Passage (58 page)

Not half as frustrated as Richard, however. “You saw the
Titanic
again!” he said when the nurse had finished monitoring her vitals and left, and Joanna had told him. “How could you have? Look at these scans.” He’d dragged her over to the console. “The pattern of temporal-lobe activity is completely different, and the acetylcholine level is much higher than before.”

“That looks the same,” Joanna said, pointing at a redorange patch in the hippocampus.

“It is, and so’s the activity in the amygdala. They’re the same in all the NDEs, but they don’t have anything to do with producing images.”

“Was the pattern in long-term completely different, too?” Joanna asked, looking at the shifting reds and blues and yellows.

“No,” he admitted. “The last few scans match, although they don’t fit any of the L+R formulas. Was the ending of your NDE the same as last time?”

“No,” she said. She told him about the flight down the stairs and into the passage. “It was the same passage, but this time the door was shut and I had to run a lot farther before I was back in the lab.”

“You say the same passage? Do you mean it looked the same?”

“No,” Joanna said. “I mean it’s the same passage. It’s in the same place, it always opens onto the same part of the deck,” she said. “It’s a real place. The doors always open on the same stairways, the Boat Deck’s always the same number of flights up, the lifeboats and the officers’ quarters and the bridge are always in the same relationship to each other.”

“You said this time there was a gymnasium,” Richard said skeptically.

“It was always there, but the door was shut before. It’s not
like a dream where things shift around and you’re in one place and then another with no transition in between. It’s a
real
place.”

“Real,” he said, and all the wariness and skepticism were back in his face. In a minute he’d accuse her of being Bridey Murphy again.

“I don’t mean real,” she said, defeated. “I mean three-dimensional. I mean linear.”

He was shaking his head. “There’s no activation of the spatial cortex areas. What about the beginning? Was it the same?”

“No,” she said. “I came through a little later this time, after the young man came over to investigate the noise.”

“But the people and what they said were the same?”

“Basically.”

“Basically,” he muttered, staring at the screens. “Even though the temporal-lobe and L+R patterns are completely different. What were you thinking about just before you went into non-REM sleep? Maybe your conscious mind is influencing what you see.”

“The
Titanic,”
Joanna admitted, and Richard looked encouraged. “But last time I was thinking about Pompeii, and the first three times I obviously couldn’t have been thinking about the
Titanic
, and it’s been the same place every time.”

“And you hear the same sound as you go through,” Richard said thoughtfully and began to type, absorbed.

Joanna went down to her office to transcribe her account and check on Vielle. There was no answer, but she had seven new messages. Joanna listened to them, fast-forwarding as soon as she’d established it wasn’t Vielle. Records. Maisie. Guadalupe.

She must not have gotten the message I left for her, Joanna thought. And she must be back at work, and Tish was right about this flu not lasting long. Maybe Vielle’s back, too, and that’s why she’s not answering. She hit “next message.” Mr. Mandrake. She hit “delete.” Betty Peterson.

“I found out the title,” Betty’s voice said, and Joanna pulled back the finger she had poised over the “next message” button and listened to the message.

“You’ll never guess how!” Betty said. “Last night I dug out my old high school yearbook to see who else was in that class with us, and I was going through the section with our pictures-and, oh, my God, the hair! the clothes!-and as I’m looking through them, I saw that Nadine Swartheimer-do you remember Nadine? Wild hair that stuck out all over and Birkenstocks, even in the dead of winter?-well, anyway, she’d signed her picture, and there it was! But that’s not all. I found out something else. You need to call me. ’Bye.”

I don’t believe it, Joanna thought. After all that, she didn’t tell me the name of the book, and now I’ll have to call her back, and we’ll probably play telephone tag for a week. How did Betty ever get straight A’s?

She’d have to call her, but not until she’d finished checking to see if Vielle had called. She went rapidly through the rest of the messages. Mr. Mandrake again. Delete. Someone named Leonard Fanshawe.

But not Vielle. Joanna tried her again, but there was still no answer. I think I’d better go down to the ER and see if she’s back and, if she’s not, go check on her, Joanna thought, and gathered up her coat, keys, and purse, but just as she was starting out the door, the phone rang. Joanna let the answering machine pick up. “Hi,” Vielle said, and Joanna snatched up the receiver.

“How
are
you?” she said.

“Better,” Vielle said, and she sounded better. Her voice was stronger and steadier than the day before. “I’m still going to stay at home for a couple of days, and, no, I don’t need you to bring me anything. I don’t want you getting this.”

“Okay,” Joanna said, “although I’ve already been exposed. Tish has it, and so does Guadalupe.”

“Well, you’re not going to get it from me. I’m locking my door, and I’m not letting you in. So don’t even think about coming over.”

“All right,” Joanna promised, “but you have to promise to call me and tell me how you’re doing and if you need anything,” and, before Vielle could protest, “I can leave it outside your door.”

“I promise I’ll check in,” Vielle said and started to hang up.

“Oh, wait,” Joanna said. “What about the you-know-what?”

“The what?”

“I don’t know. That was what you called it. You left a message that I was supposed to call you, that you had a you-know-what for me. Yesterday. Before you went home sick. You paged me.”

“Oh,” Vielle said finally. “Yes. A patient came in with a gall bladder attack and happened to mention he’d had an NDE a couple of years ago. We admitted him for surgery.” Joanna wondered if that was the Leonard Fanshawe who had called her, but Vielle said, “His name’s Eduardo Ortiz.”

“Who else was there when he mentioned it?” Joanna asked, thinking of Mr. Mandrake.

“Just me,” Vielle said. “I thought he was a good bet since he wasn’t admitted for anything life-threatening, so he’d be flying below Mr. Mandrake’s radar.”

Joanna thought so, too. As soon as she got off the phone, she called the switchboard and got his room number, and then called the surgical floor. “He had surgery this morning, and he’s still out,” the nurse said.

“When does he go home?” Joanna asked.

The nurse checked. “Tomorrow.” Which is what’s wrong with HMOs, Joanna thought. They’re not in the hospital long enough to tell anyone they’ve even
had
a near-death experience, let alone describe it. The nurse had thought Mr. Ortiz would probably wake up around noon, which would give Joanna plenty of time to record and transcribe her NDE.

She did both and then took the transcript to Richard, who was glaring at the screens. “How’s it going?” she asked, handing him the transcript.

“Terrible. I thought maybe the initial stimulus was what was determining the unifying image, and that was why you continued to see the
Titanic
, even though the stimuli were different, but in this last NDE there was no activity in the superior auditory cortex at all.” He raked his hand through his hair. “I just don’t have enough data. Have you been able to reschedule Mrs. Haighton yet?”

“No.”

“And you haven’t heard from Mr. Pearsall about when he’s coming back?”

She shook her head.

“Then I’ve got to find out what’s aborting Mrs. Troudtheim’s NDE-state and fix it. We need her.”

“I’ll call Mr. Pearsall and Mrs. Haighton,” Joanna said. And go find her at the Spring Fling, or wherever she is, and drag her back here myself, she thought, going back to her office to call, but the housekeeper didn’t know where she was.

“Some kind of meeting,” she said. “She has so many I get them confused.” And there was no answer at Mr. Pearsall’s number.

Joanna made a note to try them both again and then listened to the messages she’d fast-forwarded through before. Guadalupe wanted Joanna to call her. Maisie had something important to tell her. Leonard Fanshawe said, “I understand you’re interested in near-death experiences. I had one six months ago, and since then I have discovered I have unusual powers: telekinesis, clairvoyance, distance-viewing, and teleportation. I would very much like to talk with you about this,” and gave his number.

Joanna called him and gave him Mr. Mandrake’s number. Then she called Mr. Pearsall again. No answer. She called Betty Peterson. Her line was busy.

She printed out a file copy of the transcript and then sat there staring at the screen, trying to make sense of it. It
was
the
Titanic
, she was sure of it, in spite of the staircase and the mailbag and the lack of activity in the auditory cortex.

She called Kit to ask her what the call letters of the
Titanic
had been and what deck the gymnasium had been on. And whether it had a mechanical camel. I surely wouldn’t have confabulated a detail that specific, she thought, punching in Kit’s number, and then remembered Mr. Wojakowski and “The Katzenjammer Kids.”

Kit’s line was busy. Joanna looked at her watch. It was eleven-thirty. She decided to take a chance on Mr. Ortiz’s having come out of the anesthetic early, and went down to the surgical ward. He was awake, but the surgeon was in with him. “And then we’ve got to do his post-op check,” the nurse subbing for Patricia said. “It’ll be about twenty minutes.”

Twenty minutes. Not long enough to go back up to her office
and get anything useful done. She could go see Maisie—Peds was just two floors up and actually in the same wing—but the likelihood of getting away from Maisie in under an hour was nonexistent. I’ll go see Guadalupe instead, Joanna thought, and headed for the elevator.

A pair of nurses Joanna didn’t know were waiting for it, their heads together, talking. “ . . . and she said, that’s it, I’m not coming to work in that ER one more day,” one of the nurses said, and the other said, “I don’t blame her.” Vielle should be listening to this, Joanna thought, and the elevator door opened.

Mr. Mandrake was inside. “ . . . evidence which will prove to the skeptic that the near-death experience is real,” he was saying to a man with a copy of
The Light at the End of the Tunnel.
“No so-called ‘rational’ explanation is possible.”

All his attention was on the man, and the two nurses, still gossiping, shielded her for the moment. “ . . . just a flesh wound, thank God,” one of them said, “but still.”

Mr. Mandrake hadn’t seen her yet. Joanna turned and walked rapidly away, her head averted. I’ll go see Guadalupe later, she thought. I’ll go down and pick up the release forms instead.

“Joanna Lander,” Mr. Mandrake said.

Oh, no, he’d seen her. She kept walking, resisting the impulse to look back and see if he was following her.

“ . . . a colleague of mine,” he said.

He hadn’t seen her. He was just talking about her. “She’s working on a project that will confirm my findings.”

A
colleague
of mine, Joanna fumed, walking faster. It would almost be worth it to turn around and go tell the man she was
not
Mr. Mandrake’s colleague and their project proved no such thing.

Almost, she thought and ducked into a stairway. It only went down one flight, but at least she had gotten away from Mr. Mandrake. She could take the service elevator up to the fifth-floor walkway. No, she’d have to go through Medicine. She didn’t want to take the risk of running into Mrs. Davenport. Talk about out of the frying pan into the fire. She’d better take the walkway on second.

She went down the stairs and along a corridor full of offices. It was usually deserted, but not today. A group of elderly people were sitting in the hall on plastic chairs, playing cards. One of them stood up as soon as he saw Joanna and waved his cards at her. “Hiya, Doc,” he said.

T
HIS IS NOT MY DAY
, Joanna thought. “Mr. Wojakowski,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

“Ed,” he corrected. He cocked his thumb at the door behind him. “This is that hearing project I told you about.” He leaned toward her confidentially. “I gotta say, Doc, your project was a hell of a lot more interesting than this thing. All we do is sit around with headphones on and raise our hands if we hear a beep.”

Joanna looked at the cardplayers. “And play acey-deucey?”

“Naw, none of them were ever in the navy. All they know how to play is hearts. I been trying to talk ’em into poker, but they’re all too cheap. Say, I heard one of the docs down in the ER got shot. You know anything about that?”