She took a bite of energy bar. “I didn’t say that. NDEs didn’t start with Mr. Mandrake or this current crop of books. There are accounts dating all the way back to ancient Greece. In Plato’s Republic, there’s an account of a soldier named Er who died and traveled through passageways leading to the realms of the afterlife, where he saw spirits and something approaching heaven. The eighth-century Tibetan Book of the Dead talks about leaving the body, being suspended in a foggy void, and entering a realm of light. And most of the core elements seem to go way back.”
She took another bite. “It’s not that people don’t see the tunnel and all the rest. It’s just that it’s so hard separating the wheat from the chaff. And there’s tons of chaff. People tend to use NDEs to get attention. Or to stump for their belief in the paranormal. Twenty-two percent of people who claim they’ve had NDEs also claim to be clairvoyant or telekinetic, or to have had past-life regressions like Bridey Murphy. Fourteen percent claim they’ve been abducted by aliens.”
“So how do you separate the wheat from the chaff, as you call it?”
She shrugged. “You look for body language. I had a patient last month who said, ‘When I looked at the light, I understood the secret of the universe,’ which, by the way, is a common comment, and when I asked her what it was, she said, ‘I promised Jesus I wouldn’t tell,’ but as she said it, she put her hand out, as if reaching for something just out of her grasp,” Joanna said, demonstrating. “And you look for experiences outside the standard imagery, for consistency. People tend to include many more specific details, some of them seemingly irrelevant, when they’re describing what they’ve actually experienced than when they’re describing what they think they should have seen.”
“And what have they actually experienced?” Richard asked.
“Well, there’s definitely a sensation of darkness, and a sensation of light, usually in that order. There also seems to be a sound of some kind, though nobody seems to be able to describe it very well. Mr. Mandrake says it’s a buzzing—”
“—so all of his patients say it’s a buzzing,” Richard said.
“Yes, but even they don’t sound all that convinced,” Joanna said, remembering the uncertainty in Mrs. Davenport’s voice. “And my subjects are all over the map. It’s a click, it’s a roar, it’s a scraping sound, and it’s a shriek.”
“But there definitely seems to be a sound?”
“Oh, yes, eighty-eight percent of my patients mentioned it. Without prompting.”
“What about the floating-above-your-body-on-the-operating-table?” Richard asked, pulling a box of raisins out of his pocket.
“Mr. Mandrake claims sixty percent of his patients have an out-of-body experience, but only eleven percent of mine do. Seventy-five percent of mine mention feelings of peacefulness and warmth, and nearly fifty percent say they saw some kind of figure, usually religious, usually dressed in white, sometimes shining or radiating light.”
“Mandrake’s Angel of Light,” Richard said.
She held out her hand, and he tipped some raisins into her palm. “Mr. Mandrake’s brainwashees see an Angel of Light and their dead relatives, waiting to greet them on the Other Side, but for everyone else, it seems to be religion-specific. Christians see angels or Jesus unless they’re Catholics, then they see the Virgin Mary. Hindus see Krishna or Vishnu, non-believers see relatives. Or Elvis.” She ate a raisin. “That’s what I mean about chaff. People bring so many biases from their own background, it’s almost impossible to know what they actually saw.”
“What about children?” he asked. “Don’t they have fewer preconceived ideas?”
“Yes,” Joanna said, “but they’re also more apt to want to please the adult who’s interviewing them, as proved by the nursery-school-abuse cases of the eighties. Children can be manipulated to say anything.”
“I don’t know,” he said doubtfully. “I met a little girl today who didn’t look too influenceable. You know her. Maisie?”
“You talked to Maisie Nellis?” she said, and then frowned. “I didn’t know she was back in again.”
Richard nodded. “She told me to tell you she has something important to tell you. We had quite a chat about the Hindenburg.”
She smiled. “So that’s the disaster of the week?”
He nodded. “That and the Great Molasses Flood. Did you know that twenty-one people met a pancakelike death in 1919?”
“How long were you there?” she laughed. “No, let me guess. Maisie’s wonderful at thinking up excuses for why you have to stay just a little longer. She’s one of the world’s great stallers. And one of the world’s great kids.”
He nodded. “She told me she has cardiomyopathy and that she’d gone into V-fib.”
Joanna nodded. “Viral endocarditis. They can’t get her stabilized, and she keeps having reactions to the antiarrhythmia drugs. She’s a walking disaster.”
“Hence the interest in the Hindenburg,” he said.
She nodded. “I think it’s a way of indirectly addressing her fears. Her mother won’t let her talk about them directly, won’t even acknowledge the possibility that Maisie might die,” she said. “But more than that, I think Maisie’s trying to make sense of her own situation by reading about other people who’ve had sudden, unaccountable, disastrous things happen to them.” She ate another raisin. “Plus, children are always fascinated by death. When I was Maisie’s age, my favorite song was ‘Poor Babes in the Wood,’ about two children ‘stolen away one bright summer’s day’ and left in the woods to die. My grandmother used to sing it to me, to my mother’s horror. The elderly are fascinated by death, too.”
“Did they?” Richard asked curiously. “Die? The babes in the wood?”
She nodded. “After wandering around in the dark for several stanzas. ‘The moon did not shine and the stars gave no light,’ ” she recited. “ ‘They wept and they sighed, and bitterly cried, and the poor little children, they lay down and died.’ After which the birds covered them with strawberry leaves.” She sighed nostalgically. “I loved that song. I think because it had children in it. Most of Maisie’s disasters involve children. Or dogs.”
Richard nodded. “There was a dog on the Hindenburg. Named Ulla. It survived the crash.”
She wasn’t listening. “Did she say what she wanted to talk to me about?”
“Near-death experiences.”
“Oh, dear, I hope she didn’t go into V-fib and code again.”
“I don’t think so. She was up and around. The nurse had a hard time keeping her in bed.”
“I should go see her,” Joanna said, looking up the stairs.
She crept up them and opened the door a crack. “ . . . an Angel of Light, with golden light radiating from him like sparkling diamonds,” Mr. Mandrake was saying.
She eased the door shut. “Still there.”
“Good,” Richard said, “because I haven’t had a chance to convince you to come work with me on my project yet, and you haven’t finished telling me what people experience during an NDE. And we haven’t had dessert yet.” He reached in his lab coat pocket and pulled out a package of peanut M&M’s.
She shook her head. “No, thanks. They’d just make me thirsty.”
“Oh, in that case,” he said. He reached in his right pocket. “Mocha Frappuccino,” he said, pulling out a bottle and setting it on the step, and then pulling out another. “Or . . . ” he read the label, “mandarin green tea with ginseng.”
“You’re amazing,” Joanna said, taking the Frappuccino. “What else do you have in there? Champagne? Lobster thermidor? All I’ve got in my pockets is a postcard and my tape recorder and . . . ” she fumbled in her cardigan pockets, “ . . . my pager—oops, which I’d better turn off. I don’t want it going off and giving away our position to Mr. Mandrake,” she switched it off, “and three used Kleenexes.” She opened the Frappuccino. “You wouldn’t have a straw, would you?”
He pulled a paper-wrapped one out of his pocket. “You said ther
e’s a sensation of darkness,” he said, handing it to her. “Not a tunnel?”
She unwrapped the straw. “The majority of them call it a tunnel, but that isn’t what they describe. For some it seems to be a spinning vortex, for others a passage or hallway or narrow room. Several of my subjects have described darkness collapsing in around them.”
Richard nodded. “The visual cortex shutting down.” He jerked a thumb up toward the door. “What about the life review?”
“Only about a quarter of my subjects describe having one,” Joanna said, sipping her Frappuccino, “but the flashing of your life before your eyes is a well-documented phenomenon in accidents. Mr. Mandrake says the NDE, or near-afterlife experience, as he prefers to call it—”
“He told me,” Richard said, grimacing.
“—has ten core elements: out-of-body experience, sound, tunnel, light, dead relatives, Angel of Light, a feeling of peace and love, a life review, the bestowing of universal knowledge, and a command to return. Most of my subjects experience three or four of the elements, usually the sound, the tunnel, the light, and a sense that people or angels are present, though when they’re questioned, they have trouble describing them.”
“That sounds like temporal-lobe stimulation,” he said. “It can cause a feeling of being in a holy presence without any accompanying visual image. It can also cause flashbacks and assorted sounds, including voices, but so can carbon dioxide buildup, and certain endorphins. That’s part of the problem-there are several physical processes that could cause the phenomena described in an NDE.”
“And Mr. Mandrake will claim that the effects produced in the laboratory aren’t the same as the ones the NDEer is experiencing. In his book Mr. Mandrake says the lights and tunnel vision produced during anoxia experiments are completely unlike the ones his patients describe.”
“And without an objective standard, there’s no way to disprove that,” Richard said. “NDE accounts are not only subjective, they’re hearsay.”
“And vague,” Joanna said. “So your project is hoping to develop an objective standard?”
“No,” he said. “I’ve got one. Three years ago I was using the RIPT scan to map brain activity. You ask the subject to count to five, what his favorite color is, what roses smell like, and locate the areas of synaptical activity. And in the middle of the experiment, one of the subjects coded.”
“Because of the scan?”
“No. The scan itself’s no more dangerous than a CAT scan. Less, because there’s no radiation involved. It was a massive coronary. Completely unrelated.”
“Did he die?” Joanna asked, thinking of Greg Menotti.
“Nope. The crash cart team revived him, he had a bypass, and he was fine.”
“And he’d had an NDE?”
Richard nodded. “And we had a picture of it.” He reached in his lab coat pocket and pulled out an accordion-folded strip of paper. “It was three minutes before the crash cart could get there. The RIPT scan was running the entire time.”
He shifted so he was sitting next to her and unfolded the long strip of pictures. They showed the same black cross-section of the brain she’d seen in PET scan photos, with areas colored in blue and green and red, but in sharper detail than she’d seen in the PET scan photos, and with rows and rows of coded data along either side.
“Red indicates the greatest level of activity and blue the lowest,” Richard said. He pointed to an orangish-red area on the pictures. “This is the temporal lobe,” he said, “and this,” pointing to a smaller splash of red, “is the hippocampus.” He handed her the strip. “You’re looking at an NDE.”
Joanna stared at the splotches of orange and yellow and green in fascination. “So it is a real thing.”
“That depends on what you mean by real,” he said. “See this area where there’s no activity? That’s the visual cortex, and this and this are sensory areas, where outside information is processed. The brain isn’t getting any data from outside. The only stimuli are coming from deep inside the brain, which is bad news for Mandrake’s theory. If the patient were actually seeing a bright light or an angel, the visual cortex here and here,” he pointed, “would be activated.”
Joanna stared at the dark blue areas. “What did he see?” she asked. “The man who coded.”
“Mr. O’Reirdon,” Richard said. “A tunnel, a light, and several scenes from his childhood, all in succession.”
“The life review,” Joanna murmured.
“My guess is that those images are what account for the activation here,” he said, pointing at yellow-green spots in a succession of the pictures. “These are random firing of long-term-memory synapses.”
“Did he see a shining figure in white?” Joanna asked.
He shook his head. “He felt a holy presence that told him to come back, and then he was on the table.”
He indicated a picture near the end of the strip. “This is where he came out of the NDE state. You can see the radically different pattern. Activity drops off sharply in the temporal lobe and increases in the visual and auditory cortexes.”
Joanna wasn’t listening. She was thinking, they always talk about going and coming back, as if it were a real place. NDEers all talked about it that way. They said, “I came back to the ambulance then,” or, “I went through the tunnel,” or, “The whole time I was there, I felt so peaceful and safe.” And Greg Menotti had said, “Too far away for her to come,” as if he were no longer in the ER but had gone somewhere else. Far. “That far country from whose bourne no traveller returns,” Shakespeare had called death.
“The greatest level of activity is here,” Richard was saying, “next to the Sylvian fissure in the anterior temporal lobe, which indicates the cause may be temporal-lobe stimulation. Temporal-lobe epileptics report voices, a divine presence, euphoria, and auras.”
“A number of my subjects describe auras surrounding the figures in white,” Joanna said, “and light radiating from them. Several of them, when they talked about the light, spread their hands out as if to indicate rays.” She demonstrated.
“This is exactly the kind of information I need,” Richard said. “I want you to come work with me on this project.”
“But I don’t know how to read RIPT scans.”
“You don’t have to. That’s my department. I need you to tell me exactly the kind of thing you’ve been telling me—”
The door banged open, and a nurse clattered down the steps. Joanna and Richard both made a dive for the landing, but it was too late. She’d already seen them.
“Oh,” the nurse said, looking surprised and then interested. “I didn’t know anything was going on in here.” She gave Richard a winsome smile.
“You can’t get through this way,” Joanna said. “They painted the steps.”
She arched a speculative eyebrow. “And you two are waiting for them to dry?”
“Yes,” Richard said.
“Is Mr. Mandrake still up there?” Joanna asked. “In the hall?”
“No,” she said, still smiling at Richard.
“Are you sure?” Joanna asked.
“The only thing in the hall is the supper cart.”
“Supper cart?” Joanna said. “Good Lord, how late is it?” She glanced at her watch. “Oh, my gosh, it’s after six.”
The eyebrow again. “Lost all track of time, did you? Well, have fun,” she said, and waved at Richard. She clattered up the stairs and out.
“I had no idea it was this late,” Joanna said, wadding up the energy-bar wrapper and sticking it in her pocket. She stood, gathering up the Frappuccino bottle and the apple core.
Richard ran up two stairs and turned, blocking her way. “You can’t go yet. You haven’t agreed to work with me on the project.”
“But I already interview everyone who comes into the hospital,” Joanna said. “I’d be glad to share my transcripts with you—”
“I’m not talking about those people. I want you to interview my volunteers. You’re an exper
t at, as you said, separating the wheat from the chaff. That’s what I want you to do: interview my subjects, separate out their actual experiences so I can see how it relates to their RIPT scan maps.”
“Their RIPT scan maps?” Joanna said, bewildered. “I don’t understand. Very few people code in the hospital, and even if they do, you’d only have four to six minutes to get your scanner down to the ER, and—”
“No, no,” he said. “You don’t understand. I’m not observing NDEs. I’m manufacturing them.”
“I beg your pardon, monsieur. I did not mean to do it.”
—MARIE ANTOINETTE, AFTER SHE HAD ACCIDENTALLY STEPPED ON THE EXECUTIONER’S FOOT WHILE MOUNTING TO THE GUILLOTINE
YOU MANUFACTURE NDES? You mean, like in Flatliners?” Joanna blurted out, and then thought, you shouldn’t have said that. You’re alone in a stairwell with him, and he’s clearly a nutcase.
“Flatliners?” Richard said, horrified. “You mean that movie where they stopped people’s hearts and then revived them before they were brain dead? Of course not. Manufacturing’s the wrong word. I should have said simulating.”
“Simulating,” Joanna said, still wary.
“Yes, using a psychoactive drug called dithetamine. Wait, let me start at the beginning. Mr. O’Reirdon coded, and we got his NDE on tape, so to speak, but, as you can imagine, I wasn’t eager to publish that fact. Mr. Mandrake’s book had just come out, he was on all the talk shows claiming the afterlife was real, and I could just imagine what would happen if I showed up with photographic proof.” He moved his spread hand through the air, as if displaying a headline: “ ‘Scientist Says Near-Death Experience Real.’ ”
“No, no,” Joanna said, “ ‘Scientist Takes Photo of Heaven,’ with an obviously faked picture of the pearly gates superimposed on a diagram of the brain.”
“Exactly,” Richard said, “and besides, it didn’t have anything to do with the mapping project I was working on. So I documented the scans and Mr. O’Reirdon’s NDE account and stuck them in a drawer. Then, two years later, I was reading about a study showing the effects of psychoactive drugs on temporal-lobe activity. There was a photo of an fPET scan of a patient on dithetamine, and I thought, That looks familiar, and got out Mr. O’Reirdon’s scans. They showed the same pattern.”