Passage (107 page)

Richard thought of Maisie, trying to signal him, trying to get Nurse Lucille to page him, to let her call, bribing Eugene to carry a message, finally telling her mother about the project as a last resort.

“So then he tries to use the radio,” Mr. Wojakowski was saying, “but the door to the radio room’s locked. Can you imagine that? Locking the doors on a sinking ship? Who do they think’s gonna get in?”

Locked. Himself, yanking frantically at the locked door, kicking at it, trying to get back to the lab, and Joanna, trying the door to the aft stairway and finding it locked, going down to the mail room to get the key to the locker with the rockets in it. The key. Amelia saying, “I had to find the key.”

“Pichette went all over that ship,” Mr. Wojakowski said, “looking for something he can get their attention with.”

All over the ship. Joanna going up to the Boat Deck, down to the Promenade Deck, along Scotland Road. Running all over. Up to the lab to tell him about Coma Carl, and, when he wasn’t there, up to Dr. Jamison’s office, down to the ER.

And he and Kit and Vielle, running all over, too. Up to Timberline and over to four-east, asking nurses and taxi drivers, mapping stairways, trying to find out where Joanna had gone, who she had talked to. Going over the transcripts and through
Mazes and Mirrors
, graphing the scans, searching the hospital and their memories and the
Titanic
, trying everything they could think of.

“Pichette tries everything he can think of,” Mr. Wojakowski said. “He even takes off his shirt and waves it like a flag, but that doesn’t work either, and the ship’s sinking. He’s gotta think of some way to signal ’em before it’s too late.”

Some way to signal them. Mr. Briarley sending up rockets. The quartermaster working the Morse lamp. The wireless operator tapping out messages to the
Carpathia
and the
Californian
and the
Frankfurt.
Messages. The bearded man sending the steward with a message to Mr. Briarley, and the mail clerk dragging sacks of wet letters up to the Boat Deck, and J. H. Rogers writing a note to his sister.

“Messages,” Richard murmured. “It’s about messages.” His NDE had been full of them: the wireless operator taking down the names of the survivors, and the secretary with the telephone to her ear and Joanna’s number on his pager.

Mr. Sage heard a telephone ringing, he thought suddenly. And Mrs. Davenport got a telegram, telling her to come back.
“There’s got to be some common thread between all these NDEs,” Kit had said, and this must be it. Messages. The NDEs were all about messages.

But there hadn’t been any telegrams in Amelia Tanaka’s NDE, or rockets, or telephones. There weren’t any messages in it at all, just a test and a locked cupboard full of chemicals. And she had tried one key after another, one chemical after another, trying to find the one that would work.

Like Joanna-he had a sudden vision of the crash team working over her, trying CPR, paddles, epinephrine, trying technique after technique. Looking for something that would work, he thought, and had the feeling Joanna had described, of almost,
almost
knowing.

“I know it has something to do with the
Titanic
,” Joanna had said. The
Titanic
, which had sent up rockets, lowered lifeboats, tapped out Morse code, looking for something that would work.

“So, anyway, I’m standing on the deck of the
Hughes
, looking down in the water,” Mr. Wojakowski said, but Richard shut his voice out, trying to hold on to the knowledge he nearly had, that was almost within reach.

Morse code. Code. “It was like the labels were written in code,” Amelia had said. And Maisie, gleefully telling him why she’d set the time at two-ten, “I sent it in code.” Code. Chemical formulas and metaphors and “some strange language.” Dots and dashes and “Rosabelle, remember.” Code.

“Tell Richard it’s . . . SOS,” Joanna had said, and he had thought she’d tried to tell him something and failed. But she hadn’t. That was the message. “It’s an SOS.”

An SOS. A message sent out in all directions in the hope that somebody hears it. A message tapped out by the dying brain to the frontal cortex, the amygdala, the hippocampus, trying to get somebody to come to the rescue.

“Pretty damned ingenious, huh?” Mr. Wojakowski was saying.

“What? I’m sorry,” Richard said. “I didn’t hear how he finally got their attention.”

“Sounds like you’re the one needs to sign up for that hearing study,” he said, and slapped Richard on the shoulder.
“With a machine gun. See, I’m standing there on the
Hughes
looking down at the water for Jap subs, and all of a sudden I see these little fountains. ‘Sub!’ I shout, and the lieutenant comes over and looks at it and says, ‘A sub doesn’t make the water fly up like that. That’s a depth charge,’ but I’m looking at the splashes and they don’t look like a depth charge either, they’re in a straight line, and I look to see where they’re coming from, and there’s a guy up on the catwalk, leaning over the railing and firing a machine gun into the water. I can’t hear it, it’s too far, and he knows that, he knows he’s gotta—”

Too far, and the way’s blocked. Half of the synapses have already shut down from lack of oxygen, half the pathways are locked or have “Closed for Repair” signs on them. So the temporal lobe tries one route after another, one chemical after another, carnosine, NPK, amiglycine, trying to find a shortcut, trying to get the signal through to the motor cortex to start the heart, the lungs. “It was really late,” Amelia had said. “All I wanted was to find the right chemical and go home,” and Mrs. Brandeis’s angel had said, “You must return to earth. It is not yet your time.”

“The command to return is in over sixty percent of them,” Joanna had said, but it wasn’t a command. It was a message that had finally gotten through, a chemical that had finally connected, a synapse that had finally fired, like a key turning over in the ignition. The NDE’s a survival mechanism, Richard thought, a last-ditch effort by the brain to jump-start the system. The body’s version of a crash team.

He looked blindly at Mr. Wojakowski, who was still talking. “So we take a boat over to get him and throw him up a ladder,” he said, “but he won’t come, he keeps shouting something down at us, only we can’t hear over the motor. We think he must be in too bad a shape to climb down the ladder, so the first mate sends me up after him, and he is in bad shape, shot in the gut and lost a lot of blood, but that isn’t what he was trying to tell us. Seems there’s
another
guy down in sick bay, and he’s
really
in bad shape, unconscious from a skull fracture.” He shook his head. “He’d ’a been a goner if Pichette hadn’t thought of that machine gun.”

Down the hall, a door opened. Richard looked up and saw
Mandrake coming. And knew suddenly what Joanna had said to Mandrake. The orderly had said Joanna had laughed, and of course she had. “You were right,” she’d told him. “The NDE
is
a message.”

But not from the Other Side. From this side, as the brain, going down, made a last valiant effort to save itself, trying everything in its arsenal: endorphins, to block out the pain and fear and clear the decks for action, adrenaline to strengthen the signals, acetylcholine to open up pathways and connectors. Pretty damned ingenious.

But the acetylcholine had a side effect. It increased the associative abilities of the cerebral cortex, too, and long-term memory, struggling to make sense of the sensations and sights and emotions pouring over it, turned them into tunnels and angels and the
Titanic.
Into metaphors that people mistook for reality. But the reality was a complex system of signals sent to the hippocampus to activate a neurotransmitter that could jump-start the system.

And I know what it is, Richard thought in a kind of wonder. I’ve been looking right at it all this time. That’s why it was in all of Mrs. Troudtheim’s NDEs and the one where Joanna kicked out. I was looking for an inhibitor, and I was right, theta-asparcine’s not an inhibitor. It’s an activator. It’s the key.

“What are you telling my subject, Dr. Wright?” Mandrake demanded. “That NDEs aren’t real, that they’re nothing but a physical phenomenon?” He turned to Mr. Wojakowski. “Dr. Wright doesn’t believe in miracles.”

I do, Richard thought, I do.

“Dr. Wright refuses to believe that the dead communicate with us,” Mandrake said. “Is that what he was telling you?”

“He wasn’t telling me anything,” Mr. Wojakowski said. “I was telling the doc here about this time on the Yorktown—”

“I’m sure Dr. Wright will let you tell him some other time,” Mandrake said. “I have a very busy schedule, and if we’re going to meet—”

Mr. Wojakowski turned to Richard. “Is it okay if I talk to him, Doc?”

“It’s fine. You tell him anything you want,” Richard said and started for the elevator. He needed to set up tests to see if
theta-asparcine could bring subjects out of the NDE-state on its own, or whether it was the combination of theta-asparcine and acetylcholine and cortisol. I need to call Amelia, he thought. She said she’d be willing to go under.

He punched the “up” button on the elevator. I need to look at the scans, and talk to Dr. Jamison. And Maisie’s mother, he thought, and looked back down the hall. Mr. Wojakowski and Mandrake were almost to his office. Richard sprinted after them. “Mr. Wojakowski. Ed,” he said, catching up to them. “What happened to him?”

“Dr. Wright,” Mr. Mandrake said, “you have already taken up more than half of my appointment time with Mr. Wojakowski here—”

Richard ignored him. “What happened to the sailor, the one who fired the machine gun?” he said to Mr. Wojakowski.

“Norm Pichette? Didn’t make it.” He shook his head.

Didn’t make it.

“Dr. Wright,” Mandrake said, “if this is your way of undermining my research—”

“Peritonitis,” Mr. Wojakowski said. “Died the next day.”

“What happened to the other one?”

“Dr.
Wright
,” Mandrake bellowed.

“The one out cold in sick bay? George Weise?” Mr. Wojakowski said. “He recovered fine. Got a letter about him from Soda Pop Papachek the other day.”

“You mean a message,” Richard said gaily. “You were right, Mandrake, it
is
a message.”

Mandrake pursed his lips. “What are you talking about?”

Richard clapped him on the shoulder. “You wouldn’t understand. There are more things in heaven and earth, Manny, old boy, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. And you’re about to find out what they are.”

A
FTER A LONG TIME
, the darkness seemed to diminish a little, the blackness taking on a tinge of gray, the stars beginning to dim. “The sun is coming up,” Joanna said to the little French bulldog, though she still couldn’t see him, and began to scan the sky to the east for a telltale pallor along the horizon. But she could not make out the horizon, and the light, if that was what it was, leaked evenly from all directions into the sky, if that was what it was.

It grew light so slowly that Joanna thought she had been mistaken, that she had only imagined the diminishing of the blackness, but after an endless time, the stars went out, not one by one, but all together, and the sky turned charcoal and then slate. A little wind came up, and the night took on an early-morning chill.

It’s four o’clock, Joanna thought. That was when the
Carpathia
had steamed up, having come fifty-eight miles in three hours at pushing, punishing speed. The people in the lifeboats had seen it in the black-gray of near dawn, first her light and then the tall stack, streaming smoke. But though Joanna stared, squinting, toward the southwest, there was no light, no smoke.

There’s nothing out there at all, she thought, but as the darkness continued to diminish, she could make out a jagged horizon, as of distant mountains. The Blessed Realm, she thought, hope fluttering up in her. Or the Isle of Avalon.

“Maybe we’re saved after all,” she said, looking down at the dog, and when she did, she saw that it was not the French bulldog she was holding after all, but the little girl from the Hartford circus fire, Little Miss 1565. Her face was smudged with soot, and ash had caught in her sausage curls.

“I never had a dog,” the little girl said. “What’s his name?”
and Joanna saw that the little girl was holding the French bulldog in her arms.

Joanna brushed a flake of ash from the little girl’s hair. “I don’t know,” she said.

“I will give you a name then,” the little girl said to the dog, holding him up, her smudged hands clutching it around its fat middle. “I will call you Ulla.”

Ulla. “Who are you?” Joanna asked, “what’s your name?” and waited, afraid, for the answer. Not Maisie. Please don’t let it be Maisie.

“I don’t know,” the little girl said, dandling the dog by its paws. “Can you do tricks, Ulla?” she said, and then to Joanna, “The dog at the circus could jump through a hoop. He had a purple collar. That color.”