transplant. She has NDEs and is a friend of Joanna. She is obsessed with famous disasters, including the Hartford circus fire (which becomes the setting of her final NDE). Maisie infects Joanna with her obsession, so that Lander's last NDE includes people who died in that fire. "Maisie, in fact, with her junior gonzo way of facing down death, owns the spiritual center of the novel," writes Gary Wolfe. (Jo Walton adds, "The chapter from Maisie's point of view after she has been lied to is one of the best things Willis has ever written...") Pat Briarley - Joanna's English teacher in high school who spoke often of the events surrounding the Titanic, which Joanna has internalized and largely forgotten; he suffers from Alzheimer's disease. Kit Gardiner - Pat Briarley's niece, who has become her uncle's caregiver, and who becomes good friends with Joanna, offering to do research for her among Mr. Briarley's many books. Carl Aspinall - A coma patient in the hospital (whom the nurses and Joanna irreverently call "Coma Carl"). Like a dreamer in rapid eye movement sleep, he sometimes talks and gestures; his caretakers mistakenly interpret his movements as "rowing" and his utterances as "patches" and "oh, grand." When he suddenly awakens, Joanna learns that he was experiencing a sort of NDE set in Arizona, in which he was menaced by Apaches, was muttering about the Rio Grande river, and was attempting to send smoke signals, not rowing. Though a minor character, he actuates the novel's climax by unintentionally enlightening Joanna that the NDE is a process of sending a message, both physiologically and symbolically. References to pop culture When they gather to watch movies one night, Vielle tells Richard, "As if talking to patients about their NDEs isn't bad enough, in her spare time Joanna researches famous people's last words." So does Willis: each chapter section and each chapter has an epigraph; they include: "More light!" (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's last words) "To die would be an awfully big adventure." (Charles Frohman, quoting J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan before he died on the sinking RMS Lusitania in 1915) "I must go in, the fog is rising." (Emily Dickinson's last words) "Hold tight!" (Karl Wallenda's last words) Willis has the characters discuss a great many movies, some of which have indirect or obvious bearing on the novel's themes. They include Coma, Fight Club, Final Destination, Flatliners,