Passage (82 page)

He burst through the door to sixth, raced down the hall. Tish had to be there. Mrs. Troudtheim’s session was scheduled for two. She had to be there. “Tish!” he shouted and flung open the door to the lab. “Tish!”

Tish looked up from where she was hanging the bag of saline. “You need to call the ER. They’ve been calling every two minutes,” she said. “And there’s a message for you from Dr. Lander. You turned your pager off again, didn’t—” She stopped when she saw his face. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

“Start an IV,” he said, striding over to the medicine cupboard. “Saline and dithetamine.”

“But Joanna isn’t here,” Tish said. “I checked her office, and she’s not there.”

“She coded,” he said, grabbing a vial of dithetamine and a syringe.

“Joanna coded?” Tish said blankly, coming over to the cupboard. “What do you mean? Was she in a car accident?”

“She was stabbed,” he said, filling the syringe.

“Stabbed? Is she okay?”

“I told you, she
coded,”
he said. He walked rapidly back to the examining table. “We’re going to have to use an IV push!”

Tish looked at him blankly. “An IV push? But—how can she go under if she—” she stopped, horrified. “She didn’t
die
, did she, and you’re going to record her NDE?”

“She didn’t die, and she’s not going to,” he said. He wrenched off his lab coat and flung it over a chair. “Because I’m going after her.”

“I don’t understand,” Tish said bewilderedly. “What do you mean, you’re going after her?”

“I mean, I’m going to go get her. I’m going to bring her back.” He rolled up his sleeve.

“But you said the NDEs weren’t real,” she said, looking frightened. “You said they were hallucinations. You said they were caused by the temporal lobe.”

“I said a lot of things,” he said, laying his arm flat on the examining table with the hand palm-up. “Start an IV.”

“But—”

“Start the IV,”
he said fiercely, and Tish picked up the length of tubing and wrapped it around his upper arm. He made a fist, and she began probing for a vein.

“Hurry!” he said. “We’ve only got four minutes.” Tish pushed the needle in, clipped it to the IV line, adjusted the feed. She began taping down the needle. “You can do that later,” he snapped. “Start the dithetamine. IV push.”

“Dr. Wright, I don’t think it’s a good idea to do this while you’re so upset,” Tish said. “Why don’t I call Dr. Everett or somebody, and—”

“Because there’s no time,” Richard said. “Never mind. I’ll do it myself.” He grabbed the syringe with his free hand and injected it into the line. “Start the white noise,” he said and reached for the headphones.

“Dr. Wright—” Tish said uncertainly and then went over to the amplifier.

Richard picked up the headphones and looked around for the sleep mask. He couldn’t see it anywhere, and there was no time to look for it. He put on the headphones and lay down. “Put the cushions under my arms and legs,” he said, unable to tell if Tish could hear him. He couldn’t hear anything through the headphones. “Put the—” he began, but she must have heard him. She was lifting his left arm and sliding the cushion under it and then under the other.

She placed the cushions under his legs and then wrapped a blood pressure cuff around his arm. “Don’t bother with that,” Richard said, but Tish wasn’t listening to him. She was putting electrodes to his scalp.

“I don’t need an EEG,” he said, but she didn’t look up, he was trying to talk to the top of her head. “Tish!” he shouted, and realized he was too far away for her to hear him. He was above her, above the examining table on which he lay, his arm hooked to an IV. He was drifting slowly up to the ceiling. He looked across to the top of the medicine cupboard. It was polished and bare, except for a glint of silver at the very back. He drifted closer, trying to see.

The silver object was tucked all the way back in the corner, where Joanna had put it, behind the raised edge of the cupboard. Out of sight except for someone having an out-of-body experience. He drifted still closer. It was a toy tin zeppelin.

Of course, he thought. The
Hindenburg.
I’ll have to tell Joanna I saw it. But she wouldn’t believe him. She would think he had climbed up on a chair to see what it was. Joanna would—

“Joanna!” he said, abruptly remembering. This was an out-of-body experience. But there wasn’t any time for it. “Send me through!” he shouted down to Tish. “Send me into the tunnel!”

He continued to float slowly upward, wafting slowly back and forth, like the
Hindenburg
drifting in its moorings. “Hurry!” he shouted, and looked down at Tish. She had found the sleep mask and was placing it over his eyes. He lay stiffly under the RIPT scan, his hands clenched tightly at his sides.

“Let go!” he shouted. The noise echoed loudly, reverberating as if he were in an enclosed space, and then stopped, and everything went dark.

I’m in the passage, he thought. He put out his hand in the pitch blackness and felt hardness, paint. The wall of the passage. There should be a light at the end of it, he thought, straining to see. Nothing. No light at all. It must be very late, after the lights had gone out. When had they gone out? Only a few minutes before the end.

It’s because she’s going down, he thought. Because there are only four minutes left. “Joanna!” he called. “Where are you?”

There was no answer. He fumbled for a book of matches in his lab coat pockets, but they were empty. He reached in his pants pocket. The pager. He drew it out. It was turned off. He fumbled for the switch in the darkness and turned it on. The face lit up—Joanna’s number—but the LED numbers gave no light.

He began to grope his way along the corridor, feeling his way with a hand on each wall, trying to hurry. Because there’s no time. But if it were that late, then the ship should be at a sharp angle, so tilted that he’d be having trouble standing, and he wasn’t. The floor felt perfectly level.

“Joanna!” he called again, and saw a light ahead of him. It was a thin line of white, from under a door, and that must be what he had heard—the sound of the door slamming shut. He groped his way toward the door and felt for the doorknob, thinking, Don’t let it be locked, don’t let it be locked. He found the rectangular metal plate, found the knob, turned it. And opened the door onto another corridor. A brightly lit corridor, so bright it was almost blinding, and he shielded his eyes and stood there, blinking.

This wasn’t the passage Joanna had come through. Hers had opened onto the outside, onto a window-lined deck. This was an inside passage, with a series of shut doors and light sconces on the walls between them. The lights had not gone out. They shone strongly all along the corridor, and the wooden floor was dry and perfectly level. It must be much earlier, before anyone realized it was sinking, and maybe the
sound he’d heard was the same one Joanna had heard—the iceberg scraping along the side—and it had sounded different because he was in a different part of the ship.

Which part? Second class? The brass light sconces were elaborate enough for it to be first class, but the walls were unadorned, and there were no windows, no portholes. It must be an interior corridor, or belowdecks. Steerage?

Where
was
it? On C Deck, she had said. But where was C Deck? Above this? Below it? Did they count the decks down from the top or up from the bottom?

He remembered Joanna talking about climbing up to the Boat Deck. How many decks had she said she’d climbed? He couldn’t remember. I should have paid more attention, he thought, starting down the passage at a run. I should have listened to her when she said it was real.

Because it was real. She had tried to tell him. She had said she saw colors, heard sounds, felt staircase railings under her hand, had tried to describe the reality of the ship, but he had been convinced it was a hallucination, that it was something happening in long-term memory and the temporal lobe, even when she’d tried to tell him, even when she’d said, “It’s a real place.”

I should have listened to her, he thought, looking for a stairway, or a door to the outside. I should have told her where I was going. I shouldn’t have turned off my pager.

All the doors were shut, locked. “Hey!” he shouted, banging on them, rattling the old-fashioned knobs. “Anybody there?”

The third door opened under his hand. Inside, a man wearing headphones was sitting bent over a wireless key, listening. Dot-dash-dot-dot, he wrote on a pad. “Hey!” Richard said. “How do I get to C Deck?”

The man didn’t look up.

“C Deck,” Richard said, coming to stand over him. “Which deck is this I’m on now?”

The man went on writing, his face intent on the key, dash-dash-dot-dash-dot-dot-dot—

SOS, Richard thought. Of course. He’s calling for help. When had they sent the first SOS? Not until after midnight.

“What time is it?” Richard asked him loudly. “How long have you been sending?”

A gray-haired woman appeared in the door, in a high-collared blouse and a long black skirt. “You’re not supposed to be here,” she said, her hand on the doorjamb.

“I’m looking for—”

“How did you get in here?” she interrupted sternly. “Unauthorized persons are not allowed in this part of—”

“I’m looking for Joanna Lander,” he said. “I have to find her.”

“Yes, sir, I know, sir,” she said, leading him out of the wireless room, “but this part of—”

“You don’t understand. It’s urgent. She’s in danger. She’d be on C Deck. Or on the Boat Deck—”

“I know, sir,” she said, and her voice had, surprisingly, softened. “If you’ll just come with me, sir.” She led him back down the passage the way they’d come, her hand gently on his arm.

“Her passage is on C Deck,” he said. “It opens onto the deck.”

“Yes, sir.” She opened a door and led him down a flight of stairs.

“She’s about five foot six,” he said. “Brown hair, glasses. She was wearing a cardigan sweater and—” He stopped. He didn’t know what else. A skirt? Pants? He tried to envision the heap of clothes at the end of the table, but he couldn’t tell what they were for the blood, the blood. “I have to find her immediately.”

“Yes, sir,” she said, and continued to walk slowly, sedately down the corridor.

“You don’t understand!” he said. “It’s urgent! She—”

“I understand that you’re upset, sir,” she said, but didn’t quicken her pace.

“She’s in danger!”

The woman nodded and walked him slowly down the hall and around a corner.

Bong! He looked up, alarmed. It was a clock, a large wooden wall clock with Roman numerals and a pendulum. A quarter to two. And the
Titanic
had gone down at 2:20.

“You don’t understand!” he said, clutching the woman’s
arms and shaking her. “There’s no
time!
I have to find her and get her off. Just tell me how to get to C Deck!”

Her eyes widened and filled with tears. “If you’ll just come this way, sir,” she said pleadingly.
“Please
, sir.”

“There’s no time!” he said. “I’ll find her myself!” and ran down the passage and through the door at the end of it. And into a mass of jostling, gesturing people.

The Boat Deck, he thought, but this was an inside room, too, with large double doors along one side. Everyone was pushing toward those doors. The Boat Deck must lie beyond them, and they were waiting here for their chance to board. He stretched his neck, trying to see over the top hats of the men, the feathered hats of the women, looking for Joanna’s bare head. He couldn’t see her.

Joanna had said the passengers out on the deck had had no idea what was happening, but these people obviously did. They looked frightened, the men’s faces strained and worried, the women’s eyes rimmed with red. A young girl clung to an elderly man, sobbing helplessly into a black-edged handkerchief. “There, there,” the old man said. “We must not give up hope.” Did that mean all the boats were already gone? When had they launched the last one? Not until the very end, Joanna had said, but it couldn’t be the very end. The deck wasn’t slanting at all.

If he could get through the crowd. He pushed forward, looking for Joanna, craning his neck, trying to see over the sea of hats, trying to move forward, but the crowd was packed in tightly, and as he tried to push in, they blocked his way.

“Excuse me,” he said, shoving past a young man in a brown coat and hat. He had a newspaper under his arm. At a time like this, Richard thought. “I have to get through. I’m looking for someone.”

“What was her name?” the young man asked, taking a leather notebook out of his pocket. “Was she traveling first class?”

“She’s on C Deck.”

“C Deck,” the young man said, jotting it down. “Traveling alone?”

“Yes,” Richard said. “Traveling alone.”

“Name?” he asked, taking more notes.

“Joanna Lander,” he said. “Please. I have to get through. I have to find her.”

“She may very well have gotten into one of the boats,” the young man said.

“No,” Richard said. “She can’t get out that way. She has to go back down to C Deck to the passage,” but the young man wasn’t listening. He had looked up toward the double doors. So had everyone else. The double doors opened, and someone must have come through because everyone looked at the doors expectantly. A hush fell, and the young girl who had been sobbing straightened up and clutched the elderly man’s hand.

Richard pushed forward, elbowing his way past a middle-aged couple, a young woman with a baby, two teenaged boys, till he could see the man who’d emerged from the doors. He wore spectacles and was wearing a black frock coat and a black vest. He was carrying a sheaf of papers. He stepped up onto something—a dais?—and raised his hands to quiet the already quiet crowd. Who was this? The captain? One of the officers? Then why wasn’t he in uniform?

“I know you are all anxious for news,” the man said, putting on the pince-nez. “We do not as yet have a full list of survivors.”

What?

“We are currently in wireless contact with the
Carpathia
, and as soon as we have a complete list—”

“No!” Richard said.

“Get hold of yourself,” the young man said, grasping his shoulder. “She may have been in one of the boats.”