Connie Willis - Passage

“Do you still have the feeling?”

“No, it just sort of flashes past.”

“Interesting. I want you to tell me if the feeling recurs,” he said.

“Or if I figure out where it is,” she said, and spent the remainder of the afternoon and evening trying to place it. Something to do with a blanket and a wooden floor. And a palace. No, not a palace, but something with the word palace in it. The Palace Hotel? But it wasn’t a hotel. The Palace Theater?

She got exactly nowhere. It’s the watched-pot syndrome, she thought, driving to work the next morning, and decided to not think about it in the hope the elusive memory would kick spontaneously forward. She focused on transcribing her account and on helping prep Mrs. Troudtheim, who kicked out immediately with no memory of having had an NDE. “It was the same as last time,” she said. “I was lying there in the dark, trying not to fall asleep, but I guess I must have. I’m so sorry. I even took a nap this morning so I wouldn’t.”

“You were lying there in the dark,” Joanna said. “Did the darkness change at any point? Grow darker? Or take on a different quality?”

“No.”

“You say you fell asleep. Do you have any memory of being asleep?”

“No. I was just lying there, and then I sort of jerked awake.”

“Did something wake you? A movement? A sound?”

“No.”

“Nice try,” Richard said after Mrs. Troudtheim had left, “but it’s no use. She doesn’t remember.”

And neither do I, Joanna thought, typing up Mrs. Troudtheim’s nontranscript. Not thinking about the tunnel hadn’t worked any better than trying to place the passage.

She did a global search on “floor” and then “blanket,” neither of which turned up any matches. She tried, “It’s so cold.” Nothing. She ran it again on “cold,” and this time there were a number of hits. Most were vague references to feelings the subject had had in the tunnel or on returning, and a couple were in Joanna’s notes. “During interview subject repeatedly asked me if I thought room was cold,” and, “Subject seemed cold, put on robe, then stuck hands up inside sleeves.”

All of which was very interesting, but it didn’t tell her where the tunnel was, and when Richard told her he wanted to send her under the next day, her first thought was, “Maybe when I see it again, I’ll know.” Her second was, “But first I’m going to identify that sound if it kills me,” and she held that thought through Tish’s attaching the electrodes, starting the IV, adjusting the sleep mask.

“The sound,” she murmured to herself as Tish put on her headphones. “First identify the sound, then the hallway.”

There was a sound, and she was in the passage. The line of light where the floor met the door still looked oddly distant, but she knew she must be closer to the door than the last time. She could clearly hear the sound of voices beyond the door.

The sound! She had intended to listen for the sound, and she had forgotten again. She whirled to look back down the dark tunnel. It was a sound that—what? She clearly remembered hearing something, but what was it? “Was it a ringing or a buzzing?” she said, frustrated, and her voice sounded shockingly loud in the tunnel. She looked back toward the door and the light, half-expecting the voices to have stopped in surprise, but they continued to talk.

“I’m sure it’s nothing,” the man said, and Joanna wondered if he was talking about her.

“Should we send someone to find out?” another man’s voice said. Maybe their voices are what I heard coming through, Joanna thought, and knew they weren’t. They hadn’t started till halfway through the last time, and the first time she hadn’t heard anything. After the sound stopped, the passage had been absolutely silent.

And it was a sound, she thought, not voices. A sound like… She could not call up any memory of it at all. But it came from down here, she thought, and started back along the passage. It came from the end of—

And she was back in the lab. Oh, no, she thought, I’ve kicked out, just like Mrs. Troudtheim.

“I’m sorry,” she said, but Tish ignored her and went on taking off the headphones and detaching the electrodes as if nothing catastrophic had happened.

“Is she awake?” Richard asked from over at the console, and he didn’t sound upset either.

“Did you change the dosage?” she asked, groping for the edge of the examining table so she could pull herself to a sitting position.

“Why?” Richard said, appearing above her. “Was your experience different?”

“No, but when I went back to—”

“Wait,” he said, fumbling in his pocket for her minirecorder. “From the beginning.”

She stared up at him uncomprehendingly. “Didn’t I kick out?”

“Kick out?” he said. “No. Didn’t you experience an NDE this time?”

“Yes, I was in the passage,” she said, and he held the recorder up to her mouth, “and I turned around to see where the sound came from. I was determined this time to identify it, and I started back down the passage toward it, and—”

“Did you?” Richard cut in. “Identify it?”

“No,” she said. “It’s so odd. I know I hear it, but when I try to reconstruct it, I can’t.”

“Because it’s a strange sound you’ve never heard before?”

“No, that’s not it. It’s like when you wake up in the middle of the night, and you know something awakened you, but you can’t hear it now, and you didn’t really hear it because you were asleep, so you don’t know if it was a branch scraping against the window or the cat knocking something off the counter. That’s what this feels like.”

“So you think the sound is something you hear before you go into the NDE-state?”

Joanna considered that. “I’m not sure. Maybe.” She looked thoughtfully at him. “When the patient I was interviewing in the ER coded and a nurse pushed the code alarm, I remember thinking that maybe that was what people were hearing in their NDEs. It was a sort of cross between a ringing and a buzzing.”

“There’s no code alarm in here,” Tish said. Richard looked at her in surprise, as if he’d forgotten she was there. “She wouldn’t have been able to hear a code alarm, anyway, if there had been one,” Tish said. “She was wearing headphones, remember?”

“She’s right,” Joanna said. “It can’t be an outside sound. It’s…”

“And you said none of the patients you interviewed were able to describe the sound either,” Richard said.

“Not with any degree of confidence,” Joanna said, “or consistency, and now I feel guilty I was so impatient with them.”

“As soon as you finish your account, I want to take a look at the superior auditory cortex,” he said.

“That is my account,” Joanna said. “I turned around to see where the sound came from and started back down the passage, and I was back in the lab. That’s why I asked you if I’d kicked out of the NDE.”

Richard had put down the recorder in his surprise. “How long were you in the tunnel?”

“I don’t know,” Joanna said. “However long it takes to turn around and take a couple of steps.”

“How long were you there the time before?”

“I don’t know, several minutes. Longer than the first time.”

Richard was already over at the console, calling up the scans. “Normal time?” he asked, and when she looked blank, he said, “Was there any sense of time dilation, of time being slowed down or speeded up?”

“No,” she said. “Why?”

“Because you were in the NDE-state the first two times a little over two minutes,” he said, calling up arrays of numbers, “and this time nearly five.” He looked over at her. “Have you ever asked your patients how long their NDEs lasted?”