Passage

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.