Connie Willis: Passage

“Maybe,” Joanna had said, but she didn’t think so. He doesn’t know the IV lines are there, she thought, or the snow or the nurses. He’s a long way from here, seeing something different altogether. Like all the heart attack and car accident and hemorrhage patients she’d interviewed over the last two years, wading through the angels and tunnels and relatives they’d been programmed to see, listening for the offhand comment, the seemingly irrelevant detail that might give a clue as to what they had seen, where they had been.

“The light enveloped me, and I felt happy and warm and safe,” Lisa Andrews, whose heart had stopped during a C-section, had said, but she’d shivered as she said it, and then sat for a long time, gazing bleakly into the distance. And Jake Becker, who had fallen off a ledge while hiking in the Rockies, had said, trying to describe the tunnel, “It was a long way away.”

“The tunnel was a long way away from you?” Joanna had asked.

“No” Jake had said angrily. “I was right there. In it. I’m talking about where it was. It was a long way away.”

Joanna went over to the window and looked out at the snow. It was coming down faster now, covering the cars in the visitors’ parking lot. An elderly woman in a gray coat and a plastic rain bonnet was laboriously scraping snow off her windshield. Heart attack weather, Vielle had said. Car accident weather. Dying weather.

She pulled the curtains closed and went back over to the bed and sat down in the chair beside it. Carl wasn’t going to speak, and the cafeteria would close in another ten minutes. She needed to go now if she ever wanted to eat. But she sat on, watching the monitors, with their shifting lines, shifting numbers, watching the almost imperceptible rise and fall of Carl’s sunken chest, looking at the closed curtains with the snow falling silently beyond them.

She became aware of a faint sound. She looked at Carl, but he had not moved and his mouth was still half-open. She glanced at the monitors, but the sound was coming from the bed. Can you describe it? she thought automatically. A deep, even sound, like a foghorn, with long pauses between, and after each pause, a subtle change in pitch.

He’s humming, she thought. She fumbled for her minirecorder and switched it on, holding it close to his mouth. “Nmnmnmnm,” he droned, and then slightly lower, shorter, “nmnm,” pause while he must be taking a breath, “nmnmnm,” lower still. Definitely a tune, though she couldn’t recognize it either, the spaces between the sounds were too long. But he was definitely humming.

Was he singing on a summer lake somewhere, while a pretty girl played a ukulele? Or was he humming along with Mrs. Davenport’s heavenly choir, standing in a warm, fuzzy light at the end of a tunnel? Or was he somewhere in the dark or the jungles of Vietnam, humming to himself to keep his fears at bay?

Her pager began abruptly to beep. “Sorry,” she said, scrabbling to turn it off with her free hand. “Sorry.” But Carl hummed on undisturbed, nmnm, nmnm, nmnm, nmnm, nm, nm. Oblivious. Unreachable.

The number showing on the pager was the ER. “Sorry,” Joanna said again and switched off the recorder. “I have to go.” She patted his hand, lying unmoving at his side. “But I’ll come see you again soon,” and she headed down to the ER.

“Heart attack,” Vielle said when she got there. “Digging his car out of a ditch. Coded briefly in the ambulance.”

“Where is he?” Joanna said. “Up in CICU?”

“No,” Vielle said. “He’s right here.”

“In the ER?” Joanna said, surprised. She never talked to patients in the ER, even though there were times she wished she could so she could interview them before Mr. Mandrake did.

“He came back really fast after coding, and now he’s refusing to be admitted till the cardiologist gets here,” Vielle said. “We’ve paged him, but in the meantime the guy’s driving everybody crazy. He did not have a heart attack. He works out at his health club three times a week.” She led Joanna across the central area toward the trauma rooms.

“Are you sure he’s well enough to talk to me?” Joanna asked, following her.

“He keeps trying to get out of bed and demanding to talk to someone in charge,” Vielle said, sidling expertly between a supply cart and a portable X-ray machine. “If you can distract him and keep him in bed till the cardiologist gets here, you’ll be doing everybody a big favor. Including him. Listen, there’s your subject now.”

“Why isn’t my doctor here yet?” a man’s baritone demanded from the end examining room. “And where’s Stephanie?” His voice sounded strong and alert for someone who’d just coded and been revived. Maybe he was right, and he hadn’t had a heart attack at all. “What do you mean, you haven’t gotten in touch with her yet? She has a cell phone,” he shouted. “Where’s a phone? I’ll call her myself.”

“You aren’t supposed to get up, Mr. Menotti,” a woman’s voice said. “You’re all hooked up.”

Vielle opened the door and led Joanna into the room, where a nurse’s aide was vainly trying to keep a young man from removing the electrodes pasted to his chest. A very young man, not more than thirty-five, and tan and well muscled. She could believe he worked out three times a week.

“Stop that,” Vielle said and pushed him back against the bed, which was at a forty-five-degree angle. “You need to stay quiet. Your doctor will be here in a few minutes.”

“I have to get in touch with Stephanie,” he said. “I don’t need an IV.”

“Yes, you do,” Vielle said. “Nina here will call her for you.” She looked at the heart monitor and then checked his pulse.

“I already tried,” the aide said. “She isn’t answering.”

“Well, try again,” Vielle said, and the aide scooted out. “Mr. Menotti, this is Dr. Lander. I told you about her.” She pushed him firmly back against the bed. “I’ll let you two get acquainted.”

“Don’t let him get up,” she mouthed silently to Joanna and went out.

“I’m glad you’re here,” Mr. Menotti said. “You’re a doctor, maybe you can talk some sense into them. They keep saying I had a heart attack, but I couldn’t have. I work out three times a week.”

“I’m not a medical doctor. I’m a cognitive psychologist,” Joanna said, “and I’d like to talk to you about your experience in the ambulance.” She pulled a release form out of her cardigan pocket and unfolded it. “This is a standard release form, Mr. Menotti—”

“Call me Greg,” he said. “Mr. Menotti’s my father.”

“Greg,” she said.

“And what do I call you?” he asked and grinned. It was a very cute grin, if a little wolfish.

“Dr. Lander,” she said dryly. She handed him the form. “The release form says that you give your permission for—”

“If I sign it, will you tell me your first name?” he asked. “And your phone number?”

“I thought your girlfriend was on her way here, Mr. Menotti,” she said, handing him a pen.

“Greg,” he corrected her, trying to sit up again. Joanna leaped forward to hold the form so he could sign it without exerting himself.

“There you go, Doctor,” he said, handing her back the form and pen. “Look, I’m thirty-four. Even if you’re not a doctor, you know guys my age don’t have heart attacks, right?”

Wrong, Joanna thought, and usually they aren’t lucky enough to be revived after they code. “The cardiologist will be here in a few minutes,” she said. “In the meantime, why don’t you tell me what happened?” She switched on the minirecorder.

“Okay,” he said. “I was on my way back to the office from playing racquetball—I play racquetball twice a week, Stephanie and I go skiing on the weekends. That’s why I moved out here from New York, for the skiing. I do downhill and cross-country, so you can see it’s impossible for me to have had a heart attack.”