“Maybe he thinks the IV lines are ropes,” Guadalupe, her eye swollen shut, had said helpfully when she gave Joanna a transcript of the episode.

“Maybe,” Joanna had said, but she didn’t think so. He doesn’t know the IV lines are there, she thought, or the snow or the nurses. He’s a long way from here, seeing something different altogether. Like all the heart attack and car accident and hemorrhage patients she’d interviewed over the last two years, wading through the angels and tunnels and relatives they’d been programmed to see, listening for the offhand comment, the seemingly irrelevant detail that might give a clue as to what they had seen, where they had been.

“The light enveloped me, and I felt happy and warm and safe,” Lisa Andrews, whose heart had stopped during a C-section, had said, but she’d shivered as she said it, and then sat for a long time, gazing bleakly into the distance. And Jake Becker, who had fallen off a ledge while hiking in the Rockies, had said, trying to describe the tunnel, “It was a long way away.”

“The tunnel was a long way away from you?” Joanna had asked.

“No” Jake had said angrily. “I was right there. In it. I’m talking about where it was. It was a long way away.”

Joanna went over to the window and looked out at the snow. It was coming down faster now, covering the cars in the visitors’ parking lot. An elderly woman in a gray coat and a plastic rain bonnet was laboriously scraping snow off her windshield. Heart attack weather, Vielle had said. Car accident weather. Dying weather.

She pulled the curtains closed and went back over to the bed and sat down in the chair beside it. Carl wasn’t going to speak, and the cafeteria would close in another ten minutes. She needed to go now if she ever wanted to eat. But she sat on, watching the monitors, with their shifting lines, shifting numbers, watching the almost imperceptible rise and fall of Carl’s sunken chest, looking at the closed curtains with the snow falling silently beyond them.