Connie Willis - Passage

Too far, and the way’s blocked. Half of the synapses have already shut down from lack of oxygen, half the pathways are locked or have “Closed for Repair” signs on them. So the temporal lobe tries one route after another, one chemical after another, carnosine, NPK, amiglycine, trying to find a shortcut, trying to get the signal through to the motor cortex to start the heart, the lungs. “It was really late,” Amelia had said. “All I wanted was to find the right chemical and go home,” and Mrs. Brandeis’s angel had said, “You must return to earth. It is not yet your time.”

“The command to return is in over sixty percent of them,” Joanna had said, but it wasn’t a command. It was a message that had finally gotten through, a chemical that had finally connected, a synapse that had finally fired, like a key turning over in the ignition. The NDE’s a survival mechanism, Richard thought, a last-ditch effort by the brain to jump-start the system. The body’s version of a crash team.

He looked blindly at Mr. Wojakowski, who was still talking. “So we take a boat over to get him and throw him up a ladder,” he said, “but he won’t come, he keeps shouting something down at us, only we can’t hear over the motor. We think he must be in too bad a shape to climb down the ladder, so the first mate sends me up after him, and he is in bad shape, shot in the gut and lost a lot of blood, but that isn’t what he was trying to tell us. Seems there’s another guy down in sick bay, and he’s really in bad shape, unconscious from a skull fracture.” He shook his head. “He’d ’a been a goner if Pichette hadn’t thought of that machine gun.”

Down the hall, a door opened. Richard looked up and saw Mandrake coming. And knew suddenly what Joanna had said to Mandrake. The orderly had said Joanna had laughed, and of course she had. “You were right,” she’d told him. “The NDE is a message.”

But not from the Other Side. From this side, as the brain, going down, made a last valiant effort to save itself, trying everything in its arsenal: endorphins, to block out the pain and fear and clear the decks for action, adrenaline to strengthen the signals, acetylcholine to open up pathways and connectors. Pretty damned ingenious.

But the acetylcholine had a side effect. It increased the associative abilities of the cerebral cortex, too, and long-term memory, struggling to make sense of the sensations and sights and emotions pouring over it, turned them into tunnels and angels and the Titanic. Into metaphors that people mistook for reality. But the reality was a complex system of signals sent to the hippocampus to activate a neurotransmitter that could jump-start the system.

And I know what it is, Richard thought in a kind of wonder. I’ve been looking right at it all this time. That’s why it was in all of Mrs. Troudtheim’s NDEs and the one where Joanna kicked out. I was looking for an inhibitor, and I was right, theta-asparcine’s not an inhibitor. It’s an activator. It’s the key.

“What are you telling my subject, Dr. Wright?” Mandrake demanded. “That NDEs aren’t real, that they’re nothing but a physical phenomenon?” He turned to Mr. Wojakowski. “Dr. Wright doesn’t believe in miracles.”

I do, Richard thought, I do.

“Dr. Wright refuses to believe that the dead communicate with us,” Mandrake said. “Is that what he was telling you?”

“He wasn’t telling me anything,” Mr. Wojakowski said. “I was telling the doc here about this time on the Yorktown —”

“I’m sure Dr. Wright will let you tell him some other time,” Mandrake said. “I have a very busy schedule, and if we’re going to meet—”

Mr. Wojakowski turned to Richard. “Is it okay if I talk to him, Doc?”

“It’s fine. You tell him anything you want,” Richard said and started for the elevator. He needed to set up tests to see if theta-asparcine could bring subjects out of the NDE-state on its own, or whether it was the combination of theta-asparcine and acetylcholine and cortisol. I need to call Amelia, he thought. She said she’d be willing to go under.

He punched the “up” button on the elevator. I need to look at the scans, and talk to Dr. Jamison. And Maisie’s mother, he thought, and looked back down the hall. Mr. Wojakowski and Mandrake were almost to his office. Richard sprinted after them. “Mr. Wojakowski. Ed,” he said, catching up to them. “What happened to him?”

“Dr. Wright,” Mr. Mandrake said, “you have already taken up more than half of my appointment time with Mr. Wojakowski here—”

Richard ignored him. “What happened to the sailor, the one who fired the machine gun?” he said to Mr. Wojakowski.

“Norm Pichette? Didn’t make it.” He shook his head.

Didn’t make it.

“Dr. Wright,” Mandrake said, “if this is your way of undermining my research—”

“Peritonitis,” Mr. Wojakowski said. “Died the next day.”

“What happened to the other one?”

“Dr. Wright,” Mandrake bellowed.

“The one out cold in sick bay? George Weise?” Mr. Wojakowski said. “He recovered fine. Got a letter about him from Soda Pop Papachek the other day.”

“You mean a message,” Richard said gaily. “You were right, Mandrake, it is a message.”

Mandrake pursed his lips. “What are you talking about?”

Richard clapped him on the shoulder. “You wouldn’t understand. There are more things in heaven and earth, Manny, old boy, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. And you’re about to find out what they are.”

After a long time, the darkness seemed to diminish a little, the blackness taking on a tinge of gray, the stars beginning to dim. “The sun is coming up,” Joanna said to the little French bulldog, though she still couldn’t see him, and began to scan the sky to the east for a telltale pallor along the horizon. But she could not make out the horizon, and the light, if that was what it was, leaked evenly from all directions into the sky, if that was what it was.

It grew light so slowly that Joanna thought she had been mistaken, that she had only imagined the diminishing of the blackness, but after an endless time, the stars went out, not one by one, but all together, and the sky turned charcoal and then slate. A little wind came up, and the night took on an early-morning chill.

It’s four o’clock, Joanna thought. That was when the Carpathia had steamed up, having come fifty-eight miles in three hours at pushing, punishing speed. The people in the lifeboats had seen it in the black-gray of near dawn, first her light and then the tall stack, streaming smoke. But though Joanna stared, squinting, toward the southwest, there was no light, no smoke.

There’s nothing out there at all, she thought, but as the darkness continued to diminish, she could make out a jagged horizon, as of distant mountains. The Blessed Realm, she thought, hope fluttering up in her. Or the Isle of Avalon.

“Maybe we’re saved after all,” she said, looking down at the dog, and when she did, she saw that it was not the French bulldog she was holding after all, but the little girl from the Hartford circus fire, Little Miss 1565. Her face was smudged with soot, and ash had caught in her sausage curls.

“I never had a dog,” the little girl said. “What’s his name?” and Joanna saw that the little girl was holding the French bulldog in her arms.

Joanna brushed a flake of ash from the little girl’s hair. “I don’t know,” she said.

“I will give you a name then,” the little girl said to the dog, holding him up, her smudged hands clutching it around its fat middle. “I will call you Ulla.”