Passage. Part 6

Richard nodded. "There was a dog on the Hindenburg. Named Ulla. It survived the crash."

She wasn't listening. "Did she say what she wanted to talk to me about?"

"Near-death experiences."

"Oh, dear, I hope she didn't go into V-fib and code again."

"I don't think so. She was up and around. The nurse had a hard time keeping her in bed."

"I should go see her," Joanna said, looking up the stairs.

She crept up them and opened the door a crack. "...an Angel of Light, with golden light radiatingfrom him like sparkling diamonds," Mr. Mandrake was saying.

She eased the door shut. "Still there."

"Good," Richard said, "because I haven't had a chance to convince you to come work with me on my project yet, and you haven't finished telling me what people experience during an NDE. And we haven't had dessert yet." He reached in his lab coat pocket and pulled out a package of peanut M&M's.

She shook her head. "No, thanks. They'd just make me thirsty."

"Oh, in that case," he said. He reached in his right pocket. "Mocha Frappuccino," he said, pulling out a bottle and setting it on the step, and then pulling out another. "Or..." he read the label, "mandarin green tea with ginseng."

"You're amazing," Joanna said, taking the Frappuccino. "What else do you have in there?

Champagne? Lobster thermidor? All I've got in my pockets is a postcard and my tape recorder and..." she fumbled in her cardigan pockets, "...my pager-oops, which I'd better turn off. I don't want it going off and giving away our position to Mr. Mandrake," she switched it off, "and three used Kleenexes." She opened the Frappuccino. "You wouldn't have a straw, would you?"

He pulled a paper-wrapped one out of his pocket. "You said there's a sensation of darkness,"

he said, handing it to her. "Not a tunnel?"

She unwrapped the straw. "The majority of them call it a tunnel, but that isn't what they describe.

For some it seems to be a spinning vortex, for others a pa.s.sage or hallway or narrow room. Several of my subjects have described darkness collapsing in around them."

Richard nodded. "The visual cortex shutting down." He jerked a thumb up toward the door.

"What about the life review?"

"Only about a quarter of my subjects describe having one," Joanna said, sipping her Frappuccino, "but the flas.h.i.+ng of your life before your eyes is a well-doc.u.mented phenomenon in accidents. Mr. Mandrake says the NDE, or near-afterlife experience, as he prefers to call it-"

"He told me," Richard said, grimacing.

"-has ten core elements: out-of-body experience, sound, tunnel, light, dead relatives, Angel of Light, a feeling of peace and love, a life review, the bestowing of universal knowledge, and a command to return. Most of my subjects experience three or four of the elements, usually the sound, the tunnel, the light, and a sense that people or angels are present, though when they're questioned, they have trouble describing them."

"That sounds like temporal-lobe stimulation," he said. "It can cause a feeling of being in a holy presence without any accompanying visual image. It can also cause flashbacks and a.s.sorted sounds, including voices, but so can carbon dioxide buildup, and certain endorphins. That's part of the problem-there are several physical processes that could cause the phenomena described in an NDE.""And Mr. Mandrake will claim that the effects produced in the laboratory aren't the same as the ones the NDEer is experiencing. In his book Mr. Mandrake says the lights and tunnel vision produced during anoxia experiments are completely unlike the ones his patients describe."

"And without an objective standard, there's no way to disprove that," Richard said. "NDE accounts are not only subjective, they're hearsay."

"And vague," Joanna said. "So your project is hoping to develop an objective standard?"

"No," he said. "I've got one. Three years ago I was using the RIPT scan to map brain activity.

You ask the subject to count to five, what his favorite color is, what roses smell like, and locate the areas of synaptical activity. And in the middle of the experiment, one of the subjects coded."

"Because of the scan?"

"No. The scan itself's no more dangerous than a CAT scan. Less, because there's no radiation involved. It was a ma.s.sive coronary. Completely unrelated."

"Did he die?" Joanna asked, thinking of Greg Menotti.

"Nope. The crash cart team revived him, he had a bypa.s.s, and he was fine."

"And he'd had an NDE?"

Richard nodded. "And we had a picture of it." He reached in his lab coat pocket and pulled out an accordion-folded strip of paper. "It was three minutes before the crash cart could get there. The RIPT scan was running the entire time."

He s.h.i.+fted so he was sitting next to her and unfolded the long strip of pictures. They showed the same black cross-section of the brain she'd seen in PET scan photos, with areas colored in blue and green and red, but in sharper detail than she'd seen in the PET scan photos, and with rows and rows of coded data along either side.

"Red indicates the greatest level of activity and blue the lowest," Richard said. He pointed to an orangish-red area on the pictures. "This is the temporal lobe," he said, "and this," pointing to a smaller splash of red, "is the hippocampus." He handed her the strip. "You're looking at an NDE."

Joanna stared at the splotches of orange and yellow and green in fascination. "So it is a real thing."

"That depends on what you mean by real," he said. "See this area where there's no activity?

That's the visual cortex, and this and this are sensory areas, where outside information is processed.

The brain isn't getting any data from outside. The only stimuli are coming from deep inside the brain, which is bad news for Mandrake's theory. If the patient were actually seeing a bright light or an angel, the visual cortex here and here," he pointed, "would be activated."

Joanna stared at the dark blue areas. "What did he see?" she asked. "The man who coded."

"Mr. O'Reirdon," Richard said. "A tunnel, a light, and several scenes from his childhood, all insuccession."

"The life review," Joanna murmured.

"My guess is that those images are what account for the activation here," he said, pointing at yellow-green spots in a succession of the pictures. "These are random firing of long-term-memory synapses."

"Did he see a s.h.i.+ning figure in white?" Joanna asked.

He shook his head. "He felt a holy presence that told him to come back, and then he was on the table."

He indicated a picture near the end of the strip. "This is where he came out of the NDE state.

You can see the radically different pattern. Activity drops off sharply in the temporal lobe and increases in the visual and auditory cortexes."

Joanna wasn't listening. She was thinking, they always talk about going and coming back, as if it were a real place. NDEers all talked about it that way. They said, "I came back to the ambulance then," or, "I went through the tunnel," or, "The whole time I was there, I felt so peaceful and safe."

And Greg Menotti had said, "Too far away for her to come," as if he were no longer in the ER but had gone somewhere else. Far. "That far country from whose bourne no traveller returns,"

Shakespeare had called death.

"The greatest level of activity is here," Richard was saying, "next to the Sylvian fissure in the anterior temporal lobe, which indicates the cause may be temporal-lobe stimulation. Temporal-lobe epileptics report voices, a divine presence, euphoria, and auras."

"A number of my subjects describe auras surrounding the figures in white," Joanna said, "and light radiating from them. Several of them, when they talked about the light, spread their hands out as if to indicate rays." She demonstrated.

"This is exactly the kind of information I need," Richard said. "I want you to come work with me on this project."

"But I don't know how to read RIPT scans."

"You don't have to. That's my department. I need you to tell me exactly the kind of thing you've been telling me-"

The door banged open, and a nurse clattered down the steps. Joanna and Richard both made a dive for the landing, but it was too late. She'd already seen them.

"Oh," the nurse said, looking surprised and then interested. "I didn't know anything was going on in here." She gave Richard a winsome smile.

"You can't get through this way," Joanna said. "They painted the steps."

She arched a speculative eyebrow. "And you two are waiting for them to dry?""Yes," Richard said.

"Is Mr. Mandrake still up there?" Joanna asked. "In the hall?"

"No," she said, still smiling at Richard.

"Are you sure?" Joanna asked.

"The only thing in the hall is the supper cart."

"Supper cart?" Joanna said. "Good Lord, how late is it?" She glanced at her watch. "Oh, my gosh, it's after six."

The eyebrow again. "Lost all track of time, did you? Well, have fun," she said, and waved at Richard. She clattered up the stairs and out.

"I had no idea it was this late," Joanna said, wadding up the energy-bar wrapper and sticking it in her pocket. She stood, gathering up the Frappuccino bottle and the apple core.

Richard ran up two stairs and turned, blocking her way. "You can't go yet. You haven't agreed to work with me on the project."

"But I already interview everyone who comes into the hospital," Joanna said. "I'd be glad to share my transcripts with you-"

"I'm not talking about those people. I want you to interview my volunteers. You're an expert at, as you said, separating the wheat from the chaff. That's what I want you to do: interview my subjects, separate out their actual experiences so I can see how it relates to their RIPT scan maps."

"Their RIPT scan maps?" Joanna said, bewildered. "I don't understand. Very few people code in the hospital, and even if they do, you'd only have four to six minutes to get your scanner down to the ER, and-"

"No, no," he said. "You don't understand. I'm not observing NDEs. I'm manufacturing them."

4.

"I beg your pardon, monsieur. I did not mean to do it."

-Marie Antoinette, after she had accidentally stepped on the executioner's foot while mounting to the guillotine.

"You manufacture NDEs? You mean, like in Flatliners?" Joanna blurted out, and then thought, you shouldn't have said that. You're alone in a stairwell with him, and he's clearly a nutcase."Flatliners?" Richard said, horrified. "You mean that movie where they stopped people's hearts and then revived them before they were brain dead? Of course not. Manufacturing's the wrong word. I should have said simulating."

"Simulating," Joanna said, still wary.

"Yes, using a psychoactive drug called dithetamine. Wait, let me start at the beginning. Mr.

O'Reirdon coded, and we got his NDE on tape, so to speak, but, as you can imagine, I wasn't eager to publish that fact. Mr. Mandrake's book had just come out, he was on all the talk shows claiming the afterlife was real, and I could just imagine what would happen if I showed up with photographic proof." He moved his spread hand through the air, as if displaying a headline: " 'Scientist Says Near-Death Experience Real.' "

"No, no," Joanna said, " 'Scientist Takes Photo of Heaven,' with an obviously faked picture of the pearly gates superimposed on a diagram of the brain."

"Exactly," Richard said, "and besides, it didn't have anything to do with the mapping project I was working on. So I doc.u.mented the scans and Mr. O'Reirdon's NDE account and stuck them in a drawer. Then, two years later, I was reading about a study showing the effects of psychoactive drugs on temporal-lobe activity. There was a photo of an fPET scan of a patient on dithetamine, and I thought, That looks familiar, and got out Mr. O'Reirdon's scans. They showed the same pattern."

"Dithetamine?" Joanna said.

"It's a drug similar to PCP," Richard said, fumbling in his lab coat pockets, and Joanna wondered if he was going to come up with a vial full of the drug. He pulled out a roll of spearmint Life Savers. "After-dinner mint?" he said, offering Joanna the roll. She took one.

"It doesn't produce PCP's psychotic side effects," Richard said, peeling back the paper covering the Life Savers, "or its high, but it does cause hallucinations, and when I called the doctor who conducted the study and asked him to describe them, he said his subjects reported floating above their bodies and then entering a dark tunnel with a light at the end of it and a radiant being standing in the light. And I knew I was on to something."

To be able to find out what happened after death was something people had always been fascinated with, as witness the popularity of spiritualism and Mr. Mandrake's books. n.o.body'd ever figured out a scientific way to do it, though, unless you counted Harry Houdini, whose attempt to communicate with his wife from beyond the grave had failed, and Lavoisier.

Sentenced to die on the guillotine, the great French chemist had proposed an experiment to prove or disprove the hypothesis that the beheaded retained consciousness after death. Lavoisier had said he would blink his eyes for as long as he retained consciousness, and he had. He had blinked twelve times.

But it might have been nothing more than a reflex action, like that of chickens running around with their heads cut off, and there had been no way to verify what had happened. Until now. "So your project involves giving patients dithetamine and putting them under a RIPT scan," Joanna said. "And then interviewing them?""Yes, and they're reporting tunnels and lights and angels, all right, but I don't know if they're the same kind of phenomena NDEers experience, or if it's a totally different type of hallucination."

"And that's what you'd want me for," Joanna asked, "to interview your subjects and tell you if I thought their accounts matched those of people who'd had an NDE?"

Richard nodded. "And I'd want you to obtain a detailed account of what they've experienced.

Their subjective experience is an indicator of which brain areas are being stimulated and which neurotransmitters are involved. I really need your NDE interviewing expertise on the project," Richard said. "The accounts I've been able to get from my subjects haven't been very enlightening."

"Then they must be NDEs," Joanna said. "Unless Mr. Mandrake's been telling them what to say, NDEers are notoriously vague, and if you try to press them for details, you run the risk of influencing their testimony."

"Exactly," Richard said, "which is why I need you. You know how to ask questions that aren't leading, and you have experience with NDEs. Except for the core elements, I have no way of knowing how the dithetamine hallucinations compare to real NDEs. And I think it would be useful to you, too," he said earnestly. "You'd have the opportunity to interview subjects in a controlled environment."

And without worrying about Mr. Mandrake getting to them first, she thought.

"So what do you say?" Richard asked.

"I don't know," Joanna said, rubbing her temple tiredly. "It sounds wonderful but I'll have to think about it."

"Sure. Of course," he said. "It's a lot to lay on you all at once, and I know you've had a hard day."

Yes, she thought, and saw Greg Menotti's body lying there on the examining table, pale and cold. And uninhabited. Gone. "You don't have to decide now," Richard was saying. "You'll want to see the setup, read my grant proposal. You don't have to make a decision tonight."