The sound! She had intended to listen for the sound, and she had forgotten again. She whirled to look back down the dark tunnel. It was a sound that-what? She clearly remembered hearing something, but what was it? “Was it a ringing or a buzzing?” she said, frustrated, and her voice sounded shockingly loud in the tunnel. She looked back toward the door and the light, half-expecting the voices to have stopped in surprise, but they continued to talk.
“I’m sure it’s nothing,” the man said, and Joanna wondered if he was talking about her.
“Should we send someone to find out?” another man’s voice said. Maybe their voices are what I heard coming through, Joanna thought, and knew they weren’t. They hadn’t started till halfway through the last time, and the first time she hadn’t heard anything. After the sound stopped, the passage had been absolutely silent.
And it was a sound, she thought, not voices. A sound like . . . She could not call up any memory of it at all. But it came from down here, she thought, and started back along the passage. It came from the end of—
And she was back in the lab. Oh, no, she thought, I’ve kicked out, just like Mrs. Troudtheim.
“I’m sorry,” she said, but Tish ignored her and went on taking off the headphones and detaching the electrodes as if nothing catastrophic had happened.
“Is she awake?” Richard asked from over at the console, and he didn’t sound upset either.
“Did you change the dosage?” she asked, groping for the edge of the examining table so she could pull herself to a sitting position.
“Why?” Richard said, appearing above her. “Was your experience different?”
“No, but when I went back to—”
“Wait,” he said, fumbling in his pocket for her minirecorder. “From the beginning.”
She stared up at him uncomprehendingly. “Didn’t I kick out?”
“Kick out?” he said. “No. Didn’t you experience an NDE this time?”
“Yes, I was in the passage,” she said, and he held the recorder up to her mouth, “and I turned around to see where the sound came from. I was determined this time to identify it, and I started back down the passage toward it, and—”
“Did you?” Richard cut in. “Identify it?”
“No,” she said. “It’s so odd. I know I hear it, but when I try to reconstruct it, I can’t.”
“Because it’s a strange sound you’ve never heard before?”
“No, that’s not it. It’s like when you wake up in the middle of the night, and you know something awakened you, but you can’t hear it now, and you didn’t really hear it because you were asleep, so you don’t know if it was a branch scraping against the window or the cat knocking something off the counter. That’s what this feels like.”
“So you think the sound is something you hear before you go into the NDE-state?”
Joanna considered that. “I’m not sure. Maybe.” She looked thoughtfully at him. “When the patient I was interviewing in the ER coded and a nurse pushed the code alarm, I remember thinking that maybe that was what people were hearing in their NDEs. It was a sort of cross between a ringing and a buzzing.”
“There’s no code alarm in here,” Tish said. Richard looked at her in surprise, as if he’d forgotten she was there. “She wouldn’t have been able to hear a code alarm, anyway, if there had been one,” Tish said. “She was wearing headphones, remember?”
“She’s right,” Joanna said. “It can’t be an outside sound. It’s . . . ”
“And you said none of the patients you interviewed were able to describe the sound either,” Richard said.
“Not with any degree of confidence,” Joanna said, “or consistency, and now I feel guilty I was so impatient with them.”
“As soon as you finish your account, I want to take a look at the superior auditory cortex,” he said.
“That is my account,” Joanna said. “I turned around to see where the sound came from and started back down the passage, and I was back in the lab. That’s why I asked you if I’d kicked out of the NDE.”
Richard had put down the recorder in his surprise. “How long were you in the tunnel?”
“I don’t know,” Joanna said. “However long it takes to turn around and take a couple of steps.”
“How long were you there the time before?”
“I don’t know, several minutes. Longer than the first time.”
Richard was already over at the console, calling up the scans. “Normal time?” he asked, and when she looked blank, he said, “Was there any sense of time dilation, of time being slowed down or speeded up?”
“No,” she said. “Why?”
“Because you were in the NDE-state the first two times a little over two minutes,” he said, calling up arrays of numbers, “and this time nearly five.” He looked over at her. “Have you ever asked your patients how long their NDEs lasted?”
“No,” Joanna said. “It never occurred to me.” She had always assumed they were experiencing the NDE in what Richard called normal time. Some of them had talked about moving rapidly through the tunnel, and she had asked what they meant by “rapidly” to see if they were attempting to describe some sort of speeded-up sense of time, but she had never thought to ask how long they’d stared at the light or how long the life review had taken. She’d simply assumed that the duration of the NDEs matched the length of the activities they’d described. And it had never occurred to her to compare their subjective experience with the length of time they’d been clinically dead.
“What about at the end of your NDE?” Richard asked. “Was there time dilation as you were going back down the tunnel?”
“I didn’t go back down the tunnel,” she said. “I started to, and then all of a sudden I was back in the lab. It wasn’t like the other times I’ve returned. It was much more . . . abrupt,” she said, trying to think of a way to describe it, but Richard was back on the subject of time dilation.
“You didn’t experience time dilation the other times either?”
“No.” I need to ask Mrs. Woollam if the duration of her NDEs varies, she thought. And Maisie. Maisie’d said she’d only seen fog, and Joanna had assumed from that that her NDE had only lasted a few seconds. Now she wondered.
“Look at this,” Richard said, staring at the console screen. “The duration of Amelia Tanaka’s NDE-state varies as much as four minutes.”
Tish went over to stand next to him and look interestedly at the screens. “Maybe it’s like time in a dream. You can dream whole days between the time your alarm goes off and when you wake up a few seconds later,” she said. “I had a dream like that the other morning. I dreamed I went to Happy Hour at the Rio Grande and then up skiing at Breckenridge and it all happened in the two seconds between the guy on the radio saying, ‘It’s six o’clock,’ and, ‘More snow predicted for the Rocky Mountain area today,’ ” but Richard didn’t hear her. He went on typing, totally absorbed.
“Can I get dressed now?” Joanna asked, but he didn’t hear that either. “I’m getting dressed now,” she said, slid off the examining table, and went into the dressing room.
Richard was still at the console, staring intently at the images, when she came out. Tish was putting on her coat. “I’m leaving,” she said disgustedly. “Not that he’d notice. If you can get through to him, tell him if he wants me here before two tomorrow to give me a call.” She looked wistfully at him. “At least I know it’s not me. He doesn’t know you exist either.” Tish pulled on her coat. “There are more things in life—”
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio, Joanna thought.
“—than just work, you know,” Tish finished. She pulled on her gloves. “Happy Hour’s at Rimaldi’s tonight, if you want to ditch Doctor-All-Work-and-No-Play.”
“Thanks,” Joanna said, smiling, “but I’ve got to get my NDE recorded while it’s still fresh in my mind.”
Tish shrugged. “There’d better be more things in death than work,” she said, zipping up her
coat, “or I’m not going. ’Bye, Dr. Wright,” she called gaily on her way out.
Richard didn’t even look up. “Mr. Sage’s NDEs vary by two minutes and fifteen seconds,” he said. “I’d been assuming there was a direct correlation between real time and the subjective time of the NDE, but if there’s not . . . ”
If there’s not, then maybe brain death doesn’t occur in four to six minutes, Joanna thought. Maybe it’s shorter. Or longer.
“Can you check for references to time dilation in your interviews?” Richard asked.
“Yes,” she said, but there aren’t any, she thought. If time had seemed to slow down or speed up, they wouldn’t have said it wasn’t a dream, that it felt real.
And it did feel real, she thought, going back to her office to record her account. It had seemed like it was happening in real time, in a real place. Which you’re no closer to identifying than you were.
And no closer to identifying the sound, which meant it only took her a few minutes to record her entire NDE. She described the voices and what they’d said, her turning around, starting back—
I wonder if that was what ended the NDE, she thought, and started through the transcripts, looking specifically at the endings. A number of them described their return as “abrupt” or “sudden.” “I felt like I was being pulled back to my body,” Ms. Ankrum had said, and Mr. Zamora had described the end of his NDE as “like somebody picked me up by the scruff of the neck and threw me out.”
Neither of them had mentioned the tunnel as being the way back, but Ms. Irwin had said, “Jesus told me, ‘Your time is not yet fulfilled,’ and I found myself in the tunnel again,” and nearly a dozen had said they’d reentered the tunnel. “The spirit pointed to the light and said, ‘Dost thee choose death?’ and then he pointed at the tunnel and said, ‘Or dost thee choose life? Choose thee well.’ ” Why does every spirit and religious figure and dead relative speak in that stilted, quasi-religious manner, a cross between the Old Testament and Obi-Wan Kenobi? Joanna thought.
She made a list of the references to show Richard, wishing she’d gone to Happy Hour, where there would at least be nachos or something to eat. She hadn’t had any lunch because of the session. She opened her desk drawer, looking for a stray candy bar or an apple, but all she found was half a stick of gum so old it broke when she pulled the foil off.
She should have ransacked Richard’s lab coat pockets before she left the lab. He’d never have noticed, she thought, and had the feeling again of almost, almost knowing where the tunnel was. She sat perfectly still, trying to hold on to the feeling, but it was already gone. What had triggered it? Something about stealing food from Richard’s lab coat supply. Or could it have been the gum? And what famous place had she never been to that featured wooden floors, blankets, and ancient gum?
It’s hunger, she thought. Starving people are prone to mirages, aren’t they? But Richard had told her to tell him if the feeling recurred, so she went up to the lab and reported it to him.
“You don’t have to steal, you know,” he said, producing a package of Cheetos, a pear, and a bottle of milk from his pockets. “You can just ask.”
“It wasn’t the food,” she said, opening the milk. “It was the idea that you were so intent on what you were doing that you wouldn’t know I was taking it.”
“Do you have the feeling now?”
“No.”
“I think it might be the temporal lobe.” He went over to the console. “I’ve been looking at your scans. Tell me again about the sound. You heard it, but you can’t identify it?”
She nodded, biting into the pear.
“I think that may be because it’s not occurring. Look at this,” he said, pointing to a blue area on the scan. “There’s no activity in the auditory cortex. I’d been assuming there was an actual auditory stimulus from within the brain, but I think it may be a temporal-lobe stimulus instead.”
“Which means what?”
“Which means you can’t identify the sound because you’re not hearing it. You’re only experiencing a sensation of having heard something, with no sound to attach it to.”
But I did hear it, Joanna thought.
“Temporal-lobe stimulation would explain why there’s so much variation in description. Patients have a feeling they heard a sound, so they simply confabulate one out of whatever sound they heard last.”
Like the ringing of the code alarm, Joanna thought, or the hum of the heart monitor going flatline.
“It might also explain some of the other core elements, too,” Richard said. “I’ve been assuming the NDE was endorphin-generated, but maybe . . . ” He began typing. “Light, voices, time dilation, even déjà vu, are also effects of temporal-lobe stimulation.”
“It wasn’t déjà vu,” Joanna said, but Richard was already lost in the scans, so she ate her Cheetos and went down to ask Mrs. Woollam about the duration of her NDEs and the manner of her return.
“I was standing there looking up at the staircase,” Mrs. Woollam, even more fragile-looking in a white knitted bed jacket, said, “and then I was in the ambulance.”
“You weren’t doing anything?” Joanna asked. “Like walking back down the tunnel? You were just standing there?”
“Yes. I heard a voice, and I knew I had to go back, and there I was.”
“What did the voice say?”
“It wasn’t a voice exactly. It was more a feeling, inside, that I had to go back, that it wasn’t my time.” She chuckled. “You’d think it would be, wouldn’t you, as old as I am? But you never know. There was a girl in the room with me at Porter’s last time. A young girl, she couldn’t have been more than twenty, with appendicitis. Well, appendectomies aren’t anything. They did them back when I was a girl. But the day after her operation, she died. You never know when your time will come to go.” Mrs. Woollam had opened her Bible and was leafing through the tissue-thin pages. She found the passage and read, “ ‘For none may know the hour of his coming.’ ”
“I thought that verse referred to Christ, not death,” Joanna said.
“It does,” Mrs. Woollam said, “but when death comes, Jesus will be there, too. That was why He came to earth, to die, so that we would not have to go through it alone. He will help us face it, no matter how frightening it is.”
“Do you think it will be frightening?” Joanna asked, and felt the sense of dread again.
“Of course,” Mrs. Woollam said. “I know Mr. Mandrake says there’s nothing to fear, that it’s all angels and joyous reunions and light.” She shook her white head in annoyance. “He was here again yesterday, did you know that? Talking all sorts of nonsense. He said, ‘You will be in the Light. What is there to fear?’ Well, I’ll tell you,” Mrs. Woollam said spiritedly. “Leaving behind the world and your body and all your loved ones. How can that not be frightening, even if you are going to heaven?”
And how do you know there is a heaven? Joanna thought. How do you know there isn’t a tiger behind the door, or something worse? and remembered Amelia’s voice, full of knowledge and terror: “Oh, no, oh, no, oh, no.”
“Of course I will be afraid,” Mrs. Woollam said. “Even Jesus was afraid. ‘Let this cup pass from me,’ he said in the garden, and on the cross, he cried out, ‘Eloi, eloi, lama sabacthani.’ That means, ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ ”
She opened her Bible and leafed through the pages. The skin on her hands was as thin as the gilt-edged pages. “Even in the Psalms, it doesn’t say, ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will not fear it.’ It says,” and Mrs. Woollam’s voice changed, becoming softer and somehow bleaker, as if she were really walking through the valley, “ ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.’ ”
She closed the Bible and held it to her birdlike chest like a shield. “Because Jesus will be with me. ‘And, lo, I am with you always,’ he said, ‘even unto the end of the world.’ ”
She smiled at Joann
a. “But you didn’t come to be preached to. You came to ask me about my NDEs. What else do you want to know?”
“The other times you had NDEs,” Joanna asked, “was the return the same?”
“Except for one time. That time I was in the tunnel and then all of a sudden, I was back on the floor by the phone.”
“On the floor?”
“Yes. The paramedics hadn’t gotten there yet.”
“And the transition was fast?”
“Yes,” Mrs. Woollam said. She opened her Bible again, and for a moment Joanna thought she was going to read her a Scripture, like, “in the twinkling of an eye we shall all be changed,” but instead she held the Bible up and closed it with a sudden slap. “Like that.”
“She described it as abrupt, like a book slamming shut,” Joanna told Richard the next day while they were waiting for Mr. Sage, “and Mrs. Davenport described her return as sudden, too.”
“Mrs. Davenport?” Richard said disbelievingly.
“I know, I know,” Joanna said, “she’ll say anything Mr. Mandrake wants her to. But he’s not interested in returns, and the word sudden occurs several times in her account. And in both cases, their hearts spontaneously started beating again, without medical intervention.”
“What about your other interviews?” Richard asked. “Is there a correlation between the means of revival and the manner of return?”
“I’ll check as soon as we’re done with Mr. Sage,” she said.
“Ask him about time dilation,” Richard said, “and his return,” and Joanna dutifully did, but it didn’t yield much. After twenty minutes of struggling with time dilation, she gave up and asked, “Can you describe how you woke up? Was it fast or slow?”
“I don’t know,” Mr. Sage said. “Just waking up.”
“Waking up like when your alarm clock goes off?” she asked, and Richard shot her a questioning glance.
I know I’m leading, she thought. I’ve given up all hope of getting anything out of him without leading. “Like when your alarm clock goes off,” she repeated, “or like on a Saturday morning, where you wake up gradually?”