Passage (62 page)

“Which would explain why you were not on the passenger list,” he said. “I was certain I hadn’t seen your name. Near-death experiences. Accounts of those who have returned to tell the tale. ‘The times have been that, when the brains were out, the man would die, and there an end, but now they rise again.’ And what have you learned from these voyages to ‘the country from whose bourn no traveler returns’?”

“I—” Joanna said, and, across the library, the door opened, and the steward came in.

He walked quickly up to them. “I beg your pardon, miss,” he said to Joanna and turned to Mr. Briarley. “If I might speak to you a moment, sir.”

“Of course,” Mr. Briarley said. The two men went over by the bookcases, and the steward began speaking in a low, urgent voice. Joanna caught the words “requested me to ask you” and “know what happened.”

“Tell them . . . ” Mr. Briarley said, and Joanna stepped forward, trying to hear. As she did, her hand brushed against the desk and knocked the ink bottle over. Ink splashed onto the floor, soaking darkly into the carpet. Joanna bent to right the bottle, reaching in her pocket for a Kleenex.

“Yes, sir, thank you, sir,” the steward said. “I’ll tell them. They will be much relieved.”

The steward went out, and Mr. Briarley came back over to the desk where Joanna knelt, blotting up the spilled ink.

“Never mind,” he said, taking her arm to raise her gently to standing. “It doesn’t matter. Come, sit down, and in a moment
we’ll go have tea,” he said, sitting down at the desk again. “I must just finish writing a note first.” He picked up the pen and began to write.

Joanna had forgotten that she’d come in here to look for the
Titanic’
s name on the stationery. She looked down at the note he was writing, hoping the letter would be faceup so she could see the letterhead, but it wasn’t a letter. It was a postcard.

“I was writing a message to my niece,” Mr. Briarley said. There was no printed letterhead on the postcard, only three lines for the address and the words “Dear Kit.”

“Have you met my niece?” he asked and, before she could answer, said, “You’d like her. She was named after Kit Marlowe. ‘Is this the face that launched a thousand ships?’ Though I doubt he meant this one. And, ‘Honour is purchased by the deeds we do. It is not won until some honourable deed is done.’ Did he manage to win it? I wonder. There is always less time than we imagine. Time that in his case ended abruptly in an inn in Deptford.”

“I know,” Joanna said.

Mr. Briarley looked pleased. “You remember that from class?”

“No, I saw the movie.
Shakespeare in Love,”
she said. “With Gwyneth Paltrow.” I can’t believe we’re having this conversation, she thought. “Vielle and I rented it.”

“Stabbed to death,” Mr. Briarley said. “A quick way to die, though not as quick perhaps as he imagined. Or as serene, though he may have had some idea. ‘Pray for me!’ Faust says, ‘and what noise soever ye hear, come not unto me, for nothing can rescue me.’ Though that’s not always true. And, at any rate, there is still time for tea, though it is a pity I didn’t know of your being on board sooner. We would have had time to talk of many things, ‘of shoes and ships—’ ” He stood up and took his coat off the back of the chair and put it on. “And time to solve the mysteries of the universe. Well, it can’t be helped, and there should still be time for tea, at least.”

He picked up the postcard and slid it inside his jacket, too quickly for Joanna to get more than a glimpse of a hand-colored photo of a ship and pale blue ocean, pale blue sky, on
the other side. “I have an errand to run first,” he said, “and then we’ll go to the A La Carte Restaurant. No, perhaps it had better be the Palm Court. It’s farther aft.” He looked at his watch. “Yes, definitely the Palm Court, but I must take this to the post office first.”

“The post office?” Joanna said, thinking of the mail clerk, dragging the wet canvas bag up the stairs. “No, wait, Mr. Briarley,” but he was already out the door of the library.

She ran after him out onto the deck. “Mr. Briarley!” she called, but he was disappearing through another door. “You can’t go down to the mail room,” she shouted, opening it and running down the curving marble steps to the bronze statue at its foot. “It’s already underwater,” she said, and stopped, staring at the statue.

It was a cherub, with wings and curly hair, holding aloft a golden torch. I knew there was an entrance on the Promenade Deck, Joanna thought. Because there was no mistaking this was the Grand Staircase. And no mistaking what ship she was on.

She turned and looked back up at the head of the stairs, and there was the bronze clock flanked by two angels with long robes and wings. Honour and Glory Crowning Time. Joanna craned her neck to look up at the skylight. The curved glass was the same milky-gold color as in the one above the aft staircase, but this one was much larger, and in the center hung a crystal chandelier, light radiating from it like glittering diamond prisms. “It
is
the
Titanic,”
Joanna said, and turned back to Mr. Briarley.

He wasn’t there. While she’d been looking at the skylight, he’d vanished. Which way had he gone? She ran down to the bottom of the stairs to look over the railing at the decks below. “Mr. Briarley!” she shouted, but he wasn’t on the stairs, and as she leaned forward, trying to see into the darkness, she heard a door off to the left slam. She ran in the direction of the sound, down a long, brightly lit corridor carpeted in red toward the door that was just closing.

“Mr. Briarley!” she called, opening the door. Beyond it, the corridor widened and made a turn, and there was another stairway, and on the deck below, the sound of another door closing. Joanna pattered down the stairs. Next to the stairway
was a small room with a red-and-white-striped pole. The barber shop, and next to it, on the corner, a teller’s window with a gold-lettered sign above it: “Purser’s Office.” The post office must be somewhere nearby.

Between the barber shop and the purser’s was a door. There was no sign on it, but when Joanna put her hand on it, it opened easily. Inside, red-and-black cloth-covered wires crossed and recrossed on a large wooden board, and coming from somewhere-the headphones, lying in front of the board-was an insistent ringing.

The ship’s switchboard, Joanna thought, hurrying past the purser’s and around the corner. This passage wasn’t lit, and after the bright lights of the stairway, she couldn’t see anything. She took a few tentative steps in. “Why, this is my passage,” she said.

“What did she say?” Richard asked sharply.

“ ‘Passed away,’ ” Tish said. “I think she’s awake.”

“She can’t be,” Richard said, and Joanna felt her sleep mask being removed.

She opened her eyes. “I am,” she said, “but I didn’t say ‘passed away.’ I said ‘passageway.’ I went in by mistake. I didn’t realize it was my passage.” She tried to sit up. “It was the other end of it. I was—”

“Lie still,” Tish said, wrapping a blood pressure cuff around Joanna’s arm. “I haven’t even taken your vitals yet.”

“I wouldn’t have gone in it if I’d realized—”

“Lie
still,”
Tish said. Joanna obeyed, waiting for Tish to finish monitoring her and begin unhooking the electrodes and the IV.

“Do you think it was because of the lowered dosage?” Tish asked, untaping the IV needle and sliding it out.

“I don’t know,” Richard said. “It was well above the threshold level.”

“What happened?” Joanna asked, twisting her head around to see Richard.

“You kicked out,” Tish said. “Just like Mrs. Troudtheim.”

“Kicked out?” Joanna said, bewildered. “But I couldn’t have. I was all over the—” She looked at Tish. “I was all over. I was there a long time.”

Richard helped her to a sitting position. “How long?”

“I don’t know,” Joanna said, trying to think. She’d gone up to the Boat Deck and talked to Greg Menotti and then had the conversation with Mr. Briarley. How long had that taken? And then they’d walked down to the Grand Staircase—

“Oh, I have something to tell you,” she said. “About what I saw. It’s definitely the . . . what we discussed before.”

“How long?” he repeated as if he hadn’t heard her.

“An hour at least.”

“An
hour?
” Tish blurted.

“You have a continuous memory of events?” Richard asked. “Not fragmented flashes?”

“No. It was just like the other times. Everything happened in sequence.”

“What about time dilation?”

She shook her head. “Nothing was speeded up or slowed down. It all happened in real time.” Only obviously it hadn’t. “How long was I under?”

“Eight seconds,” Richard said. “How long was it compared to the other times?”

“Longer,” she said promptly.

“Then that and Mr. Sage’s NDE confirm there’s no correlation between subjective time and elapsed time,” he said, and Joanna thought suddenly of Lavoisier. How long had he really been conscious? And how much time had elapsed for him between each blink?

“Was it a complete NDE or did it cut off in the middle?” Richard was asking.

“Both,” Joanna said, wishing Tish would finish unhooking her so she could explain. “I was trying to find Mr. Briarley. He was going to the post office, and I was trying to catch up with him, and I started down this passage—”

“Post office?” Tish said. “I thought you were supposed to see heaven.”

“—and I didn’t realize till I was already in it that it was the same one, and then it was too late. I was already back in the lab.”

“So the ending was different?” Richard said eagerly.

“Yes and no. I came back through the same passage, but it
was more sudden than the other times. There was more of an abrupt cutoff.”

Richard went over to the console and typed rapidly, and then looked up at the screen. “Just what I thought. Your last scan is a dead-on match for Mrs. Troudtheim’s.” He began typing again. “I need you to get your account recorded and transcribed as soon as possible.”

“I will,” Joanna said, “and I want to talk to you about what I saw.”

He nodded absently, staring at the screens. Joanna gave up and went into the dressing room, pulled on her blouse and jacket and put on her shoes, and then came back out. Richard was still typing. Tish was winding up the monitor cords. She was nearly done putting things away. I’ll wait till she’s gone and then tell him about the Grand Staircase, Joanna thought, and pulled a chair over to the far corner of the lab, sat down, and switched the recorder on.

Of course he’ll probably say I confabulated it from the conversation we had, she thought, and began recording. “Joanna Lander, session six, March 2. I heard a noise, and I was in the passage,” she said softly into it. She described her attempts to find the Grand Staircase, her fruitless conversation with Greg Menotti, her going out onto the Promenade Deck. “I walked along the deck to where the light from the bar—” she said, and thought of something.

She had said an hour, and it had definitely seemed that long, but an hour after the collision the ship would have had a definite list. Maybe there had been time dilation, after all, or maybe that was another discrepancy that meant something.

I need to tell Richard that, she thought, and looked over at the console. He was taking papers out of the printer. “Joanna,” he said, “I want to show these readouts to Dr. Jamison and see what she thinks,” and walked out before she could turn off her recorder.

She had half stood up. She sat down again, frustrated, and began recording where she’d left off, describing the man dealing out cards, the library, seeing the man at the writing desk. “And when he looked up, I saw it was Mr. Briarley, my high school English teacher, but it wasn’t the Mr. Briarley I’d seen
five days ago. He remembered my name and which class I was in, and he looked well and happy—”

Well and happy. “My mother looked well and happy,” Ms. Isakson had said, “not like the last time I’d seen her. She got so thin there at the end, and so yellow,” and Joanna had thought, That’s how NDEers always describe their dead relatives, with their limbs
and their faculties restored.

Mr. Briarley remembered who Kit had been named for, he had been able to quote “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”

He’s dead, she thought, and a current of fear ran through her. He died. That’s why I saw him on board. The stories Mr. Mandrake told me about seeing someone in an NDE and then finding out they’d died are true.

No, they aren’t, Joanna thought, glaring at the recorder in her hand. You know perfectly well that none of those cases were documented, that the subjects never even mentioned having seen the person until after they’d had outside confirmation of the death, like those mediums who claimed they’d “seen” W. T. Stead at two-twenty on the night the
Titanic
went down. Not a single one had come forward with their claim until after they’d seen Stead’s name listed among the lost. Those stories aren’t true. Mr. Briarley’s not dead. You saw him because you were thinking about him, because you were worrying about him. Then why didn’t I see Vielle? Or Maisie? And why
did
I see Greg Menotti?

Because he’s dead, she thought, the dead are who’s on board, and felt the shiver of fear again. I have to find out. I have to call Kit.

But if she called, and something had happened to Mr. Briarley, she’d be in exactly the same situation as Mr. Mandrake’s NDEers. She’d have no proof she hadn’t had advance knowledge of his death, that she hadn’t talked to Kit first and then confabulated Mr. Briarley’s presence in the library.

I have to tell Richard about my NDE first, before I call Kit, she thought, but there was no telling when he’d be back. She could try to find him, but even if she did, he hadn’t been with her the whole time. For all he knew, she might have received a call from Kit while he was out of the lab.

Tish could attest to the fact that she hadn’t left the lab, or received or made any calls, but Richard didn’t want her to know about the
Titanic.
He’s right, Joanna thought. If Mr. Mandrake were to find out about this . . . she could see the
Star
headlines already: “I See Dead People! Scientist Receives Message from Afterlife.”