Passage

“I promise,” the nurse said.

Now she’ll call for sure, Maisie thought happily. She’ll call as soon as she hears I had a near-death experience.

But she didn’t.

44

“It is another thing to die than people have imagined.”

—Last words of St. Boniface, as boiling lead was poured into his mouth

Joanna stood at the railing a long time, looking out at the darkness, and then went over to the deck chairs and sat down.

She clasped her hands around her knees and looked down the Boat Deck. It was deserted, the deck lamps making pools of yellow light, illuminating the empty lifeboat davits, the deck chairs lined up against the wall of the wheelhouse and the gymnasium. There was no sign of the officers who had been loading the boats, or of J. H. Rogers, or the band. Or of Greg Menotti.

Well, of course not. “ ‘All alone, so Heav’n has will’d, we die,’ ” Mr. Briarley had said, reading aloud from Mazes and Mirrors, and Mrs. Woollam had said, “Death is something each one of us must go through by ourselves.”

“ ‘Alone, alone, all all alone, alone on the wide wide sea,’ ” Joanna said, and her voice sounded weak and self-pitying in the silence. Don’t be such a baby, she told herself. You were the one who said you wanted to find out about death. Well, now you’re going to. Firsthand. “To die will be an awfully big adventure,” she said firmly, but her voice still sounded shaky and uncertain.

It was very quiet on the deck, and somehow peaceful. “Like waiting, and not waiting,” Mr. Wojakowski had said, talking about the days before World War II. Knowing it was coming, waiting for it to start.

She wondered if there was something she was supposed to do. Benjamin Guggenheim and his valet had gone below and changed into formal evening dress, but the staterooms were already underwater. And you can’t do anything, she thought. You’re dead. You’ll never do anything again. You’re not even here. You’re in the ER, on the examining table where you died, with a sheet over your face, and you’re not capable of doing anything at all.

“Except thinking,” she said out loud to the silent Boat Deck, “except knowing what’s happening to you,” and she remembered Lavoisier, who had still been conscious after he had been beheaded, who had blinked his eyes twelve times, knowing, knowing, she thought, horror rising in her throat, that he was dead.

But only for a few seconds, she thought, and wondered how long twelve blinks took. “Bud Roop went down, bam! just like that,” Mr. Wojakowski had said. “He never even knew what hit him. Died instantly.” Only it wasn’t instant. Brain death took four to six minutes, and Richard believed there was no correlation between time in the NDE and actual time. That time she had explored the entire ship, she had only been under for a few seconds. “I could be here for hours,” she said, her voice rising.

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 fiance 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.

“Did it get through?”

No, she thought, remembering Vielle’s worried voice saying, “Shh, honey, don’t try to talk,” and her own,