Passage

“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.