Passage

He clapped a hand over the IV. “Restart it now!” he shouted, and managed, finally, to heave himself to a sitting position. They had not been ropes, they were electrodes, hooked up to the EEG and EKG monitors, and this was the lab. The handkerchief Tish was holding was a sodden Kleenex.

“Now, Tish!” he shouted, “or I’ll do it myself!” but he had sat up too fast, he felt dizzy and cold. “Tish, please! You don’t understand. We’re nearly out of time! You have to send me back under before it’s too late!”

But she just stood there, haloed in light, turning the lump of tissue over and over in her hands. “But you still didn’t come out, even after I stopped the dithetamine, and I didn’t know whether to administer norepinephrine or not. Your vitals were normal, and that one time Mr. Sage was under for—”

He turned sharply and looked at the clock, but Joanna had moved it so it couldn’t be seen from the far wall. “Tish,” he said, “how long was I under?” and waited with dread for the answer.

“I am so sorry, Dr. Wright. Mrs. Troudtheim told me when she came…” She twisted the sodden Kleenex in her hands. “She was so upset. We all loved Dr. Lander—”

“How long was I under?” he repeated dully.

“I don’t know. I can’t read the scans, so I didn’t know if you were in the NDE-state or if you’d come out and were in non-REM sleep—”

“How long was I under, Tish?” he said, but he already knew the answer. He had heard the clock striking in the corridor of the White Star Line offices, chiming the hours. “Tell me.”

“Two hours,” Tish said, and started to cry.

PART 3

“There’s another act coming after this. I reckon you can guess what that’s about.”

—Thornton Wilder, Our Town

42

“Nobody has heard the Titanic for about two hours.”

—Wireless message from the La Provence

to the Celtic

That night Richard had gone back to his lab — even though work was impossible, unthinkable — because the police had said they might want him to make a statement and because he couldn’t think of anywhere else to go. The ER had been cordoned off into a crime scene, with all the emergency patients shunted off to Swedish and St. Luke’s, and the doctors’ lounge and the hallways and the cafeteria were full of people asking him, “How are you holding up?” and, “Where the hell were the security guards? I’ve been saying for the last three years that ER was an accident waiting to happen. Why didn’t they have a metal detector?” and, “Have they determined the cause of death?” All questions he had no idea how to answer.

She died of drowning, he wanted to tell them. She went down on the Titanic.

At one point — the first night? the next day? — he had gone down to the morgue. “Oh, man, I’m sorry,” the attendant had said, shamefaced. “They took her over to University.”

For the autopsy, Richard thought. When a crime was involved, they didn’t do it at Mercy General. They sent the body over to the forensic pathologist at University Hospital.

“Maybe you could…” the attendant began. Go over there, Richard thought, but the attendant didn’t finish, and Richard knew he was sorry he’d spoken, that he was thinking of the Y-shaped incision in the chest, the ribs and breastbone removed, the heart pulled out, weighed, dissected. Joanna’s heart.

“It’s all right,” Richard said. “I just wanted—”

Wanted — what? To convince himself that she was safely there, swathed in a plastic sheet in a metal drawer, safely dead. Instead of still on the Titanic, clinging to the railing on the slanting deck, waiting to drown.

“Why don’t you go home and try to get some sleep, Dr. Wright?” the attendant had said gently, and Richard had nodded and turned, and then just stood there stupidly, staring at the wall.

“How do I get out of here?” he had said finally.

“You go down this hall and take a right,” the attendant had said, pointing, and it was like a knife going in. You take that hallway down. There’s a stairway. You take the stairs up to seventh and go across the walkway to Surgery. Joanna, pointing. There’s a hall on the right. You take that to the elevators and that’ll take you down to Personnel. Him, disbelieving. Isn’t there a shortcut I could take? Joanna, laughing, That is the shortcut.

The attendant had taken his arm. “Here, I’ll walk you up,” he said. He had led him back up to the first floor, supporting Richard’s arm as if Richard were an old woman, down a hall and up a stairway and into the lobby.

And it must have been during the day because Mr. Wojakowski was there, waiting for the elevator, his freckled face beaming. “Mornin’, Doc,” he’d said, bustling over to them. “Say, did Joanna Lander ever find you?”