Passage. Part 22

"No," Joanna said. She came back around the bed, picked up the remote, and turned the TV back on. She hit "play." "It's a Disney movie."

"Oh," Maisie said, disappointed.

"But she hurts her back and can't walk," Joanna said. She handed Maisie the remote. "And she's very crabby about it."

"Oh, good," Maisie said. "Did somebody have an NDE about the Coral Sea?"

"No more questions," Joanna said firmly. "Watch your movie," and went back up to her office to listen to the tape again. He had definitely said Malakula and the Coral Sea. She called him and left a message for him to come in at three, and then went through the transcripts again, looking for some definitive discrepancy that would make the interview unnecessary. And, reading through his accounts, she became more and more convinced there had to be some mistake.

The naval terms-hatches, islands, flight decks-and the gratuitous details-not just a canoe, but a dugout, not just a soda fountain, but one that made cherry phosphates. Surely he couldn't have made up the Katzenjammer Kids and the neighbor lady two doors down and the newsreel about Pearl Harbor. He had even known the name of the movie that was playing.

But he couldn't have been on the Yorktown and in his hometown when Pearl Harbor was bombed. And the Norfolk story was full of believable details, too, from the PA system to Woody Pikeman asking, "Who's the wiseguy?" I have to talk to Richard, she thought.

The phone rang. She picked it up, hoping it was him. It was Mrs. Haighton. "I got yourmessage," she said. "I'm afraid neither Tuesday nor Thursday will work. I've got a hospital board meeting Tuesday, and Thursday's my afternoon to volunteer at the crisis center."

We've got a crisis right here, Joanna thought. "How would Wednesday afternoon work?" she said. "Two? Four? Or we could do this in the evening."

"Oh, no, evenings are even worse," she said and launched into a litany of board and organizing committee meetings.

"Earlier then," Joanna said doggedly. "I really need to schedule you this week, if possible. It's important." But this week was absolutely impossible. Maybe next week. No, that was the Women's Center fundraiser. The week after.

And by then, we'll have no volunteers at all, Joanna thought. She printed out the transcripts, and took them and the tapes to the lab to show Richard. "Hiya, Doc," Mr. Wojakowski said. He was standing outside the door in the exact spot where she'd left him.

"What are you doing here?" Joanna asked, turning hastily away to open the door so he couldn't see the stricken expression on her face.

"I figured I'd stick around till you got done with your meeting," he said, following her into the lab.

"I remembered what you said about talking about the stuff you saw while it was still fresh in your mind, and I didn't have anyplace to go, so I thought, I'll just wait till she comes back, so we can get it all down before my memory gets mixed up." He sat down in the chair and leaned forward, his ruddy face eager, smiling, waiting for her to begin asking questions, and she thought again, there must be some mistake.

But how could she find out what it was? She couldn't ask him directly, "Why did you tell me two different stories about where you were when Pearl Harbor was bombed?" or, "Do you have any proof you served on the Yorktown?" Not with him sitting there, his face eager and open.

"I was telling you about the peaceful feeling I had in the tunnel, like something was going to happen," he said, "so I walked a little ways till I come to a door, and all of a sudden there was this bright light, and I mean bright. The only time I ever saw something that bright was when a bomb from an Aichi-99 went right through the hangar deck and blew up Repair 5. She took three hits that day."

"Was that at the Battle of the Coral Sea?" Joanna asked, feeling like a traitor, like a n.a.z.i grilling a spy, trying to trap him into a mistake, an inconsistency. And if he told her a different version this time, named a different island, a different kind of canoe, what would it prove? Only that his memory was fuzzy. The Battle of the Coral Sea had happened sixty years ago, and confabulations multiplied over time.

"One of the depth charges. .h.i.t her in the port-side oil tanks," Mr. Wojakowski was saying, "and oil was gus.h.i.+ng out of her side. She woulda bled to death if we hadn'ta gotten her back to Pearl when we did. Boy, were we glad to see Diamond Head-"

"You went with the Yorktown back to Pearl Harbor?" Joanna blurted.

"Yep," Mr. Wojakowski said, "and helped patch her up myself. We worked straight through,welding her boilers and patching up her hull. I worked on the crew fixing her watertight doors. We worked seventy-eight hours straight and were still working on 'em when we left Oahu. I tell ya, I was so tired when we got done, I slept all the way back to Midway."

14.

"Mother never reached me. if... anything happens... you must be prepared. Remember the message: Rosabelle, believe. When you hear those words... know it is Houdini speaking..."

-Harry Houdini's words to his wife on his deathbed, promising to communicate with her from the afterlife.

"He made the whole thing up?" Richard said. "Even being on the Yorktown?"

"I don't know," Joanna said, pacing back and forth, her hands jammed in her cardigan pockets.

"All I know is that he couldn't have been in Pearl Harbor repairing the Yorktown and adrift at sea thousands of miles away at the same time."

"But does it have to mean he's lying?" Richard said. "Couldn't it just be a memory lapse? He's sixty-five, after all, and the war was over fifty years ago. He may have forgotten exactly where he was at a given time."

"How do you forget being shot down and losing your copilot and your gunner? You heard him tell that story. It was the best d.a.m.ned day of his life."

"Are you sure he said he was in Pearl Harbor while the s.h.i.+p was being repaired?" Richard asked. "Maybe he was just speaking generally-" but she was shaking her head violently.

"He also told me he was on board the Yorktown when he heard Pearl Harbor was bombed,"

she said, "and that he was reading the funny papers back home. 'The Katzenjammer Kids,' " she added bitterly. "You can't tell me he doesn't remember where he was when he heard about Pearl Harbor. An entire generation remembers where it was when it heard about Pearl Harbor!"

"But why would he lie about something like that?"

"I don't know," she said unhappily. "Maybe he's trying to impress us. Maybe he's listened to so many war stories over the years he's gotten them all confused. Or maybe it's more serious than that, Alzheimer's, or a stroke. All I know is-"

"That we can't use him," Richard said. "s.h.i.+t."

Joanna nodded. "I went back and checked the transcripts and then the tapes. They're full of discrepancies. According to Mr. Wojakowski, he was"-she pulled a piece of paper from her pocket and read from it-"a pilot, a gunner's mate, a pharmacist's mate on burial detail, a semaph.o.r.e flagman, and an airplane mechanic. I also checked the movie he said was playing the Sat.u.r.day nightbefore Pearl Harbor was bombed. The Desperadoes wasn't made until 1943."

She wadded up the paper. "I feel so stupid I didn't catch this sooner. Being able to tell whether people are telling the truth or confabulating is what I do for a living, but I honestly thought-his body language, the irrelevant details..." She shook her head wonderingly. "I am so sorry. You hired me to spot this kind of thing, and I was completely fooled."

"At least you caught it when you did." He looked at her. "Do you think he lied about what he saw in his NDEs, too?" and, at the look on Joanna's face, "Don't worry, I know he has to go. I just wondered."

"I don't know," Joanna said, shaking her head, "and there's no way to tell without outside confirmation. Some of the stories he told about the Yorktown were true. I checked them out before I came to talk to you. There really was a Jo-Jo Powers who 'laid his bomb right on the flight deck' and was killed doing it, and they really did repair the Yorktown and get it back to Midway in time for the battle. It was what saved the day, because the j.a.panese navy thought it had been sunk."

"But there's no way to get outside confirmation on an NDE," Richard finished. "Except the scans, which can't tell us what the subject saw."

"I am so sorry," Joanna said. "All I've done since I joined this project is decimate your subject list, and then, when I should have caught-"

"You did catch it," Richard said. "That's the important thing. And you caught it in time, before we published any resuits. Don't worry about it. We've still got five subjects. That's more than enough-"

He stopped at her expression.

"We only have four," she said unhappily. "Mr. Pearsall called. His father died, and he has to stay in Ohio to arrange the funeral and settle his affairs."

Four. And that was including Mr. Sage, who even Joanna couldn't get anything out of. And Mrs.

Troudtheim.

"What about Mrs. Haighton?" he said. "Have you been able to set up an interview yet?"

She shook her head. "She keeps rescheduling. I don't think we should count on her. We're just one item on her very long list of social activities. How's the authorization on the new volunteers coming?"

"Slowly. Records said six more weeks," he said, "if the board votes to continue the project."

"What do you mean?" Joanna said. "I thought you had funding for six months."

"I did," he said. "I got a call from the head of the inst.i.tute this morning. It seems Mrs. Brightman has been telling everyone what high hopes she has for the project, that we've already found indications of supernatural phenomena."

"Mr. Mandrake," Joanna said through gritted teeth."Bingo," he said. "So now the head of the inst.i.tute wants a progress report that he can use to rea.s.sure the board we're doing legitimate scientific research."

"Didn't you tell him-?"

"What? That half our subject list turned out to be cranks, plants, and psychics? That there's something wrong with the process that keeps our best subject from responding?" he said bitterly. "Or did you want me to tell him about the imaginative Mr. Wojakowski? I didn't know about him when the head called."

"How long do we have?" Joanna said. "Before we have to file this progress report?"

"Six weeks," he said. "Oddly enough."

"You've got Amelia's scans," she said, "and Mr. Sage's, and one set of Mr. Pearsall's. Maybe it won't take him very long to settle his father's affairs."

"Right, and, having just buried his father, he would definitely be an impartial observer," Richard said, and then felt ashamed of himself. It wasn't Joanna's fault. He was the one who'd approved a list of unreliable people.

"I'm sorry." He raked his hand through his hair. "I just... maybe I should go under."

"What?" Joanna said. "You can't."

"Why not? One, it would give us one more set of scans and one more account for comparison.

I'd have to be at least as good an observer as Mr. Sage," he said, ticking reasons off on his fingers.

"Two, I'm not a spy or a crank. And three, I could go under right now, today, instead of waiting for authorization."

"Why wouldn't you have to be authorized?"

"Because it's my project, so it would qualify as self-experimentation. Like Louis Pasteur. Or Dr.

Werner Forssmann-"

"Or Dr. Jekyll," Joanna said. "Talk about something that would jeopardize the credibility of the project. Dr. Foxx experimented on himself, didn't he?"

"I am not going to suddenly announce I've found the soul," Richard said, "and there's a long, legitimate tradition of self-experimentation-Walter Reed, Jean Borel, the transplant researcher, J. S.

Haldane. All of them experimented on themselves for precisely the same reason, because they couldn't find willing, qualified subjects."

"But who would supervise the console? You'd have to train someone to monitor the dosage and the scans. Tish can't do it."

"You could-" he started.

"I won't do it," she said. "What if something went wrong? It's a terrible idea.""It's better than sitting around for the next six weeks trying to pry two words out of Mr. Sage and waiting for our funding to be cut," he said. "Or do you have a better idea?"

"No," she said unhappily. "Yes. You could send me under."

"You?" he said, astounded.

"Yes. If one of us is going to go under, I'm the logical choice. One, I don't need authorization either, since I'm part of the project. Two, I'm not going to see a bright light and a.s.sume it's Jesus.

Three, Mr. Mandrake can't convert me," she said, ticking off reasons just like he had. "Four, I'm not indispensable during sessions like you are. All I do is hold my tape recorder. I can just as easily turn it on before I go under. Or Tish could turn it on. Or you."

"But what about afterward? The interview-"

"Five," she tapped her thumb, "I don't need to be interviewed. I already know what you want to know. And I'm sure I can do better than 'It was dark,' or 'I felt peaceful.' I could describe what I saw, the sensations I was feeling."

"You could be more specific," he said thoughtfully. It was a tempting idea. Instead of prying answers out of untrained observers, Joanna would know what to look for, how to describe it. She would be able to tell him whether what she saw was a superimposed vision or a hallucination and what subjects meant when they insisted it wasn't a dream.

More than that, she'd recognize the sensations for what they were. She'd know that certain effects were due to temporal-lobe stimulation or endorphins, and she could provide valuable information about the processes causing the sensations. She would know- And that was just the problem. "It won't work," he said. "You said yourself a subject shouldn't have preconceptions about what he was going to experience. You've interviewed over a hundred people. You've read all the books. How do you know your experience wouldn't be totally shaped by them?"

"It's a possibility," she said. "On the other hand, I'd have the advantage of being on guard. If I found myself in a dark enclosed s.p.a.ce I wouldn't automatically a.s.sume it was a tunnel, and if I saw a figure radiating light, I definitely wouldn't a.s.sume it was an angel. I'd look at it-really look at it-and then tell you what I saw, without waiting for you to ask."

Richard held his hands up in surrender. "You've convinced me. If one of us were going under, you'd be the best one," he said, "but neither of us is going under. We still have four volunteers left, and what we should be doing is concentrating on how to make them more effective."

"Or present," Joanna said.

"Exactly. I want you to call Mrs. Haighton and get her in here for a session."

"I haven't even interviewed her yet," Joanna said doubtfully.

"Do it over the phone if you have to. Tell her how much we need her. In the meantime, I'll workon Mrs. Troudtheim."

"What about Mr. Sage?"

"We'll get a crowbar," he said and grinned at her.

Joanna left to call Mrs. Haighton, and he went back to comparing Mrs. Troudtheim's data with the scans of the other subjects just prior to the NDE-state, looking for differences, but they were identical. Joanna had said some patients didn't have NDEs. He wondered which ones.

He went down to her office to ask her. She was just coming out, wearing her coat. "Where are you going?" he asked her.

"To the Wils.h.i.+re Country Club," she said in an affected, aristocratic voice. "I couldn't get Mrs.

Haighton on the phone, but her housekeeper told me she was setting up for the Junior Guild Spring Fling, whatever that is, so I'm going to see if I can catch her there."

"Spring Fling?" Richard said. "It's the middle of winter."

"I know," Joanna said, pulling on her gloves. "Vielle called. She says it's snowing outside. I'll be back in time for Mrs. Troudtheim's session." She started walking toward the elevator.

"Wait a minute," Richard said. "I need to ask you a question about patients who have NDEs versus patients who don't. Is there a pattern to it?"

"Not a reliable one," she said, pressing the "down" b.u.t.ton. "NDEs mostly occur in certain types of death-heart attacks, drownings, car accidents, childbirth complications-but that may be just because patients with those sorts of traumas are more likely to be revived than patients with, say, a stroke or traumatic internal injuries." The elevator opened.