Connie Willis - Passage

“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.”

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—”

“—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.”