Connie Willis - Passage

“It might also explain some of the other core elements, too,” Richard said. “I’ve been assuming the NDE was endorphin-generated, but maybe…” He began typing. “Light, voices, time dilation, even déjà vu, are also effects of temporal-lobe stimulation.”

“It wasn’t déjà vu,” Joanna said, but Richard was already lost in the scans, so she ate her Cheetos and went down to ask Mrs. Woollam about the duration of her NDEs and the manner of her return.

“I was standing there looking up at the staircase,” Mrs. Woollam, even more fragile-looking in a white knitted bed jacket, said, “and then I was in the ambulance.”

“You weren’t doing anything?” Joanna asked. “Like walking back down the tunnel? You were just standing there?”

“Yes. I heard a voice, and I knew I had to go back, and there I was.”

“What did the voice say?”

“It wasn’t a voice exactly. It was more a feeling, inside, that I had to go back, that it wasn’t my time.” She chuckled. “You’d think it would be, wouldn’t you, as old as I am? But you never know. There was a girl in the room with me at Porter’s last time. A young girl, she couldn’t have been more than twenty, with appendicitis. Well, appendectomies aren’t anything. They did them back when I was a girl. But the day after her operation, she died. You never know when your time will come to go.” Mrs. Woollam had opened her Bible and was leafing through the tissue-thin pages. She found the passage and read, “ ‘For none may know the hour of his coming.’ ”

“I thought that verse referred to Christ, not death,” Joanna said.

“It does,” Mrs. Woollam said, “but when death comes, Jesus will be there, too. That was why He came to earth, to die, so that we would not have to go through it alone. He will help us face it, no matter how frightening it is.”

“Do you think it will be frightening?” Joanna asked, and felt the sense of dread again.

“Of course,” Mrs. Woollam said. “I know Mr. Mandrake says there’s nothing to fear, that it’s all angels and joyous reunions and light.” She shook her white head in annoyance. “He was here again yesterday, did you know that? Talking all sorts of nonsense. He said, ‘You will be in the Light. What is there to fear?’ Well, I’ll tell you,” Mrs. Woollam said spiritedly. “Leaving behind the world and your body and all your loved ones. How can that not be frightening, even if you are going to heaven?”

And how do you know there is a heaven? Joanna thought. How do you know there isn’t a tiger behind the door, or something worse? and remembered Amelia’s voice, full of knowledge and terror: “Oh, no, oh, no, oh, no.”

“Of course I will be afraid,” Mrs. Woollam said. “Even Jesus was afraid. ‘Let this cup pass from me,’ he said in the garden, and on the cross, he cried out, ‘Eloi, eloi, lama sabacthani.’ That means, ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ ”

She opened her Bible and leafed through the pages. The skin on her hands was as thin as the gilt-edged pages. “Even in the Psalms, it doesn’t say, ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will not fear it.’ It says,” and Mrs. Woollam’s voice changed, becoming softer and somehow bleaker, as if she were really walking through the valley, “ ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.’ ”

She closed the Bible and held it to her birdlike chest like a shield. “Because Jesus will be with me. ‘And, lo, I am with you always,’ he said, ‘even unto the end of the world.’ ”

She smiled at Joanna. “But you didn’t come to be preached to. You came to ask me about my NDEs. What else do you want to know?”

“The other times you had NDEs,” Joanna asked, “was the return the same?”

“Except for one time. That time I was in the tunnel and then all of a sudden, I was back on the floor by the phone.”

“On the floor?”

“Yes. The paramedics hadn’t gotten there yet.”

“And the transition was fast?”

“Yes,” Mrs. Woollam said. She opened her Bible again, and for a moment Joanna thought she was going to read her a Scripture, like, “in the twinkling of an eye we shall all be changed,” but instead she held the Bible up and closed it with a sudden slap. “Like that.”

“She described it as abrupt, like a book slamming shut,” Joanna told Richard the next day while they were waiting for Mr. Sage, “and Mrs. Davenport described her return as sudden, too.”

“Mrs. Davenport?” Richard said disbelievingly.

“I know, I know,” Joanna said, “she’ll say anything Mr. Mandrake wants her to. But he’s not interested in returns, and the word sudden occurs several times in her account. And in both cases, their hearts spontaneously started beating again, without medical intervention.”

“What about your other interviews?” Richard asked. “Is there a correlation between the means of revival and the manner of return?”

“I’ll check as soon as we’re done with Mr. Sage,” she said.

“Ask him about time dilation,” Richard said, “and his return,” and Joanna dutifully did, but it didn’t yield much. After twenty minutes of struggling with time dilation, she gave up and asked, “Can you describe how you woke up? Was it fast or slow?”

“I don’t know,” Mr. Sage said. “Just waking up.”

“Waking up like when your alarm clock goes off?” she asked, and Richard shot her a questioning glance.

I know I’m leading, she thought. I’ve given up all hope of getting anything out of him without leading. “Like when your alarm clock goes off,” she repeated, “or like on a Saturday morning, where you wake up gradually?”

“I work Saturdays,” Mr. Sage said.

It was a relief to go back to her office and look for abrupt returns, even though there didn’t seem to be a clear correlation between them and spontaneous revival. “Abraham said, ‘Return!’ ” Mr. Sameshima had said, “and wham! just like that I was back on the operating table,” but when she checked his file, they had used the paddles on him four times. Ms. Kantz, on the other hand, who had begun breathing on her own after a car accident, said, “I drifted for a long time in this sort of cloudy space.”

At four, Joanna compiled what she had. While it was printing out, she listened to her messages. Vielle, wanting to know if she’d made any progress with Dr. Wright yet. Mr. Wojakowski, wanting to know if they needed him. Mrs. Haighton, saying she needed to reschedule, she had an emergency Spring Frolic meeting. Mr. Mandrake. She fast-forwarded through that one. Guadalupe. “Call me when you get the chance.”

She probably wants to know whether I’m still interested in Coma Carl, Joanna thought. I haven’t been to see him in days.

She ran the list up to Richard, who barely glanced up from the scans, and then went down to see Guadalupe. She was in Carl’s room, entering his vitals on the computer screen. Joanna looked over at the bed. It was at a forty-five-degree slant, and Carl, propped on all sides with pillows, looked like he might slide down to the foot of it at any moment. A clear plastic oxygen mask covered his nose and mouth.

“How’s he doing?” Joanna asked Guadalupe, forcing herself to speak in a normal tone.

“Not great,” Guadalupe whispered. “He’s been having a little congestion the last two days.”

“Pneumonia?” Joanna whispered.

“Not yet,” Guadalupe said, moving to check his IVs. There were two more bags on the stand than last time.

“Where’s his wife?” Joanna asked.

“She left to get something to eat,” Guadalupe said, punching numbers on the IV stand. “She hadn’t eaten all day, and the cafeteria was closed when she went down. Honestly, why do they even bother having a cafeteria?”