Passage

“I did, too, but some of them were wearing lifejackets, so they floated.” She laid her head back against the pillows, arms outstretched, mouth open in a grotesque imitation of a floating corpse. “And they were afraid people on other ships would see them, so they sent the Mackay-Bennett out to get them. It had all these coffins and a minister. What’s an embalmer?”

“It’s a person who prepares bodies for burial. To keep them from spoiling.”

“Oh,” Maisie said. “Well, they had an embalmer, and all this ice. That was to keep them from spoiling, too, right?”

“Yes,” Joanna said. “Okay, your two minutes are up.” She stood up.

“No,” Maisie said. “I haven’t told you the thing yet. One of the bodies was this little boy who nobody knew who he was, and nobody came to claim him, so the captain and the guys on the Mackay-Bennett had a funeral for him and a little white coffin and they put up a headstone to ‘The Unknown Child Whose Remains were Recovered after the Disaster to the Titanic.’ ”

“Just like Little Miss 1565,” Joanna said.

“No,” Maisie said, “ ’cause this one they found out who he was.” She wrapped her hand around her dog tags, as if it were a rosary. “Gosta Paulsson,” she said. “That was his name. Gosta Paulsson.” Joanna ended up sitting with Maisie till her mother came in, bubbling with cheer.

“The nurses say you’re doing much better,” Joanna heard her say as she scooted out of the room. “I brought you a brand-new video. Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.”

Joanna went back to her office, feeling relieved. There wasn’t a garden on the Titanic, and no fog, and Maisie wasn’t the only NDEer to have seen fog. It was listed as a separate NDE category in one of the books, Entranced by the Light. She read the section. “A number of patients describe being in an open, undefined, foggy space. Some say it is dark, like fog at night, others that it is light. Nearly all describe it as being a cold and frightening place. This is clearly Purgatory, and those who see it can be described as nonreligious or unsaved.”

Joanna closed the book with a slap and did a global search of “fog,” and scrolled down through the references. “It was cold,” Paul Smetzer had said, “and there was so much fog I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face.”

Paul Smetzer. That name rang a bell. She called up his file and read the full account. Oh, yes, Paul. “…I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face. Of course, if I was dead, I guess I wouldn’t have had a hand, would I? Or a face, for that matter.”

Paul Smetzer, the Ricky Inman of NDEers. He had also told her he’d seen an angel, “almost as cute as you,” and asked her if it was true there wasn’t any sex in heaven, “because if it is, I told her, I want to go to the other place.”

His remarks could be discounted, but he wasn’t the only one who had mentioned fog: “There were people standing there, but I couldn’t see who they were because of the fog.” “No, it was dark” (this in response to Joanna’s asking Ray Gomez to describe the tunnel), “and all blurry, like fog or something.” “I was floating in a kind of fog.”

And there definitely hadn’t been any fog that night. Just to make sure, Joanna called Kit, but her number was still busy. She printed out the list of fog references to take home and began gathering up her things.

The phone rang. “Hi, it’s Richard,” he said to the answering machine. “I just wanted to tell you Mrs. Troudtheim’s coming in at four tomorrow if that will—”

She picked up the phone. “Hi, I’m here.”

“Oh, I thought you’d gone home,” he said. “I came by earlier and didn’t see any light under your door.”

“Nope, I’m still here. I’ve been working on the backlog of transcripts,” she said, which was at least partly true. “I thought you weren’t going to send Mrs. Troudtheim under again until you’d figured out why she keeps kicking out.”

“I wasn’t, but when I told Dr. Jamison about the DABA, she suggested I go talk to Dr. Friedman over at St. Anthony’s. He’s worked extensively with DABA and artificial DABA surrogates. He said DABA alone couldn’t inhibit endorphins, but combined with cortisol, it definitely could.”

“And inhibiting the endorphins would kick her out?”

“I don’t know yet. I asked him about theta-asparcine, too, but it’s not an inhibitor. His specialty’s inhibitors, so he didn’t know much about it. He said he thought it had a regulatory function and that an artificial surrogate’s been produced. I need to do some more research, but not till I’ve checked Mrs. Troudtheim’s NDEs to see if cortisol’s been present in all of them. If it has, there are a number of ways to counteract the cortisol and keep her under. So I’ll see you tomorrow at four o’clock.”

Four o’clock. And by that time, she should know one way or the other. Or maybe sooner, if she could reach Kit. She called her again, and as soon as she got home, slightly worried, and at fifteen-minute intervals till she finally got through.