Passage

endangered his health, breaking rules right and left. Acting like a nutcase.

“…before it got dark,” Carl was saying, “but when I got closer, I saw the Apaches were already there.”

Joanna put the bluebird greeting card and the pen in her pocket and stood up. “I should go,” she said. Before Guadalupe catches me in here. Before the review board finds out you didn’t sign a waiver. Before anyone finds out how I’ve acted. She patted the covers. “You need to get some sleep.”

“Are you leaving?” he said, and his hand lunged for her wrist like a striking snake. “Don’t leave.” He gripped it tightly. “I’m afraid I’ll go back there, and it’s getting dark back there. It’s getting redder.”

“It’s all right, Carl,” Joanna said soothingly. “It was just a dream.”

“No. It was a real place. Arizona. I knew it was, because of the mesas. But it wasn’t. And it was. I can’t explain it.”

“You knew Arizona was a symbol for something else.”

“Yes,” he said, and she thought, It does mean something. The NDE isn’t just random synapses firing, random associations. “What was it a symbol for, Carl?” she asked, and waited, breath held, for his answer.

“They scalped Cody. Took the top of his skull right off, and I could see his brain. It was all red,” he said. “I had to get out, before it got dark. I had to get the mail through.”

The mail. The letters floating in the ankle-deep water of the mail room, the names on their envelopes blurred and unreadable, and the mail clerk putting them onto higher and higher racks, dragging them up the carpeted stairs.

“The mail?” Joanna asked, her chest tight.

“For the Pony Express,” he said. “Cody was the regular rider, but they killed him, and I didn’t have any way to get the mail through. It was too far to ride on a horse, and the Apaches had cut the wires.”

And the Carpathia was too far away, Joanna thought. The Californian wasn’t answering. She thought of Mr. Briarley writing a postcard to Kit, sending up rockets, trying to send out messages. And none of them getting through.

“The mesa was a long way,” Carl was saying, “and I was afraid there wouldn’t be anything up there to make a fire with.”

“A fire?” Joanna said, thinking of Maisie.

“For the smoke signal. I got the idea from the Apaches. You hold the blanket down over the fire and then yank it back, and the smoke goes up.” He pulled back on an imaginary blanket, his hands holding its imaginary sides, a sharp backward motion with both hands. Like rowing. Like rowing.

“I didn’t know any Apache,” he said. “All I knew was Morse code.”

The sailor working the Morse lamp, and Jack Phillips, bent tirelessly over the wireless key, tapping out CQD, SOS—“SOS,” she said. “You sent an SOS.”

“And as soon as I did, the nurse was opening the curtains and I was back here.”

“You were back here,” Joanna said, remembering Mr. Edwards saying, “The light started to flash, and I knew I had to go back, and all of a sudden I was in the operating room.” Remembering Mrs. Woollam saying, “I was in the tunnel, and then all of a sudden I was back on the floor by the phone.” Remembering Richard saying, “Something just kicks them out.”

Out in the hall, a voice said excitedly, “We found her!”

Joanna glanced at the door, the half-open door she had forgotten to shut. “Finally,” Guadalupe’s voice said, and then, “Where were you? We’ve been looking all over for you.”

Looking all over. The steward, heading up the aft staircase to the Promenade Deck, checking the smoking room, the gymnasium, looking for Mr. Briarley. And Mr. Briarley, running down to G Deck, along Scotland Road, into the mail room, looking for the key. The key.

“Oh, my God!” Joanna breathed. “I know what it is!” She put her hand up to her mouth. “I remember what Mr. Briarley said!”

39

“Well, Wiley’s got her warmed up. Let’s go.”

—Last radio broadcast by Will Rogers before the plane crash in which he and Wiley Post were killed

“What?” Carl said, alarmed. “What do you mean, you know what it is?” but Joanna didn’t hear him.

I have to tell Richard, she thought. I have to tell him I’ve figured it out.

She stood up. “You’re not leaving, are you?” Carl said, reaching for her wrist again. “You know what what is? What Arizona is?”

“He’s sitting up talking,” Guadalupe’s voice said out in the hall.

They’re coming this way, Joanna thought. She stood up and jammed the scribbled-on greeting card in her pocket. “Your wife’s here,” she said, and hurried toward the door before Carl could protest.

And how was she going to explain her being here? she wondered, peering out the door. Mrs. Aspinall was standing next to the nurses’ station, Guadalupe and the aide bent comfortingly over her. “You shouldn’t cry now,” the aide was saying, “it’s all over.”

“I don’t want him to see me like this,” Mrs. Aspinall said tearfully, dabbing at her eyes.

“I’ll get you a Kleenex,” Guadalupe said, disappearing around the corner of the nurses’ station.

Joanna didn’t hesitate. She bolted out the door, across the hall, and into the waiting room, and just in time. Guadalupe reappeared with the Kleenex, Mrs. Aspinall blew her nose, and all three of them started toward Carl’s room.

There was no one in the waiting room. Joanna leaned against the door, waiting for them to go into the room. It’s an SOS, Joanna thought, belated understanding pouring in like seawater through the gash in the Titanic’s side. That’s what the NDE is. It’s the dying brain sending out a call for help, a distress signal, tapping out Morse-code messages to the nervous system: “Come at once. We have struck a berg.”

Transmitting signals to the brain’s neurotransmitters, trying to find one that could kick lungs that were no longer breathing into action, trying to find one that could jump-start a heart that was no longer beating. Trying to find the right one.

And sometimes it succeeded, reviving patients who were clinically dead, bringing them back abruptly, miraculously. Like Mr. O’Reirdon. Like Mrs. Woollam. Because the message got through.

“Carl, oh, Carl!” Mrs. Aspinall said tearfully. “You’re all right!”

Joanna looked down the hall. Mrs. Aspinall and Guadalupe had gone into the room, and the aide was headed back toward the elevators, carrying a piece of equipment.

Joanna waited till she’d gone into the elevator, and then ran down to the nurses’ station. She grabbed up the phone receiver from behind the counter, leaning over it to punch in the lab’s number. If Guadalupe caught her out here, she’d just think she’d gone and then come back.

If Carl hasn’t blabbed, she thought, listening to the phone ring. “Answer, Richard,” she murmured. “Answer.”

Answer. That was what the NDE was doing, too, punching in numbers and listening to the phone ring, trying to get through, hoping someone would answer on the other end. And if Richard knows it’s an SOS, she thought, he’ll be able to figure out what the other end is.

And no wonder her mind, trying to make sense of it, had fastened on to the Titanic. It was the perfect metaphor. The SOS sent five minutes after the Californian’s wireless operator had gone to bed, the Morse lamp, the rockets, the screams for help from the water. And above all, Phillips sitting in the wireless room, faithfully tapping out, “SOS, CQD,” tapping out, “We are flooded up to the boilers,” sending out calls for help to the very end.