Connie Willis - Passage

Joanna looked at Carl, lying still and silent on the slanting bed. She wondered if he could hear them, if he knew his wife had left and Joanna was there, or if he was in a beautiful, beautiful garden, like Mrs. Woollam. Or in a dark hallway with doors on either side.

“Has he said anything?” she asked Guadalupe.

“Not today. He said a few words on Pam’s shift yesterday, but she said she had trouble making it out because of the mask.” Guadalupe reached in her pocket for a slip of paper and handed it to Joanna.

Carl moaned again and muttered something. Joanna went over closer to the bed. “What is it, Carl?” she said and took his limp hand.

His fingers moved as she picked up his hand, and she was so surprised, she nearly dropped it. He heard me, she thought, he’s trying to communicate with me, and then realized that wasn’t it. “He’s shivering,” she said to Guadalupe.

“He’s been doing that for the past couple of days,” Guadalupe said. “His temp’s normal.”

Joanna went over to the heating vent on the wall and put her hand up to it to see if any air was coming out. It was, faintly warm. “Is there a thermostat in here?” she asked.

“No,” Guadalupe said, and started out, saying as she went, “You’re right. It does feel chilly in here. I’ll get him another blanket.”

Joanna sat down by the bed and read the slip of paper Guadalupe had given her. There were only a few words on it: “water” and “cold? code?” with question marks after them, and “oh grand” again.

Carl whimpered, and his foot kicked out weakly. Shaking something off? Climbing into something? He murmured something unintelligible, and his mask fogged up. Joanna leaned close to him. “Her,” Carl murmured. “Hurry,” he said, his head coming up off the pillow. “Haftoo—”

“Have to what, Carl?” Joanna asked, taking his hand again. “Have to what?” but he had subsided against the pile of pillows, shivering. Joanna pulled the bedspread up over his unresisting body, wondering what had happened to Guadalupe and the blanket, and then stood there, holding his hand in both of hers. Have to. Water. Oh, grand.

There was a sudden difference in the room, a silence. Joanna looked, alarmed, at Carl, afraid he had stopped breathing, but he hadn’t. She could see the shallow rise and fall of his chest, the faint fogging of the oxygen mask.

But something had changed. What? The monitors were all working, and if there had been some change in Carl’s vitals, they would have started beeping. She looked around the room at the computer, the IV stand, the heater. She put her hands in front of the vent. No air was coming out.

The heater shut off, she thought, and then, What I heard wasn’t a sound. It was the silence afterward. That was what I heard in the tunnel. That’s why I can’t describe it. Because it wasn’t a sound. It was the silence after something shut off, she thought, and almost, almost had it.

“Here we go, Carl, a nice toasty blanket,” Guadalupe said, unfolding a blue square. “I warmed it up for you in the microwave.” She stopped and stared at Joanna’s face, her clenched fists. “What’s wrong?”

I almost had it and now it’s gone again, Joanna thought, that’s what’s wrong. “I was just trying to remember something,” she said, making her hands unclench.

She watched Guadalupe lay the blanket over Carl, watched her tuck it around his shoulders. Something to do with a blanket and a heater. No, not a heater, she thought, in spite of the blanket, in spite of the woman’s saying, “It’s so cold.” It was something else, something to do with high school, and ransacking the pockets of Richard’s lab coat, and a place she had never been. A place that was right on the tip of her mind.

I know, I know what it is, she thought, and the feeling of dread returned, stronger than before.

“Interesting,” Richard said when Joanna told him about the episode of the heater. “Describe the feeling again.”

“It’s a…” she searched for the right word, “…a conviction that I know where the hallway in my NDE is.”

“You’re not talking about a flashback, are you? You don’t find yourself there again?”

“No. And, no, it’s not déjà vu,” she said, anticipating his next question. “I know I’ve never been there before.”

“How about jamais vu? That’s the feeling that you’re in a strange place even though you’ve been there many times? It’s a temporal-lobe phenomenon, too.”

“No,” she said patiently. “It’s a place I know I’ve never been, but I recognize it. I know what it is, but I just can’t think of it. It’s like,” she pushed her glasses up on her nose, trying to think of a parallel, “okay, it’s like, one day I was at the movies with Vielle, and I saw this woman buying popcorn. I knew I’d seen her somewhere, but I couldn’t place her. I had the feeling it was something negative, so I didn’t want to go up to her and ask her, and I spent the whole movie trying to think whether she worked at the hospital or lived in my apartment building or had been a patient. It’s that feeling.” She looked expectantly at Richard.

“Who was she?”

“One of Mr. Mandrake’s cronies,” she said, and grinned. “Three-fourths of the way through the movie, Meg Ryan had her palm read, and I thought, ‘That’s where I know her from. She’s a friend of Mr. Mandrake’s,’ and Vielle and I sneaked out before the credits.”

Richard looked thoughtful. “And you think the heater going off was the same kind of trigger as the palm reading.”

“Yes, except it didn’t work. All three times I’ve felt like the answer was just out of reach—” She realized she was starting to make the clutching gesture again and stopped herself. “But I couldn’t get it.”

“When the feeling occurred, did you experience any nausea?”

“No.”

“Unusual taste or smell?”

“No.”

“Partial images?”

“Partial images?” she asked.

“Like when you’re trying to think of someone’s name, and you remember that it begins with a T.”

She knew what he meant. When Meg Ryan held her palm out to the fortune-teller, she had had a sudden memory of Mr. Mandrake calling to her from down the hall. “No.”

He nodded vigorously. “I didn’t think so. I think what you’re experiencing is a sense of incipient knowledge, a feeling of significance. It’s a visceral sensation of possessing knowledge coupled with an inability to state what the content of that knowledge is. It’s an effect of temporal-lobe stimulation, which turns on a significance signal in the limbic system, but without any content attached to it.”

“Like the sound,” Joanna said.

“Exactly. I’ll bet you both it and this feeling of recognizing the tunnel are temporal-lobe effects.”

“But I know—”

He nodded. “There’s an intense feeling of knowing. The person experiencing it will state definitely that he understands the nature of God or the cosmos, but when he’s asked to elaborate, he can’t. It’s a common symptom in temporal-lobe epileptics.”

“And NDEers,” Joanna said. “Over twenty percent of them believe they were given special knowledge or an insight into the nature of the cosmos.”

“But they can’t articulate it, right?”

“No,” she said, remembering an interview with a Mrs. Kelly. “The angel said, ‘Look at the light,’ ” Mrs. Kelly had said, “and as I did I understood the meaning of the universe.”

Joanna had waited, minirecorder running, pencil poised. “Which is?” she’d asked finally, and then, when Mrs. Kelly looked blank, “What is the meaning of the universe?”