Passage

“Send it. SOS. SOS.”

Kevin glanced at Joanna and then bent forward and began to tap out the message. Dot-dot-dot. Dash- dash-dash. Above his head, the blue spark arced, flickered, disappeared, arced again.

It’s fading, Joanna thought, and pushed forward between them. “No! It’s too late for SOSs. Tell Richard it’s an SOS, tell him Mrs. Troudtheim’s NDEs are the key.”

“Keep sending SOS!” Greg said, his hand snaking out to fasten on Joanna’s wrist. “You, show me where they keep the lifejackets.”

She called to Kevin, “You have to get the message through to Richard. Tell him it’s a code, that the neurotransmitters—” but Greg had already pushed her out of the wireless room, onto the deck.

“Where are the lifejackets?” he demanded. “We have to stay afloat till the ship gets here! Where did they keep them?”

“I don’t know,” Joanna said helplessly, looking back at the door of the wireless room. Light radiated from it, golden, peaceful, and in the light Kevin sat, his golden head bent over the wireless key, the spark above his head like a halo. Please, Joanna prayed. Let it get through.

“Where did they keep them?” Greg’s fingers cut into her wrists.

“In a chest next to the officers’ quarters,” Joanna said, “but they won’t help. There aren’t any ships coming —” but he was already pushing her down the slanting deck toward the bow. Ahead, Joanna could hear a gentle, slopping sound, like water, like blood.

“Show me where the chest is—so I can see what I’m doing!” the resident saying, and Joanna flinching away from the scissors, afraid he had a knife, a knife! Vielle saying, “Hang on, honey. Close your eyes,” and the lights going off, the room suddenly dark, and then a door opening somewhere on light, on singing, “Happy birthday to you!,” the candles on the cake flaring into brightness, and her father saying, “Blow them out!,” and her, leaning far forward, her cheeks puffed with air, blowing, and the candles flickering red and going out, the deck lights dimming, glowing red, and then coming on again, but not as bright, not as bright.

Joanna was sprawled over a white metal chest. “What was that?” Greg said, on his hands and knees by the railing. “What’s happening?” His voice was afraid.

Joanna stood up. “The unifying image is breaking up,” she said. “The synapses are firing haphazardly.”

“We have to get our lifejackets on!” Greg said, scrambling wildly to his feet. He wrenched the chest open, hauled out a lifejacket and thrust it at her. “We have to get off the ship!”

Joanna looked steadily at him. “We can’t.”

He tossed the lifejacket at her feet, snatched up another one, began putting it on. “Why not?” he said, fumbling with the ties.

She looked at him with infinite pity. “Because we’re the ship.”

He stopped, his hands still clutching the trailing ties, and looked fearfully at her. “You died, Greg, and so did I, in the ER. You had a massive heart attack.”

“I work out at the health club every day,” he said.

She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. We hit an iceberg and we sank, and all this”—she waved her hand at the deck, the empty davits, the darkness—“is a metaphor for what’s really happening, the sensory neurons shutting down, the synapses failing to arc.” The poor, mortally wounded mind reflexively connecting sensations and images in spite of itself, trying to make sense of death even as it died.

He stared at her, his face slack with hopelessness. “But if that’s true, if that’s true,” he said, and his voice was an angry sob, “what are we supposed to do?”

Why is everyone always asking me? Joanna thought. I don’t know. Trust in Jesus. Behave well. Play the hand you’re dealt. Try to remember what’s important. Try not to be afraid. “I don’t know,” she said, infinitely sorry for him, for herself, for everyone. “Look, it’s too late to save ourselves, but there’s still a chance we can save Maisie. If we could get a message through—”

“Maisie?” he shouted, his voice filled with fury and contempt. “We have to save ourselves. It’s every man for himself.” He yanked the ties into a knot. “There aren’t enough lifeboats for everyone, are there?” he said. “That’s why you don’t want to tell me where they are, because you’re afraid I’ll steal your place. They’re down belowdecks, aren’t they?”

“No!” Joanna said. “There’s nothing down there except water!” And darkness. And a boy with a knife.

“Don’t go down there!” Joanna said, reaching out for him, but he was already past her, already to the door. “Greg!” She raced after him.

He yanked the door open on darkness, on destruction. “Wait!” Joanna called. “Kevin! Mr. Briarley! Help! SOS!”

There was a sound of footsteps, of people running from the stern. “Hurry!” she said, and turned toward the sound. “You have to help me. Greg’s—”

It was a squat, white dog with batlike ears, padding down the deck toward her, trailing a leather leash. It’s the French bulldog, Joanna thought, the one Maisie felt so bad about. “Here, boy!” she called, squatting down, but the dog ignored her, trotting past with the frantic, single-minded look of a lost dog trying to get to its master.

“Wait!” Joanna said and ran after it, grabbing for the end of the leash. She caught the little dog up in her arms. “There, there,” she said. “It’s all right.” It looked up at her with its bulging brown eyes, panting hard. “Don’t be afraid,” she said. “I’ve got—”

There was a sound. Joanna looked up. Greg stood on the top step of the crew stairway, looking down into the darkness. He took a step down. “Don’t go down there!” Joanna cried. She thrust the little dog under her arm and ran toward the door. “Wait!” she cried, but the door had already shut behind him. “Wait!”

She grabbed the doorknob with her free hand. It wouldn’t turn. She hastily set the dog down, looping the end of the leash over her wrist, and tried the doorknob again. It was locked. “Greg!” she shouted through it. “Open the door!”

She put her whole weight against the door and pushed. “Open the door!” Pounding on the glass of the door, shouting, “What kind of hospital cafeteria is this?” Beating so hard the glass rattled, the cardboard sign that said “11 a.m. to 1 p.m.” shook, trying to make the woman inside look up from setting out the dishes of red Jell-O, shouting, “It’s not even one yet!” pointing to her watch in proof, but when she looked at it, it didn’t say ten to one, it said twenty past two.

She was on her knees, holding on to one of the empty lifeboat davits. The little bulldog huddled at her feet, looking up at her, shivering. His leash trailed behind him on the slanting deck. I let go of it, she thought in horror. I can’t let go of it.

She wrapped the leash tightly around her wrist twice, and clutched it in her fist. She scooped the little dog up in her arms, staggering against the rail as she straightened. The deck was slanting steeply now. “I’ve got to get a lifejacket on you,” she said and set off with the dog in her arms, climbing the hill of the deck, trying to avoid the deck chairs that were sliding down, the birdcages, the crash carts.

I’m in the wrong wing, she thought, I have to get to the Boat Deck, and heard the band. “The band was on the Boat Deck,” Joanna said, and climbed toward the sound.

The musicians had wedged the piano into the angle of the Grand Staircase and the funnel. They stood in front of it, their violins held to their chests like shields. As Joanna reached them, the bandleader raised his baton, and the musicians tucked their violins under their chins, raised their bows, began to play. Joanna waited, the bulldog pressed against her, but it was a ragtime tune, sprightly, jagged.

“It’s not the end yet,” Joanna said to the dog, climbing past them, past the first-class lounge. “We still have time, it isn’t over till they play ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee.’ ”

And here was the chest. Joanna rolled an IV pole out of the way, and a gurney, trailing a white sheet, and grabbed a lifejacket. She stood the little dog on the white chest to put the lifejacket on him, wrapping it around his squat body and pulling his front legs through the armholes. She reached for the dangling ties, clutched— “ ‘Come, let me clutch thee!’ ” Mr. Briarley intoned from Macbeth. “ ‘I have thee not, and yet I see thee still. Art thou a dagger of the mind…?’ ” Ricky Inman tilted back and forth in his chair, Joanna watching him, fascinated, waiting for him to overbalance. “ ‘…a false creation, proceeding from the oppressed brain?’ ” and Ricky toppled over backward, grabbing at the wall, at the light switch, as he went over, Mr. Briarley saying, as the light went out, “Exactly, Mr. Inman, ‘put out the light and then put out the light,’ ” and the whole class laughing, but it wasn’t funny, it was dark. “It was dark,” Mrs. Davenport said, pausing between every word, Joanna, bored, uncaring, asking, “Can you describe it?” and Mr.