Passage

“Okay. It started in L.A.,” Nina went on chattily. “Attacks on ER personnel out there have increased twenty- five percent, and now it’s here. Last week a nurse over at Swedish—”

“Nina!” Vielle said dangerously. “I said I’d be there in a minute.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Nina said, cowed, and went off toward the front.

Joanna waited till she was out of earshot, and then said, “Attacks on ER personnel up twenty-five percent, and you’re lecturing me on doing something dangerous?”

“All right,” Vielle said, putting her hands up. “Truce. But I still think you’re crazy.”

“It’s mutual,” Joanna said, and at Vielle’s skeptical expression, “I’ll be fine. There’s nothing to worry about.”

But, lying on the examining table that afternoon, looking up at the masked overhead light and waiting for Tish to start the IV, Joanna felt a dull ache of anxiety. It’s the nervousness patients always feel, she thought. It comes from having a hospital gown on and your glasses off. And from lying flat on your back, waiting for a nurse to do things to you.

And not just any nurse. Tish, who had said, when Joanna emerged from the dressing room, “How did you manage to talk Dr. Wright into sending you under?”

Joanna had wondered, considering Vielle’s out-of-left-field reaction, if Tish would suddenly voice all kinds of objections, too, and she did, but not the kind Joanna expected.

“How come you get to do this, and I don’t?” she had asked, as if Joanna had talked Richard into taking her to Happy Hour. Joanna explained as best she could from her supine and nearsighted position. “Oh, right, I forgot, you’re a doctor, and I’m only a lowly nurse,” Tish said and began slapping electrodes on Joanna’s chest.

She would have thought Tish would like the prospect of having Joanna absent and Richard all to herself for the duration of the session. I should be nervous, she thought. Tish is liable to start flirting with Richard and forget all about me. Or she’ll decide this is a good time to get rid of the competition once and for all, and pull the plug.

But there was no plug to be pulled. Even if the two of them went off to Conrad’s and left her lying there, she would simply wake up when the dithetamine wore off. Or kick out of her NDE like Mrs. Troudtheim.

Which was something else to worry about. What if she, like Mrs. Troudtheim, proved unable to achieve an NDE-state? Mrs. Troudtheim had kicked out again this last session, even faster than before, in spite of the fact that Richard had adjusted the dosage.

“I don’t know what else to try,” Richard had said, looking at her scans after the session. “Maybe you’re right, and she’s one of those forty percent who don’t have NDEs.”

What if I’m one of them, too? Joanna worried. What would they do then? “Relax,” Tish snapped, raising her knee to put the pad under it. “You’re stiff as a board.” She shoved a pad under Joanna’s left arm and came around the table to do the other side.

Joanna consciously tried to relax, breathing slowly in and then releasing the breath, willing her arms, her legs, to lie limply. Relax. Let go. She stared at the blacked-out light fixture. Without warning, Tish wrapped a rubber tube around her upper arm and twisted a knot in it. She jerked her head around to look at what Tish was doing. “Relax!” Tish ordered, and began poking around the inside of her elbow, looking for a vein.

If nothing else, I’ll know a lot more about how to treat our subjects, Joanna thought. They need to be told everything that’s going to happen. They need to be told, “I’m going to start the IV now. Small poke,” Joanna thought.

Tish didn’t say anything. She swabbed Joanna’s arm, jabbed in the needle, attached the IV line, all without a word. She disappeared out of Joanna’s field of vision, and Joanna felt the sleep mask being placed over her eyes and something icy on her forehead. “What are you doing?” she asked involuntarily.

“Attaching the electrodes to your scalp,” Tish said, irritated. “They say doctors make the worst patients, and they’re right. Relax!”

Joanna resolved to give Mr. Sage and Mrs. Troudtheim a running account of every procedure the next time they went under. And they shouldn’t be left lying on the table for long periods of time with no idea what’s going on, she thought, straining to hear voices or footsteps or something. She wondered if Tish and Richard had gone off to Happy Hour. No, she would have heard the door shut. Could Tish have put the headphones on her without her realizing it?

“All ready?” Richard’s voice said abruptly in her left ear, and she groped blindly for his arm. “You’re sure you want to do this?” Richard said worriedly, and the anxiety in his voice made hers vanish completely.

“I’m positive,” she said, and smiled in what she hoped was his direction. “I’m determined to solve the mystery of the ringing or the buzzing once and for all.”

“All right,” he said. “You may not see much. It sometimes takes a couple of tries to get the dosage right.”

“I know.”

“You’re sure about this?”

“I’m sure,” she said, and was. “Let’s get this show on the road.” She let go of his arm.

“Okay,” he said, and someone—Richard? Tish?—fitted the headphones over her ears. Joanna relaxed into the white-noise silence and the darkness, waiting for the sedative to take effect. She breathed in deeply. In. Out. In. Out. It isn’t working, she thought, and heard a sound.

Tish didn’t get the headphones on properly, she thought. “Richard,” she started to say, and realized she wasn’t in the lab. She was in a narrow space. She could feel walls on either side of her. A coffin, she thought, but it was too wide for that, and she was standing up. She looked down at her body, but she couldn’t see anything, the space was completely dark. She raised her hand in front of her face, but she couldn’t see it either, or feel the movement of her arm.

I can’t see because of the sleep mask, she thought, and tried to take it off, but she wasn’t wearing it. She was wearing her glasses. She felt her forehead. There were no electrodes on her scalp, no headphones. She felt her arm. No IV.

I’m in the NDE, she thought, in the tunnel, but that wasn’t right either. It wasn’t a tunnel. It was a passage. Can you be more specific? she asked silently, and looked around her at the darkness.

It’s narrow, she thought, with no idea how she knew that. Or that there were walls on either side, that there weren’t walls in front of or behind her, and that there was a low ceiling. She stared up at the unseeable ceiling, as if willing her eyes to adjust, but the darkness remained absolute. And how do you know it’s not the roof of a tunnel?

She looked down at the floor, which she could not see either, and tapped her foot tentatively against it. The floor—if it was a floor—felt hard and smooth, like tile or wood, but her foot made no sound.

Maybe I’m barefoot, she thought. Paul McCartney was barefoot on that Beatles album cover, that’s how you knew he was dead. But Joanna couldn’t feel the floor against her skin, the way she would if she were barefoot. Maybe I don’t have feet. Or maybe I can’t hear. Her patients had talked about the Angel of Light talking to them, “but in thoughts, not words.” Perhaps the NDE was only visual.

But she remembered hearing a sound as she came through. She turned her head, trying to remember it. It had been a loud sound. She had heard it distinctly right after she came through. Or had it been as she was coming through? No, she had been in the lab, and then, abruptly, she was here.

As she thought it, she had the sudden feeling that she knew where “here” was, that it was somewhere familiar. No, that was the wrong word. Somewhere she recognized, even though the passage was completely dark.

It’s a place, she thought, a real place. I know where this is, and light poured into the passage ahead of her. She turned to look at it. It filled the corridor, blindingly bright, and she thought, now I’ll see where I am, but the light was too dazzling. It was like trying to look directly into headlights. You couldn’t see anything.

Headlights. “What if the light at the end of the tunnel turns out to be an oncoming train?” Vielle had said. Joanna looked instinctively down at her feet for railroad tracks, but the light came from all directions, the glare as intense from below as from ahead of her, so bright she had to close her eyes against the pain of the brightness.

No wonder her subjects had squinted. It was like someone turning on the light in the middle of the night, or shining a flashlight in your face. But neither one, because the light was golden.

Her patients said that, too—“it was golden”—and when she had said, “It wasn’t white?” they had said,