Passage

He said it quite matter-of-factly.

And that was that. He didn’t remember. And she should thank him, tell him to get some rest, get out of here before she was caught redhanded and waiverless by Guadalupe. But she didn’t get up. “What about sounds?”

He shook his head.

“Or voices, Carl?” she said, reverting to his first name without thinking. “Do you remember hearing any voices?”

He had started to shake his head again, but he stopped and stared at her. “I remember your voice,” he said. “You said you were sorry.”

“I’m sorry,” she had said, apologizing for her beeper going off, for having to leave.

“There were voices calling my name,” he said, “saying I was in a coma, saying my fever was up.”

That was us, Joanna thought, whispering about his condition, calling him Coma Carl. Guadalupe was right, he could hear us, and felt ashamed of herself.

“Were you here?” he said, looking slowly around the hospital room.

“Yes,” she said. “I used to come and sit with you.”

“I could hear your voice,” he said, as if there were something about that that he couldn’t understand. “So it must have been a dream. I was really here, the whole time.” He looked up at her. “It didn’t feel like a dream.”

“What didn’t?”

He didn’t answer. “Could you hear me?” he asked.

“Sometimes,” she said carefully. “Sometimes you hummed, and once you said, ‘Oh, grand.’ ”

He nodded. “If you heard me, it must have just been a dream.”

It took all her willpower not to blurt out, “Was ‘grand’ the Grand Staircase? What were you humming?” Not to say, “You were on the Titanic, weren’t you? Weren’t you?”

“If you heard me, I couldn’t really have been there,” he said eagerly.

“Why not?” she asked.

“Because it was too far—” He stopped and looked at the door.

Too far for her to come. She said urgently, “Too far for what?” and the door opened.

“Hi,” a lab technician said, coming in with a metal basket of tubes and needles. “No, don’t get up,” he said to Joanna, who’d jerked guiltily to her feet. “I can do it from this side.” He set the basket on the table over the bed. “Don’t let me interrupt you two,” he said, putting on gloves. “I just need to take some blood.” He tied a strip of rubber around Carl’s arm.

Joanna knew she should say, “Oh, that’s okay,” and chat with him while he drew the blood, but she was afraid if she did, Carl would lose the tenuous thread of memory.

“Too far for what?” she asked, but Carl wasn’t listening. He was looking fearfully at the needle the technician had pulled out.

“This will just be a little sting,” the technician said reassuringly, but Carl’s face had already lost its frightened look.

“It’s a needle,” he said, in the same wondering tone as when he’d asked her if she’d been here in the room, and extended his arm so the technician could insert the needle, attach it to the glass tube. Carl’s dark blood flowed into the tube.

The technician deftly filled the tube, pulled the needle out, pressed cotton to it. “There,” he said, putting a strip of tape over it. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”

“No.” Carl turned to look at the IV in his other arm.

“Okay, you’re all set. See you later,” the technician said, the glass basket clanking as he went out.

He hadn’t shut the door all the way. Joanna got up and started over to close it. “It was just the IV,” Carl said, looking curiously at the clear narrow tubing dangling from the IV bag. “I thought it was a rattler.”

Joanna stopped. “Rattler?”

“In the canyon,” Carl said, and Joanna sat down again, greeting card and pen in hand.

“I was hiding from them,” Carl said. “I knew they were out there, waiting to ambush me. I’d caught a glimpse of one of them at the end of the canyon.” He squinted as he said it, bringing his hand up as if to shade his eyes. “I tried climbing up the rocks, but they were crawling with rattlers. They were all around,” his voice rose in fear, “rattling. I wonder what that was,” he said in a totally different tone of voice. “The rattling.” He looked around the hospital room. “The heater, maybe? When you were in here, did it make a rattling sound?”

“You were in a canyon?” she said, trying to take in what he was telling her.

“In Arizona,” he said. “In a long, narrow canyon.”

Joanna listened, still trying to take it in, taking notes almost automatically. In Arizona. In a canyon.

“It had had a stream in it,” Carl said, “but it was all dried up. Because of the fever. It was dark, because the walls were so high and steep, and I couldn’t see them, but I knew they were out there, waiting.”

The rattlers? “Who was up there waiting?”

“They were,” he said fearfully. “A whole band of them, arrows and knives and tomahawks! I tried to outride them, but they shot me in the arm,” he said, grabbing at his arm as if he were trying to pull an arrow out. “They—” His shoulders jerked, and his face contorted. The arm connected to the IV came up, as if fending off an attack. “They killed Cody. I found his body in the desert. They’d scalped him. His head was all red,” Carl said. “Like the canyon. Like the mesas.” His fists clenched and unclenched compulsively. “All red.”

“Who did that?” Joanna asked. “Who killed Cody?” and he looked at her as if the answer were obvious.

“The Apaches.”

Apaches. Not patches. Apaches. He hadn’t been on the Titanic. He’d been in Arizona. She’d been wrong about the Titanic being universal. But he had said, “Oh, grand.” He had made rowing motions with his hands. And just now he had said, “It was too far—”

“You were in Arizona,” she began, intending to ask, “Do you remember being anywhere else?”

“No!” he shouted, shaking his head vehemently. “It wasn’t Arizona. I thought it was, because of the red sandstone. But it wasn’t.”

“Where was it?” Joanna asked.

“Someplace else. I was really here, though, the whole time,” he said as if to reassure himself. “It was just a dream.”

“Did you have other dreams?” she asked. “Were you other places besides Arizona?”

“There wasn’t any other place,” he said simply.

“You said, ‘Oh, grand.’ ”

He nodded. “I could see telegraph poles off in the distance. I thought they must be next to a railroad line. I thought if I could reach it before the train came through—” he said, as if that were an explanation.

“I don’t understand.”

“I thought I could catch the Rio Grande. But there weren’t any tracks. Just the telegraph wires. But I could still send a message. I could climb one of the poles and send a message.”

She was only half-listening. Rio Grande. Not Grand Staircase. Rio Grande.

“…and it was too far to ride on horseback,” Carl was saying, staring straight ahead, “but I had to get it through.” As he spoke, he jogged gently up and down, his arms bent as if he were holding on to reins.

This is what Guadalupe thought was rowing, Joanna thought, even though it didn’t look like rowing. It looked like what it was, Carl riding a horse. He wasn’t humming, “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” she thought. It was probably “Home on the Range.”

And Mrs. Woollam had been in a garden. Mrs. Davenport had seen an angel. But she had wanted it to be a woman in a nightdress. She had wanted it to be the Verandah Cafe and the Grand Staircase. To fit her theory. So she had twisted the evidence to fit, ignored the discrepancies, led the witnesses, and believed what she wanted to. Just like Mr. Mandrake.

She had been so set on her idea she’d refused to accept the truth—that Carl had gotten his desert, his Apaches, from the Westerns his wife read to him, incorporating them into the red expanse of his coma the way she’d incorporated Mr. Briarley’s Titanic stories into hers. Because they happened to be there in long-term memory.

And the imagery meant nothing. It wasn’t universal. It was as random, as pointless, as Mr. Bendix’s seeing Elvis. And the feeling of something significant, something important, came from an overstimulated temporal lobe. And meanwhile, she had bullied Amelia Tanaka, she had harassed a man just out of a coma and possibly