“But—”
Vielle cut her off. “And even if there aren’t any side effects, you’re taking a drug that mimics a near-death experience, right?”
“Yes—”
“So what if it does such a good job of convincing the brain that it’s dying that the body takes the hint?”
“It doesn’t work like that,” Joanna said.
“How do you know? I thought you told me one of the theories was that the near-death experience served as a shut-down mechanism for the body.”
“There’s been no indication of that in our experiments,” Joanna said. “In fact, the opposite may be true, that the NDE’s a survival mechanism. That’s what we’re trying to find out. Why are you so upset about this?”
“Because interviewing patients and discussing death at Dish Night is one thing. Doing it’s a whole different matter. Trust me, I see death every day, and the best survival mechanism is staying as far away from it as possible.”
“I won’t be ‘doing it.’ I’m not going to be having a real near-death experience. I’m going to be having a simulation of one.”
“Which produces a brain scan identical to the real thing,” Vielle said. “What if something goes wrong? What if the light at the end of the tunnel turns out to be an oncoming train?”
Joanna laughed. “I’m more worried that I’ll see an Angel of Light who’ll tell me Mr. Mandrake was right, and the Other Side is actually real. Don’t worry,” she said seriously. “I’ll be fine. And I’m finally going to get to see what I’ve only been hearing about secondhand.” She hugged Vielle. “I have to get back. We’re doing a session at eleven.”
“With you?” Vielle demanded.
“No, with Mrs. Troudtheim.” She didn’t tell Vielle she was scheduled for the afternoon. It would just upset her. “The reason I came down here was to check with you about Dish Night and see what movies you wanted me to rent.”
“Coma,” she said. “This girl gets killed in the first scene because she’s convinced nothing can go wrong on the operating table.”
Joanna ignored that. “Will Thursday work, or are you going out with Harvey the Scintillating Conversationalist?”
“Are you kidding? He was in here this morning, explaining the intricacies of embalming. Thursday’s fine—just a minute,” she said, and then to the aide who’d come over, looking upset, “What is it, Nina?”
“The guy in Trauma Room Two’s acting really funny,” Nina said. “I think maybe he’s on rogue.”
“I’ll be there in a minute,” Vielle said and turned back to Joanna.
“Rogue?” Joanna said. “You mentioned that before—”
“It’s the latest variety of PCP,” Nina said, “and it’s really scary. Psychotic hallucinations plus violent episodes.”
“I said I’d be right there, Nina,” Vielle said coolly.
“Okay. It started in L.A.,” Nina went on chattily. “Attacks on ER personnel out there have increased twenty-five percent, and now it’s here. Last week a nurse over at Swedish—”
“Nina!” Vielle said dangerously. “I said I’d be there in a minute.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Nina said, cowed, and went off toward the front.
Joanna waited till she was out of earshot, and then said, “Attacks on ER personnel up twenty-five percent, and you’re lecturing me on doing something dangerous?”
“All right,” Vielle said, putting her hands up. “Truce. But I still think you’re crazy.”
“It’s mutual,” Joanna said, and at Vielle’s skeptical expression, “I’ll be fine. There’s nothing to worry about.”
But, lying on the examining table that afternoon, looking up at the masked overhead light and waiting for Tish to start the IV, Joanna felt a dull ache of anxiety. It’s the nervousness patients always feel, she thought. It comes from having a hospital gown on and your glasses off. And from lying flat on your back, waiting for a nurse to do things to you.
And not just any nurse. Tish, who had said, when Joanna emerged from the dressing room, “How did you manage to talk Dr. Wright into sending you under?”
Joanna had wondered, considering Vielle’s out-of-left-field reaction, if Tish would suddenly voice all kinds of objections, too, and she did, but not the kind Joanna expected.
“How come you get to do this, and I don’t?” she had asked, as if Joanna had talked Richard into taking her to Happy Hour. Joanna explained as best she could from her supine and nearsighted position. “Oh, right, I forgot, you’re a doctor, and I’m only a lowly nurse,” Tish said and began slapping electrodes on Joanna’s chest.
She would have thought Tish would like the prospect of having Joanna absent and Richard all to herself for the duration of the session. I should be nervous, she thought. Tish is liable to start flirting with Richard and forget all about me. Or she’ll decide this is a good time to get rid of the competition once and for all, and pull the plug.
But there was no plug to be pulled. Even if the two of them went off to Conrad’s and left her lying there, she would simply wake up when the dithetamine wore off. Or kick out of her NDE like Mrs. Troudtheim.
Which was something else to worry about. What if she, like Mrs. Troudtheim, proved unable to achieve an NDE-state? Mrs. Troudtheim had kicked out again this last session, even faster than before, in spite of the fact that Richard had adjusted the dosage.
“I don’t know what else to try,” Richard had said, looking at her scans after the session. “Maybe you’re right, and she’s one of those forty percent who don’t have NDEs.”
What if I’m one of them, too? Joanna worried. What would they do then? “Relax,” Tish snapped, raising her knee to put the pad under it. “You’re stiff as a board.” She shoved a pad under Joanna’s left arm and came around the table to do the other side.
Joanna consciously tried to relax, breathing slowly in and then releasing the breath, willing her arms, her legs, to lie limply. Relax. Let go. She stared at the blacked-out light fixture. Without warning, Tish wrapped a rubber tube around her upper arm and twisted a knot in it. She jerked her head around to look at what Tish was doing. “Relax!” Tish ordered, and began poking around the inside of her elbow, looking for a vein.
If nothing else, I’ll know a lot more about how to treat our subjects, Joanna thought. They need to be told everything that’s going to happen. They need to be told, “I’m going to start the IV now. Small poke,” Joanna thought.
Tish didn’t say anything. She swabbed Joanna’s arm, jabbed in the needle, attached the IV line, all without a word. She disappeared out of Joanna’s field of vision, and Joanna felt the sleep mask being placed over her eyes and something icy on her forehead. “What are you doing?” she asked involuntarily.
“Attaching the electrodes to your scalp,” Tish said, irritated. “They say doctors make the worst patients, and they’re right. Relax!”
Joanna resolved to give Mr. Sage and Mrs. Troudtheim a running account of every procedure the next time they went under. And they shouldn’t be left lying on the table for long periods of time with no idea what’s going on, she thought, straining to hear voices or footsteps or something. She wondered if Tish and Richard had gone off to Happy Hour. No, she would have heard the door shut. Could Tish have put the headphones on her without her realizing it?
“All ready?” Richard’s voice said abruptly in her left ear, and she groped blindly for his arm. “You’re sure you want to do this?” Richard said worriedly, and the anxiety in his voice made hers vanish completely.
“I’m positive,” she said, and smiled in what she hoped was his direction. “I’m determined to solve the mystery of the ringing or the buzzing once and for all.”
“All right,” he said. “You may not see much. It sometimes takes a couple of tries to get the dosage right.”
“I know.”
“You’re sure about this?”
“I’m sure,” she said, and was. “Let’s get this show on the road.” She let go of his arm.
Tish didn’t get the headphones on properly, she thought. “Richard,” she started to say, and realized she wasn’t in the lab. She was in a narrow space. She could feel walls on either side of her. A coffin, she thought, but it was too wide for that, and she was standing up. She looked down at her body, but she couldn’t see anything, the space was completely dark. She raised her hand in front of her face, but she couldn’t see it either, or feel the movement of her arm.
I can’t see because of the sleep mask, she thought, and tried to take it off, but she wasn’t wearing it. She was wearing her glasses. She felt her forehead. There were no electrodes on her scalp, no headphones. She felt her arm. No IV.
I’m in the NDE, she thought, in the tunnel, but that wasn’t right either. It wasn’t a tunnel. It was a passage. Can you be more specific? she asked silently, and looked around her at the darkness.
It’s narrow, she thought, with no idea how she knew that. Or that there were walls on either side, that there weren’t walls in front of or behind her, and that there was a low ceiling. She stared up at the unseeable ceiling, as if willing her eyes to adjust, but the darkness remained absolute. And how do you know it’s not the roof of a tunnel?
She looked down at the floor, which she could not see either, and tapped her foot tentatively against it. The floor—if it was a floor—felt hard and smooth, like tile or wood, but her foot made no sound.
Maybe I’m barefoot, she thought. Paul McCartney was barefoot on that Beatles album cover, that’s how you knew he was dead. But Joanna couldn’t feel the floor against her skin, the way she would if she were barefoot. Maybe I don’t have feet. Or maybe I can’t hear. Her patients had talked about the Angel of Light talking to them, “but in thoughts, not words.” Perhaps the NDE was only visual.
But she remembered hearing a sound as she came through. She turned her head, trying to remember it. It had been a loud sound. She had heard it distinctly right after she came through. Or had it been as she was coming through? No, she had been in the lab, and then, abruptly, she was here.
As she thought it, she had the sudden feeling that she knew where “here” was, that it was somewhere familiar. No, that was the wrong word. Somewhere she recognized, even though the passage was completely dark.
It’s a place, she thought, a real place. I know where this is, and light poured into the passage ahead of her. She turned to look at it. It filled the corridor, blindingly bright, and she thought, now I’ll see where I am, but the light was too dazzling. It was like trying to look directly into headlights. You couldn’t see anything.
Headlights. “What if the light at the end of the tunnel turns out to be an oncoming train?” Vielle had said. Joanna looked instinctively down at her feet for railroad tracks, but the light came from all directions, the glare as intense from below as from ahead of her, so bright she had to close her eyes against the pain of the brightness.
No wonder her subjects had squinted. It was like someone turning on the light in the middle of the night, or shining a flashlight in your face. But neither one, because the light was golden.
Her patients said that, too—“it was golden” —and when she had said, “It wasn’t white?” they had said, irritated, “No, it was white and golden.” Now she knew what they meant. The light was white, but not the greenish-white of a fluorescent light, the searing blue-white of an arc light. It had a golden cast, like candlelight, only much, much brighter.
She put her hand up to shade her eyes. The light, though it was all around, came from the end of the passage. Where somebody opened a door, she thought. The light’s coming from outside, from beyond the door.
She began to walk toward the end of the passage, squinting against the light, and as she walked, it seemed to dim a little. No, that wasn’t right, the brightness stayed the same, but now she could almost make out a figure outlined in the light. A figure in white.
Mr. Mandrake’s Angel of Light, she thought, walking toward it, but the figure did not grow clearer. She wasn’t sure there was really a figure at all, or whether it was just a trick of the light.
She squinted, trying to see, and was back in the lab. “I did it,” she said, but no sound came out, and she thought, I must be in the non-REM state, and fell asleep.
She woke to Richard calling her from a long distance away. That’s what Greg Menotti meant by “Too far away,” she thought. I must still be near where the NDE was.
“Joanna?” Richard said, much closer, and she opened her eyes. Richard was bending over her, and she thought, Vielle’s right, he really is cute, and fell asleep again.
“She’s awake,” Tish said. “Should I stop recording?” She was holding the recorder, and Joanna thought, Oh, God, I hope I didn’t say he was cute out loud.
“Did I say anything?” she asked.
Richard leaned over her, grinning. “You won’t believe what you said.”
Oh, no, Joanna thought. “What?”
“You said, ‘It was dark,’ ” Tish volunteered.
“Like every other NDEer,” Richard said.
“It was dark,” Joanna said, trying to sit up. “It was pitch-black, like in a cave, only it wasn’t a cave, or a tunnel. It was a passageway.”
“Don’t sit up,” Richard said, “and don’t try to talk till the effect of the sedative’s worn off.”
Joanna lay back down. “No, I want to describe it before I forget. Is the recorder going?” she asked Tish.
“It’s on,” Tish said, handing it to Richard. He put it close to her mouth.
“I was in the lab, and then I was in a tunnel,” Joanna said.
“Nothing in between?” Richard said. “No sensation of leaving the body or hovering above it?”
“You’re not supposed to lead the subject,” Joanna said reprovingly. “No, I just found myself in the passage.”
“You keep saying ‘passage,’ ” Richard said. “What do you mean? An underground passage?”
“You’re leading again,” Joanna said. “No, not an underground passage. And not one of the passageways the Greek soldier Er took to the realms of the afterlife. It was some kind of corridor or hallway, and there was a door at the end of it.” She described the passage and the light and the dimly seen figure.
Tish took Joanna’s pulse and entered it on the chart. “It felt like an actual experience in an actual place,” Joanna said. “It wasn’t a dream or a superimposed vision. There was no sense of what I was seeing being imposed on where I really was like Saint Paul on the road to Damascus or Bernadette in the cave at Lourdes, where even though you’re seeing a blinding light or the Virgin Mary, you’re still aware of where you are. I had no awareness of being in the lab, of lying on the table.” Tish wrapped the blood pressure cuff around her arm. “It felt like I was really there, that it was a real place.”
“Do you know what kind of place it was?” Richard asked.
“No, but I had the feeling that I knew where I was.”
“You recognized it?”
“Yes. No,” she said. “I had the feeling that I recognized it, but I can’t—” She shook her head, frustrated. No wonder her subjects ended up shrugging lamely.
Tish checked her pulse again and then began peeling the electrodes off her scalp.
“I recognized the place,” Joanna said, “but—”
“But at the same time you knew you’d never been there?” Richard said. “You had a sensation of déjà vu, of experiencing something new and feeling you’ve experienced it before?”
“No,” she said, trying to remember the fleeting feeling. It had felt familiar, no, not familiar, yet she had had the feeling that she recognized it. “Maybe. It might have been déjà vu,” she said doubtfully.
“That
’s a strong indicator of temporal-lobe involvement,” he said and couldn’t keep the excitement out of his voice. “The feeling of déjà vu’s been definitively located within the temporal lobe.”
Tish finished removing the IV and put away the equipment. “Do you need me for anything?” she asked.
“I don’t think so,” Richard said absently. “Temporal-lobe involvement . . . you didn’t have an out-of-body experience?”
“Leading,” Joanna said. “No. I was in the lab and then in the tunnel, with nothing in between.”
“Did you feel—?” He broke off and started again. “What feelings did you experience?”
“The light didn’t make me feel warm and safe, or loved. I felt . . . calm. I guess you could describe it as peaceful, but it was really more just . . . calm. I wasn’t frightened.”
“Interesting,” Richard said. “Did you feel detached? Did it feel like you were separated from what was happening, that what was happening was unreal, dreamlike?”
“It wasn’t a dream,” Joanna said firmly.
“If you don’t need me for anything, I’m going to go,” Tish said, and they both looked at her, surprised she was still there. “Do you need me tomorrow?”
“I don’t know yet,” Richard said. “I think so. I’ll call you, Tish, thanks,” and turned expectantly back to Joanna. “How was it different from a dream?”
“It . . . dreams feel real while you’re having them, and then when you wake up, you realize they weren’t. But the NDE still feels real even now. That’s something nearly all of my subjects have said, that what they experienced was real. I didn’t know what that meant, but they’re right. It doesn’t feel like the memory of a dream. It feels like the memory of something that actually happened.”
“Can you be more specific?”
Joanna grinned. “It—I could move in a normal way. There was no floating or moving swiftly through the tunnel like some of my subjects have described, and there were no dreamlike discontinuities or incongruities. It felt like it was really happening.”
“And you said you sensed the presence of someone in the light.”
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