Passage (31 page)

As soon as she was dressed, she told Richard about it. “Could it have been the mirror itself?” he said, looking at the
mirror on the door. “Did you see a mirror in your NDE? Or a reflection of something?”

“Leading,” Joanna said. “No.”

“But it was the same feeling of déjà vu?”

“It’s
not
déjà vu. I’ve never been there, but I knew where it was. It was like knowing you were in Paris because you recognized the Eiffel Tower, even though you’ve never been there before. Except that I can’t place it,” she finished lamely.

“Do you still have the feeling?”

“No, it just sort of flashes past.”

“Interesting. I want you to tell me if the feeling recurs,” he said.

“Or if I figure out where it is,” she said, and spent the remainder of the afternoon and evening trying to place it. Something to do with a blanket and a wooden floor. And a palace. No, not a palace, but something with the word
palace
in it. The Palace Hotel? But it wasn’t a hotel. The Palace Theater?

She got exactly nowhere. It’s the watched-pot syndrome, she thought, driving to work the next morning, and decided to
not
think about it in the hope the elusive memory would kick spontaneously forward. She focused on transcribing her account and on helping prep Mrs. Troudtheim, who kicked out immediately with no memory of having had an NDE. “It was the same as last time,” she said. “I was lying there in the dark, trying not to fall asleep, but I guess I must have. I’m so sorry. I even took a nap this morning so I wouldn’t.”

“You were lying there in the dark,” Joanna said. “Did the darkness change at any point? Grow darker? Or take on a different quality?”

“No.”

“You say you fell asleep. Do you have any memory of being asleep?”

“No. I was just lying there, and then I sort of jerked awake.”

“Did something wake you? A movement? A sound?”

“No.”

“Nice try,” Richard said after Mrs. Troudtheim had left, “but it’s no use. She doesn’t remember.”

And neither do I, Joanna thought, typing up Mrs.
Troudtheim’s nontranscript. Not thinking about the tunnel hadn’t worked any better than trying to place the passage.

She did a global search on “floor” and then “blanket,” neither of which turned up any matches. She tried, “It’s so cold.” Nothing. She ran it again on “cold,” and this time there were a number of hits. Most were vague references to feelings the subject had had in the tunnel or on returning, and a couple were in Joanna’s notes. “During interview subject repeatedly asked me if I thought room was cold,” and, “Subject seemed cold, put on robe, then stuck hands up inside sleeves.”

All of which was very interesting, but it didn’t tell her where the tunnel was, and when Richard told her he wanted to send her under the next day, her first thought was, “Maybe when I see it again, I’ll know.” Her second was, “But first I’m going to identify that sound if it kills me,” and she held that thought through Tish’s attaching the electrodes, starting the IV, adjusting the sleep mask.

“The sound,” she murmured to herself as Tish put on her headphones. “First identify the sound, then the hallway.”

There was a sound, and she was in the passage. The line of light where the floor met the door still looked oddly distant, but she knew she must be closer to the door than the last time. She could clearly hear the sound of voices beyond the door.

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.