Passage

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 Titanic 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 Titanic, not an amalgam or the first image the L+R happened to find that fit all the stimuli. It’s the Titanic 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 Titanic?”

“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 Titanic 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 glass or open? Did the Titanic 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 nobody’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 passes so we could go see these WACs on Lanai. Well, we asked around, but the captain and the shore 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.”