Passage

But you’ve already been here a long time, she told herself. You went down to the writing room and the First-Class Dining Saloon. You’ve already been here a long time, and the brain cells are dying, the synapses being shut down one by one. Soon there won’t be enough of them to sustain the central unifying image, and it will start to break down. And in four to six minutes, all the cells will be dead, and you won’t be capable of memory, or thought, or fear, and there won’t be anything. Nothing. Not even silence or darkness, or the awareness of them. Nothing.

“Nothing,” she said, her hands gripping the hard wooden arms of the deck chair. You won’t know it’s nothing, she told herself. There’s nothing to be afraid of. You’ll be unconscious, oblivious, asleep.

“ ‘To sleep, perchance to dream,’ ” Joanna murmured, but there was no possibility of dreaming. There were no synapses to dream with, no acetylcholine, no serotonin. Nothing. “You won’t exist,” she told herself. “You won’t be there.”

Not there. Not anywhere. And no wonder people loved Mr. Mandrake’s book — it wasn’t the relatives and the Angels of Light they loved — it was the reassurance that they still existed, that there was something, anything, after death. Even hell, or the Titanic, was better than nothing.

But the Titanic’s sinking, she thought, and the panic rose like vomit in her throat. Her heart began to pound. I’m afraid, she thought, and that proves the NDE isn’t an endorphin cushion. She looked at her palm, clammy and damp, and pressed it to her chest. Her heart was beating fast, her breathing shallow — all the symptoms of fear. She pressed two fingers to her wrist and took her pulse. Ninety-five. She reached in her pocket for a pen and paper to note it down so she could tell Richard.

So she could tell Richard. “You still don’t believe it,” she thought, and put her hand to her side. “You still can’t accept that you’re dead.”

“It’s impossible for the human mind to comprehend its own death,” she had blithely told Richard, and imagined that that would be a comfort, a protection against the horrible knowledge of destruction. But it wasn’t. It was a taunt and a tease, beckoning tantalizingly just out of reach, like the light of the Californian, promising rescue even after the boats were all gone and the lights were going out.

“Hope springs eternal” isn’t a saying of Pollyanna’s, it’s a threat, Joanna thought, and wondered, horrified, if Lavoisier had been signaling for help, dot dot dot, dash dash dash, dot dot dot. He had blinked twelve times. SOS. SOS.

Hope isn’t a protection, it’s a punishment, Joanna thought. And this is hell. But it couldn’t be, because the sign above the gate to hell read, “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.” But that was an order, not a statement, and maybe that was the true torture of hell, not fire and brimstone, and damnation was continuing to hope even as the stern began to rise out of the water, as the flames, or the lava, or the train overtook you, that there was still a way out, that you might somehow be saved at the last minute. Just like in the movies.

And it was sometimes true, she thought, you were sometimes able to summon the cavalry. “That’s what I was trying to tell Richard,” she said, and remembered trying to move her lips as Vielle’s worried face leaned over her, trying to hear, her hand holding tight to hers.

I didn’t say good-bye to Vielle, Joanna thought. She’ll think it was her fault. “It was my fault, Vielle,” she said as if Vielle could hear her. “I didn’t stay alert to my surroundings. I was too busy working Cape Race. I didn’t even see it coming.” “I didn’t say good-bye to anyone,” she said, and stood up hastily as though there were still time to do it. Kit. She’d left Kit without a word. Kit, whose fiancй and uncle had already left her. “I didn’t even say good-bye to Richard,” she said. Or Maisie.

Maisie. She had promised Maisie she would come see her. She’ll be waiting, Joanna thought, the dread filling her chest, and Barbara will come in and tell her that I died. She had taken a step forward on the deck as if to stop Barbara, but she could not stop anyone from doing anything, and she had been wrong about the punishment of the dead — it was not hope or oblivion, but remembering broken promises and neglected good-byes and not being able to rectify them. “Oh, Maisie,” Joanna said, and sat back down on the edge of the deck chair. She put her head in her hands.

“Are you supposed to be out here, Ms. Lander?” a stern voice said. “Where is your hall pass?”

She looked up. Mr. Briarley was standing over her in his gray tweed vest. “Mr. Briarley… what?” she choked out. “Why are you here? Did you die, too?”

“Did I die?” He pondered the question. “Is this multiple choice? ‘Neither fish nor fowl, neither out nor in.’ ” He smiled at her and then said seriously, “What are you doing out here alone?”

“I was trying to send a message,” she said, looking over at the darkness beyond the railing.