Passage

Mr. Mandrake was standing in the hall, talking to Tish. “Mrs. Davenport and the others have been sent back as emissaries,” he said, “to bring us word of what awaits us on the Other Side.”

Joanna eased the door shut carefully and went back down to where Dr. Wright was standing. “He’s talking to Tish,” she whispered, “telling her how NDEs are messages from the Other Side. And meanwhile, we’re trapped on This Side.” She walked past him down to the landing. “I don’t know about you, but I can’t stand the thought of having to listen to his theories of life after death. Not today. So I think I’ll just wait here till he leaves.”

She went around the landing and sat down out of sight of the door above, her feet on the step above the yellow “Do Not Cross” tape. “Don’t feel like you have to stay, Dr. Wright. I’m sure you’ve got more important things—”

“I’ve already been caught once today by Mandrake,” he said. “And I wanted to talk to you, remember? About working with me on my project. This looks like an ideal place. No noise, no interruptions — but it’s not Dr. Wright, not when we’re stuck in a half-painted stairwell together. I’m Richard.” He extended his hand.

“Joanna,” she said, shaking it.

He sat down across the landing facing her. “Tell me about your bad day, Joanna.”

She leaned her head back against the wall. “A man died.”

“Somebody you were close to?”

She shook her head. “I didn’t even know him. I was interviewing him in the ER… he…” He was there one minute, she thought, and the next he was gone. And that wasn’t just a figure of speech, a euphemism for death like “passed away.” It was how it had felt. Looking at him lying there in the ER, the monitor wailing, the cardiologist and nurses frantically working over him, it hadn’t felt like Greg Menotti had shut down or ceased to exist. It was as if he’d vanished.

“He’d had an NDE?” Richard asked.

“No. I don’t know. He’d had a heart attack and coded in the ambulance, and he said he didn’t remember anything, but while the doctor was examining him, he coded again, and he said, ‘Too far for her to come.’ ” She looked up at Richard. “The nurses thought he was talking about his girlfriend, but he wasn’t, she was already there.” And he was somewhere else, Joanna thought. Like Coma Carl. Somewhere too far for her to come.

“How old was he?” Richard asked.

“Thirty-four.”

“And probably no prior damage,” he said angrily. “If he’d survived another five minutes, they could have gotten him up to surgery, done a bypass, and given him ten, twenty, even fifty more years.” He leaned forward eagerly. “That’s why this research is so important. If we can figure out what happens in the brain when it’s dying, then we can devise strategies for preventing unnecessary deaths like the one that happened this afternoon. And I believe the NDE’s the key, that it’s a survival mechanism—”

“Then you don’t agree with Noyes and Linden that the NDE’s a result of the human mind’s inability to comprehend its own death?”

“No, and I don’t agree with Dr. Roth’s theory that it’s psychological detachment from fear. There’s no evolutionary advantage to making dying easier or more pleasant. When the body’s injured, the brain initiates a series of survival strategies. It shuts down blood to every part of the body that can do without it, it increases respiration rate to produce more oxygen, it concentrates blood where it’s most needed—”

“And you think the NDE is one of those strategies?” Joanna asked.

He nodded. “Most patients who’ve had NDEs were revived by paddles or norepinephrine, but some began breathing again on their own.”

“And you think the NDE was what revived them?”

“I think the neurochemical events causing the NDE revived them, and the NDE is a side effect of those events. And a clue to what they are and how they work. And if I can find that out, that knowledge could eventually be used to revive patients who’ve coded. Are you familiar with the new RIPT scan?”

Joanna shook her head. “Is it similar to a PET scan?”

He nodded. “They both measure brain activity, but the RIPT scan is exponentially faster and more detailed. Plus, it uses chemical tracers, not radioactive ones, so the number of scans per subject doesn’t have to be limited. It simultaneously photographs the electrochemical activity in different subsections of the brain for a 3-D picture of neural activity in the working brain. Or the dying brain.”

“You mean you could theoretically take a picture of an NDE?”

“Not theoretically,” Richard said. “I’ve—”

The door above them opened.

They both froze.

Above them a man’s voice said, ” — very productive session. Mrs. Davenport has remembered experiencing the Command to Return and the Life Review while she was dead.”

“Oh, God,” Joanna whispered, “It’s Mr. Mandrake.”

Richard craned his neck carefully around the corner.

“You’re right,” he whispered back. “He’s holding the door partway open.”

“Can he see us from there?”

He shook his head.

“Then it’s true?” a young woman’s voice said from the door.

“That’s Tish,” Joanna whispered.