Passage. Part 50

"It's too bad Chick Upchurch isn't still around. Did I ever tell you about Chick? Machinist's mate on the Old Yorky, and he could make anything, and I do mean anything," Mr. Wojakowski said, and she had to practically shut his hand in the elevator to get away from him, though he didn't seem put out.

Neither did Mr. Ortiz, even though he had three drains in him, two of which had already had to be replaced. "I don't care. I feel better than I have in two years," he said. "They should've thought of this before."

He was happy to talk to Joanna. "It's still as real to me today as it was two years ago," he said, and described it for her in detail: floating near the ceiling of the operating room, tunnel, light, the Virgin Mary radiating light, dead relatives waiting to welcome him to heaven.

Maybe Mr. Mandrake's right, Joanna thought, listening to him describe his life review, and what I'm seeing isn't a real NDE at all. Certainly no one else has seen a postal clerk dragging a sack of wet mail up a carpeted staircase."And then I had this feeling like it was time to go back," Mr. Ortiz said, "and I went back down the tunnel, and at the end of it was the operating room."

"Can you be more specific?" Joanna said. "About the feeling?"

"It was like a tug," he said, but the gesture he made with his hand was of a shove. "I can't describe it."

Joanna consulted her notes. "Can you tell me how the Virgin Mary looked?"

"She was dressed in white. She had this light radiating from her," he said, and this time the gesture matched his words, "like diamonds." She asked him several more questions and then shut off the recorder and thanked him for his time.

"I'm not really all that interested in near-death experiences," he said. "My real interest is in dreams. Is your project involved with dream imagery at all?"

"No," Joanna said and stood up.

Mr. Ortiz nodded. "Most scientists are too hidebound and narrow-minded to believe in dreams.

a.n.a.lyzing the images in your dreams can cure cancer, did you know that?"

"No."

Mr. Ortiz nodded wisely. "If you dream of a shark, that means cancer. A rope means death. If you want to tell me one of your dreams, I can a.n.a.lyze it right now."

"I have an appointment," Joanna said, and escaped.

Is everybody a nutcase? she wondered, going back up to her office. Dream imagery. But once in her office, going over the transcripts of the multiple NDEs, she began wondering if dream imagery might be the key. Not Mr. Ortiz's brand, of course, where images were a.s.signed arbitrary meanings: a snake means s.e.x, a book means an unexpected visitor. That was only a kind of glorified fortune-telling.

And Freudian dream a.n.a.lysis wasn't much better. It tried to reduce everything to basic s.e.xual desires and fears when dreaming was actually much more complex. Some imagery in dreams was lifted directly from the events of the day before, some from underlying worries and concerns, some from outside stimuli, like an alarm clock, and some from the neurochemicals generated during REM sleep, most particularly acetylcholine, which Richard had said was elevated during NDEs.

It was acetylcholine that made connections between the inputted data and long-term memory, connections the dreaming mind expressed sometimes directly and sometimes symbolically, so that the alarm clock's ringing was transformed into a siren or a scream, and it, the Pop-Tart you had for breakfast, and the patient you were worried about all became incorporated into a single dream narrative. And it was possible, taking all those things into consideration, to a.n.a.lyze the content of the dream. Which was what Richard had been doing when he'd said the acetylcholine made the t.i.tanic as likely an a.s.sociation as a hospital walkway, but he had been talking about the NDE as a whole, not the individual images within it.Joanna hadn't thought of a.n.a.lyzing those in terms of dream imagery, partly because the NDE didn't feel like a dream and partly because some of the imagery-the light and the tunnel-was obviously direct manifestations of the stimuli. But that didn't mean all of them were. What if some of them were symbolic interpretations of what was happening in the NDE?

Could that be why she kept remembering Mr. Briarley's lecture on metaphors, because the images in the NDE were metaphors? She had focused all her attention on trying to find out what Mr.

Briarley had said, but maybe the connection was in the NDE itself, hidden in what she was seeing and hearing.

She called up the transcript of her last time under and began going through it line by line. Some things were obviously direct representations of temporal-lobe stimuli. The lights from the Morse lamp and the deck lights and the light spilling out from the gymnasium and bridge obviously were, and she wondered if all the instances of white clothing-gloves, nightgown, steward's white jacket-weren't, too.

Some of the images were clearly taken directly from the t.i.tanic-the lifeboats, the pa.s.sengers out on deck, the deck chairs-and still others from her waking life-Greg Menotti and the red sneaker, and maybe even the blanket, though that could also be from the ill.u.s.tration on the cover of A Night to Remember.

Which left the details that couldn't be attributed to the t.i.tanic or the temporal lobe and therefore might be significant: Jack Phillips's tapping out CQD instead of MGY, the mail clerk dragging the wet sack of mail up the stairs, the stairs themselves, similar to the Grand Staircase and yet lacking the cherub and Honour and Glory, the location of the gymnasium, the mechanical camel. If they were symbols, they were much more subtle ones than "snake equals s.e.x."

If they were symbols. There was no point in trying to decipher them if in fact they were something that had come from her memories of the t.i.tanic. She needed to have Kit find out. She made a list of things she needed to know and then called Kit. Mr. Briarley answered. "Do you have a hall pa.s.s?" he demanded, and when she told him she needed to speak to Kit, " 'He cut a rope from a broken spar and bound her to the mast.' "

Kit came on the line. "Sorry," she said. "He's been doing 'The Wreck of the Hesperus' all morning. I thought it might be a clue, but it's Longfellow, so he would have taught it in junior English, not senior."

" ' "Oh, father! I hear the church-bells ring, oh, say, what may it be?" ' " Mr. Briarley said in the background. " ' " 'Tis a fog-bell on a rock-bound coast!" and he steered for the open sea.' "

"I need you to look up some things," Joanna said. "If it's not too much trouble."

"I told you," Kit said. "I want to help." Joanna read her the list. When she got to the mechanical camel, Kit said, "I know that one. Yes, there's a photo of it in one of the books."

"Do you know what deck the gymnasium was on?"

"Yes, the-""They say the dead can't speak," Mr. Briarley said, "but they can!"

"It was on the Boat Deck," Kit said. "I found that when I was looking for the Morse lamp."

All right, scratch the gymnasium. She read her the rest of the list. "I'll work on these tonight," Kit said. "Oh, and I found out about the staircases. There were three of them. The rear one was the second-cla.s.s stairway. It was all the way in the stern, next to the A La Carte Restaurant. The aft stairway was midway between it and the Grand Staircase. It's described as a less elegant version of the Grand Staircase, with its own skylight and the same gold-and-wrought-iron bal.u.s.trades."

And scratch the stairway, Joanna thought, going back to the transcript after they hung up. She must have stored every single thing Mr. Briarley had ever said about the t.i.tanic in long-term memory. Who says we don't remember what we learned in high school?

She transcribed Mr. Ortiz's NDE and then called Vielle, but the line was busy. She called her again when she got home and managed to wake her up. "I'm sorry," Joanna said. "You sound like you're feeling better."

"I am," Vielle said.

"Will you be back at work tomorrow?"

"No," Vielle said. "I'm still pretty wobbly." And she must be, Joanna thought after she hung up.

Or groggy, because she hadn't said a word about the dangers of going under.

Tish was still out the next day, too, and nursing subs were impossible to get. "Do you know what they said when I called and asked for a sub?" Richard said when Joanna got to work. " 'Spring has sprung.' So I rescheduled Mr. Sage for tomorrow. It's supposed to be a twenty-four-hour bug, isn't it?"

"I don't know. Vielle's already been out a couple of days," Joanna said, thinking it was just as well they'd had to cancel. She needed to finish the list of people who'd had more than one NDE, and she wanted to go over her earlier NDEs and a.n.a.lyze them for possible clues.

She spent all morning in the office doing just that and ignoring the blinking light on her answering machine. At lunchtime she went down to the lab and foraged some lunch from the lab coat pockets of Richard, who had spent the morning like she had, staring at a computer screen. "How's it going?" she asked him, taking the b.u.t.terfinger he gave her.

"Terrible," he said, leaning back from the screen. "I still haven't found anything to explain why Mrs. Troudtheim keeps kicking out. Or why you felt the fear you describe. Only a few cortisol receptors were activated."

"I felt the fear I describe because I was on the t.i.tanic and D Deck was underwater, and I was afraid I couldn't get back."

"You're still having the feeling that what you're seeing is the t.i.tanic, huh?"

"Yes, and it's not just a feeling," she said. "The places I described to you were on the t.i.tanic,and the reason the stairway didn't have marble steps and a cherub was because it wasn't the Grand Staircase. It was the second-cla.s.s staircase, and it was right where it was supposed to be, next to the A La Carte Restaurant. That's the dining room I saw, and it did have walnut paneling and rose-colored chairs and-"

"How do you know this?" Richard said, sitting forward, and then, accusingly, "Have you been reading about the t.i.tanic? No wonder you keep seeing it."

"No, of course I haven't been reading about it," she said. "I know that would contaminate the NDE. I asked someone-"

"Asked someone?" he said, coming up out of his chair. "At Mercy General? My G.o.d, if Mandrake-"

"It's no one who works here," Joanna said hastily. "I asked a friend with no connection to the hospital, and I specifically asked her not to volunteer any information, just to confirm whether the things I've seen were on the t.i.tanic. And they were, the gymnasium with the mechanical camel and the wireless room and-"

He was giving her his Bridey Murphy look again. "What are you saying? That there's no possible way you could know all these details, so what you're seeing is real?"

"No, of course not."

"You said you were afraid you couldn't get back-"

"That's because it feels like it's a real place, like it's really happening, but I know it's not," she added hastily, "and Mr. Briarley talked about the t.i.tanic all the time. Every one of the details I'm talking about could have come from him or the movie or A Night to Remember."

He visibly relaxed. "So what are you trying to tell me?"

"I'm trying to tell you it's the t.i.tanic, not an amalgam or the first image the L+R happened to find that fit all the stimuli. It's the t.i.tanic for a reason. It has something to do with what the NDE is, with how it works."

"But you don't know what the reason is," Richard said. "Does everything you're seeing match the t.i.tanic?"

"No. There should have been people on the Boat Deck uncovering the boats, and the bridge shouldn't have been empty, and the call letters the wireless operator was sending weren't right."

"And you still haven't seen or heard the name t.i.tanic or any reference to an iceberg. Or have you?"

"No, but I think those discrepancies and omissions may be a clue to deciphering the NDE." She told him her dream-imagery theory. "I think the details that don't fit may be symbolic."

He nodded as if that were the answer he'd expected. And here it comes, she thought.She was right. "Your conscious mind has confabulated a rationale to justify the sense of significance," he said. "The fact that it's so elaborate, even to explaining details that don't belong in the scenario, has to mean temporal-lobe stimulation is central to the NDE. The feeling you're having that there's a connection-"

"I know, I know. Never mind," she said. "The feeling I'm having is a sense of incipient knowledge, it's a feeling of significance, and it's all right there in the scans. I just have one question."

"What is it?"

"What would the scans look like if it wasn't just a temporal-lobe sensation, if there really was a connection? Would they look any different? Never mind." There was no way she was going to convince him until she had the connection in her hands and could show it to him.

She couldn't do that till she went under again, but she could at least try to decipher what she'd already seen. She broke her NDEs down into individual images and drew a map of the routes she'd taken and of the Boat Deck, marking the wireless room and the bridge and the place where the sailor had stood, working the Morse lamp, and then made a second list for Kit. Was there a grand piano in the A La Carte Restaurant? A birdcage? Was C Deck enclosed in gla.s.s or open? Did the t.i.tanic have a squash court?

In the late afternoon-or at least she thought it was late afternoon; when she glanced at her watch, it was nearly six-someone knocked on her door. Mr. Mandrake, she thought, and glanced at the bottom of the door to see if the light showed under it.

The knock came again. "It's Ed Wojakowski, Doc. I got your dog tags for ya." She opened the door. "They're not the real thing," he said, handing her a chain with a metal tag. Maisie's name was engraved on it in neat letters. "It's really one of those medical alert things, but you said metal and a neck chain, and it's got those."

"It's perfect," Joanna said, turning the tag over, expecting to see the red medical alert symbol, but it was plain silver.

"I filed the medical stuff off," he said, looking very pleased with himself. "I asked around like I told you I would, but n.o.body'd seen one of them dog tag machines in years, and then I went to get a prescription filled and there this was. Tags made while you wait."

"Thank you," Joanna said. "How much do I owe you?"

He looked insulted. "Glad to do it," he said. "Reminds me of the time when I was on the Yorktown and me and Bucky Parteri needed to get us a couple of leave pa.s.ses so we could go see these WACs on Lanai. Well, we asked around, but the captain and the sh.o.r.e patrol were really cracking down, so then we thought, What about getting somebody to make us a couple, and..."

It was a long story, some of it no doubt derived from real events and some symbolic. Joanna didn't try to sort out which. She waited for something resembling a break in the action and said, "I'd love to hear the rest of this, but I really should take this to Maisie."

He agreed. "Tell her hi for me. I wish they were the real thing, like the ones I had in the navy.Did I ever tell you how I fell overboard and lost 'em? We were on our way back to Pearl-"

It was after eight by the time Joanna got away from Mr. Wojakowski, and Maisie was asleep.

"I'll bring them by in the morning," she told Barbara. "How's she doing?"

"They had to take her off the amiodipril."

"I know. Maisie told me they'd put her back on nadolal."

Barbara nodded. "They're out of new drugs to try. That's why her mother fought so hard to get her into the clinical trials of amiodipril. They're talking about putting her on a new ACE-blocker, but it has really severe side effects, and she's already pretty weakened."

"And a heart?"

"Pray for a school bus accident," she said. "Sorry. It's been a long day, and I think I'm getting the flu. She's doing fine right now, and who knows, maybe there'll be a miracle."

"Maybe," Joanna said and went back upstairs to go over her NDEs with a fine-tooth comb, looking for clues, till after eleven.

She didn't find any, and in the morning when she went back to see her, Maisie was down having a heart cath. "She's staying out of A-fib so far," Barbara reported. "She said if you came by, to give you this." She handed Joanna a sheet of paper from a tablet repeatedly folded into a tight packet.

Joanna waited to unfold it till she was back in her office. Written on it in pencil was a list of s.h.i.+ps: Carpathia, Burma, Olympic, Frankfurt, Mount Temple, Baltic. I must really have paid attention in cla.s.s, she thought, though, even hearing the names, she had no memory of Mr. Briarley having talked about them in cla.s.s.

Which doesn't mean he didn't, she thought. And there were examples of people recalling books and movies almost verbatim. The phenomenon was called cryptomnesia. Which was what it had been determined Bridey Murphy had, Joanna thought wryly.

"We've got a problem," Richard said as soon as she walked in.

"Tish is still out?"

"No, she's back, but Mr. Sage just called to cancel."

"Has he got the flu, too?"

"This is Mr. Sage," Richard said irritably. "It took me ten minutes to get the fact that he was canceling out of him. So, can I send you under?"

"Sure," Joanna said. "What time?"

"I told Tish eleven."She nodded and went back to her office. Kit had called. "The gymnasium was on the Boat Deck," her message said, "on the starboard side just aft of the officers' quarters. The Marconi shack was on the port side even with the officers' quarters."

Everything Mr. Briarley had ever said. Did that include his showing them a map of the Boat Deck? She couldn't remember, but he might have. Maisie's disaster books were full of maps and diagrams: the route Amelia Earhart's plane had taken, the ruins of Pompeii, the layout of the Hindenburg's gondola.

Joanna called Kit. The line was busy. She called Maisie. "Maisie, you said MGY were the call letters for the t.i.tanic, and then you started to say something else. What was it?"

"You said I wasn't supposed to talk about anything except what you asked."

"I know. That still goes, except for this one thing. What were you going to say?"

"That I knew it was MGY because of the message the t.i.tanic sent. 'MGY CQD PB. Come at once. We have struck a berg.' CQD means 'help,' " Maisie explained.

"I thought the t.i.tanic sent SOSs."

"It did, but-are you sure it's okay to tell you this?"

"I'm sure," Joanna said.

"Well, first it sent CQDs, and then Harold Bride, that was the other wireless guy, said, kind of laughing, 'Let's send SOS. That's the new distress code, and it may be your last chance to send it.' "