Passage

The woman with her hair down her back spoke to the bearded man. Joanna took another step forward, nearly up to the door, trying to hear. The bearded man said, “I’m sure it’s nothing.”

Joanna shot an anxious glance back down the passageway. That was what he’d said the last time, and then the woman had said, “It’s so cold,” and the NDE had ended. If she was going to test her theory that the passageway was the way back, that going back down the tunnel would end the NDE, she needed to do it now, before the NDE ended on its own, but she wanted to stay and hear what they were talking about.

It’s a clue to where this is, she thought, hesitating, poised on one foot, ready to run, trying to decide. Like Cinderella at the ball, with the clock striking midnight, she thought, and then, looking at the women again in their long white dresses, that’s what this must be, a ball. That’s why the woman’s hand on the bearded man’s arm was white, because she was wearing white gloves, and the sparkling flash when she moved her hand was jewels in a bracelet. And the young man was dressed in a white dinner jacket. She shaded her eyes against the light, trying to see what the man with the white beard was wearing.

“It’s so cold,” the young woman said, and Joanna gave her one last, frustrated glance, then turned and ran down the passageway.

And into the lab. “I want to hear about your return,” Richard said as soon as Tish had finished monitoring her and removed the electrodes and the IV.

“Was it — ?” he said and then clamped his lips shut. “Tell me about your return.”

She told him what she’d done. “Why? Did it look different on the scans?”

“Radically,” he said, pleased, and started over to the console, as if he were finished.

“Wait, you have to hear about the rest of the NDE,” Joanna said. “I saw another one of the core elements this time. Angels.”

“Angels?” Tish said. “Really?”

“No,” Joanna said, “but figures dressed all in white, or ‘snowy raiment,’ as Mr. Mandrake would say.”

“Did they have wings?” Tish asked.

“No,” Joanna said. “They weren’t angels. They were people. They were dressed in long white robes, and there was light all around them,” Joanna said. “I’d always assumed that people saw what they thought were angels and then gave them the traditional white robes and haloes because that was what they’d learned angels looked like in Sunday school. But now I wonder if it isn’t the other way around, that they see the white robes and the light surrounding them, and that’s what makes them think they’re angels.”

“Did they speak to you?” Tish asked.

“No, they didn’t seem to know I was there,” Joanna said. She told Richard what the woman had said.

“You could hear them talking,” he said.

“Yes,” she said, “and it wasn’t the telepathic communication some NDEers report. They were speaking, and I could hear some of what they said, and some I couldn’t, because they were too far away.”

“Or because it lacked content,” Richard said, “like the noise or the feeling of recognition.”

No, Joanna thought, typing her account into the computer that afternoon, because I don’t know what they said, and I know where the tunnel is. I’m sure of it.

Someplace with numbers on the doors and a door at the end, where people stood, milling around in white dresses. A party? A wedding? That would explain the preponderance of white. But why would they keep asking, “What’s happened?” Had the groom jilted the bride? And why would the men be in white, too? When was the last time you saw a bunch of men and women dressed in white, standing around complaining about the cold?

During a hospital fire drill, she thought. Hospitals are full of people wearing white, and that was where nearly all patients experienced their NDEs. The vast majority of them had their NDEs in an ER, surrounded by doctors and nurses and a buzzing code alarm and a resident, leaning over the unconscious patient, shining a light in their eyes, asking, “What happened to him?” It made perfect sense.

Except that the ER staff didn’t wear white, they wore green or blue or pink scrubs, and the trauma rooms weren’t numbered C8, C10, C12. C. What did C stand for?

Confabulation, she thought. Stop thinking about it. Get busy, which turned out to be easier than she thought. The torrent of NDEs continued for several days, and Joanna dutifully interviewed every one, though they didn’t prove all that useful. They were uniformly unable to describe what they’d experienced, as if ineffability had infected every aspect of their NDE: the length of time they’d been there, the manner of their return, the things they’d seen, including angels.

“They looked like angels,” Mr. Torres said irritably when Joanna asked him to describe the figures he’d seen standing in the light, and when she asked him if he could be more specific, “Haven’t you ever seen an angel?”