“No,” Joanna said, rounding the corner and coming, finally, to the elevators. She pushed the button, praying, Please don’t take forever. “We’ll let you know as soon as we do.”
“Good. Just give me a call,” he said. “I can do it just about anytime.”
The elevator finally, blessedly opened and Joanna stepped in. For one awful moment she thought he intended to follow her, but he had just stepped up to the elevator’s edge. “So anyway, Ace wasn’t looking where he was going, and he stepped in an open hatch and fell two full decks. Broke both legs. Spent the next year and a half in a hospital on Oahu.”
Joanna pushed “eight” and the door started slowly, slowly to close. “ ‘So where did all your hurrying get you?’ I asked him,” he said as the door slid shut. “You shoulda seen him, all hung up in traction and two plaster casts that went all the way up to his—”
He was still talking when the elevator door snicked shut. And probably still talking, Joanna thought, stepping out of the elevator on eight and looking for the room signs.
“830-850,” one of them said, pointing to the hall on the left. She started down it, looking for 841. Two Hispanic men in white coveralls stood down by the end, leaning over a cluster of buckets, mixing paint.
All of the doors in the hall were open except 841. Joanna knocked on it, banging progressively harder when no one answered. She tried the door. It was locked. “Do you know where Dr. Jamison is?” she called down to the painters.
They both shook their heads and went back to pouring paint from one bucket to another. Joanna frowned at the door, frustrated. Where were they? Had they gone someplace else to talk? To the cafeteria, maybe?
She walked down to the painters, who both straightened up, as if expecting to be lectured by her. “Did either of you see Dr. Jamison leave?” Joanna asked. They shook their heads again, with a timidity that made her wonder if either of them spoke English.
“Señor—” she began, and a young man stuck his head out of the door next to Dr. Jamison’s office and said, “You’re looking for Dr. Jamison? She had to go see somebody in the ER.”
“Thank you,” Joanna said. “Do you know if Dr. Wright was with her?”
He shook his head. “I just got back from lunch and saw her note.”
“Her note?”
“On the door,” he said, leaning around his door to point at Dr. Jamison’s. “Oh,” he said when he saw it wasn’t there. “Somebody must have taken it down.”
Richard. He’d seen the note, pocketed it, gone down to the ER after her. Or the painters had taken it down. She considered asking them, then discarded the idea. “Can I use your phone for a second?” she asked the young man.
“Sure,” he said, opening the door farther to let her in.
She dialed the lab, listened to the ring till the answering machine clicked on, and hung up. “Thanks,” she said, and started back for the elevators, trying to think what the fastest way down to the ER was. Back down to third, take the walkway to main, and the elevators down to first, she thought, pushing the button for the elevator. I should have punched the button when I got off. It might be here by now.
She pushed the button again, thinking of Mr. Briarley pressing the ivory-and-gold button over and over and over, of him smacking A Night to Remember against his desk the same way, over and over and over—“Literature is a message!” he’d shouted, whacking the paperback for emphasis.
And that was the lecture she’d been trying to remember, the lecture that came welling up out of her long-term memory now when she no longer needed it, when she’d already figured out what the NDE was. “It’s a message!” he’d thundered, and she could see Ricky Inman cowering in his seat. She could see it all, the snow—not fog but snow—falling outside the windows and the words “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” on the board and Mr. Briarley in his gray tweed vest, hitting the red-and-white paperback against his desk, shouting, “What do you think these poems and novels and plays are? Boring, dusty artifacts? They’re not!” Smack. “They’re messages, just like the Titanic sent!” Smack. “Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Milton, William Shakespeare, they’re tapping out messages to you!”
He shook A Night to Remember at them. “They say the dead can’t speak, but they can! The people in this book died over sixty years ago, in the middle of the ocean, with no one around them for miles, but they still speak to you. They still send us messages—about love and courage and death! That’s what history is, and science, and art. That’s what literature is. It’s the people who went before us, tapping out messages from the past, from beyond the grave, trying to tell us about life and death! Listen to them!”
She had listened. And remembered. And over ten years later, while she was experiencing an NDE, Mr. Briarley had spoken to her out of the past, trying to tell her the NDE was a message.
The elevator opened, and she stepped in. On second thought, she’d better not risk third. Mr. Wojakowski might still be standing outside the door of the elevator, waiting to finish his story about Ace Willey. She’d better go down to second, cut through Radiology, and take the service elevator. She punched the button for “two.”
I’m doing what the brain does during an NDE, she thought, watching the floor numbers descend. Racing around, taking roundabout routes when there’s no direct way through, trying one thing, and then, when that doesn’t work, trying another. Asking Mr. Briarley for the answer, and then when he couldn’t help her, trying to find the textbook, looking through transcripts, asking Kit, asking Maisie.
Just like in Carl’s coma—heading first for the railroad tracks, then, when the wires were cut, trying to get to the mesas. Images of searching and not finding, of lines down and doors locked and passages blocked. Images of the dying brain.
And images of hurrying because there’s not any time. Brain death occurs in four to six minutes, and the mail room’s already flooded, the elevator’s not working, it’s already getting dark.
Images generated by endorphins and electrical impulses, frantically sending out SOSs, desperately reaching out for something to latch on to, like Coma Carl grabbing for her wrist. And the rest of it, the tunnels and relatives and Angels of Light, the gardens and slanting decks and sandstone deserts are nothing more than side effects, she thought, taking the hall that led to Surgery, passing a nurse she didn’t recognize, the desperate efforts of the conscious mind to keep up with what it’s experiencing, to make sense of sensations it can’t understand, searching through its long-term memories for its own connections, its own metaphors.
How could I not have recognized the metaphor? she thought. And ran straight into Mr. Mandrake.
“Dr. Lander. Just the person I wanted to see,” he said sternly. “I have been searching all over for you. You never answer your pages.”
“This really isn’t a good time, Mr. Mandrake,” she said, sidestepping to go around him. “I’m—” but he’d taken a firm grip on her arm.
“This will only take a few minutes,” he said smoothly, steering her over to the side of the hallway. “Now that you’ve become one of Dr. Wright’s subjects, I’m sure you’ve realized that his lab-produced hallucinations bear no resemblance to authentic NAEs. Or, if you, through some fluke, have experienced a true NAE, then you know that it is real, that what you are seeing is the afterlife that awaits—”
“I don’t have time to discuss this with you right now,” Joanna said and started to walk rapidly away.
He darted in front of her. “That’s exactly the issue. You don’t have time to discuss your findings with me. All of your time is taken up with Dr. Wright’s project, which can’t possibly lead to anything useful.”