Passage

“I don’t know what’s wrong,” Richard said disgustedly after the third try. “I thought the problem might be the sedative, since she wakes up, so I raised the dosage last time, and this time I used diprital instead of zalepam, but nothing.”

“Could Mrs. Troudtheim be one of those people who simply don’t have NDEs?” Joanna asked. “Forty percent of patients who’ve coded and been revived don’t remember anything at all.”

“No, that’s not it,” Richard said.

“How do you know?”

“Because we’ve only got five volunteers,” he said. “I’m going to check her cortisol levels. Maybe the dosage is still too low.”

But that just made it worse. When Joanna came into the lab for Amelia’s next session, he asked abruptly, “Didn’t you tell me your subjects frequently say the NDE isn’t a dream?”

“Yes,” Joanna said. “It was one of the things that surprised me when I first started interviewing. One of Mandrake’s big arguments for the reality of the NDE was that all of his subjects said it was real. Of course, subjective experience isn’t proof of anything, as I’ve tried to tell him, and I assumed he’d coached his NDEers into making the comment anyway. But when I started interviewing, I found he wasn’t exaggerating: nearly all of them volunteer that their experience was real, ‘not like a dream.’ ”

“And have you been able to get them to be more specific?” Richard asked.

“Do you have any food?” Joanna asked. “I spent my entire lunch trying to track down Mrs. Haighton.”

“Sure,” Richard said, reaching in his pockets. “Let’s see, V8 juice, trail mix, cheese-and-peanut-butter crackers… and an orange. Take your pick.”

“No, to answer your question,” Joanna said, ripping the crackers’ cellophane. “They just keep repeating that it feels real. I think it may be because the NDE doesn’t have incongruities and discontinuities.”

“Discontinuities?”

“Yes, you know,” Joanna said, “you’re in your pajamas taking a final for a class you never had, and then suddenly you’re in Paris, which is somehow south of Denver and on the sea-coast. Dreams are full of places and times that shift with no transition, juxtapositions of things and people from different times and places, inconsistencies.” She took a swig of V8. “None of my NDEers ever report any of those things. The NDE seems to proceed in a logical, linear fashion.”

She ate a cracker and then said, “There also seems to be a much longer retention of an NDE. The memory of a dream fades very quickly, usually within a few minutes of waking up, but NDEers retain their memories for days, sometimes years. Why all these dream questions?”

“Because when I checked Mrs. Troudtheim’s cortisol levels against the template, I noticed the acetylcholine levels matched those of REM sleep, and when I checked the other subjects, they had similarly high levels.”

“So you think the NDE is similar to a dream, in spite of what they say?”

“No, because there’s no corresponding drop in norepinephrine, which there would be in dreaming. I don’t know what to think. There’s no consistency in endorphin levels, and I found levels of cortisol in all of Mr. Wojakowski’s NDEs, in spite of the fact that he says he doesn’t feel any fear.”

“But he does talk a lot about Zeroes and people being killed,” Joanna said.

“I found them in Amelia’s most recent NDE, too. I have no idea what’s going on.”

Joanna didn’t either. Amelia’s session yesterday had been her most euphoric so far. When Joanna’d asked her to describe her feelings, she’d beamed at Richard, and said happily, “Warm, safe, wonderful!”

None of the others had showed any signs of anxiety either. Joanna had finally managed to get in touch with Ann Collins, the nurse who’d attended the session at which Mr. Wojakowski had murmured something while coming out. “He said, ‘Battle stations!’ ” Ann reported, which somehow wasn’t a surprise and, when Joanna asked how he had sounded when he said it, had said, “Excited, jubilant.”

So cortisol didn’t explain Amelia’s saying, “Oh, no.” Or Greg Menotti’s “fifty-eight,” the meaning of which still nagged at her. After her second visit to see Mrs. Woollam (a very short one because she had been scheduled for a chest X ray), Joanna had even gone to the hospital chapel, gotten a Bible, and looked up Psalm 58, but it was about the sins of the wicked, who were going to be melted away “as waters which run continually.”

Joanna had spent a few guilty minutes flipping through the rest of the Bible and discovered that most chapters didn’t have a verse 58, and the ones that did tended to say something like, “The gates of Babylon shall be burned with fire, and the people shall labor in vain, and the folk in the fire,” which wasn’t exactly helpful. Especially the part about laboring in vain.