Passage

She came back in less than an hour to report that there was nothing in Amelia’s accounts about comparative brightness, “so I called her and asked her, and she said the light was much brighter her first session. I also asked her about the feeling of warmth and love she’d described, and she said that was present in all three sessions and strongest in the first. Of course, you have to keep in mind that over ten days have passed since her first session, and four since her last one, so her memory may not be reliable.”

But it matched the scans, which showed a much higher level of endorphin activity in the first session than the second, and the neurotransmitter analysis confirmed it. Higher levels of both beta- and alpha-endorphins in the first. Not only that, but NPK was present in the first and not the second.

He compared it with the scans they’d just gotten of Mr. Wojakowski. Both NPK and beta-endorphins, and in greater amounts than either of Amelia’s. When Joanna came in for Mrs. Troudtheim’s session, he asked her if she could check the NDE interviews she’d done over the past two years for bright lights and warm feelings.

She’d already started. “There does seem to be a correlation,” she said. “It’s hard to tell from secondhand accounts, especially since bright is a subjective word, but the subjects who describe the feeling as ‘enveloping me in love and peace,’ or, ‘overwhelming me in a sense of safety,’ also report a very bright light, and sometimes nothing but a light, as if the glare were so bright they couldn’t see anything else.”

“ ‘I couldn’t see a damn thing,’ ” Richard said, quoting Mr. Wojakowski. “Interesting. We’ll have to see what Mrs. Troudtheim says on the subject.”

But Mrs. Troudtheim didn’t say anything. And she wasn’t “our best observer yet,” as Joanna said right before Tish started the dithetamine. She was instead a huge disappointment.

Not that she wasn’t every bit as sensible and matter-of-fact as Joanna had predicted. She undressed and climbed on the examining table with no fuss, repositioned the sleep mask herself when it didn’t fully cover her eyes, and recounted what she’d experienced with a clear precision.

The problem was, there was no experience to recount. She didn’t enter the NDE-state at all. Instead, after five minutes in non-REM sleep, the scan pattern shifted abruptly to that of a waking brain. “What happened?” Richard said to Tish. “Is Mrs. Troudtheim all right?”

Joanna looked down at Mrs. Troudtheim, alarmed, and Tish said, “Vitals normal.”

“She’s awake,” Richard started to say, and Mrs. Troudtheim’s voice cut across his with, “Are you ready to start?”

It developed, on Joanna’s close questioning of her, that she had nodded off for a moment and “awoke” to feel Tish’s hand on her wrist, taking her pulse. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I’ll try to stay awake next time.”

“Do you remember the point at which you feel asleep?” Joanna asked.

“No, I was lying there, and it was so quiet and dark…” she said, clearly making an effort to remember. “I don’t know what came over me. I don’t usually doze off like that.”

“Did the quality of the silence or the dark change at any point?” Joanna pressed. “Did something wake you up? A sound?” But it was no use. Mrs. Troudtheim had told her everything she remembered.

“I’ll be happy to try it again, and this time I promise to stay awake,” she said.

Richard explained to her that they couldn’t send her under again so soon. “This doesn’t disqualify me, does it?” she said worriedly.

“Not at all,” Richard said. “There’s usually some trouble getting the dosage right at first. I’d like to schedule you for another session this week. Can you come in day after tomorrow?” That would give him time to look at the scans and the data and see what the problem was. It was probably simply that Mrs. Troudtheim required a higher dosage to achieve an NDE-state. It was too bad, though. He could have used another set of scans for comparing the endorphin sites.

“I just thought of something,” Joanna said after Mrs. Troudtheim left. “She had oral surgery the day before yesterday. Could the anesthetic she’s getting for her oral surgery be interfering with the dithetamine?”

“It shouldn’t be,” he said, but he had Joanna call and ask her what she was getting, which turned out to be short-term novocaine and nitrous oxide, neither of which should have stayed in her system for more than a few hours, but he checked her neurotransmitter analysis anyway and then called up Mr. Wojakowski’s, and then Mr. O’Reirdon’s.

He spent the rest of the day analyzing them for endorphins. Both showed the presence of beta-endorphins. Alpha-endorphins were present in Mr. Wojakowski’s, but not Mr. O’Reirdon’s. Tish came back at five to collect a scarf she’d forgotten and to ask him if he wanted to go to dinner at Conrad’s, “a bunch of us are going,” but he wanted to go over the rest of the analyses before Amelia’s session, so he told her no.