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.
But even though the answer wasn’t in the Bible, it was somewhere. The feeling that she knew what it meant persisted, and sometimes, listening to Mr. Sage’s interminable pauses or ducking into an elevator to get away from Mr. Mandrake, she felt she almost had it. That if she just had an uninterrupted half-hour to concentrate, she could get it.
But there were no half-hours. Mrs. Haighton called to say Thursday wouldn’t work, and Vielle, and Maisie, to tell Joanna she was back in the hospital. “I went into A-fib again,” she said matter-of-factly. “I’ve been here a whole day. Don’t you ever answer your pages?”
No, Joanna thought. They were always from Mr. Mandrake, trying to find out from her who their subjects were and what they’d experienced.
“I need to see you right away,” Maisie said. “I’m in the same room as before.”
Joanna promised she’d be down right after Mr. Sage’s session. He saw a tunnel (dark), a light (bright), and some people (maybe), which it took an hour and a half to get out of him. It was a positive pleasure to talk to Maisie.
“You never told me why you wanted to know what a Victory garden was,” Joanna said, trying not to look appalled at Maisie’s badly puffed face. Fluid retention, Joanna thought. A bad sign.
“Oh,” Maisie said, “because Emmett Kelly, he’s this clown who has a really sad face and raggedy clothes, I’ve got a picture—it’s the big red book with the volcano,” she said. “It’s in my Barbie bag.”
“I see Ms. Sutterly brought your books,” Joanna said, looking through the bag.
“What’s this?” Joanna asked, bringing it over to the bed. “Pompeii?”
“Pompeii’s the city,” Maisie corrected her. “Mount Vesuvius is the volcano. But this is Mount Pelee. It killed thirty thousand people in like two minutes.” She opened the book and began turning pages filled with photos and maps and newspaper headlines. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, the sinking of the
“Here it is,” Maisie said, wheezing a little. With the mere effort of turning pages? Maisie showed Joanna a double-page spread of photos. The one at the top was of Emmett Kelly, with his white-painted downturned mouth, his battered hat and enormous flopping shoes, running toward the circus tent with a bucket of water. There was a look of horror and desperation on his face, visible even under the clown makeup, but Maisie seemed blissfully unaware of it.
“Emmett Kelly helped get all of these little kids out of the fire,” she said, “and there was this one little girl, he saved her, and after he got her out of the tent, he said, ‘Go over there in the Victory garden and wait for your mother.’ So she’d be out of the way.”
“Oh,” Joanna said, “and you thought that was some sort of special place they had at circuses back then?”
“No,” Maisie said. “I thought a victory was a kind of vegetable.” She pushed the book around so the other half of the double page was facing Joanna and pointed at a man in a tall bandleader’s hat, waving a baton. “That’s the bandleader. When the fire started, he made the band play ‘The Stars and Stripes Forever.’ Do you know how that goes?”
“Yes.” Joanna hummed a few bars for her.
“Oh, I know that song,” Maisie said. “That’s the duck song, ‘Be kind to your web-footed friends.’ If you’re at a circus and you hear that song, you need to get out of there fast. It means there’s a fire or a lion loose or something.”
“I didn’t know that.”
Maisie nodded wisely. “It’s like a signal. Whenever the band plays it, all the circus people know to come ’cause there’s an emergency. Like when somebody codes. How come Emmett Kelly’s clothes are all raggedy?”
Joanna explained he was supposed to look like a tramp and then, because her humming “The Stars and Stripes Forever” had reminded her of Coma Carl’s humming, went up to see him for a few minutes.
His wife said he was having a good day, which meant he hadn’t yanked out his IV in his flailings and hadn’t been ambushed by the Vietcong, but Joanna thought he looked much thinner. When she went out to the nurses’ station, Guadalupe gave her an index card of his murmurings, saying, “He hasn’t said much lately.”
“Does he still row on the lake?” Joanna asked.
“No,” Guadalupe said.
Joanna looked at the card. “No,” he had said. “…have to… male… patches…,” and underneath, scrawled in a different hand, “red.”
Joanna transcribed the words, entering them onto Carl’s computer file along with “water” and “oh, grand”
