I had reached the wall; I started feeling along it for the door.
“Then legal and funding problems intervened, and our work was interrupted. Until recently. With the help of the university and interest from the National Geographic, Dr. Sorel and I have been able to continue the explorations that Dr. Noroguchi and I began. And your ability to paint will enable us to share with the world what we discover. The last unexplored frontier, the ‘undiscovered country’ of which Shakespeare wrote, is now within the reach of—”
“You’re talking about killing yourselves,” I interrupted. “You’re talking about killing me.”
“Only temporarily,” said Dr. Sorel. It was the first thing she’d said; I felt her hand on my arm and I shuddered.
“Dr. Sorel has been to LAD space many times,” DeCandyle said, “and as you can see—forgive me; I mean tell—she has returned. Can it be called true death, if it is not final? And the compensations are—”
“Sorry,” I interrupted again. Feeling behind me for the door, I was stalling for time. “What with insurance and royalties, I’m pretty well fixed.”
“I am not speaking of money,” Dr. DeCandyle said, “Although you will of course be paid. There is another and, perhaps for you, more important compensation than money.”
I found the door. I was just about to go through it when he said the only words that could have turned me around:
“In LAD space, you will once again be able to see.”
By two that afternoon I had completed my physical and was being strapped into what DeCandyle and Sorel called “the car” for my first mission into LAD space.
Of all the scenes of heaven and hell and the regions between which I was to witness, the one I most wish I was able to paint is that empty-sounding room and the car that was to carry me beyond this life. All I had was DeCandyle’s description of the car. It was a black (appropriately) open fiberglass cockpit with two seats: I visualized it as a Corvette without the wheels.
Dr. Sorel strapped me in, while DeCandyle explained that the frame contained the electroshock revival mechanism and the monitoring systems. Around my left wrist, she fastened a Velcro gauntlet which contained the intradermal injector for the atropine chemical mix that would shut down my sympathetic nervous system.
In what I later realized was a shrewd psychological move, I was seated on the left: the first time I had been in a driver’s seat since I had lost my sight.
“Give you a lift to the cemetery?” I joked.
“You must take this first trip alone,” Sorel said; I was to learn that she had no sense of humor whatsoever. This brief orientation trip (or “LAD insertion”; DeCandyle was fond of NASA-type jargon) was supposed to be perfectly safe; it was to provide a chance for me to experience LAD space, and for them to evaluate my reaction, both physical and psychological, to induced death.
Sorel clipped the belt over my shoulder with her big, cold hands, and I heard her footsteps walking away. I had the image of her and DeCandyle hiding behind a lead curtain like X-ray technicians. The car’s monitoring systems started up with a low hum.
“Ready?” DeCandyle called.
“Ready.” But I had to say it twice before the word came out.
I felt a brief sting in my wrist. “Mr. Ray? Can you hear me now?” asked DeCandyle, who had somehow acquired a high, tinny edge to his voice, like Sorel’s. I tried to answer but couldn’t, wondering why, until I realized that the injection was working, that the trip was beginning.
That I was dying.
I felt an instant of panic and reached to pull off the wrist cuff, but my reflexes were slowing and by the time the impulse reached my left arm I was too weak to lift it. Dr. Sorel (or was it DeCandyle?) was saying something now, but the voice was receding from me. I tried again to lift my hand; I can’t remember whether or not I succeeded. I felt a sudden strong sense of shame, as if I had been caught doing something terribly, irrevocably wrong; then the shame was gone. It had blown away. There seemed to be a wind blowing through the room as if a new door had opened. My skin grew cooler and seemed to be expanding; I felt like a balloon being inflated.
In those first moments, I didn’t have the experience of which so many have spoken, of floating upward and looking down on their own bodies. Perhaps because of my blindness I had lost the impulse to “look” back. I was conscious only of floating upward, faster and faster, with no desires and nothing tying me to what was below: I felt myself dwindling, and there was a gladness in it, as if I were dwindling toward some tiny bright point which all of me had always yearned to be.
My naturalist’s instincts, which I have carefully nurtured over the years as an essential balance to my artistic vision, were somehow missing in all this: I had no objectivity. I was what I was experiencing, which is just another way of saying there was no “me” to experience my experiencing it. Somehow this pleased me, like an accomplishment.
It was as I was becoming conscious of this pleasure that I saw the light, a lattice of light, toward which I was floating, as if it were the surface of a pond in which I had been submerged so long, and so deeply, as to forget that it had a surface at all.
I saw! I was seeing! It seemed perfectly natural, as if I had never stopped; and yet a great joy filled me.
I grew closer to the light and I seemed to slow; I felt myself spinning and “looked” back, or “down.” For the first time, all in a rush, I remembered the car, my blindness, my life, the world. I saw specks floating like dust in shafts of light and wondered if that was all it had ever amounted to. Even as I puzzled over this I was turning back toward the lattice of light, which drew me toward it almost like a lover.
In their preliminary briefing, Sorel and DeCandyle had warned of the “chill” of LAD space; but I didn’t feel it. I felt only awe and peacefulness, like the feeling one gets gazing down from a mountaintop onto a sea of clouds.
Perhaps my experience was moderated by the wonderful new gift of vision; or perhaps somewhere in my bones I knew that this death was not final and that I would soon return to Earth.
I turned back toward the lattice of light (or was it turning toward me?) and saw that it was a display of light and light, no shade. I bathed in it, floating under it with a kind of bliss that I can compare only with that of orgasm, though it lasted for a long time, never peaking, never diminishing—a never-ending climax of quiet joy.
Was this, then, Heaven? Whether I asked that question then, or later, on reflection, I have no way of knowing; for memory and experience and anticipation were one to me then.