Passage

The door was open, and Guadalupe was on the far side of the bed, hanging up an IV bag. The chair Carl’s wife usually occupied was empty. “How’s he doing today?” Joanna whispered, approaching the bed.

“Much better,” Guadalupe said cheerfully, and then in a whisper, “His fever’s back up.” She unhooked the empty IV bag and carried it over to the window. “It’s dark in here,” she said. “Would you like some light, Carl?” She pulled the curtains open.

Vielle had been right. It was snowing. Big flakes out of a leaden gray sky. “It’s snowing, did you know that, Carl?” Guadalupe said.

No, Joanna thought, looking down at the man on the bed. His slack face under the oxygen tubes was pale and expressionless in the gray light from the window, his eyes not quite closed, a slit of white showing beneath the heavy lids, his mouth half-open.

“It looks cold out there,” Guadalupe said, going over to the computer. “Is it building up on the streets yet?”

It took Joanna a moment to realize Guadalupe was talking to her and not Carl. “I don’t know,” she said, fighting the impulse to whisper so as not to disturb him. “I came to work before it started.”

Guadalupe poked at icons on the screen, entering Carl’s temperature and the starting of the new IV bag. “Has he said anything this morning?” Joanna asked.

“Not a word,” Guadalupe said. “I think he’s boating on the lake again. He was humming earlier.”

“Humming?” Joanna said. “Can you describe it?”

“You know, humming,” Guadalupe said. She came over to the bed and pulled the covers up over Carl’s taped and tubed arm, over his chest. “Like a tune, only I couldn’t recognize it. There you are, all tucked in nice and warm,” she said and started for the door with her empty IV bag. “You’re lucky you’re in here and not out in that snow, Carl,” and went out.

But he’s not in here, Joanna thought. “Where are you, Carl?” she asked. “Are you boating on the lake?”

Boating on the lake was one of the scenarios the nurses had invented out of his murmurings. He made motions with his arms that might have been rowing, and at those times he was never agitated or cried out, which was why they thought it was something idyllic.

There were several scenarios: The Bataan Death March, during which he cried over and over, “Water!,” and Running for the Bus, and one each of the nurses had a different name for — Burned at the Stake and Vietcong Ambush and The Torments of Hell — during which he flailed wildly at the tangled covers, yanked out his IV. Once he had blacked Guadalupe’s eye when she tried to restrain him. “Blanked out,” he had screamed over and over, or possibly “placket!” or “black.” And once, in a tone of panicked dread, “Cut the knot.”

“Maybe he thinks the IV lines are ropes,” Guadalupe, her eye swollen shut, had said helpfully when she gave Joanna a transcript of the episode.

“Maybe,” Joanna had said, but she didn’t think so. He doesn’t know the IV lines are there, she thought, or the snow or the nurses. He’s a long way from here, seeing something different altogether. Like all the heart attack and car accident and hemorrhage patients she’d interviewed over the last two years, wading through the angels and tunnels and relatives they’d been programmed to see, listening for the offhand comment, the seemingly irrelevant detail that might give a clue as to what they had seen, where they had been.

“The light enveloped me, and I felt happy and warm and safe,” Lisa Andrews, whose heart had stopped during a C-section, had said, but she’d shivered as she said it, and then sat for a long time, gazing bleakly into the distance. And Jake Becker, who had fallen off a ledge while hiking in the Rockies, had said, trying to describe the tunnel, “It was a long way away.”

“The tunnel was a long way away from you?” Joanna had asked.

“No” Jake had said angrily. “I was right there. In it. I’m talking about where it was. It was a long way away.”

Joanna went over to the window and looked out at the snow. It was coming down faster now, covering the cars in the visitors’ parking lot. An elderly woman in a gray coat and a plastic rain bonnet was laboriously scraping snow off her windshield. Heart attack weather, Vielle had said. Car accident weather. Dying weather.

She pulled the curtains closed and went back over to the bed and sat down in the chair beside it. Carl wasn’t going to speak, and the cafeteria would close in another ten minutes. She needed to go now if she ever wanted to eat. But she sat on, watching the monitors, with their shifting lines, shifting numbers, watching the almost imperceptible rise and fall of Carl’s sunken chest, looking at the closed curtains with the snow falling silently beyond them.

She became aware of a faint sound. She looked at Carl, but he had not moved and his mouth was still half-open. She glanced at the monitors, but the sound was coming from the bed. Can you describe it? she thought automatically. A deep, even sound, like a foghorn, with long pauses between, and after each pause, a subtle change in pitch.