words. “Metaphor. [Tap.] A direct or implied comparison. [Tap.] ‘This is a nightmare.’ [Tap.] As opposed to simile. [Tap.] ‘Silent as death.’ [Tap.] Does that help, Mr. Inman?”

And Ricky, rocking so far back he threatened to overbalance, saying, “I still don’t get it. Fog doesn’t have feet.”

“The mathematical formula for the frontal-cortical activity is identical,” Richard said. “Your mind was clearly searching through long-term memory for a unifying image that would explain all the sensations you were experiencing—the sound, the tunnel, the light, figures in white. And, as you said, it all fit. The Titanic was that unifying image.”

“And that’s why I saw it,” Joanna said, “because it was the best match for the stimuli out of all the images in my long-term memory.”

“Yes,” Richard said. “The pattern—”

“What about Mercy General? Or Pompeii?”

“Pompeii?” he said blankly.

“Mercy General fits all the stimuli—long dark walkways, figures in white, buzzing code alarms—and so does Pompeii. The people wore white togas, the sky was pitch-black from ashfall,” she said, ticking the reasons off on her fingers, “it had long covered colonnades like tunnels, the volcano’s erupting made a loud, hard-to-describe sound, and Maisie talked to me about it not two hours before I went under.”

“There may be more than one suitable image in long-term, and the one that happens to be accessed first is chosen,” Richard said. “That wouldn’t necessarily be the most recent memory. Remember, acetylcholine levels are elevated, which increases the brain’s ability to access memories and see associations. Or the brain may only be able to access memories in certain areas. Some areas may be blocked or shut down.”

Like Mr. Briarley’s memory, Joanna thought. “That isn’t why I saw the Titanic,” she said. “I know where the memory came from.”

“You do?” Richard said warily.

He’s still afraid I’m going to turn into Bridey Murphy at any moment, she thought. “Yes. It came from my high school English teacher, Mr. Briarley.”

“Your high school—when did you figure this out?”

“This afternoon.” She told him about recording her account and remembering that the steward had said Mr. Briarley’s name. “And I remembered he’d talked about the Titanic in class.”

Richard looked delighted. “That fits right in with the mind’s attempting to unify everything into a single scenario, including the source of the memory. Your mind did an L+R, searching for a unifying image that would explain the outline of figures in a light and an auditory-cortex stimulus, and—”

She shook her head. “That isn’t why I saw it. There’s something else, something to do with something Mr. Briarley said in class.”

“Which was?”

“I don’t know,” she had to admit. “I can’t remember. But I know—”

“—that it means something,” Richard finished. He was looking at her with that maddening superior expression.

Joanna glared at him. “You think this is the temporal lobe again, but I told you I recognized the passage, and I did, and I told you I knew the memory wasn’t from the movie, and it wasn’t, and now—”

“Now you know the Titanic wasn’t chosen for a unifying image because it fit the stimuli,” Richard said.

“Exactly. I was right the other times, and—”

“And when you discovered what the passage was, the feeling of almost knowing should have disappeared, but it didn’t, did it? It transferred to the source of the memory and now to Mr. Briarley’s words. And if you’re able to remember his words, the feeling will transfer to another object.”

Was that true? Joanna wondered. If Kit called right now and said, “I asked Uncle Pat again, and he said what he said was…” and told her, would she transfer the feeling to something else?

“How the feeling of significance factors into the choice of scenario is one of the things I want to explore,” Richard said. “Also, does the scenario remain the same, or does it change depending on the stimuli, or the initial stimulus?”

“The initial stimulus? I thought you said—”

“That the unifying memory fit all the stimuli? I did, but the initial stimulus may be what determines the choice of one suitable image over another. That would explain why religious images are so prevalent. If the initial stimulus was a floating feeling, there would be very few suitable memories, except for angels.”

“Or Peter Pan.”

Richard ignored that. “You didn’t have an out-of-body experience. Your initial stimulus was auditory.”

So I saw a ship that sank nearly a hundred years ago, Joanna thought.

“If the initial stimulus changes, does the unifying image change? That’s one of the things I want to explore the next time you go under.”

“Go under?” Joanna said. He wanted to send her under again. To the Titanic.

“Yes, I’d like to schedule you as soon as possible.” He called up the schedule. “Mrs. Troudtheim’s scheduled for one. We could do yours at three, or would you rather switch with Mrs. Troudtheim and do yours at one?”

One, Joanna thought. It’s already gone down by three.

“Joanna?” Richard said. “Which one will work better for you? Or is morning better? Joanna?”

“One,” she said. “I might need to go see Maisie in the morning if I can’t get in to see her tonight.”

“Which you’d better go do,” Richard said, glancing at the clock, which said eight-thirty. “Okay, I’ll call Mrs. Troudtheim and reschedule. I hope she doesn’t have a dental appointment. And if you have any time—tomorrow, not tonight—I’d like you to go through your interviews and see if there’s a correlation between initial stimulus and subsequent scenario.”

There isn’t, she thought, going down to Maisie’s. That isn’t what the connection is. It’s something else. But the only way to prove that was to get hard evidence, which meant finding out what Mr. Briarley had said.

But how? Even if Mr. Briarley didn’t have Alzheimer’s, he probably wouldn’t have remembered a stray remark he’d made in class over ten years ago, and his students were even less likely to. If she could find them. If she could even remember who they were. I need to call Kerri, she thought again. But first she needed to go see Maisie, who she hoped wasn’t asleep.

She wasn’t. She was lying back against her phalanx of pillows, looking bored. Her mother sat in a chair next to the bed, reading aloud from a yellow-bound book: “ ‘Oh, don’t be such a gloomy-gus, Uncle Hiram,’ Dolly said. ‘Things will work out all right in the end. You just have to have faith,’ ” Mrs. Nellis read. “ ‘ You’re right, Dolly,’ Uncle Hiram said, ‘even if you are a little slip of a girl. I shouldn’t give up. Where there’s a will—

Maisie looked up. “I knew you’d come,” she said. She turned to her mother. “I told you she would.” She turned back to Joanna, her cheeks pink with excitement. “I told her you promised you’d come.”

“You’re right, I did promise, and I’m sorry I’m so late,” Joanna said. “Something came up…”

“I told you something happened,” Maisie said to her mother, “or she’d have been here. You said she probably forgot.”

I did forget, Joanna thought, and even worse, shut my pager off and was out of touch for hours, hours during which something could have happened to you.