Connie Willis - Passage

“Right, the stern,” Kit said. “It was next to the second-class stairway. There were definitely two staircases, and I think there may have been three, but I can’t tell for sure. One book mentions an aft stairway and another one a rear stairway. I can’t tell if they’re both referring to the same thing. I do know the Grand Staircase was in the middle of the ship.” And I intend to find it, Joanna thought.

She called Vielle in the morning, but Vielle had apparently taken the phone off the hook like she’d said she was going to. There was no answer, and no messages on her answering machine when she got to work. I should have swung by, she thought, getting dressed to go under. If there was still no message after the session, she would.

“The switchboard just called,” Richard said when she came out of the dressing room. “Tish is out. She went home yesterday afternoon with the flu.”

“Does this mean I can’t go under?” Joanna asked. Good. She’d be able to run over to Vielle’s and make sure she was all right.

“They’re sending a sub up,” Richard said, “as soon as they can find one. The switchboard says a ton of people are out. How do you feel?”

“Fine.”

“Good. I’m raising the dosage this time. That will increase the amount of stimulation in the temporal lobe and alter the endorphin levels. That will alter the stimuli, which should produce a different unifying image.”

It won’t, Joanna thought as the sub nurse, a stolid sixtyish woman, put the headphones on her and pulled the sleep mask down over her eyes without a word. It can’t, because it’s the Titanic, and I’m going to prove it. I’m going to find the Grand Staircase, she thought, and was in the passage, looking toward the door. It was half-shut, light coming from around the edges, and the voices from beyond it were muffled.

“… noise…” she heard a man’s voice say.

“What… sound…?” a woman’s voice asked anxiously, and Joanna recognized it as that of the young woman in the nightgown. She pushed open the door.

The young woman was talking to the young man who’d come over to this side to investigate. “You said you heard a noise,” she said, clutching the white sleeve of his sweater. “Did it sound like something crashing down?”

“No,” the young man said. “It sounded like a child’s cry.”

Joanna looked over at the inside wall. There was a life preserver hanging next to the deck light, but she couldn’t read what it said. The stout man in tweeds was standing in the way. She started toward him.

The stout man said, turning to his friend, “What do they say is the trouble?”

Joanna strained to hear what his friend answered, but he spoke too softly, and he couldn’t have said, “We’ve struck an iceberg,” because the stout man sat down in a deck chair and opened his book, but at least he had moved from in front of the life preserver. She put up her hand, shielding her eyes from the glare, and tried to read the lettering.

She had been wrong. There was no lettering around the white ring of the life preserver, and no lettering on the backs of the deck chairs, or the metal lockers, or the doors. But one of them has to lead to the Grand Staircase, she thought, walking along the deck, trying each one.

The first two were locked. The third opened on a bare lightbulb and a metal stairway leading down. A crew stairway, Joanna thought, and tried the next one.

It was locked, too, but the one after that opened onto a darkened wooden staircase. It was wider than the one she’d climbed up before. The railings and newel posts were more elaborately carved, and rose-colored carpeting covered the stairs.

But the stairs should be marble, she thought, and why is it dark? There were light sconces on the wall, but no switch that she could see. She walked over to the railing and looked up. Far above, several decks up, she thought she caught a glimpse of gray. The skylight? Or the steward’s white jacket? Or something else? There was only one way to find out. Joanna put her hand on the railing and started up the stairs.

It grew progressively darker as she climbed, so that she could barely see the steps in front of her, and nothing of what she was passing. The First-Class Dining Saloon should be here, she thought, rounding the landing. No, that was down on the saloon deck, but the cherub should be here, and the clock with Honour and Glory Crowning Time, and the skylight.

The skylight was there, a dark gray dome above her head as she started up the third flight. She could see its wrought-iron ribs, darker between the curves of darkened glass, but there was no cherub. The newel post was carved wood in the shape of a basket of fruit. There was a clock at the top of the stairs, but it was a square wooden one. Yet this had to be the Grand Staircase. There wouldn’t be two elaborate skylights on one ship. What if Richard’s right, and it is an amalgam? she thought, and opened the door at the head of the stairs.

She was back on the Boat Deck and it was still deserted and dark. There wasn’t even a light on the bridge. She peered toward the bow, trying to make out the flicker of the Morse lamp or catch the scrape of the lantern shutter, but the deck was utterly silent. The boats, off to her right, still hung in their davits, shrouded in canvas.

The boats should have the name of the ship on them, she thought, and tried to raise the canvas on the nearest one, but it was lashed down tightly, the ropes knotted into fist-sized bundles. She couldn’t budge the canvas at all.

She walked along the line of boats, trying to find one whose canvas was looser, but they were all as immovable as the first one. She crossed to the other side of the deck. There was a light on this side. From the bridge? No, closer than that. An open door in the near end of the building that housed the officers’ quarters. Joanna went over to it and looked in.

It was some sort of gymnasium. There were Indian clubs and medicine balls stacked against the inside wall and pieces of exercise equipment scattered around the red-and-white tile floor: a mechanical horse and a rowing machine and a tall black weight-lifting apparatus, the same shape and size as a guillotine. A punching bag hung from the ceiling.

Against the right-hand wall stood a line of stationary bicycles. A young man in a T-shirt and gray sweatpants was riding the middle bicycle, pedaling furiously. On the wall in front of him was a large clock face with numbers and red and blue arrows pointing to them.

The young man had pedaled till both arrows were on the final number. He gave a final burst of effort, bent forward over the handlebars. The red-and-blue numbers swung up to zero, and he stopped pedaling and raised his fists, like a runner after a race. He dismounted and bent to pick up a towel, and she saw his face. “Oh,” she said and sucked in her breath.

It was Greg Menotti.

“I know you,” Greg Menotti said, dabbing at his face with a towel. He walked over to where she was standing. “Don’t I?”

“I’m…” Joanna said, and for one horrible moment could not think of her name, “…Joanna Lander,” and then remembered he had known her as Dr. Lander. “Dr. Lander.”

“Dr. Lander?” he said, clearly still trying to place her. “You look so familiar… oh, wait, I remember you. You were the one who asked me all those questions that day I got hit on the head. You wouldn’t give me your phone number. So what are you doing here? Did you change your mind?”