Passage (32 page)

“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 Joanna. “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?”

“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.

I
NTERESTING,” 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.”