Passage. Part 42

"You had the same vision this time?" he asked as soon as Tish was gone.

"No," Joanna said, sitting up. "Not the exact same vision." Richard looked both pleased and relieved. "But it was still the same place, and it is the t.i.tanic."

"How do you know?"

Joanna told him about the dining room and the Boat Deck. "It had to be the t.i.tanic. They were signaling the Californian with a Morse lantern."

"Dr. Wright?" Tish said from the door. Joanna wondered how long she'd been standing there. "I forgot to ask you before I left, are you interested?"

"In what?" Richard asked.

"Seeing Tommy Lee Jones's new movie."

"Oh," he said, and it was clear from his tone that he had no idea at all what she was talking about. "Uh, no, Joanna and I have to go over her account, and I have to a.n.a.lyze the scans. It'll probably be pretty late."

"It doesn't have to be tonight," she said, and then, before he could give her another excuse, "I'll talk to you about it tomorrow."

"Tomorrow?"

"Yes. Mr. Sage. At ten?"

"Oh, yes," he said. "Right. Mr. Sage. See you then."

"Wait," Joanna said. "What about Mrs. Troudtheim? Doesn't she have a session at three?"

"She called and canceled," Richard said.

"While you were under," Tish added helpfully.

"She said she thinks she's coming down with the flu and she'll call and reschedule when she'sfeeling better," Richard said; and to Tish, still lingering in the door, "Tomorrow at ten."

Tish left, and he turned back to Joanna. "Did they say it was the Californian they were signaling?"

"No, but they said they were taking on water and that the Baltic and the Frankfurt were coming. And the dining room had to be the First-Cla.s.s Dining Saloon-"

"Tell me about the beginning. Was it the same?"

"Yes," she said, "except for the young man in the sweater." She told him about the bearded man telling him the area was restricted and the young man replying that he'd heard a noise and come to investigate.

"But the noise was the same?"

"Yes," Joanna said.

"And the pa.s.sage, and the door? And the light?"

"Yes," Joanna said, puzzled.

"And the unifying image was the same," he murmured. "Come here," he said. "I want to show you something."

Joanna wrapped the blanket around her shoulders, slid down off the examining table, and followed him over to the console. He'd already called up her scans.

"This is the NDE you just experienced," he said, and typed rapidly. All the areas went black except the frontal cortex. "What you're looking at now is the long-term-memory activity." He typed some more. "This is fast-forward," he said, and the scans s.h.i.+fted rapidly, small scattered areas winking on and off, orange, red, and then back to blue, exploding across the screen like fireworks in a complex pattern.

"Okay," he said, freezing the screen and putting another scan up beside it, "this is Tuesday's NDE." He went through the same process. "Now I'm going to superimpose the two," he said and did.

"Today's is the darker shades, Tuesday's is the lighter."

Joanna watched the colors blink on and off, blue to orange, then red and back to blue-green, lighting randomly and going out again in different spots, at different speeds. "They don't look anything like each other."

"Exactly," Richard said. "The L+R is completely different, which should indicate a completely different experience and a completely different memory as a unifying image. There's not a single point of congruity, and yet you say you experienced the same images and the same central image." He stared at the screen. "Maybe the frontal-cortex activity is random, after all, and it's the temporal lobe that's dictating the experience."

He turned to her. "I'd like you to record as detailed an account as possible. Put down exactlywhat you saw and heard." He stared at the scans. "When you had patients who'd coded more than once, did they have the same NDE each time?"

"No," Joanna said. "Mrs. Woollam saw a garden one time, and a stairway, and a dark, open place. She did see that more than once, and she said she had been in a tunnel twice."

He nodded. "Have you had other patients with more than one NDE?"

"Yes," she said, trying to remember. "I'll have to look up their accounts."

"I'd like to have a list of them with what they saw each time, especially if it was the same thing."

He went back to looking at the screens. "There's got to be a clue in here somewhere as to why you're still seeing the t.i.tanic."

There is, Joanna thought, but it's not in the scans. It's in something Mr. Briarley said in cla.s.s, or read to us out of a blue book with a caravel on it, and wondered if Kit had found the book yet.

That was hardly likely. She'd only had a few hours to look, and Joanna hadn't exactly given her helpful clues, but she checked her answering machine anyway. Mr. Mandrake had called, and Guadalupe. "Do you still want us to write down what Carl Aspinall says?" her voice asked.

Yes, Joanna thought, feeling guilty. She hadn't been over to five-east in nearly two weeks.

Guadalupe probably thought she'd forgotten all about him. She thought about running down right then, but it had already been over an hour since she'd come out of the NDE. She'd better get her account down before she forgot anything. Oh, and she'd promised to contact Eldercare and put them in touch with Kit.

She did, and then recorded her account, putting it directly on the computer to save time. She printed it out and ran it up to Richard, who was on the phone, then went down to talk to Guadalupe, taking the stairs down to fifth and cutting through Pathology to the walkway.

The painters had been here, too. The walkway doors were swathed in yellow "Do Not Cross"

tape, and someone had jammed a metal bar through the door handles for good measure. She would have to go down to third, which meant going straight past Mrs. Davenport's room. An unacceptable risk.

She went down to second, crossed the walkway, and took the service elevator up to fifth. And ran into the painters themselves, working on the hallway ceiling. "You can't come through here," the nearest one said, pointing off to her left with a paint roller. "You need to go down to fourth and take the visitors' stairs." Which would take her through Peds and right past Maisie's, but better Maisie than Mrs. Davenport, and maybe she was watching one of her videos and wouldn't notice.

Fat chance. "Joanna!" Maisie called the second she started past the door, and when Joanna leaned in and said, "Hi, kiddo," she said breathlessly, "I've got something to show you."

The fluid retention was back. Her arms and legs were swollen, and her face was puffy.

"I can only stay a minute," she said. "I have to go see a patient.""It'll just take a minute," Maisie said, hauling books out from under her covers. "I had Ms.

Sutterly bring me a whole bunch of t.i.tanic books. Look!" She held up a large picture book. On the cover was the familiar picture of the t.i.tanic, its stern out of the water, propellers dripping and unlikely smoke still coming out of her funnels, poised for the final plunge, her lights still blazing.

"Did you know the band played right up till the very end?" Maisie asked.

"Yes," Joanna said, thinking, I never should have mentioned the t.i.tanic to her. "They played 'Nearer, My G.o.d, to Thee.' "

"Huh-unh," Maisie said. "n.o.body knows for sure what they played. Some people think it was 'Nearer, My G.o.d, to Thee,' and some people think it was this other song, 'Autumn.' But n.o.body knows for sure, 'cause they all died."

"Your teacher brought you all these books?" Joanna asked to change the subject.

"Uh-huh," Maisie said, digging under the covers again. "She brought me a lot more, but some of them were little-kids' books. Did you know there's a t.i.tanic ABC book?" she said, disgusted.

"No," Joanna said, glad that it was possible to offend even Maisie's sensibilities. She wondered what the letters stood for. I is for Iceberg? L is for Lorraine Allison? D is for Drowning?

"Do you know what they had for F?" Maisie said contemptuously. "First-Cla.s.s Dining Saloon."

"What should they have had?" Joanna said, almost afraid to ask.

Maisie gave her a withering look. "F is for French bulldog. You know, the one I told you about. Did you know there was this little girl who played with it on the Promenade Deck all the time?"

"Maisie-"

"There's a t.i.tanic pop-up book, too," Maisie said. "I made Ms. Sutterly take those back to the library, but these have lots of stuff in them, so now if you need me to help with your research, I can,"

she said, still breathless. With the exertion of digging for the books? Or with something else? Not only was she retaining fluid, but her lips looked bluer than usual, and when she inhaled, Joanna could hear a faint catch, like the beginning of a wheeze. She's getting worse, Joanna thought, watching her leaf through the book.

"So, do you want me to look up something for you?" Maisie said.

"I think right now I want you to just read about the t.i.tanic, so when I have questions, you'll be ready to answer them. And I want you resting and doing everything the doctors and nurses tell you."

She began stacking up the books. "Where do you want these?"

"In my Barbie bag in the closet," she said, "except for this one." She grabbed a tall red book called The Child's t.i.tanic.

Joanna put the rest in the pink duffel bag and shoved it out of sight on the side of the closet.

"Now I've got to go see my patient," she said. "I'll come see you soon, kiddo," and started out of theroom.

"Wait!" Maisie said before she'd taken two steps. "I have to ask you something." She paused for breath, and Joanna heard the wheezing catch in her breath again. "What happens if your bracelet gets too tight?" She held out her puffy wrist with the plastic ID bracelet on it.

"Barbara will just cut it off and make a bigger one," Joanna said. Was she worried about getting puffier? The bracelet wasn't even snug, let alone pressing into the flesh.

"What if after they cut it off something bad happens," Maisie said, "like a disaster, and they can't put another one on?"

Had she been thinking about the abandoned gold bracelet they'd found in the ruins of Pompeii?

"There won't be a disaster," Joanna started to say, and then decided not to. "I'll tell Barbara if she has to cut this one off, she should put the new one on first," she said. "All right?"

"Did you know the firemen go visit her grave every year?" Maisie said.

"Who?"

"The little girl," Maisie said, as if it were obvious. "From the Hartford circus fire. They go put flowers on it every year. Do you think maybe her mother died?"

"I don't know," Joanna said. The mother's dying in the fire, too, would explain why no one had come forward to identify the little girl, but all the other bodies had been identified, and if someone had identified the mother, why not the child? "I don't know."

"The firemen buried her in the cemetery, and every year they go put flowers on her grave,"

Maisie said. "They put up a tombstone and everything. It says 'Little Miss 1565' on it and the year she died and stuff, but it's not the same as a name."

"No," Joanna said. "It's not."

"I mean, at least all the little kids on the t.i.tanic, they knew who they were, Lorraine Allison and Beatrice Sandstrom and Nina Harper and-is Sigrid a boy or a girl?"

"A girl."

"And Sigrid Anderson. Of course they didn't have tombstones, but if they did-"

"Maisie-"

"Can you put in a video?" Maisie said, lying back against the pillows.

"Sure. Which one? Winnie the Pooh?" Joanna said, reading out t.i.tles. "The Wizard of Oz?

Alice in Wonderland?"

"The Wizard of Oz," Maisie said."That's a good one," Joanna said, sliding it in and pus.h.i.+ng "play."

Maisie nodded. "I like the tornado." Of course, Joanna thought. What was I thinking?

"And the part where the hourgla.s.s is running out," Maisie said, "and they don't have much time left."

26.

"See you in the morning."

-Last words of John Jacob Astor to his bride, as he put her into one of the t.i.tanic's lifeboats.

Joanna didn't make it up to Coma Carl's. By the time she escaped from Maisie's room-Maisie insisted on telling her a few choice details about the 1953 Waco, Texas, tornado first-it was four.

Guadalupe will already have gone home, Joanna thought. It was just as well. She wanted to talk to Barbara and ask her about Maisie's condition and find out what all this talk about her hospital wristband was about. But Barbara was in with a three-year-old boy with advanced leukemia, trying unsuccessfully to get an IV started.

Joanna went back up to her office and spent the rest of the afternoon working on the list of people who'd had more than one NDE. They seemed to be split evenly between people who'd seen radically different scenes and people who'd seen the same thing each time. Mr. Tabb had seen by turns an opening with a light coming through it and "bright figures beyond," a stairway, a reddish darkness, and a feeling of intense warmth, while Ms. Burton, a brittle diabetic who'd coded four separate times, had had the exact same vision each time, "which is how I know it's real."

It seemed to Joanna that its always being exactly the same thing would more likely be proof that it was a prerecorded experience, played over and over again by the brain like a record stuck in a groove. She wished she'd asked Ms. Burton exactly what she meant by "real," wished she'd asked all of her patients if it had seemed like an actual place, if it seemed to them like they had really gone there.