Passage (98 page)

Joanna stood up. “The unifying image is breaking up,” she said. “The synapses are firing haphazardly.”

“We have to get our lifejackets on!” Greg said, scrambling wildly to his feet. He wrenched the chest open, hauled out a lifejacket and thrust it at her. “We have to get off the ship!”

Joanna looked steadily at him. “We can’t.”

He tossed the lifejacket at her feet, snatched up another one, began putting it on. “Why not?” he said, fumbling with the ties.

She looked at him with infinite pity. “Because we’re the ship.”

He stopped, his hands still clutching the trailing ties, and looked fearfully at her. “You died, Greg, and so did I, in the ER. You had a massive heart attack.”

“I work out at the health club every day,” he said.

She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. We hit an iceberg and we sank, and all this” —she waved her hand at the deck, the empty davits, the darkness—“is a metaphor for what’s really happening, the sensory neurons shutting down, the synapses failing to arc.” The poor, mortally wounded mind reflexively connecting sensations and images in spite of itself, trying to make sense of death even as it died.

He stared at her, his face slack with hopelessness. “But if that’s true, if that’s
true,”
he said, and his voice was an angry sob, “what are we supposed to do?”

Why is everyone always asking me? Joanna thought. I don’t
know.
Trust in Jesus. Behave well. Play the hand you’re dealt. Try to remember what’s important. Try not to be afraid. “I don’t know,” she said, infinitely sorry for him, for herself, for everyone. “Look, it’s too late to save ourselves, but there’s still a chance we can save Maisie. If we could get a message through—”

“Maisie?”
he shouted, his voice filled with fury and contempt. “We have to save ourselves. It’s every man for himself.” He yanked the ties into a knot. “There aren’t enough lifeboats for everyone, are there?” he said. “That’s why you don’t want to tell me where they are, because you’re afraid I’ll steal your place. They’re down belowdecks, aren’t they?”

“No!” Joanna said. “There’s nothing down there except water!” And darkness. And a boy with a knife.

“Don’t go down there!” Joanna said, reaching out for him, but he was already past her, already to the door. “Greg!” She raced after him.

He yanked the door open on darkness, on destruction. “Wait!” Joanna called. “Kevin! Mr. Briarley! Help! SOS!”

There was a sound of footsteps, of people running from the stern. “Hurry!” she said, and turned toward the sound. “You have to help me. Greg’s—”

It was a squat, white dog with batlike ears, padding down the deck toward her, trailing a leather leash. It’s the French bulldog, Joanna thought, the one Maisie felt so bad about. “Here, boy!” she called, squatting down, but the dog ignored her, trotting past with the frantic, single-minded look of a lost dog trying to get to its master.

“Wait!” Joanna said and ran after it, grabbing for the end of the leash. She caught the little dog up in her arms. “There, there,” she said. “It’s all right.” It looked up at her with its bulging brown eyes, panting hard. “Don’t be afraid,” she said. “I’ve got—”

There was a sound. Joanna looked up. Greg stood on the top step of the crew stairway, looking down into the darkness. He took a step down. “Don’t go down there!” Joanna cried. She thrust the little dog under her arm and ran toward the door. “Wait!” she cried, but the door had already shut behind him. “Wait!”

She grabbed the doorknob with her free hand. It wouldn’t turn. She hastily set the dog down, looping the end of the leash over her wrist, and tried the doorknob again. It was locked. “Greg!” she shouted through it. “Open the door!”

She put her whole weight against the door and pushed. “Open the door!”
Pounding on the glass of the door, shouting, “What kind of hospital cafeteria is this?” Beating so hard the glass rattled, the cardboard sign that said “11
A.M.
to 1
P.M.
” shook, trying to make the woman inside look up from setting out the dishes of red Jell-O, shouting, “It’s not even one yet!” pointing to her watch in proof, but when she looked at it, it didn’t say ten to one, it said twenty past two.

She was on her knees, holding on to one of the empty lifeboat davits. The little bulldog huddled at her feet, looking up at her, shivering. His leash trailed behind him on the slanting deck. I let go of it, she thought in horror. I can’t let go of it.

She wrapped the leash tightly around her wrist twice, and clutched it in her fist. She scooped the little dog up in her arms, staggering against the rail as she straightened. The deck was slanting steeply now. “I’ve got to get a lifejacket on you,” she said and set off with the dog in her arms, climbing the hill of the deck, trying to avoid the deck chairs that were sliding down, the birdcages, the crash carts.

I’m in the wrong wing, she thought, I have to get to the Boat Deck, and heard the band. “The band was on the Boat Deck,” Joanna said, and climbed toward the sound.

The musicians had wedged the piano into the angle of the Grand Staircase and the funnel. They stood in front of it, their violins held to their chests like shields. As Joanna reached them, the bandleader raised his baton, and the musicians tucked their violins under their chins, raised their bows, began to play. Joanna waited, the bulldog pressed against her, but it was a ragtime tune, sprightly, jagged.

“It’s not the end yet,” Joanna said to the dog, climbing past them, past the first-class lounge. “We still have time, it isn’t over till they play ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee.’ ”

And here was the chest. Joanna rolled an IV pole out of the way, and a gurney, trailing a white sheet, and grabbed a life-jacket. She stood the little dog on the white chest to put the lifejacket on him, wrapping it around his squat body and pulling his front legs through the armholes. She reached for the dangling ties, clutched—
“ ‘Come, let me clutch thee!’ ” Mr. Briarley intoned from
Macbeth. “ ‘I have thee not, and yet I see thee still. Art thou a dagger of the mind . . . ?’ ” Ricky Inman tilted back and forth in his chair, Joanna watching him, fascinated, waiting for him to overbalance. “ ‘ . . . a false creation, proceeding from the oppressed brain?’ ” and Ricky toppled over backward, grabbing at the wall, at the light switch, as he went over, Mr. Briarley saying, as the light went out, “Exactly, Mr. Inman, ‘put out the light and then put out the light,’ ” and the whole class laughing, but it wasn’t funny, it was dark. “It was dark,” Mrs. Davenport said, pausing between every word, Joanna, bored, uncaring, asking, “Can you describe it?” and Mr. Briarley answering, “ ‘The sun did not shine and the stars gave no light.’ ”

She was clinging to the deck railing, her body half over the
side. She had let go of the bulldog again, and it scrabbled at her legs, whimpering, sliding away from her down the steep deck.

She caught it up against her chest and groped her way toward the support in the middle of the deck, hanging on to the railing as long as she could and then letting go and half-sliding, half-falling toward the safety of the wooden pillar. The deck lights dimmed down to nothing and came on again, dull red.

“The visual cortex is shutting down,” Joanna said, and lurched for the pillar. She wrapped the leash around her wrist, struggling to bind them to the pillar without letting go of the leash. A crash cart slid past them, picking up speed. A tiger, its striped fur red and black in the dimming light, loped by.

Joanna passed the leash around her waist, the dog, the pillar, and tied it in a knot. “This way I won’t let go of you. Like ‘The Wreck of the Hesperus,’ ” she said and wished Mr. Briarley were here. “ ‘He cut a rope from a broken spar, and bound her to the mast,’ ” she recited, but when she said the next line, it didn’t come out right. “ ‘And when they were dead,’ ” she recited, “ ‘the robins so red, gathered strawberry leaves and over them spread.’ ”

The ship was beginning to overbalance, like Ricky Inman going over in his chair. The bulldog, between her chest and the pillar, looked up at her with wild, frightened eyes. “Don’t be afraid,” she whispered. “It can’t last much longer.”

Snow began to fall, large gray-white flakes drifting down onto the deck like apple blossoms, like ash. Joanna looked up, half-expecting to see Vesuvius above them. A sailor, all in white, ran past, dragging landing chocks behind him, shouting, “Zeroes at oh-nine hundred!” The band stopped, paused, began to play.

“This is it,” Joanna whispered, “ ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee.’ ” But that wasn’t the tune. “Well, at least some good has come out of this,” she said to the dog, trying to smile. “We’ve solved the mystery of whether they were playing ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee,’ or ‘Autumn.’ ” But it wasn’t “Autumn” either. It wasn’t a hymn at all. It was “The Stars and Stripes Forever.”

“Oh, Maisie,” she murmured.

An Apache galloped past, brandishing a knife. Water began to pour from the lifeboat davits, from the railings, from the chest. “This is the worst of the worst catastrophes in the world!” a reporter on the roof of the officers’ quarters sobbed into a microphone. “It’s a terrific crash, ladies and gentlemen, the smoke and the flames now! Oh, the humanity!” The code alarm began to scream.

Joanna looked up. The stern of the ship reared above her, suspended against the blackness. She hugged the dog against her and tried to shield its head. The lights went out, blinked on dull red, went off, came on again. Like Morse code. Like Lavoisier.

There was a horrible rending sound, and everything began to fall, deck chairs and the grand piano and the giant funnels, violins and Indian clubs and playing cards, postcards and pomegranates and dishes and Dish Night, transcripts and trellises and telegrams. Books toppled out of their shelves,
Mirrors and Mazes
and
The Titanic ABC
and
The Light at the End of the Tunnel.
The davits broke loose from their moorings, and the mechanical camel, and the weight machine, looking more than ever like a guillotine. The stanchions fell, and the engine room telegraph, set now on Stop, and scans and sleep masks and shortcuts, arteries, ancient mariners, minirecorders, metaphors, dog tags, heating vents, knives, neurons, night.

They crashed down on Joanna and the little bulldog with a rending, deafening roar, and in the last moment before it reached them, she realized she had been wrong about the noise she had heard when she came through. It was not the sound of the engines stopping or of the code alarm buzzing, of the iceberg slashing into the ship’s side, but the sound of her whole life crashing, crashing, crashing down on her.

I
’VE BEEN TRYING
to call you since
Wednesday,”
Maisie said disgustedly to Richard. She reached for her remote and turned down the sound on
The Sound of Music.
“But they don’t let you have phones in your room in here, you have to tell the sector nurse and she makes the call
for
you, she dials it and everything, and they don’t allow cell phones either ’cause of people’s pacemakers, you might scramble their signals and they’d go into V-fib or something,” she said, a little like a runaway train herself, “so I asked Nurse Lucille to call you, and she said, ‘What for?’ and I couldn’t say the real reason ’cause I’m not supposed to know about Joanna. We need to have a code for next time.”

“All right, we’ll work one out,” Richard said. “You found out who Joanna had been to see?”

“Yes. So, anyway, I told her to tell you I needed to see you, and I said you weren’t a visitor, you were a doctor, but she still wouldn’t call you.”

She paused to get her breath, wheezing a little, and then started up again. “So I asked her to call Ms. Sutterly to bring me my books, because she’s not a visitor, I have to have my books so I can do my homework. I thought when she came I could secretly hand her this note with your phone number on it, but Nurse Lucille said ‘Family members only.’ It’s like a prison.”

“So you told your mother I’d discovered a cure for coding?” Richard said.

She nodded. “I got the idea watching
The Parent Trap
, the part where they fool the mom. I couldn’t think of anything else,” she said defensively. “I figured she’d
make
you come see me if she thought you’d figured out a way to bring people back
after they coded. And she did.” She sobered. “I know you don’t really know how to do that. Are you mad?”

“No. I should have come to see you earlier when you didn’t call. I came a couple of days ago, but you were out having tests.”

She nodded. “An echocardiogram. Again. I tried the whole time I was down there to get somebody to page you, but nobody would. They said pages were for hospital business only.”

“But you got the message to me,” Richard said. “That’s the important thing. And you found out where Joanna was and who she talked to.”

She nodded emphatically. “That was even harder than getting the message to you ’cause I couldn’t
go
anywhere or call anybody, and I knew if I asked the nurses, they’d ask me what I wanted to know for, so I asked Eugene. He’s the guy who brings the menu things. When I was down in Peds, Eugene brought the menu things down there, too, so I figured he did all the floors and saw lots of people.”