Connie Willis - Passage

But she didn’t look terrified. In fact, she was smiling slightly, as if she were seeing something pleasant. Angels? Heavenly choirs? “How long does the NDE last?” Joanna asked.

“It depends,” Richard said, busy at the console. “Mr. O’Reirdon’s NDE lasted three minutes, but there’s no physical reason they can’t go ten to fifteen minutes.”

But four to six minutes causes brain death, Joanna thought, still unable to shake the feeling that this was an actual NDE and not a simulation.

“Theoretically, it could last as long as dithetamine’s being fed in,” he said, “but half the time, the—damn!”

“What? Is something wrong?” Joanna asked, glancing anxiously at the monitors and then at Amelia.

“She came out of the NDE spontaneously,” Richard said. “I don’t know if it’s a problem with the dosage or if it’s related to the NDE. It’s one of the things we need to find out, what’s kicking them out of the NDE-state and back into consciousness.”

“She’s awake?”

“No,” Richard said, taking another look at the monitors. “She’s back in non-REM sleep.”

Joanna looked down at Amelia. Her hands still lay limply on the foam. The pleased half-smile remained. “If the NDE is causing it,” Richard said, “it may be the same mechanism that causes patients experiencing an NDE to revive, and if that’s the case—”

There was a sound. “Shh,” Joanna said, and bent over Amelia.

“Is she awake?” Richard said, looking at the screens. “She shouldn’t be. The pattern shows her in non-REM sleep.”

“Shh,” Joanna said and bent close to Amelia’s mouth.

“Oh, no,” Amelia murmured, and her voice was hoarse and despairing. “Oh, no, oh, no, oh, no.”

Amelia Tanaka had no memory of anything negative in her NDE. “It was just like the last time,” she told Joanna. “There was a light, and this wonderful feeling.”

“Can you describe it?”

“The feeling?” Amelia said dreamily. “Calm… safe. I felt enveloped in love.”

You didn’t sound enveloped in love, Joanna thought. You sounded terrified. “Did you have that feeling the entire time?”

“Yes.”

Joanna gave up on that for the moment. “Can you describe the light?”

“It was beautiful,” Amelia said. “It was bright, but it didn’t hurt my eyes.”

“What color was it?”

“White. Like a lamp, only really bright,” she said, and this time she squinted, as if it had hurt to look at it, in spite of what she had said.

“Was the light there all the time?”

“No, not at first, not till after they opened the door.”

Richard looked sharply at Joanna. I’m going to have to tell him he can’t be present at these interviews, she thought. “Where was the door?” she asked impassively.

“At the end of… I don’t know,” Amelia said, frowning. “I was in a hall, or a tunnel, or…” She shook her head.

Joanna waited, giving her time to say something else. When she didn’t, Joanna said, “You said, ‘They opened the door.’ Can you be more specific?”

“Um, I didn’t actually see anybody open the door,” Amelia said. “It was dark, and then all of a sudden, there was a light, like when somebody opens a door at night and the light spills in. I thought…” She squinted again and then shook her head. “There was a light.”

“Did you hear anything?”

She shook her head, and then said, “There was a sound at the very beginning.”

“Can you describe it?”

“It was a…” A ringing or a buzzing, Joanna thought resignedly. “I can’t really describe it,” Amelia said. “I heard a sound, and then I was in this hall and the door opened and I saw the light. It was very real.”

“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.”