Passage

  “I work Saturdays,” Mr. Sage said.

  It was a relief to go back to her office and look for abrupt returns, even though there didn’t seem to be a clear correlation between them and spontaneous revival. “Abraham said, ‘Return!’ ” Mr. Sameshima had said, “and wham! just like that I was back on the operating table,” but when she checked his file, they had used the paddles on him four times. Ms. Kantz, on the other hand, who had begun breathing on her own after a car accident, said, “I drifted for a long time in this sort of cloudy space.”

  At four, Joanna compiled what she had. While it was printing out, she listened to her messages. Vielle, wanting to know if she’d made any progress with Dr. Wright yet. Mr. Wojakowski, wanting to know if they needed him. Mrs. Haighton, saying she needed to reschedule, she had an emergency Spring Frolic meeting. Mr. Mandrake. She fast-forwarded through that one. Guadalupe. “Call me when you get the chance.”

  She probably wants to know whether I’m still interested in Coma Carl, Joanna thought. I haven’t been to see him in days.

  She ran the list up to Richard, who barely glanced up from the scans, and then went down to see Guadalupe. She was in Carl’s room, entering his vitals on the computer screen. Joanna looked over at the bed. It was at a forty-five-degree slant, and Carl, propped on all sides with pillows, looked like he might slide down to the foot of it at any moment. A clear plastic oxygen mask covered his nose and mouth.

  “How’s he doing?” Joanna asked Guadalupe, forcing herself to speak in a normal tone.

  “Not great,” Guadalupe whispered. “He’s been having a little congestion the last two days.”

  “Pneumonia?” Joanna whispered.

  “Not yet,” Guadalupe said, moving to check his IVs. There were two more bags on the stand than last time.

  “Where’s his wife?” Joanna asked.

  “She left to get something to eat,” Guadalupe said, punching numbers on the IV stand. “She hadn’t eaten all day, and the cafeteria was closed when she went down. Honestly, why do they even bother having a cafeteria?”

  Joanna looked at Carl, lying still and silent on the slanting bed. She wondered if he could hear them, if he knew his wife had left and Joanna was there, or if he was in a beautiful, beautiful garden, like Mrs. Woollam. Or in a dark hallway with doors on either side.

  “Has he said anything?” she asked Guadalupe.

  “Not today. He said a few words on Pam’s shift yesterday, but she said she had trouble making it out because of the mask.” Guadalupe reached in her pocket for a slip of paper and handed it to Joanna.

  Carl moaned again and muttered something. Joanna went over closer to the bed. “What is it, Carl?” she said and took his limp hand.

  His fingers moved as she picked up his hand, and she was so surprised, she nearly dropped it. He heard me, she thought, he’s trying to communicate with me, and then realized that wasn’t it. “He’s shivering,” she said to Guadalupe.

  “He’s been doing that for the past couple of days,” Guadalupe said. “His temp’s normal.”

  Joanna went over to the heating vent on the wall and put her hand up to it to see if any air was coming out. It was, faintly warm. “Is there a thermostat in here?” she asked.

  “No,” Guadalupe said, and started out, saying as she went, “You’re right. It does feel chilly in here. I’ll get him another blanket.”

  Joanna sat down by the bed and read the slip of paper Guadalupe had given her. There were only a few words on it: “water” and “cold? code?” with question marks after them, and “oh grand” again.

  Carl whimpered, and his foot kicked out weakly. Shaking something off? Climbing into something? He murmured something unintelligible, and his mask fogged up. Joanna leaned close to him. “Her,” Carl murmured. “Hurry,” he said, his head coming up off the pillow. “Haftoo—”

  “Have to what, Carl?” Joanna asked, taking his hand again. “Have to what?” but he had subsided against the pile of pillows, shivering. Joanna pulled the bedspread up over his unresisting body, wondering what had happened to Guadalupe and the blanket, and then stood there, holding his hand in both of hers. Have to. Water. Oh, grand.

  There was a sudden difference in the room, a silence. Joanna looked, alarmed, at Carl, afraid he had stopped breathing, but he hadn’t. She could see the shallow rise and fall of his chest, the faint fogging of the oxygen mask.

  But something had changed. What? The monitors were all working, and if there had been some change in Carl’s vitals, they would have started beeping. She looked around the room at the computer, the IV stand, the heater. She put her hands in front of the vent. No air was coming out.

  The heater shut off, she thought, and then, What I heard wasn’t a sound. It was the silence afterward. That was what I heard in the tunnel. That’s why I can’t describe it. Because it wasn’t a sound. It was the silence after something shut off, she thought, and almost, almost had it.

  “Here we go, Carl, a nice toasty blanket,” Guadalupe said, unfolding a blue square. “I warmed it up for you in the microwave.” She stopped and stared at Joanna’s face, her clenched fists. “What’s wrong?”

  I almost had it and now it’s gone again, Joanna thought, that’s what’s wrong. “I was just trying to remember something,” she said, making her hands unclench.

  She watched Guadalupe lay the blanket over Carl, watched her tuck it around his shoulders. Something to do with a blanket and a heater. No, not a heater, she thought, in spite of the blanket, in spite of the woman’s saying, “It’s so cold.” It was

  something else, something to do with high school, and ransacking the pockets of Richard’s lab coat, and a place she had never been. A place that was right on the tip of her mind.

  I know, I know what it is, she thought, and the feeling of dread returned, stronger than before.

  “And in my dream an angel with white wings came to me, smiling.”

  —FROM PAUL GAUGUIN’S LAST NOTES, PUBLISHED AFTER HIS DEATH

  INTERESTING,” RICHARD SAID when Joanna told him about the episode of the heater. “Describe the feeling again.”

  “It’s a . . . ” she searched for the right word, “ . . . a conviction that I know where the hallway in my NDE is.”

  “You’re not talking about a flashback, are you? You don’t find yourself there again?”

  “No. And, no, it’s not déjà vu,” she said, anticipating his next question. “I know I’ve never been there before.”

  “How about jamais vu? That’s the feeling that you’re in a strange place even though you’ve been there many times? It’s a temporal-lobe phenomenon, too.”

  “No,” she said patiently. “It’s a place I know I’ve never been, but I recognize it. I know what it is, but I just can’t think of it. It’s like,” she pushed her glasses up on her nose, trying to think of a parallel, “okay, it’s like, one day I was at the movies with Vielle, and I saw this woman buying popcorn. I knew I’d seen her somewhere, but I couldn’t place her. I had the feeling it was something negative, so I didn’t want to go up to her and ask her, and I spent the whole movie trying to think whether she worked at the hospital or lived in my apartment building or had been a patient. It’s that feeling.” She looked expectantly at Richard.

  “Who was she?”

  “One of Mr. Mandrake’s cronies,” she said, and grinned. “Three-fourths of the way through the movie, Meg Ryan had her palm read, and I thought, ‘That’s where I know her from. She’s a friend of Mr. Mandrake’s,’ and Vielle and I sneaked out before the credits.”

  Richard looked thoughtful. “And you think the heater going off was the same kind of trigger as the palm reading.”

  “Yes, except it didn’t work. All three times I’ve felt like the answer was just out of reach—” She realized she was starting to make the clutching gesture again and stopped herself. “But I couldn’t get it.”

  “When the feeling occurred, did you experience any nausea?”

  “No.”
r />   “Unusual taste or smell?”

  “No.”

  “Partial images?”

  “Partial images?” she asked.

  “Like when you’re trying to think of someone’s name, and you remember that it begins with a T.”

  She knew what he meant. When Meg Ryan held her palm out to the fortune-teller, she had had a sudden memory of Mr. Mandrake calling to her from down the hall. “No.”

  He nodded vigorously. “I didn’t think so. I think what you’re experiencing is a sense of incipient knowledge, a feeling of significance. It’s a visceral sensation of possessing knowledge coupled with an inability to state what the content of that knowledge is. It’s an effect of temporal-lobe stimulation, which turns on a significance signal in the limbic system, but without any content attached to it.”

  “Like the sound,” Joanna said.

  “Exactly. I’ll bet you both it and this feeling of recognizing the tunnel are temporal-lobe effects.”

  “But I know—”

  He nodded. “There’s an intense feeling of knowing. The person experiencing it will state definitely that he understands the nature of God or the cosmos, but when he’s asked to elaborate, he can’t. It’s a common symptom in temporal-lobe epileptics.”

  “And NDEers,” Joanna said. “Over twenty percent of them believe they were given special knowledge or an insight into the nature of the cosmos.”

  “But they can’t articulate it, right?”

  “No,” she said, remembering an interview with a Mrs. Kelly. “The angel said, ‘Look at the light,’ ” Mrs. Kelly had said, “and as I did I understood the meaning of the universe.”

  Joanna had waited, minirecorder running, pencil poised. “Which is?” she’d asked finally, and then, when Mrs. Kelly looked blank, “What is the meaning of the universe?”

  “No one who hasn’t experienced it could possibly understand,” Mrs. Kelly had said haughtily. “It would be like trying to explain light to a blind man,” but Joanna could still remember the frantic, frightened look on her face. She hadn’t had a clue.

  “But the knowledge NDEers feel they have is metaphysical,” Joanna said to Richard. “This feeling has nothing to do with religion or the nature of the cosmos.”

  “I know, but in a subject with a scientific background, that sense of cosmic awareness might take another, secular form.”

  “Like thinking I recognize the location of the tunnel.”

  He nodded. “And attributing significance to random items, like the blanket and the heater, which is also a common phenomenon. What you’re interpreting as recognition is really just temporal-lobe overstimulation.”

  “You’re wrong. I do know what it is. I just can’t . . . ”

  “Exactly,” Richard said. “You can’t tell me what it is because it’s an emotion, not actual knowledge. Feeling without content.”

  Richard’s theory made sense. It explained why, in spite of repeated incidents, she was no closer to an answer, and why the stimuli seemed so unrelated-a blanket, a heater shutting off, Richard’s lab coat, a floor that looked wrong. And something to do with high school, she thought, don’t forget that.

  “But it feels so real . . . ”

  “That’s because it’s the same neurotransmitters as are present when the brain experiences an actual insight,” Richard said. “If you have another incident, document everything you can about it. Circumstances, accompanying symptoms—”

  “And if next time I actually figure out what it is?” she asked.

  He grinned. “Then it wasn’t temporal-lobe stimulation. But I’m betting it is. It would account for the presence of such varied endorphins, and nearly all the core elements are also temporal-lobe symptoms—sounds, voices, light, feelings of in-effability and warmth . . . ”

  It wasn’t warm, Joanna thought stubbornly, it was cold. And I do know where it is. And the next time I have an incident, I’ll figure it out.

  But there were no more incidents. It was as if being told their cause had cured her. And it was just as well. Joanna was too busy the next three days to even catch her breath, let alone remember anything. There was a sudden rash of patients coding and being revived. Mrs. Jacobson, whom she’d interviewed six weeks ago, was brought in in cardiac arrest, and there were two unrelated asthma attacks.

  Joanna listened to them describe the tunnel (dark), the light (bright), and the sound they’d heard (they couldn’t). The only thing they were agreed on was that the NDE felt like it had really happened. “I was there,” Mr. Darby said almost violently. “It was real. I know it.”

  In between interviews, she left messages for Mrs. Haighton to call her and searched the transcripts for instances of incipient knowledge or ineffability and for hypersignificance. A number of NDEers talked about having returned to earth to fulfill a mission, though none of them were able to articulate exactly what the mission was. “It’s a mission,” Mr. Edwards had said vehemently. “Topic upsets him,” Joanna had written in her notes.

  Instances of hypersignificance were rarer. Miss Hodges had said, “Now when I look at a flower or a bird, it means so much more,” but that might just have been a heightened appreciation of life, and none of the subjects had talked about almost knowing the key to the universe. All of them, as near as she could tell, were convinced they were already in possession of the knowledge, not that it was just out of reach.

  She did a global search on “elusive,” but it didn’t turn up anything, and she had to abandon “tip of the tongue” in mid-search because the ICU called with two more heart attacks, and while she was interviewing the second one, Vielle paged her with an anaphylactic shock.

  Joanna went up to see him immediately, but not soon enough. “I went straight into a tunnel,” he said the minute she entered the room. “Why didn’t I leave my body first and float up by the ceiling? I thought that was supposed to happen first.”

  Uh-oh, she thought. “Has Mr. Mandrake been in to see you, Mr. Funderburk?”

  “He just left,” Mr. Funderburk said. “He told me people leave their bodies and hover above them, looking down on the doctors working on them.”

  “Some people have an out-of-body experience and some don’t,” Joanna said. “Everyone’s NDE is different.”

  “Mr. Mandrake said everyone had an out-of-body experience, a tunnel, a light,” he said, ticking them off on his fingers, “relatives, an angel, a life review, and a command to return.”

  Why am I even bothering? Joanna thought, but she took out her minirecorder, switched it on, and asked, “Can you describe what you experienced, Mr. Funderburk?”

  He had experienced, predictably, a tunnel, a light, relatives, an angel, a life review, and a command to return.

  “Did your surroundings seem familiar to you?”

  “No, should they have?” he said, as if he’d been cheated of something else. “Mr. Mandrake didn’t say anything about that.”

  “Tell me about your return, Mr. Funderburk.”

  “You have to have the life review first,” he said.

  “Okay, tell me about the life review.”

  But he was extremely vague about both its form and its content. “It’s a review,” he said. “Of your life. And then the angel commanded me to return, and I did.”

  “Can you describe your return?”

  “I returned.”

  She was starting to appreciate Mr. Sage. “During your NDE, do you remember hearing anything?”

  “No. Mr. Mandrake said there was supposed to be a sound when I went into the tunnel, but I didn’t get that either,” he said, sounding exactly like someone complaining that dessert was supposed to come with the meal, it said so in the menu.

  The other interviews went better, though neither of them contributed much in the way of detail about the manner of their return or the sound.

  Ms. Isakson couldn’t describe the sound at all. “Are you certain it was a sound?” Joanna asked.

  “What do you mean?” Ms. Isakson asked.
r />   “Could it have been the silence after a sound had stopped that you heard instead of the sound itself?” Joanna asked, knowing it was a leading question, but unable to think of any other way to ask what she needed to know, and her suggestion had no effect on Ms. Isakson.

  “No, it was definitely a sound. I heard it when I first entered the tunnel. It was a tapping sound. Or a whine. I don’t really remember because I was so happy to see my mother.” Tears came to her eyes. “She looked so well and happy, not like the last time I’d seen her. She got so thin there at the end, and so yellow.”

  A classic comment. NDEers always described their dead relatives as looking healthier than they had on their deathbeds, with the weight or limbs or faculties they’d lost in life restored.

  “She was standing there in the light, holding out her arms to me,” Ms. Isakson said.

  “Can you describe the light?” Joanna asked.

  “It was beautiful,” she said, looking up and opening her hands out. “All spangled.”

  “Can you describe the tunnel?”

  “It was pretty dark,” she said hesitantly. “It reminded me of a hallway. Sort of.”

  “You say it reminded you. Did it seem familiar to you?”

  “No,” she said promptly. Well, that was that, Joanna thought. She glanced over her notes, trying to think what she’d forgotten to ask her about.

  “I had the feeling,” Ms. Isakson said thoughtfully, “that wherever it was, it was a long way away.” She’s right, Joanna thought, remembering the passage. It is a long way away. That’s what Greg Menotti meant when he said it was too far for his girlfriend to come.

  I lied to Richard, Joanna thought. I told him I’d only had three incidents, but there were four. She’d forgotten about Greg’s murmuring, “Fifty-eight.” When he’d said it, she’d had the same feeling that she almost knew what he was talking about. And that can’t have been temporal-lobe overstimulation, she thought. I hadn’t even gone under then. I hadn’t even met Richard.

  “Thank you for your input,” she said to Ms. Isakson, switching off the minirecorder. She stuck her notebook and Ms. Isakson’s waiver in her pocket, said good-bye, and walked out of the room. And into Mr. Mandrake.