Passage

“Is that what this is?” Ms. Grant said anxiously. “The valley of the shadow of death?”

“No,” Mr. Funderburk said firmly. “That’s nothing like this. I’ve been there. There’s a tunnel, and at the end of it, there’s a light. And a Life Review.” He looked skeptically around the smoking room. “I don’t know what this is.”

“It’s five-card draw,” Yates said. He swept up the cards Stead had been turning over and shuffled them into the deck. “Aces high,” he said, and began to deal the cards.

Joanna picked hers up as he dealt them. A five. An eight. “If it isn’t the valley of the shadow of death,” Ms. Grant said, looking at Joanna, “what is it?”

“I don’t know,” Joanna said.

“Really?” Mr. Stead said, arching an eyebrow at her. “I was given to understand you were an expert on the phenomena of dying.”

“No,” Joanna said. “I thought I was, but I didn’t know anything.” And neither do you, she thought. Nobody knows anything.

“In that case,” Stead said, “I will explain. There is nothing to fear, Ms. Grant. Death is not an end, but a transition. We are but sailing to the Other Side, where wait the spirits of our dear departed. They will greet us on that farther shore, where all is peace and knowledge.”

“And a Life Review,” Mr. Funderburk said.

“And we shall understand all mysteries,” Stead said and picked up his cards.

“Are they right?” Ms. Grant said. She was gazing hopefully at Joanna, and so was Mrs. Woollam. So was Yates.

Joanna glanced at Mr. Briarley, but his face was carefully impassive, like it had been in English class, offering no clue to what the answer was, no help at all. “Are they?” Edith Evans said quietly, and Joanna thought suddenly of Maisie asking, “Will it hurt?” and of her saying, “People should tell the truth, even if it’s bad.”

“No,” Joanna said, and a sigh went around the table, though of relief or despair she couldn’t tell. “This isn’t real. It’s all a hallucination. The dying mind—”

“A hallucination?” Mr. Stead said, arching an eyebrow at her. “Are you saying that this fire, this table, these cards—” he said, plucking two from his hand and pushing them across the table toward Yates. “Two,” he said, and Yates dealt him a pair. He picked them up, arranged them in his hand, “—that these cards—” he fanned them out, face up, “are not real, and we only imagine that we see them?” He stood up and went over to the fire. “We only imagine we feel this fire’s warmth?” he said, spreading his hands out to the flames. “Or are we part of the hallucination as well?”

I don’t know, Joanna thought.

“ ‘All alone, so Heav’n has will’d, we die,’ ” Mr. Briarley murmured beside her. She looked at him, wondering what he was, what they all were. Confabulations? Snatches of memory and sound and color, flickering randomly? Or metaphors? Symbols of her fear and faith and denial?

“The mind tries to make sense of whatever it experiences,” she said, trying to explain. To whom? To Edith Evans and Jay Yates, who had died ninety years ago? Or to herself? “The mind can’t help it. It keeps doing it even when what it’s experiencing is a systems failure. The brain’s shutting down and synapses are firing randomly as the cells die, but the mind keeps trying to make sense of it, even though it can’t.”

Mrs. Woollam was praying, her lips moving silently. Edith Evans had her chin up proudly, bravely. “It looks for associations from long-term memory, for metaphors to explain what’s happening,” Joanna said, “and since the body’s damaged and its systems are slowly going under, it confabulates the Titanic.”

“The very image and mirror of Death,” Mr. Briarley said.

“But it isn’t real,” Joanna said. “It only seems real.”

“The sinking,” Ms. Grant said fearfully. “Will that seem real?”

“The soul cannot sink,” Stead said sternly. “It is immortal, and if this,” he waved his arm to include the cards, the fireplace, the entire room, “is, as Miss Lander says, a symbol, what else can it symbolize but the ship of the soul, eternal, indestructible?” He smiled at Ms. Grant. “Such a ship shall never sink.”

Joanna thought of Mr. Wojakowski saying earnestly, “All ships sink sooner or later.”

“Will we confabulate the sinking?” Ms. Grant repeated, and it was Joanna she was looking at.

Yes, Joanna thought, afraid. “I don’t know,” she said. “This is all just a metaphor for what the mind’s experiencing, and as the experience changes, as the brain shuts down and the synapses start firing more and more erratically, and—” She thought of what had happened to her on the way down here, memories flaring up like a match and then going out.

“And what?” Ms. Grant said frightenedly. “What will happen?”

“Nothing,” Joanna said. “As the cells die, there’ll no longer be enough to hold the unifying image together, and the Titanic will fade, or come apart. It’s already happening. This table is a table from Mercy General, and you—” She broke off and began again, “—and just now, on the stairs, I wasn’t on the Titanic. I was in the hallway of my apartment the night my father died. And before, on the Boat Deck, I saw two cheerleaders from my high school. That will happen more and more, till the image of the Titanic breaks up completely.”

“And if it doesn’t?” Ms. Grant said.

“What happened on the Titanic?” Edith asked. “After the boats were gone?”

Joanna looked at Mr. Briarley, but he was busy sorting the cards in his hand. “Her bow went under and she began to list to port,” she said. “The water came up over the forward well deck and the A Deck companionway. The lights…” she faltered.

“The lights went out,” Edith Evans said.

“Do you think that will be part of the metaphor?” Ms. Grant said fearfully. “The lights going out?”

How can it not be? Joanna thought. This is the lights going out, one by one, memory by memory, sensation by sensation, telephone calls and birthday presents and Dish Night, peanut M&M’s and snow and sitting perched on Maisie’s bed, looking at pictures of the Johnstown flood.

“What happens then?” Edith asked. “After the lights go out?”

The stern rises into the sky, Joanna thought, rearing up like a drowning swimmer, like a dying soul, and we go down into darkness.

“Death is only an illusion,” Stead said. He poked at the fire. “A snare of science and unbelief.” He flung the poker into the fire, sending up sprays of ash and sparks. “There are more things in heaven and earth, Ms. Lander, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” he said, and stalked out of the room.

“What happens then?” Ms. Grant asked fearfully.

They take you to the morgue, Joanna thought, and cut your chest open in a Y to measure the knife wound, to determine the cause of death. And then they take you to the mortuary and inject embalming fluid into your veins and mastic compounds into your cheeks and brush your teeth with Ajax. And bury you in the ground.

“What happens then?” Edith said. “After the lights go out?”

They were all looking at her, waiting for her answer. “She sinks,” Joanna said.

There was a silence, and then Mrs. Woollam said, “ ‘When you pass through the waters, I will be with you, for I am the Lord your God.’ ” She took a quavering breath. “The important thing is to trust in Jesus.”

“And behave well,” Edith said, her chin up.

“And play the hand you’re dealt,” Yates said.

“Yes, so we should,” Joanna said, and picked up the rest of her cards. A two. A six. An ace.

“How many cards do you want?” Yates asked her.

“Two,” she said, and pushed two of her cards at Yates. He dealt her two more, and she knew what they were before she even picked them up.

“I’ll open for a hundred,” Mr. Funderburk said.

“I’ll see your hundred and raise you a hundred,” Edith said. The others, even Mr. Stead, even Mrs. Woollam, made their bets.

“I’ll see you,” Joanna said to them all, “and raise you everything I’ve got.” She pushed her stack of red chips to the center.

“When the end comes,” Edith said, reaching over to take Yates’s hand. “When it comes, what should we