Passage

And it did feel real, she thought, going back to her office to record her account. It had seemed like it was happening in real time, in a real place. Which you’re no closer to identifying than you were.

And no closer to identifying the sound, which meant it only took her a few minutes to record her entire NDE. She described the voices and what they’d said, her turning around, starting back—

I wonder if that was what ended the NDE, she thought, and started through the transcripts, looking specifically at the endings. A number of them described their return as “abrupt” or “sudden.” “I felt like I was being pulled back to my body,” Ms. Ankrum had said, and Mr. Zamora had described the end of his NDE as “like somebody picked me up by the scruff of the neck and threw me out.”

Neither of them had mentioned the tunnel as being the way back, but Ms. Irwin had said, “Jesus told me, ‘Your time is not yet fulfilled,’ and I found myself in the tunnel again,” and nearly a dozen had said they’d reentered the tunnel. “The spirit pointed to the light and said, ‘Dost thee choose death?’ and then he pointed at the tunnel and said, ‘Or dost thee choose life? Choose thee well.’ ” Why does every spirit and religious figure and dead relative speak in that stilted, quasi-religious manner, a cross between the Old Testament and Obi-Wan Kenobi? Joanna thought.

She made a list of the references to show Richard, wishing she’d gone to Happy Hour, where there would at least be nachos or something to eat. She hadn’t had any lunch because of the session. She opened her desk drawer, looking for a stray candy bar or an apple, but all she found was half a stick of gum so old it broke when she pulled the foil off.

She should have ransacked Richard’s lab coat pockets before she left the lab. He’d never have noticed, she thought, and had the feeling again of almost, almost knowing where the tunnel was. She sat perfectly still, trying to hold on to the feeling, but it was already gone. What had triggered it? Something about stealing food from Richard’s lab coat supply. Or could it have been the gum? And what famous place had she never been to that featured wooden floors, blankets, and ancient gum?

It’s hunger, she thought. Starving people are prone to mirages, aren’t they? But Richard had told her to tell him if the feeling recurred, so she went up to the lab and reported it to him.

“You don’t have to steal, you know,” he said, producing a package of Cheetos, a pear, and a bottle of milk from his pockets. “You can just ask.”

“It wasn’t the food,” she said, opening the milk. “It was the idea that you were so intent on what you were doing that you wouldn’t know I was taking it.”

“Do you have the feeling now?”

“No.”

“I think it might be the temporal lobe.” He went over to the console. “I’ve been looking at your scans. Tell me again about the sound. You heard it, but you can’t identify it?”

She nodded, biting into the pear.

“I think that may be because it’s not occurring. Look at this,” he said, pointing to a blue area on the scan. “There’s no activity in the auditory cortex. I’d been assuming there was an actual auditory stimulus from within the brain, but I think it may be a temporal-lobe stimulus instead.”

“Which means what?”

“Which means you can’t identify the sound because you’re not hearing it. You’re only experiencing a sensation of having heard something, with no sound to attach it to.”

But I did hear it, Joanna thought.

“Temporal-lobe stimulation would explain why there’s so much variation in description. Patients have a feeling they heard a sound, so they simply confabulate one out of whatever sound they heard last.”

Like the ringing of the code alarm, Joanna thought, or the hum of the heart monitor going flatline.

“It might also explain some of the other core elements, too,” Richard said. “I’ve been assuming the NDE was endorphin-generated, but maybe…” He began typing. “Light, voices, time dilation, even dйjа vu, are also effects of temporal-lobe stimulation.”

“It wasn’t dйjа vu,” Joanna said, but Richard was already lost in the scans, so she ate her Cheetos and went down to ask Mrs. Woollam about the duration of her NDEs and the manner of her return.

“I was standing there looking up at the staircase,” Mrs. Woollam, even more fragile-looking in a white knitted bed jacket, said, “and then I was in the ambulance.”

“You weren’t doing anything?” Joanna asked. “Like walking back down the tunnel? You were just standing there?”

“Yes. I heard a voice, and I knew I had to go back, and there I was.”

“What did the voice say?”