Passage

“You don’t have to. That’s my department. I need you to tell me exactly the kind of thing you’ve been telling me—”

The door banged open, and a nurse clattered down the steps. Joanna and Richard both made a dive for the landing, but it was too late. She’d already seen them.

“Oh,” the nurse said, looking surprised and then interested. “I didn’t know anything was going on in here.” She gave Richard a winsome smile.

“You can’t get through this way,” Joanna said. “They painted the steps.”

She arched a speculative eyebrow. “And you two are waiting for them to dry?”

“Yes,” Richard said.

“Is Mr. Mandrake still up there?” Joanna asked. “In the hall?”

“No,” she said, still smiling at Richard.

“Are you sure?” Joanna asked.

“The only thing in the hall is the supper cart.”

“Supper cart?” Joanna said. “Good Lord, how late is it?” She glanced at her watch. “Oh, my gosh, it’s after six.”

The eyebrow again. “Lost all track of time, did you? Well, have fun,” she said, and waved at Richard. She clattered up the stairs and out.

“I had no idea it was this late,” Joanna said, wadding up the energy-bar wrapper and sticking it in her pocket. She stood, gathering up the Frappuccino bottle and the apple core.

Richard ran up two stairs and turned, blocking her way. “You can’t go yet. You haven’t agreed to work with me on the project.”

“But I already interview everyone who comes into the hospital,” Joanna said. “I’d be glad to share my transcripts with you—”

“I’m not talking about those people. I want you to interview my volunteers. You’re an expert at, as you said, separating the wheat from the chaff. That’s what I want you to do: interview my subjects, separate out their actual experiences so I can see how it relates to their RIPT scan maps.”

“Their RIPT scan maps?” Joanna said, bewildered. “I don’t understand. Very few people code in the hospital, and even if they do, you’d only have four to six minutes to get your scanner down to the ER, and—”

“No, no,” he said. “You don’t understand. I’m not observing NDEs. I’m manufacturing them.”

4

“I beg your pardon, monsieur. I did not mean to do it.”

—Marie Antoinette, after she had accidentally stepped on the executioner’s foot while mounting to the guillotine

“You manufacture NDEs? You mean, like in Flatliners?” Joanna blurted out, and then thought, you shouldn’t have said that. You’re alone in a stairwell with him, and he’s clearly a nutcase.

“Flatliners?” Richard said, horrified. “You mean that movie where they stopped people’s hearts and then revived them before they were brain dead? Of course not. Manufacturing’s the wrong word. I should have said simulating.”

“Simulating,” Joanna said, still wary.

“Yes, using a psychoactive drug called dithetamine. Wait, let me start at the beginning. Mr. O’Reirdon coded, and we got his NDE on tape, so to speak, but, as you can imagine, I wasn’t eager to publish that fact. Mr. Mandrake’s book had just come out, he was on all the talk shows claiming the afterlife was real, and I could just imagine what would happen if I showed up with photographic proof.” He moved his spread hand through the air, as if displaying a headline: ” ‘Scientist Says Near-Death Experience Real.’ ”

“No, no,” Joanna said, “ ‘Scientist Takes Photo of Heaven,’ with an obviously faked picture of the pearly gates superimposed on a diagram of the brain.”

“Exactly,” Richard said, “and besides, it didn’t have anything to do with the mapping project I was working on. So I documented the scans and Mr. O’Reirdon’s NDE account and stuck them in a drawer. Then, two years later, I was reading about a study showing the effects of psychoactive drugs on temporal-lobe activity. There was a photo of an fPET scan of a patient on dithetamine, and I thought, That looks familiar, and got out Mr. O’Reirdon’s scans. They showed the same pattern.”

“Dithetamine?” Joanna said.

“It’s a drug similar to PCP,” Richard said, fumbling in his lab coat pockets, and Joanna wondered if he was going to come up with a vial full of the drug. He pulled out a roll of spearmint Life Savers. “After-dinner mint?” he said, offering Joanna the roll. She took one.

“It doesn’t produce PCP’s psychotic side effects,” Richard said, peeling back the paper covering the Life Savers, “or its high, but it does cause hallucinations, and when I called the doctor who conducted the study and asked him to describe them, he said his subjects reported floating above their bodies and then entering a dark tunnel with a light at the end of it and a radiant being standing in the light. And I knew I was on to something.”