Passage

by Connie Willis

  “Do you want the clock taken down, too?”

  “No, although it might be a good idea to move it to where the subject can’t see it. The fewer objects the subject has to confabulate about, the better. Actually, I was wondering about your subject. What time did you say she’d be here?”

  “She was scheduled for eleven, and she called to say she had an exam and would be a few minutes late. She’s a premed student,” he said, glancing at the clock. “But I expected her by now.”

  “Your subject pool is premed students?”

  “No, just Ms. Tanaka,” he said. “The other volunteers are all—”

  “Volunteers?” she said. “You’re using volunteers? How did you describe the project in your call for volunteers?”

  “Neurological research. I’ve got a copy right here,” he said, going over to his desk.

  “Did it mention NDEs?”

  “No,” he said, rummaging through the stacks of papers. “I told them what the project entailed when they came in for screening.”

  “What kind of screening?”

  “A physical and a psych profile.” He found the call for volunteers and handed it to her. “And I asked them what they knew about near-death experiences and if they’d ever had one. None of them had.”

  “And you’ve sent some of them under already?”

  “Yes. Mrs. Bendix has been under once, and Mr. Wojakowski and Ms. Tanaka, that’s the one who’s coming in today, have been under twice.”

  “Did you take all the applications at once and then bring them in for screenings?”

  He shook his head. “I started the screenings right away so I wouldn’t have to wait to begin the sessions. Why?”

  There was a rapid knock on the door, and Amelia Tanaka swept in. “I am so sorry I’m late,” she said, dropping her backpack on the floor and yanking off her wool gloves. She jammed them in her pockets. “You got my message, didn’t you, that I was going to be?”

  Her long, straight black hair was flecked with snow. She shook it out. “The anatomy exam was horrible,” she said, securing it with a clip. “I didn’t make it through half the questions.” She unzipped her coat. “Half the things he’d never even mentioned in class. ‘Where is the vestigial fold of Marshall?’ I don’t know. I said in the pericardium, but it could just as well be in the liver, for all I know.” She stripped off her coat, dumped it on top of the backpack, and came over to them. “And then it snowed the whole way over here—”

  She seemed suddenly to become aware of Joanna. “Oh, hi,” she said, and looked questioningly at Richard.

  “I want you to meet Dr. Lander, Ms. Tanaka,” he said.

  “Amelia,” she corrected. “But it’s going to be mud if I did as bad as I think I did on that exam.”

  “Hi, Amelia,” Joanna said.

  “Dr. Lander’s going to be working with me on the project,” Richard said. “She’ll be conducting the interviews.”

  “You’re not going to ask questions like ‘Where is the vestigial fold of Marshall?’, are you?” Amelia asked.

  “No.” Joanna grinned. “I’m just going to ask you what you’ve seen and heard, and today I’d like to ask you a few questions about yourself, so I can get to know you.”

  “Sure,” Amelia said. “Did you want to do that now or after I get ready for the session?”

  “Why don’t you get ready first?” Joanna said, and Amelia turned expectantly to Richard. He opened the gunmetal supply cupboard and handed her a pile of folded clothing. She disappeared into a small room at the back.

  Richard waited till she’d shut the door and then asked Joanna, “What were you going to say before Ms. Tanaka came in? About the screenings?”

  “Can I see your list of volunteers?” she asked.

  “Sure,” he said and rummaged through the papers on his desk again. “Here it is. They’ve all been approved, but I haven’t scheduled them all yet.”

  He handed it to Joanna, and she sat down on the chair she’d stood on to put the “shoe” on top of the medicine cupboard and ran her finger down the names. “Well, at least this explains why Mr. Mandrake didn’t try to pump you about your project. He didn’t have to.”

  “What do you mean?” Richard said. He came around behind her to look at the list.

  “I mean, one of your volunteers is a subject of Mr. Mandrake’s, there’s another one I think probably is, and this one,” she said, pointing at Dvorjak, A., “has CAS, compulsive attention syndrome. It’s a form of incomplete personality disorder. They invent NDEs to get attention.”

  “How do you invent an NDE?”

  “Over half of the so-called NDEs in Mandrake’s book, which I see you have a copy of here, aren’t really NDEs at all. Visions during childbirth and surgery, blackouts, even fainting episodes qualify if the person experiences the standard tunnel, light, angels. Amy Dvorjak specializes in blackouts, which, conveniently, don’t have any external symptoms so you can’t prove they didn’t happen. She’s had twenty-three.”

  “Twenty-three!”

  Joanna nodded. “Even Mr. Mandrake doesn’t believe her anymore, and he believes everything anybody tells him.”

  He grabbed the list away from her and crossed out “Dvorjak, A.” “Which ones are Mandrake’s subjects?”

  She looked ruefully at him. “You’re not going to want to hear this. One of them’s May Bendix.”

  “Mrs. Bendix!” he said. “Are you sure?”

  Joanna nodded. “She’s one of Mandrake’s favorite subjects. She’s even in his book.”

  “She said she didn’t even know what a near-death experience was,” he said, outraged. “I can’t believe this!”

  “I think before we send anybody else under, I’d better check the rest of the names on this list,” Joanna said.

  He glanced at the door of the dressing room. “I’ll tell Amelia the scan’s down and we can’t do a session today.”

  Joanna nodded. “I’d also like to interview her, and the rest of the subjects, after I’ve checked to see whether they have any connections to Mr. Mandrake or the near-death community.”

  “Right,” he said. “Wait, you said there was another one you thought might be connected to Mandrake. Which one?”

  “This one,” she said, pointing at the name on the list. “Thomas Suarez. He called me last week and told me he’d had an NDE. I suggested he call Mr. Mandrake.”

  “I thought you said you tried to get to subjects before Mandrake could corrupt them.”

  “I do. Usually,” she said. “But Mr. Suarez is part of that fourteen percent who also believe they’ve been abducted by a UFO.”

  “Hey, where the hell are the parachutes?”

  —QUESTION ASKED BY GLENN MILLER AS HE BOARDED THE PLANE TO PARIS, TO WHICH COLONEL BAESELL REPLIED, “WHAT’S THE MATTER, MILLER, DO YOU WANT TO LIVE FOREVER?”

  WHEN JOANNA CHECKED the rest of the list against the membership of the Society for Near-Death Studies, she turned up two more names. “Which makes five,” she told Richard.

  “All spies of Mandrake’s?” Richard said, outraged.

  “No, not necessarily. Bendix and Dvorjak are both perfectly capable of signing up on their own. True Believers are constantly on the lookout for anything that might validate their beliefs.”

  “But how could they have found out about it?”

  “This is Mercy General,” Joanna said. “Otherwise known as Gossip General. Or someone in the first set of interviews may have notified the others of what your research was about. NDEers have quite a network—organizations, the Internet—and it’s common knowledge that the Institute does NDE research. Mr. Mandrake may not know anything about this.”

  “You don’t seriously believe that, do you?”

  “No.”

  “I still think we should report him to the board.”

  “That won’t do any good,” she said, “not with Mrs. Brightman on the board. And the last thing you need is a confrontation with him. We need to—”

&nb
sp; “—hide down stairways?”

  “If necessary,” she said. “And make sure none of the other volunteers are connected to Mandrake or the near-death community.”

  “Or are raving lunatics,” he said. “I still can’t believe the psych profile didn’t pick them up.”

  “Believing in the afterlife isn’t a mental illness,” Joanna said. “A number of major religions have been doing it for centuries.”

  “What about Mr. Suarez’s UFOs?”

  “Mentally competent people believe all kinds of goofy things,” she said. “That’s why I want to interview them as soon as I’ve finished checking for near-death connections.” She spent the rest of the afternoon doing that and printed out the International Society for the Advancement of Spiritualism and the Paranormal Society membership lists to take home.

  Mr. Mandrake had left three messages on her answering machine saying he wanted to talk to her, so she went a roundabout way down to the parking lot, across the fifth-floor walkway to the west wing, down to third, back across the walkway, and through Oncology to the patient elevator.

  A middle-aged man and woman were standing waiting for the elevator. “You go on,” the man was saying to the woman. “There’s no reason for both of us to stay.”

  The woman nodded, and Joanna noticed her eyes were red-rimmed. “You’ll call me if there’s any change?”

  “I promise,” the man said. “You get some rest. And eat something. You haven’t had anything all day.”

  The woman’s shoulders slumped. “All right.”

  The elevator dinged, and the door opened. The woman pecked the man on the cheek and stepped into the elevator. Joanna followed her. She pressed “G,” and the door started to close. “Wait! Do you have my cell phone number?” the woman called through the closing door.

  The man nodded. “329–6058,” he said, and the door closed.

  Five-eight, Joanna thought. Fifty-eight. She’d thought Greg Menotti might have been trying to tell them a phone number, but when people recited their phone numbers, they said the individual digits. They didn’t with addresses. They said, “I live at twenty-one fifteen Pearl Street.” She wondered what Greg Menotti’s address had been.

  She leaned forward and pressed two, and when the elevator reached second, she got out, went down to the visitors’ lounge, and looked up his address in the phone book: 1903 South Wyandotte, and his phone number was 771–0642. Not even a five or an eight, let alone a fifty-eight. The address he was trying to say could have been his girlfriend’s, of course, or his parents’. But it wasn’t, Joanna thought. He had been trying to tell her something critical. And what critical piece of information had the number fifty-eight in it?

  She shut the phone book and went back down the hall to the elevator. A nurse’s aide passed her, carrying a Styrofoam cup, and stopped to ask a nurse, “What room did you say he was in?”

  “Two fifty-eight.”

  Could Greg Menotti have known someone here in the hospital and been trying to tell them to go get them? That didn’t make any sense. He would have mentioned that before, when he was demanding they contact his girlfriend. What other kinds of rooms had numbers? An office? An apartment?

  Joanna rode down to the parking lot. Fifty-eight. A safety deposit box number? A date? No, he was too young to have been born in 1958. She got in her car. Fifty-eight wasn’t the number of anything famous, like thirteen or 666. She drove out of the parking lot and down Colorado Boulevard. The car ahead of her had a purple neon light around the license plate. “WV-58.” Joanna glanced at the gas station on the right. “Unleaded,” the sign read. “1.58.99.”

  A frisson of superstitious fear passed up Joanna’s spine and raised the hairs on the back of her neck. It’s that movie Vielle and I rented, the one about the plane crash with all the omens in it. Final Destination.

  She grinned. What it really was was a heightened awareness of something that had been present in her surroundings all along. The number fifty-eight had always been there, just like every other number, but her brain had been put on alert to look for it, like a hiker cautioned to watch for snakes. That was what superstition was, an attempt to make sense of random data and random events—stars and bumps on the head and numbers.

  It doesn’t mean anything, she told herself. You’re assigning meaning where there isn’t any. But when she got home, she got on the Net and ran a search engine on the number fifty-eight. It turned up several obituaries—“Elbert Hodgins, aged fifty-eight” —one U.S. highway and fourteen state highways, and three books on Amazon.com: Russian-American Cold War Policy from 1946—1958, Adrift on the Fifty-eighth Parallel, and Better in Bed: 58 Ways to Improve Your Sex Life.

  Which doesn’t exactly add up to The Twilight Zone, Joanna thought, amused, and started through the Paranormal Society membership list. Amelia wasn’t a member, and neither were any of the other volunteers, but when she went through the ISAS list, she found the name of a volunteer, and when she checked the NDE Web site the next morning, she found two more, which left them with eight subjects. Before she’d even interviewed anyone.

  “I am so sorry,” she told Richard. “My goal was to make sure you didn’t get any ringers, not to decimate your project.”

  “I’ll tell you what would have decimated my project, to have one of my subjects show up in Mandrake’s book. Or on the cover of the Star,” he said. “You were right. I shouldn’t report Mandrake to the board. I should punch him out.”

  “We don’t have time,” Joanna said. “We’ve got to screen the subjects we’ve got left and line up additional ones. How long will the approval process take?”

  “Four to six weeks to get clearance from the board and the projects committee. It took five and a half weeks for the paperwork on this group to go through.”

  “Then we’d better put out another call immediately,” Joanna said, “and I’ll get started on these interviews. I’m about ready to talk to Amelia Tanaka. She looks good. I haven’t found anything questionable except maybe the fact that she says she’s twenty-four and she’s still a premed student, but my gut instincts say she’s not a nutcase.”

  “Gut instincts,” Richard said. He grinned at her. “I didn’t think scientists had gut instincts.”

  “Sure they do. They just don’t rely on them. Evidence,” she said, waving the ISAS membership list, “that’s the ticket. Outside confirmation. Which is why I’m calling her references and why I want to interview her. But if it goes okay, I don’t see any reason why you shouldn’t go ahead as planned with her.”

  She went back to her office and called Amelia’s references and then Amelia and set up an interview. It took some doing. Amelia had classes and labs, and she really needed to study for this biochem exam she had coming up. Joanna finally got her to agree to one o’clock the next day.

  She was pleased that rescheduling her had been so difficult. Her very lack of eagerness was evidence that she wasn’t a True Believer. Joanna checked her name against the Theosophical Society’s membership list and then started through the files of the other seven volunteers.

  They looked promising. Ms. Coffey was a data systems manager, Mr. Sage a welder, Mrs. Haighton a community volunteer, Mr. Pearsall an insurance agent. None of their names, nor Ronald Kelso’s or Edward Wojakowski’s, showed up on any of the NDE sites. The only one she was worried about was Mrs. Troudtheim, who didn’t live in Denver.

  “She lives out on the eastern plains,” she told Richard the next day, “near Deer Trail. The fact that she’d drive all that way—how far is it? sixty miles?—to be in a research project is a bit suspicious, but everything else about her checks out, and all the others look fine.” She looked at the clock. It said a quarter to one. “Amelia Tanaka should be here in a few minutes.”

  “Good,” he said. “If you don’t turn up anything negative, I’d like to proceed with a session. I told the nurse to be on standby.”

  There was a knock on the door. “She’s early,” Joanna said, and went over to answer
the door.

  It was a short elderly man with faded red hair receding from a freckled forehead. “Is Doc Wright here?” he asked, leaning past Joanna to see into the lab. He spied Richard. “Hiya, Doc. I thought I’d stop by and check to see when my next session was. I’m one of Doc Wright’s guinea pigs.”

  “Dr. Lander, this is Ed Wojakowski,” Richard said, coming over to the door. “Mr. Wojakowski, Dr. Lander’s going to be working with me on the project.”

  “Call me Ed. Mr. Wojakowski’s my dad.” He winked at her.

  Joanna thought of Greg Menotti having made the same joke. She wondered how old Mr. Wojakowski was. He looked at least seventy, and the project had specified volunteers aged twenty-one to sixty-five.

  “I knew a Joanna once,” Mr. Wojakowski said, “back when I was in the navy, during World War II.”

  World War II and the navy again, Joanna thought. First Mrs. Davenport and now Mr. Wojakowski. Did that mean she’d talked to him? Or had Mr. Mandrake talked to both of them? She hoped not—at this rate they’d be out of subjects in no time.

  “She worked at the USO canteen in Honolulu,” Mr. Wojakowski was saying. “Nice-looking girl, not as pretty as you, though. Me and Stinky Johannson sneaked her on board one night to show her our Wildcat, and—”

  “We haven’t scheduled your next session yet,” Richard said.

  “Oh, okay, Doc,” Mr. Wojakowski said. “Just thought I’d check.”

  “Since you’re here,” Joanna said, “would you mind if I asked you a few questions?” She turned to Richard. “Ms. Tanaka won’t be here for another fifteen minutes.”

  “Sure,” Richard said, but he looked doubtful.

  “Or we could schedule it for later.”

  “No, now’s fine,” Richard said, and she wondered if she’d misread him. “Do you have time to answer a few questions, Mr. Wojakowski?”

  “Ed,” he corrected. “You bet I got time. Now that I’m retired I got all the time in the world.”