Passage

by Connie Willis

  “An Angel of Light,” Joanna said with a sinking feeling.

  “Yes, and all around the angel were people I’d known who had died. My mother and my poor dear father and my uncle Alvin. He was in the navy in World War II. He was killed at Guadalcanal, and the Angel of Light said—”

  “Before you went into the tunnel,” Joanna interrupted, “did you have an out-of-body experience?”

  “No,” she said, just as promptly. “Mr. Mandrake said people sometimes do, but all I had was the tunnel and the light.”

  Mr. Mandrake. Of course. She should have known. “He interviewed me last night,” Mrs. Davenport said. “Do you know him?”

  Oh, yes, Joanna thought.

  “He’s a famous author,” Mrs. Davenport said. “He wrote The Light at the End of the Tunnel. It was a best-seller, you know.”

  “Yes, I know,” Joanna said.

  “He’s working on a new one,” Mrs. Davenport said. “Messages from the Other Side. You know, you’d never know he was famous. He’s so nice. He has a wonderful way of asking questions.”

  He certainly does, Joanna thought. She’d heard him: “When you went through the tunnel, you heard a buzzing sound, didn’t you? Would you describe the light you saw at the end of the tunnel as golden? Even though it was brighter than anything you’d ever seen, it didn’t hurt your eyes, did it? When did you meet the Angel of Light?” Leading wasn’t even the word.

  And smiling, nodding encouragingly at the answers he wanted. Pursing his lips, asking, “Are you sure it wasn’t more of a buzzing than a ringing?” Frowning, asking concernedly, “And you don’t remember hovering above the operating table? You’re sure?”

  They remembered it all for him, leaving their body and entering the tunnel and meeting Jesus, remembered the Light and the Life Review and the Meetings with Deceased Loved Ones. Conveniently forgetting the sights and sounds that didn’t fit and conjuring up ones that did. And completely obliterating whatever had actually occurred.

  It was bad enough having Moody’s books out there and Embraced by the Light and all the other near-death-experience books and TV specials and magazine articles telling people what they should expect to see without having someone right here in Mercy General putting ideas in her subjects’ heads.

  “Mr. Mandrake told me except for the out-of-body thing,” Mrs. Davenport said proudly, “my near-death experience was one of the best he’d ever taken.”

  Taken is right, Joanna thought. There was no point in going on with this. “Thank you, Mrs. Davenport,” she said. “I think I have enough.”

  “But I haven’t told you about the heavenly choir yet, or the Life Review,” Mrs. Davenport, suddenly anything but reluctant, said. “The Angel of Light made me look in this crystal, and it showed me all the things I’d ever done, both good and bad, my whole life.”

  Which she will now proceed to tell me, Joanna thought. She sneaked her hand into her pocket and switched her pager back on. Beep, she willed it. Now.

  “ . . . and then the crystal showed me the time I got locked out of my car, and I looked all through my purse and my coat pockets for the key . . . ”

  Now that Joanna wanted the beeper to go off, it remained stubbornly silent. She needed one with a button you could press to make it beep in emergencies. She wondered if RadioShack had one.

  “ . . . and then it showed my going into the hospital and my heart stopping,” Mrs. Davenport said, “and then the light started to blink on and off, and the Angel handed me a telegram, just like the one we got when Alvin was killed, and I said, ‘Does this mean I’m dead?’ and the Angel said, ‘No, it’s a message telling you you must return to your earthly life.’ Are you getting all this down?”

  “Yes,” Joanna said, writing, “Cheeseburger, fries, large Coke.”

  “ ‘It is not your time yet,’ the Angel of Light said, and the next thing I knew I was back in the operating room.”

  “If I don’t get out of here soon,” Joanna wrote, “the cafeteria will be closed, so please, somebody, page me.”

  Her beeper finally, blessedly, went off during Mrs. Davenport’s description of the light as “like shining prisms of diamonds and sapphires and rubies,” a verbatim quote from The Light at the End of the Tunnel. “I’m sorry, I’ve got to go,” Joanna said, pulling the pager out of her pocket. “It’s an emergency.” She snatched up her recorder and switched it off.

  “Where can I get in touch with you if I remember anything else about my NDE?”

  “You can have me paged,” Joanna said, and fled. She didn’t even check to see who was paging her till she was safely out of the room. It was a number she didn’t recognize, from inside the hospital. She went down to the nurses’ station to call it.

  “Do you know whose number this is?” she asked Eileen, the charge nurse.

  “Not offhand,” Eileen said. “Is it Mr. Mandrake’s?”

  “No, I’ve got Mr. Mandrake’s number,” Joanna said grimly. “He managed to get to Mrs. Davenport before I did. That’s the third interview this week he’s ruined.”

  “You’re kidding,” Eileen said sympathetically. She was still looking at the number on the pager. “It might be Dr. Wright’s. He was here looking for you earlier.”

  “Dr. Wright?” Joanna said, frowning. The name didn’t sound familiar. From force of habit, she said, “Can you describe him?”

  “Tall, young, blond—”

  “Cute,” Tish, who’d just come up to the desk with a chart, said.

  The description didn’t fit anybody Joanna knew. “Did he say what he wanted?”

  Eileen shook her head. “He asked me if you were the person doing NDE research.”

  “Wonderful,” Joanna said. “He probably wants to tell me how he went through a tunnel and saw a light, all his dead relatives, and Maurice Mandrake.”

  “Do you think so?” Eileen said doubtfully. “I mean, he’s a doctor.”

  “If only that were a guarantee against being a nutcase,” Joanna said. “You know Dr. Abrams from over at Mt. Sinai? Last week he suckered me into lunch by promising to talk to the hospital board about letting me do interviews over there, and then proceeded to tell me about his NDE, in which he saw a tunnel, a light, and Moses, who told him to come back and read the Torah out loud to people. Which he did. All the way through lunch.”

  “You’re kidding,” Eileen said.

  “But this Dr. Wright was cute,” Tish put in.

  “Unfortunately, that’s not a guarantee either,” Joanna said. “I met a very cute intern last week who told me he’d seen Elvis in his NDE.” She glanced at her watch. The cafeteria would still be open, just barely. “I’m going to lunch,” she said. “If Dr. Wright shows up again, tell him it’s Mr. Mandrake he wants.”

  She started down to the cafeteria in the main building, taking the service stairs instead of the elevator to avoid running into either one of them. She supposed Dr. Wright was the one who had paged her earlier, when she was talking to Mrs. Davenport. On the other hand, it might have been Vielle, paging her to tell her about a patient who’d coded and might have had an NDE. She’d better check. She went down to the ER.

  It was jammed, as usual, wheelchairs everywhere, a boy with a hand wrapped in a red-soaked dish towel sitting on an examining table, two women talking rapidly and angrily in Spanish to the admitting nurse, someone in one of the trauma rooms screaming obscenities in English at the top of her lungs. Joanna worked her way through the tangle of IV poles and crash carts, looking for Vielle’s blue scrubs and her black, worried-looking face. She always looked worried in the ER, whether she was responding to a code or removing a splinter, and Joanna often wondered what effect it had on her patients.

  There she was, over by the station desk, reading a chart and looking worried. Joanna maneuvered past a wheelchair and a stack of blankets to get to her. “Did you try to page me?” she asked.

  Vielle shook her blue-capped head. “It’s like a tomb down here. Literally. A gunshot, two ODs, one AIDS-rel
ated pneumonia. All DOA, except one of the overdoses.”

  She put down the chart and motioned Joanna into one of the trauma rooms. The examining table had been moved out and a bank of electrical equipment moved in, amid a tangle of dangling wires and cables. “What’s this?” Joanna asked.

  “The communications room,” Vielle said, “if it ever gets finished. So we can be in constant contact with the ambulances and the chopper and give medical instructions to the paramedics on their way here. That way we’ll know if our patients are DOA before they get here. Or armed.” She pulled off her surgical cap and shook out her tangle of narrow black braids. “The overdose who wasn’t DOA tried to shoot one of the orderlies getting him on the examining table. He was on this new drug, rogue, that’s making the rounds. Luckily he’d taken too much, and died before he could pull the trigger.”

  “You’ve got to put in a request to transfer to Peds,” Joanna said.

  Vielle shuddered. “Kids are even worse than druggers. Besides, if I transferred, who’d notify you of NDEs before Mandrake got hold of them?”

  Joanna smiled. “You are my only hope. By the way, do you happen to know a Dr. Wright?”

  “I’ve been looking for him for years,” Vielle said.

  “Well, I don’t think this is the one,” Joanna said. “He wouldn’t be one of the interns or residents in the ER, would he?”

  “I don’t know,” Vielle said. “We get so many through here, I don’t even bother to learn their names. I just call all of them ‘Stop that,’ or, ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ I’ll check.” They went back out into the ER. Vielle grabbed a clipboard and drew her finger down a list. “Nope. Are you sure he works here at Mercy General?”

  “No,” Joanna said. “But if he comes looking for me, I’m up on seven-west.”

  “And what about if an NDEer shows up and I need to find you?”

  Joanna grinned. “I’m in the cafeteria.”

  “I’ll page you,” Vielle said. “This afternoon should be busy.”

  “Why?”

  “Heart attack weather,” she said and, at Joanna’s blank look, pointed toward the emergency room entrance. “It’s been snowing since nine this morning.”

  Joanna looked wonderingly in the direction Vielle was pointing, though she couldn’t see the outside windows from here. “I’ve been in curtained patient rooms all morning,” she said. And in windowless offices and hallways and elevators.

  “Slipping on the ice, shoveling snow, car accidents,” Vielle said. “We should have lots of business. Do you have your pager turned on?”

  “Yes, Mother,” Joanna said. “I’m not one of your interns.” She waved good-bye to Vielle, and went up to first.

  The cafeteria was, amazingly, still open. It had the shortest hours of any hospital cafeteria Joanna had ever seen, and she was always coming down for lunch to find its glass double doors locked and its red plastic chairs stacked on top of the Formica tables. But today it was open, even though a hair-netted worker was dismantling the salad bar and another one was putting away a stack of plates. Joanna snatched up a tray before they could take those away and started over to the hot-food line. And stopped short. Maurice Mandrake was over by the drinks machine, getting a cup of coffee. Nope, thought Joanna, not right now. I’m liable to kill him.

  She turned on her heel and walked swiftly down the hall. She dived in the elevator, pushed “Close Door,” and then hesitated with her finger above the floor buttons. She couldn’t leave the hospital, she’d promised Vielle she’d be within reach. The vending-machine snack bar was over in the north wing, but she wasn’t sure she had any money. She rummaged through the pockets of her cardigan sweater, but all she turned up besides her minirecorder was a pen, a dime, a release form, an assortment of used Kleenex, and a postcard of a tropical ocean at sunset with palm trees silhouetted blackly against the red sky and coral-pink water. Where had she gotten that? She turned it over. “Having wonderful time. Wish you were here,” someone had written over an illegibly scrawled signature, and next to it, in Vielle’s handwriting, Pretty Woman, Remember the Titans, What Lies Beneath. The list of movies Vielle had wanted her to get for their last Dish Night.

  Unfortunately, she didn’t also have the popcorn from their last Dish Night, and the cheapest thing in the vending machine was seventy-five cents. Her purse was up in her office, but Dr. Wright might be camped outside, waiting for her.

  Where else would have food? They had Ensure in Oncology, but she wasn’t that hungry. Paula up on five-east, she thought. She always had a stash of M&M’s, and besides, she should go see Carl Aspinall. She pressed the button for five.

  She wondered how Coma Carl, which was what the nurses called him, was doing. He’d been in a semicomatose state ever since he’d been admitted two months ago with spinal meningitis. He was completely unresponsive part of the time, and part of the time his arms and legs twitched, and he murmured words. And sometimes he spoke perfectly clearly.

  “But he’s not having a near-death experience,” Guadalupe, one of his nurses, had said when Joanna had gotten permission from his wife to have the nurses write down everything he said. “I mean, he’s never coded.”

  “The circumstances are similar,” Joanna had said. And he was one subject Maurice Mandrake couldn’t get to.

  Nothing could get to him, even though his wife and the nurses pretended he could hear them. The nurses were careful not to use the nickname Coma Carl or discuss his condition when they were in his room, and they encouraged Joanna to talk to him. “There have been studies that show coma patients can hear what’s said in their presence,” Paula had told her, offering her some M&M’s.

  But I don’t believe it, Joanna thought, waiting for the elevator door to open on five. He doesn’t hear anything. He’s somewhere else altogether, beyond our reach.

  The elevator door opened, and she went down the corridor to the nurses’ station. Paula wasn’t there. A strange nurse with blond hair and no hips was at the computer. “Where’s Paula?” Joanna asked.

  “Out sick,” the pencil-thin nurse said warily. “Can I help you, Dr . . . .” She looked at the ID hanging around Joanna’s neck. “Lander?”

  It was no use asking her for food. She looked like she’d never eaten an M&M in her life, and from the way she was staring at Joanna’s body, like she didn’t approve of Joanna’s having done so either. “No. Thanks,” Joanna said coolly, and realized she was still carrying the tray from the cafeteria. She must have had it the whole time in the elevator and never been aware of it.

  “This needs to go back down to the kitchen,” she said briskly, and handed it to the nurse. “I’m here to see Com—Mr. Aspinall,” she said and started down the hall to Carl’s room.

  The door was open, and Guadalupe was on the far side of the bed, hanging up an IV bag. The chair Carl’s wife usually occupied was empty. “How’s he doing today?” Joanna whispered, approaching the bed.

  “Much better,” Guadalupe said cheerfully, and then in a whisper, “His fever’s back up.” She unhooked the empty IV bag and carried it over to the window. “It’s dark in here,” she said. “Would you like some light, Carl?” She pulled the curtains open.

  Vielle had been right. It was snowing. Big flakes out of a leaden gray sky. “It’s snowing, did you know that, Carl?” Guadalupe said.

  No, Joanna thought, looking down at the man on the bed. His slack face under the oxygen tubes was pale and expressionless in the gray light from the window, his eyes not quite closed, a slit of white showing beneath the heavy lids, his mouth half-open.

  “It looks cold out there,” Guadalupe said, going over to the computer. “Is it building up on the streets yet?”

  It took Joanna a moment to realize Guadalupe was talking to her and not Carl. “I don’t know,” she said, fighting the impulse to whisper so as not to disturb him. “I came to work before it started.”

  Guadalupe poked at icons on the screen, entering Carl’s temperature and the starting of the new
IV bag. “Has he said anything this morning?” Joanna asked.

  “Not a word,” Guadalupe said. “I think he’s boating on the lake again. He was humming earlier.”

  “Humming?” Joanna said. “Can you describe it?”

  “You know, humming,” Guadalupe said. She came over to the bed and pulled the covers up over Carl’s taped and tubed arm, over his chest. “Like a tune, only I couldn’t recognize it. There you are, all tucked in nice and warm,” she said and started for the door with her empty IV bag. “You’re lucky you’re in here and not out in that snow, Carl,” and went out.

  But he’s not in here, Joanna thought. “Where are you, Carl?” she asked. “Are you boating on the lake?”

  Boating on the lake was one of the scenarios the nurses had invented out of his murmurings. He made motions with his arms that might have been rowing, and at those times he was never agitated or cried out, which was why they thought it was something idyllic.

  There were several scenarios: The Bataan Death March, during which he cried over and over, “Water!,” and Running for the Bus, and one each of the nurses had a different name for—Burned at the Stake and Vietcong Ambush and The Torments of Hell—during which he flailed wildly at the tangled covers, yanked out his IV. Once he had blacked Guadalupe’s eye when she tried to restrain him. “Blanked out,” he had screamed over and over, or possibly “placket!” or “black.” And once, in a tone of panicked dread, “Cut the knot.”

  “Maybe he thinks the IV lines are ropes,” Guadalupe, her eye swollen shut, had said helpfully when she gave Joanna a transcript of the episode.

  “Maybe,” Joanna had said, but she didn’t think so. He doesn’t know the IV lines are there, she thought, or the snow or the nurses. He’s a long way from here, seeing something different altogether. Like all the heart attack and car accident and hemorrhage patients she’d interviewed over the last two years, wading through the angels and tunnels and relatives they’d been programmed to see, listening for the offhand comment, the seemingly irrelevant detail that might give a clue as to what they had seen, where they had been.