Passage

the Titanic, and Joanna obviously did. She not only knew that there’d been carpets in the first-class passageways, but that the wireless operator had been Jack Phillips. “All right, now, Joanna, concentrate on the source of the memory,” he said and looked up at the temporal-lobe area on the screen, expecting it to light up.

It did, a vivid orange-red. He asked her several more questions and then shut off the scan. “You can get up now,” he said and started graphing the scans.

Joanna came over to the console, rolling down her sleeve. “I still haven’t recorded my NDE.” She pulled on her cardigan. “I’ll be in my office.”

“Don’t you want to see your feeling of significance?” He called the scan up. “There it is,” he said, pointing to the temporal lobe. “That’s why you feel seeing the Titanic isn’t random.”

She looked at it glumly, her hands jammed in her lab coat pockets, as he showed her the areas of activity.

“But the feeling that I know where the memory came from is so strong…” she murmured.

“Like the feeling you had in the dressing room and the walkway,” Richard said.

“Yes,” she admitted.

He pointed at the red-orange temporal lobe. “Your mind is simply trying to make sense of an irrational feeling by giving it an object, in this case the source of the memory, but it’s only a feeling.”

She looked like she was going to contradict him, but all she said was, “I still haven’t recorded my account.” She picked up her recorder.

“When you write it up—”

“I know,” Joanna said. “Don’t let it fall into enemy hands.”

“Mandrake would—”

“I know,” she said. “Have a field day with this.”

She started out of the lab. At the door she turned and looked back at the scan. “I think I liked it better when you were accusing me of being Bridey Murphy,” she said ruefully and went out.

20

“I scorn to answer you such a question!”

—Queen Elizabeth I, on being asked on her deathbed by Sir Robert Cecil if she had seen any spirits

Richard’s wrong, Joanna thought, opening the door to her office. It isn’t a content-free feeling. The memory didn’t come from the movie, and it’s not the first thing my long-term memory happened to stumble over. It’s the Titanic for a reason.

And no doubt he’ll be down here in a minute to tell me my thinking that is yet another symptom of temporal- lobe stimulation, and show me a scan that proves it. I don’t want to see it, she thought, and I don’t want to hear another lecture on what will happen if Mr. Mandrake finds out about this. I’ll record my account somewhere else.

She yanked her door shut, locked it, and walked quickly down the hall to the stairs. She would go record her account in the cafeteria, if it was open, or in one of the nurses’ lounges. Anywhere where I don’t have to listen to him telling me the Titanic was a random synapse, she thought, clattering down the stairs. It’s not random. I’m seeing the Titanic for a reason. I know it.

And could hear Mr. Darby’s voice insisting, “I was there. It was real. I know it.” She sounded just like him. And that’s why you don’t want to talk to Richard, she thought, because you know he’s right.

He’s not right, she thought stubbornly. I know the memory isn’t from the movie.

Yes, and Mr. Viraldi knew he’d seen Elvis, Mr. Suarez knew he’d been abducted by aliens, Bridey Murphy knew she’d lived a previous life in Ireland. Her psychiatrist had been certain Bridey’s memories were proof of reincarnation, even though it had later been proved they’d been concocted out of folk songs and half-remembered stories her nanny’d told her, and that subjects under hypnosis could be talked into all sorts of false memories. And how do you know this isn’t the same thing? How do you know the memory isn’t from the movie, like Richard said?

But that scene isn’t in the movie, she thought, and knew it very well might be. Memory had been proved notoriously unreliable in study after study, and she and Vielle had had more than one argument about what was and wasn’t in various movies. After they’d watched A Perfect Murder at Dish Night, Vielle had been convinced that Gwyneth Paltrow had stabbed Michael Douglas to death with a meat thermometer instead of shooting him. Joanna had had to rent the video again and show her the ending to prove it to her. A scene with the passengers standing around asking the steward what had happened might very well be in Titanic, and she’d simply forgotten it. And there was a simple way to prove it, one way or the other. Watch the movie.

But Richard was already convinced her NDE had been influenced by the movie. If she watched it, her memory of her NDE would be hopelessly contaminated by its images, and so would any future NDEs she might have. And no matter what she saw in them, Richard would claim the memory came from the movie.

I need to have somebody else watch it and see if the scene’s there, she thought. But who? Vielle would have a fit if she told her she’d seen the Titanic. She’d be convinced it was a warning from the subconscious about going under.

Maisie? She was a disaster expert, but, as Joanna had told Richard, she’d never heard her so much as mention the Titanic, and, anyway, it was unlikely Maisie’s mother would allow her to see the movie. Quite apart from the “negative subject matter,” there was a nude scene and sex in the backseat of a Renault.

Tish? No, Joanna couldn’t trust her to keep her mouth shut, and Richard was right, Mr. Mandrake would have a field day if he found out about this, which eliminated anybody connected with Gossip General.

It would have to be Vielle, who, she hoped, wouldn’t ask too many questions. Joanna went down to the basement, past the morgue, and across to the ER.

It was jammed, as usual, with drugged and dangerous-looking people, though there didn’t seem to be any rogue-ravers on the premises at the moment. The new security guard was looking bored in a chair by the door. Joanna worked her way through the mess to Vielle, who was handing a patient on a gurney over to two orderlies. “She goes up to four-west,” Vielle said to them. “Do you know how to get there?”

The orderlies nodded uncertainly. Vielle gave them complicated instructions, laid the chart on the patient’s stomach, then turned to Joanna. “You’re too late,” Vielle said. “We had a patient who coded twice. You just missed him.”

“He died?”

“No, he’s fine,” Vielle said. “It would have been a case of natural selection if he’d died, though. He electrocuted himself taking down his Christmas lights.”

“His Christmas lights?” Joanna said. “It’s February.”

“He said it was the first day it hadn’t snowed.”

“I thought Christmas lights were shielded.”

“They are. Except when you walk your ladder straight into a power line. Your metal ladder.” She grinned at Joanna. “He’s up in CICU—a little fried, but able to talk. You better get up there fast, though. Maurice Mandrake was just down here, looking for you, and I saw him talking to Christmas Lights Guy’s doctor.”

“Mr. Mandrake was looking for me?” Joanna asked. That was all she needed.

“Yeah. He said if I saw you, I was to tell you he was going up to your office. That was before Christmas Lights Guy, though, but if he did go up to your office, you might be able to beat him to the CICU.” She walked