Zack shook his head.
“Any residual feelings or emotions?”
“Just a blank.”
“Any sense of your own physical self?”
“No.”
Dr. Luria asked a few more questions, then gave up, looking disappointed that he could recall nothing. They helped him to the screen, where he changed into his clothes.
“How about a coffee to help you wake up?” Sarah asked.
“Something cold. My mouth’s dry,” he said through the screen.
“We have some Poland Spring in the fridge.”
He pulled up his pants and tucked in his shirt. “Got anything else?”
“Such as what?”
“Root beer?”
“Root beer?”
He slipped on his shoes, then stepped out from behind the screen. They were all staring at him. “You said root beer?” Sarah looked frozen in place.
“If you have any.”
“Any particular brand?” Dr. Luria asked.
Did they stock a whole variety in their fridge? “I don’t know … A and W.”
“Is A and W root beer something you usually drink?”
“No. Any brand’ll be fine. What’s the problem?”
Luria approached him. “Zack, please bear with me. When was the last time you drank an A and W root beer?”
Zack’s head still felt buzzed, as if insects festered in his skull. “Huh?”
“Please, just answer the question. When was the last time you had an A and W root beer?”
“I don’t know,” Zack began. “I can’t remember the last time. Maybe when I was a kid … fifteen years ago, if ever. Why? What’s this all about?”
“Do you live near any stores, billboards, fast-food places, with A and W signs visible?”
“No.”
“Can you recall anyone in the recent past mentioning A and W or ordering one anywhere?”
“No.”
Luria turned the laptop toward him. “Is the A and W logo an image that’s familiar to you?”
“I think so, but I can’t tell you what it looks like.”
“But you probably recognize it, right?”
“I suppose.”
“But it’s not fresh in your head.”
“No.” The dark expectancy in Luria’s eyes set off a small charge in him. “What’s this all about?”
Luria nodded to Sarah. But instead of leaving for the drink, she produced a stepladder and moved it to a tall cabinet against the wall. She climbed up and removed a laptop flattened open on the top. When she got down, she turned the screen toward him, and on it was a shot of a frothy mug of A&W root beer.
“I don’t get it,” he said.
They were still staring at him. Then Dr. Luria said, “I think, my friend, you had an out-of-the-body experience.”
36
“A what?”
“An out-of-the-body experience. Do you know what that is?”
“Like when people have accidents and watch paramedics give them CPR or whatever?”
“Precisely. Or in an operating room, patients will report floating over the scene.”
“What does that have to do with root beer?”
“We conducted a test while you were in suspension,” Luria said. “You couldn’t see it from where you were, nor could we. But on top of that cabinet we placed that laptop with its screen opened to the ceiling. On it was an image randomly selected from hundreds. We had no idea what it was until you awoke. Your first request was for root beer, preferably A and W—the very image the computer had selected, visible only from above.”
The cabinet was about seven feet tall with nothing visible on the top. The ceiling about three feet above that was made of nonreflective panels, so there was no way he could see even if he stuck his head out of the MRI tube. “Couldn’t it be just a coincidence?”
“Statistically very unlikely, since you said you can’t recall the last time you had that brand,” Luria said.
“What about those images from the other day? Maybe it was one of them and stuck in my mind. I woke up thirsty, and that was the first thing I connected with.”
“Except that in suspension, your brain cells were anesthetized from communicating with each other. Your memory bank was dormant.”
“You mean even if that logo was in my head, I wouldn’t have remembered it?”
“Precisely.”
The skin on his scalp tightened.
“Another thing,” said Luria. “The resolution power of this machine can record minuscule variations in cell- pattern activity from visual stimuli. Those brain scans we did the other day allowed us to identify discrete neuropatterns with specific images. You follow?”
“Kind of.”
“In other words, the machine correlated particular images—kittens, sunsets, exotic cars, root beer logos, family photos—with neuroelectrical activity at the cell level.”
“Think of it as a neurostatic fingerprinting,” said Sarah. “What we saw in your brain activity patterns specifically correlates with that pattern when the A and W logo was shown to you the other day.”
“So you can recognize particular emotional states of people?”
“Yes, modes of joy, anger, sadness—a full spectrum of emotional states.”
“But pictures of birds or sunsets don’t create emotional differences.”
“You wouldn’t think,” Stern said. “But actually they do, but on a micro level. The brain creates very subtle differences, ‘microemotional’ reactions to particular stimuli. With more personal images, like your pet, girlfriend, a family member, or favorite vacation spot, there are more pronounced neuroreactions. Eventually we can develop full neuroelectrical signatures of test subjects’ various states. And those help us interpret what goes on during NDEs.
“Also, some of these individual signature patterns coincide with those of other test patients. In fact, some of these patterns are standard and give us a boilerplate code.”
“But I thought you said the anesthetic stopped the electrical activity in my brain.”
“That’s right.”
“Then how did you detect electrical patterns in the scans?”
“That’s the key question,” Stern said. “There’s a biochemical explanation. Part of your brain didn’t respond to the anesthetic. Possibly there’s an undiscovered sodium channel that did not react to the tetrodotoxin but still kept you in a flatline state.”
“I don’t follow.”
“Well, that specific neuroelectrical pattern regarding the root beer logo could only have been there had you woken up and climbed out of the MRI and up a ladder to the cabinet.”
“But that didn’t happen,” Zack said.
“That’s right,” said Dr. Luria. “The other explanation is that in the state of suspension, your consciousness transcended your brain. If you will, your spirit left your body.”
Zack’s mind felt stunned. “But how…?”
Sarah came over to him with a bottle of water. “Are you okay?”
