Passage. Part 27

"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 pa.s.sage 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 pa.s.s from me,' he said in the garden, and on the cross, he cried out, 'Eloi, eloi, lama sabacthani.' That means, 'My G.o.d, my G.o.d, 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 s.h.i.+eld. "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 thefloor 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 Sat.u.r.day morning, where you wake up gradually?"

"I work Sat.u.r.days," 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.

Sames.h.i.+ma 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 s.p.a.ce."

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 s.h.i.+ft 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 s.h.i.+vering," 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 wascoming 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, s.h.i.+vering. 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.

17.

"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 deja vu," she said, antic.i.p.ating 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 gla.s.ses 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."

"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 G.o.d 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-lobeoverstimulation."

"You're wrong. I do know what it is. I just can't..."