Passage

“A dog tag?” Joanna said, frowning.

“So we’d know what its name was,” he said. “I told her its name was Fido, that all Roman dogs were named Fido.”

“Did she believe you?”

“Are you kidding? This is Maisie we’re talking about.”

Joanna nodded. “I’d better go at least check in with her so she won’t think I’ve forgotten her.” She rubbed her forehead tiredly. She was getting a headache, probably because she hadn’t had anything to eat for hours. I’ll stop by for a minute, and then I’m going home, she thought.

“Before you go see Maisie, I want to show you something,” Richard said. He led the way up to the lab. “You were right about the Titanic. It wasn’t a random memory.”

“It wasn’t?”

“No,” he said, stopping at the door and unlocking it. “I’ve just been up conferring with Dr. Jamison. After you left, I got to thinking about what you said about the NDEs not being varied enough to support a theory of randomness,” he opened the door and switched on the lights, “and I decided I should take another look at the synapse firings in the frontal cortex.” He walked over to the console and switched it on. “And when I did, I noticed something interesting.” He began typing in commands. “Are you familiar with Dr. Lambert Oswell’s work?”

Joanna shook her head.

“He’s done extensive research on long-term memory, mapping L+R patterns,” Richard said. “When you ask a subject a straightforward question, like, ‘Who won the Battle of Midway?’ you get a fairly simple L+R pattern.”

“Unless you’re Mr. Wojakowski,” Joanna said, “in which case it reminds you of a story.”

Richard grinned. “Or a whole novel. Anyway,” he said, typing, “the pattern looks like this.” He called up a series of scans. “See how the neural firings very quickly become localized? That’s the mind zeroing in on the target, as Mr. Wojakowski would say. Now, no two people would have the same pattern for ‘Who won the Battle of Midway?’ because not only is there no particular storage location for a given memory, but the same memory may be stored in any number of categories: World War II, islands, Pacific Ocean, or words beginning with M, to name just a few. The pattern’s not even always the same for a given question. Oswell asked identical questions at intervals of three months and got different L+R patterns each time. But,” he said, “he was able to come up with mathematical formulas for the patterns that make it possible for us to tell if a pattern is an L+R or something else.”

He typed some more, and the right-hand scan disappeared and was replaced by another one. “The pattern’s different, and so is the formula, for a question like ‘What is the Yorktown?’ ”

Or, “What was it Mr. Briarley said that day in class?” Joanna thought, watching the neural pathways wink on and off, red to green, yellow to blue, blossoming like fireworks and then fading out. He had been sitting on the edge of his desk, talking about what? Macbeth? Subjunctive clauses? “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”?

“If I ask a question like ‘What is the Yorktown?’—assuming you’re not Mr. Wojakowski—the L+R pattern involves the selection and discarding of possibilities and is much more complex. It’s also broader, since it’s searching through a whole variety of memories for the information. Is it a place? A battle? The name of a movie? A racehorse? The pattern has a much higher degree of apparent randomness.”

Joanna squinted at the screen, trying to follow what he was saying, her headache getting worse by the minute. “And that’s what the pattern in the scans resembles?”

“No,” he said. “However, Dr. Jamison reminded me that Dr. Oswell also did a series of experiments on image interpretation. He showed his subjects an abstract—”

“Do you have any food?” Joanna interrupted.

Richard turned and looked at her.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “but I didn’t get any dinner. Or lunch, now that I think of it, and I thought maybe you —”

“Sure.” He was already reaching in his pockets. “Let’s see, I’ve got a Mars bar,” he said, examining the items as he pulled them out, “…some cashews… Listen, we could go get some real dinner if you’d rather. I don’t suppose the cafeteria’s open at this hour?”

“The cafeteria’s never open.”

“We could run to Taco Pierre’s.”

“No, I’ve still got to go see Maisie,” she said, taking the Mars bar. “This is fine. You were saying?”

“Oh, yeah, well, in a separate series of experiments, Oswell showed subjects a scene in which objects and shapes were kept intentionally vague and abstract.”

“Like a Rorschach,” Joanna said.

“Like a Rorschach,” Richard said. “The subjects were asked, ‘What is this a picture of?’ Here’s an orange.” He handed it to her. “In most cases the pattern was similar to that of the open-ended L+R with increased activity in the memory cortex, and the subjects described the pattern as being… Skittles… and a package of cheese crackers with peanut butter. Nothing to drink, though, so maybe peanut butter’s a bad idea. I could get you a Coke from the vending machine—”

“I’m fine,” Joanna said, peeling the orange. “They described the pattern as being?”

“Just what you’d expect,” Richard said. “A big white oblong object on a blue background with a round blob of pink off to the right. However, in some instances, the subjects answered, ‘It’s Antarctica. There’s the ice and the sky. And there’s the sun setting.’ In those cases, the subject had searched through long-term memory to find a scenario that explained not only the separate images, but a metaphor for all the shapes and colors the subject was seeing.”

A metaphor. Something about a metaphor. That’s what triggered the feeling at Dish Night, Joanna thought, Vielle’s saying something about a metaphor. No, Vielle had called optioning Richard a simile, and she had corrected her, had told her a simile was a comparison using “like” or “as” while a metaphor was a direct comparison. Mr. Briarley taught me that, she thought, and tried to remember exactly what he had said. Something about fog.

“…with an abstract scene, the scans showed an entirely different pattern,” Richard said, “one that was much more scattered and chaotic—”

Fog. Ricky Inman, she thought, asking Mr. Briarley about a poem. “I don’t get it,” he’d said, rocking back in his chair. “How can fog come on little cat feet?”

And Mr. Briarley, picking up an eraser as if he were going to throw it and sweeping it across the blackboard in wide strokes, searching for a stub of chalk, printing the words in short strokes. She could hear the tap of chalk against slate as he printed the words. “Metaphor. [Tap.] A direct or implied comparison. [Tap.] ‘This is a nightmare.’ [Tap.] As opposed to simile. [Tap.] ‘Silent as death.’ [Tap.] Does that help, Mr. Inman?”

And Ricky, rocking so far back he threatened to overbalance, saying, “I still don’t get it. Fog doesn’t have feet.”

“The mathematical formula for the frontal-cortical activity is identical,” Richard said. “Your mind was clearly searching through long-term memory for a unifying image that would explain all the sensations you were experiencing—the sound, the tunnel, the light, figures in white. And, as you said, it all fit. The Titanic was that unifying image.”

“And that’s why I saw it,” Joanna said, “because it was the best match for the stimuli out of all the images in my long-term memory.”

“Yes,” Richard said. “The pattern—”

“What about Mercy General? Or Pompeii?”

“Pompeii?” he said blankly.

“Mercy General fits all the stimuli—long dark walkways, figures in white, buzzing code alarms—and so does Pompeii. The people wore white togas, the sky was pitch-black from ashfall,” she said, ticking the reasons off on her fingers, “it had long covered colonnades like tunnels, the volcano’s erupting made a loud, hard-to-describe sound, and Maisie talked to me about it not two hours before I went under.”

“There may be more than one suitable image in long-term, and the one that happens to be accessed first is chosen,” Richard said. “That wouldn’t necessarily be the most recent memory. Remember, acetylcholine levels are elevated, which increases the brain’s ability to access memories and see associations. Or the brain may only be able to access memories in certain areas. Some areas may be blocked or shut down.”

Like Mr. Briarley’s memory, Joanna thought. “That isn’t why I saw the Titanic,” she said. “I know where the memory came from.”