Passage

by Connie Willis

  “How did it feel real?”

  “It wasn’t like a dream. I was really there,” but when Joanna pressed her about tactile sensations and sensory involvement, she turned vague again. “The light was all around me. I felt warm and . . . nice.”

  “What about before the light? When you were in the dark place?”

  Amelia smiled. “Peaceful.”

  “Were you aware of the temperature?”

  “No, not at all.”

  You just said you felt warm, Joanna thought, but she didn’t say it. She switched the questioning to the door and the people in white, and then, after several minutes, brought the conversation back to feelings, but Amelia merely repeated that she had felt calm, nice, warm. “The warmth surrounded me, like the light,” she said, “and then Dr. Wright was removing my headphones and asking me how I was feeling.”

  When Joanna told her she was finished asking questions, Amelia said eagerly, “When do I get to go under again?” and later, after she’d gotten dressed, she asked again, “When’s my next session?” She shouldered her backpack. “This is a lot more fun than biochem.”

  “Joanna, you were great,” Richard said as soon as Amelia was gone. “I can’t believe how much you got out of her.”

  “I didn’t find out why she said, ‘Oh, no, oh, no, oh, no.’ ”

  “That may have been part of the waking process and not the NDE,” he said. “Mr. Wojakowski said something the first time he came out of the dithetamine.”

  “What?” Joanna demanded.

  “I don’t remember,” Richard said. “Knowing him, it probably had something to do with the Yorktown.”

  “When he said it, did he sound frightened?”

  “I don’t think so. I don’t remember. The nurse might. Her name is in the session transcripts. It couldn’t have been part of the NDE, you know. Speech isn’t possible in the NDE state. The outer brain, including the speech cortex, is essentially shut down.”

  But it could be Amelia’s memory of the NDE immediately after she was revived, Joanna thought. A memory much different from the NDE she reported.

  Richard said, “What I’m really interested in is, how does her account compare with the subjects you’ve interviewed?”

  “She had three of the ten core elements: the sound, the light, and the feeling of peace.”

  “And the tunnel,” Richard said.

  Joanna shook her head. “Too vague. She couldn’t describe either the darkness or the tunnel-slash-hall, and she didn’t even mention it till I asked her if the light had been there all along. There may simply have been a blank space there between the sound and the light, and she was confabulating something to fill it.”

  “But if you don’t count the tunnel because she couldn’t describe it, what about the sound?” Richard asked. “She couldn’t describe that either.”

  “Nobody is able to describe the sound with any certainty,” Joanna said. “Most of them can’t describe it at all, and the ones who can say it’s a ringing the first time you ask them and a whoosh the next, or a scream or a scraping sound or a thud. Or all three. Mr. Steinhorst described it as someone whispering, and then, the second time I asked him, as a whole supermarket shelf of canned goods crashing down. I don’t think they have any idea what they heard.”

  “Do they have the same inconsistency describing what they’ve seen?”

  “Yes and no. They’re more consistent, but unless they’ve been coached by Mr. Mandrake, they tend to use vague, general terms. The light is ‘bright,’ the place they’re in is ‘beautiful.’ They hardly ever use specific sensory words or colors, with the exception of ‘white’ and ‘golden.’ ”

  “That might indicate that the language cortex is only marginally involved,” he said, making a note of that. “Which could cause their vagueness in describing the sound, too.”

  She shook her head. “They’re not the same. When they describe what they’ve seen, they’re vague, but they know what they’ve seen, even if they have trouble describing it. But with the sound, they don’t seem to have any idea what they’ve heard. I get the idea they’re just guessing.”

  “You said she had three of the ten core elements,” Richard said. “Do most subjects have all ten?”

  “Only Mr. Mandrake’s,” she said. “Most of my interview subjects have had between two and five. Some only had one. Or none,” she said, thinking of Maisie’s seeing fog and nothing else. “The three Amelia had, plus the sense of people or ‘beings’ being present, are the most common.”

  “Was there anything you saw that indicated it wasn’t an NDE? You seemed concerned about Amelia’s sounding frightened. Is fear an indication it’s not an NDE?”

  “No, twenty percent of the experiences I’ve recorded have had a negative element, such as feeling fear or anxiety or a sense of impending doom.”

  “Understandable under the circumstances,” Richard said.

  Joanna grinned. “Eleven percent report a completely negative experience—a gray, empty void or frightening figures. I’ve only had one who experienced a traditional hell—flames, smoke, demons.” She frowned. “But Amelia said she didn’t feel anything negative. And usually if they report a negative feeling, they don’t also report feelings of peacefulness or warmth.”

  “That’s interesting,” Richard said. “It might mean that in some NDEs, the endorphin levels are lower and can’t completely mask anxious feelings. I want to look at the activity in Amelia’s endorphin receptor sites,” he said, going over to the console. “Was there anything else that made you think this wasn’t an NDE?”

  “No, there weren’t any anomalous elements and nothing that indicated it was some other type of experience—a super-imposed vision or a dream. In fact, her insistence that it wasn’t a dream is a common phenomenon among NDEers. Nearly all of my subjects say something to the effect that it’s real and become quite agitated if you suggest it might have been a dream or a vision. I can remember Mr. Farquahar shouting, ‘I was there! It was real! I know!’ ”

  “So you definitely think it was an NDE?” Richard said.

  “I think so, yes. Her account sounded just like the revived patients I’ve interviewed.”

  “It wasn’t too close, was it?” he asked. “You don’t think she could be a spy for Mandrake and have faked it?”

  She laughed. “If she were one of Mandrake’s spies, she’d have had all ten elements and brought back a message from the Other Side, telling us there are things science can’t explain.” She stood up. “I’d better get this transcribed before it gets cold. And I’ve still got to set up interviews with the other three volunteers,” she said. She gathered up the files. “I’ll be in my office if you need me. Otherwise, I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow?” he said, surprised.

  “Yes. Why? Was there something else you needed me for this afternoon?”

  “No,” he said, frowning. “No. I’m going to look at the receptor sites and then check Amelia’s readouts to see what endorphins were present.”

  Joanna went back to her office to transcribe the interview, but first she needed to call the rest of the volunteers. She set up interviews with Mr. Sage, Ms. Coffey, and Mrs. Troudtheim, calling Mrs. Haighton, who was apparently never home, in between. Vielle called at four. “Can you come over early?” she asked. “Say, at six-thirty?”

  “I guess,” Joanna said. “Look, if you want to get to bed early, we can make this another night.”

  “No,” Vielle said. “I just want to talk to you about something.”

  “What?” Joanna said suspiciously. “That nail-gunner didn’t show up and shoot somebody, did he?”

  “No. The nail-gunnee showed up, though, and you should have seen the police officer they sent over to arrest him. Gorgeous! Six foot three, and looks just like Denzel Washington. Unfortunately, I was cleaning pus out of an infected toe and didn’t get to meet him.”

  “Is Denzel what you wanted to talk to me about?” Joanna asked, amused.

&
nbsp; “Oops, gotta go. Van rollover. Wouldn’t you know it? Right as I’m supposed to get off.”

  “If you’re going to be late,” Joanna began, “we could—”

  “Six-thirty. And can you pick up some cream cheese?” she said and hung up.

  And what was that all about? Dish Night was completely informal. Half the time they didn’t start the movies till halfway through the evening, so if Vielle wanted to talk, they could do it anytime. And earlier she’d done everything she could to avoid talking.

  She’s found out what Greg Menotti was talking about, and it’s something terrible, Joanna thought, so terrible she couldn’t tell me in the ER.

  But when she’d asked her, she’d genuinely seemed to have forgotten about him. She’s transferring out of the ER, Joanna thought. Oh, now she was letting her imagination completely run away from her.

  She typed up Amelia’s account of her NDE with annotations. When she got to the “oh, no’s” on the tape, she stopped, rewound, and listened to it two more times. Fear, and despair, and something else. Joanna rewound again, and pressed “play.” “Oh, no, oh, no, oh, no.” Knowledge, Joanna thought, like someone has just told her something she can’t bear to hear.

  She went back to the lab, got Mr. Wojakowski’s file from Richard, and looked up the name of the nurse who’d assisted at Mr. Wojakowski’s session. Ann Collins. It wasn’t anybody Joanna knew. She called the hospital operator and found out what floor she was subbing on, but she’d gone off-shift at three. “You have several messages,” the operator said sternly.

  “Sorry,” Joanna said. “What are they? I think there’s something wrong with my pager.” The operator told her. Mr. Mandrake, of course, and Mrs. Davenport, and Maisie. “She said to tell you she’d found out something important about . . . ” she hesitated, “the Hildebrand?”

  “The Hindenburg,” Joanna said. She looked at her watch. It was after five. If she went to see Maisie now, she was likely to get caught, and she still hadn’t transcribed her conclusions. She’d better finish the account first, and run by Maisie’s room on her way out.

  Just before she left, she tried Mrs. Haighton one more time, and, amazingly, got an answer. “This is her housekeeper. Mrs. Haighton’s at her Symphony Guild board. Is this Victoria? She said to tell you she’ll be late to the meeting tomorrow because she has an Opera Colorado meeting.”

  “I’m not Victoria,” Joanna said, and asked her to tell Mrs. Haighton to please call her tomorrow, gathered up her coat and bag, and started down to see Maisie. As she got out of the elevator next to the walkway on fifth, she saw Mr. Mandrake down the hall, expounding on the afterlife to a patient in a wheelchair. She stepped hastily back in the elevator, punched three, and took the third-floor walkway instead, cutting through Medicine and the Burn Unit, and up the service stairs to fourth.

  Maisie was lying back against her pillows, reading Peter Pan. All very innocent, but there was an air of secretiveness, of hurried movement about the scene, as if she would have caught Maisie turning somersaults or swinging from the traction bars above her bed if she’d gotten there a moment earlier. “You rang, kiddo?” Joanna said, and Maisie instantly shut the book and sat up.

  “Hi,” she said happily. “I knew you’d come. Nurse Barbara didn’t want to page you, but I told her you’d want to know this right away. You know the guy on the Hindenburg who had the NDE?”

  “Yes. Did you find out his name?”

  “Not yet,” Maisie said, “but I figured out a way to. The librarian at my school, Ms. Sutterly, always brings me books to read, so the next time she comes I’m going to ask her if she can look it up. She’s really good at finding things out.”

  And you’re really good at thinking up reasons to get me down here, Joanna thought.

  “Wasn’t that a good idea?” Maisie said.

  “Yes. When you find out from her, you can have me paged.” And not before, she added silently. She started for the door.

  “Wait, you can’t go yet,” Maisie said. “You just got here. I’ve got a whole bunch of stuff to tell you.”

  “Two minutes,” Joanna said, “and then I have to go.”

  “Are you going out on a date?”

  “No, I’m going to Dish Night.”

  “Dish Night? What’s that?”

  Joanna explained how she and Vielle got together to eat popcorn and watch movies. “So I’ve really got to go,” she said, patting Maisie’s feet through the covers. “Bye, kiddo. I’ll come see you tomorrow, and you can tell me all about the Hindenburg.”

  “Not the Hindenburg,” Maisie said. “I don’t like it anymore.”

  Joanna looked at her, surprised. “How come?” Was it possible a disaster had gotten too grisly even for her?

  “It was boring.”

  “So what are you reading now?” Joanna asked, leaning over to pick up Maisie’s discarded book. “Peter Pan. Good book, huh?”

  Maisie shrugged. “I think the part where Tinkerbell almost dies and they save her just by everybody believing in fairies is stupid.”

  I can imagine, Joanna thought.

  “I like the part where Peter Pan says to die would be an awfully big adventure, though,” she said. “Did you know there were a whole bunch of babies on the Lusitania?”

  “The Lusitania? You mean the ship that got torpedoed by the Germans in World War I?”

  “Yes,” Maisie said happily. She reached under the covers and pulled out an enormous book with a tornado on the cover. Which explained the sensation of abruptly checked movement Joanna had felt when she walked in. “There were all these babies on the ship,” Maisie said, opening the book. “They tied lifejackets to their bassinets, but it didn’t do any good. The babies still all drowned.”

  Well, so much for the “too grisly” theory. “This is Dean and Willie,” Maisie said, showing Joanna a picture of two little boys in white sailor suits. “They drowned, too. And here’s the funerals.” Joanna looked dutifully at the photo of a phalanx of priests in white surplices officiating over rows of coffins.

  “One of the Lusitania stewards kept saying everything was all right, that they weren’t sinking, and there was nothing to worry about,” Maisie said. “He shouldn’t have done that, should he?”

  “No, not if the ship was sinking.”

  “I hate when people lie. You know that dog named Ulla on the Hindenburg?”

  “The German shepherd?”

  Maisie nodded. “He didn’t get saved. The mom and dad just said he did. He got burned up, and the mom and dad got another German shepherd and told their kids it was Ulla. So they wouldn’t feel bad.” She looked belligerently at Joanna. “I don’t think parents should lie to their kids about dying, do you?”

  “No,” Joanna said, afraid of where this was going, of what Maisie would ask next. “I don’t.”

  “There was a poodle on the Lusitania,” Maisie said, and showed her a picture of it and of bodies washed onto the shore, of the Lusitania foundering helplessly in the water, smoke and fire all around.

  “I’ve really got to go, Maisie,” Joanna said. “I told my friend I’d bring some cream cheese, and I’ve got to stop at the store on the way.”

  “Cream cheese?” Maisie said. “I thought you said you ate popcorn.”

  “We usually do,” Joanna said, wondering again what Vielle was up to and what she wanted to talk about that made it necessary for her to come early. “But this time we’re eating cream cheese, and I’ve got to go pick it up.” She started out.

  “Wait!” Maisie yelped. “I have to tell you about Helen first.”

  “Helen?”

  “This little girl on the Lusitania,” Maisie said, and hurried on before Joanna could stop her, “she looked all over for her mom, but she couldn’t find her anywhere, so she ran up to this man, and said, ‘Please, mister, will you take me with you?’ and he said, ‘Stay right there, Helen,’ and ran to get her a life-jacket.”

  And he never saw her again, Joanna thought, knowing the type of
story Maisie usually told. But, surprisingly, Maisie was saying, “ . . . and he ran back and tied the lifejacket on her and then he picked her up and took her to look for a lifeboat, but it was already going down the side.” Maisie paused dramatically. “So what do you think he did?”

  He tried to save her, but he couldn’t, Joanna thought, looking at Maisie. And she drowned. “I don’t know,” Joanna said.

  “He threw Helen into the boat,” Maisie said triumphantly, “and then he jumped in, too, and they both got saved.”

  “I like that story,” Joanna said.

  “Me, too,” Maisie said, “’cause he saved her. And he didn’t tell her everything would be all right.”

  “Sometimes people do that because they hope things will be all right,” Joanna said, “or because they’re afraid the person will be frightened or sad if they know the truth. I think that’s probably why the parents lied to their children about Ulla, because they wanted to protect them.”

  “They still shouldn’t’ve,” Maisie said, her jaw set. “People should tell you the truth, even if it’s bad. Shouldn’t they?”

  “Yes,” Joanna said and waited, holding her breath for the question that was coming, but Maisie merely said, “Will you put my book away first? It goes in my duffel bag. So my room won’t be all messy.” And so your mother won’t catch you with it, Joanna thought. She took the book over to the closet, stuck it in the pink duffel bag, and handed Maisie back Peter Pan.

  And just in time. Maisie’s mother appeared in the door with a huge pink teddy bear and a beaming smile. “How’s my Maisie-Daisy? Dr. Lander, doesn’t she look wonderful?” She handed Maisie the teddy bear. “So, what have you two been talking about?”

  “Dogs,” Maisie said.

  “Mildred, why aren’t my clothes laid out? I’ve got a seven o’clock call.”

  —LAST WORDS OF BERT LAHR

  IT WAS SIX FORTY-FIVE before Joanna made it to Vielle’s. “What happened to you?” Vielle said. “I said six-thirty.”

  “I got caught by Maisie. And her mother,” Joanna said, taking off her coat. “She wanted to tell me how well Maisie’s doing.”