Mend the Living (10 page)

Slanting the angle of his eyes, Revol observes Marianne and Sean – she burns her irises on the yellow fluorescent tube attached to the ceiling while he rests his forearms on his thighs, face tilted toward the ground, head sunk between his shoulders – what might they have seen in their son’s room? what might they have understood, with their untrained eyes, when they couldn’t make the link between Simon’s destroyed interior and his peaceful exterior, between the inside and the outside? Their child’s body offered no evidence, manifested no physical sign that would allow the diagnosis to be made from a reading of the body – you might think of the fantastic “Babinski reflex,” capable of detecting diseases of the brain simply via stimulation of the sole of the foot – for them it lay undecipherable, mute, closed as a chest. Remige’s phone rings, sorry, he leaps to his feet and shuts it off, sits down again, Marianne sits shaking beside Sean, who doesn’t lift his head, unmoving, his back wide, rounded, black.

Revol keeps them in his field of vision, he surrounds them, his gaze like a lens scanning their movements, these two are a little younger than him, children from the late 1960s, they live in a part of the world where life expectancy just keeps getting higher, where we’re shielded from a view of death, where it’s erased from the day-to-day, carried off to the hospital and handled by professionals. Have they even seen a corpse before? Watched over a grandmother, found a drowned person, sat with a friend as she neared the end of life? Have they seen a dead person other than on an American TV series,
Body of Proof
,
CSI
,
Six Feet Under
? Revol likes to stroll from time to time through these televised morgues, where emergency doctors, medical examiners, undertakers, embalmers, and hotshot forensic teams meander amid a good number of sexy, frenzied girls – usually some gothic creature flaunting a tongue piercing left and right or a girlfriend who’s classy but bipolar and always thirsty for love – he likes listening to this little world chattering away around a stiff stretched out across the bluish screen, confiding in each other, flirting shamelessly – even working, formulating hypotheses from a single hair brandished at the end of a pair of tweezers, a button under the microscope, a swab of oral mucus analyzed up close, because the clock is always ticking, the night always has to come to an end, because it’s always urgent that they elucidate the traces recorded in the epidermis, try their hand at deciphering flesh that can tell us whether the victim went to nightclubs, sucked lozenges, ate too much red meat, drank whisky, was afraid of the dark, dyed his hair, worked with chemicals, had sex with multiple partners; yes, Revol sometimes likes to watch these episodes, even though, in his opinion, the series don’t say anything about death, the corpse may well fill the focal range, asphyxiate the screen, be scrutinized, fractioned, turned over, but it’s only a simulacra, and everything unfolds as though, as long as it hasn’t revealed all its secrets, as long as it remains a potentiality – narrative, dramaturgical – this corpse could keep death at a distance.

Sean and Marianne still haven’t moved. Despair, bravery, dignity, Revol doesn’t know, was just as ready to see them explode, come hurtling over his desk, send his papers flying, knock over his stupid ornaments, even hit and yell at him – bastard, shithead – there is enough reason to come unhinged, to bash their heads against the wall, scream their rage, instead of which everything was happening as though these two were slowly dissociating themselves from the rest of humanity, migrating toward the edges of the earth’s crust, leaving a time and a territory behind to begin a sidereal drift.

How could they even conceive of the death of their child, when this absolute – death, the most pure of all absolutes – had been reshaped, rewritten, into different bodily states? Because it is no longer this rhythm beating in the hollow of the chest that confirms life – a soldier removes his helmet and leans down to place an ear on the chest of his comrade lying in the mud at the bottom of the trench – it is no longer the breath exhaled through the mouth that indicates life – water streams off an expert swimmer as she performs mouth-to-mouth on a young girl with a greenish complexion – but rather the brain electrified, activated by cerebral waves, beta waves preferably. How could they even envision it, Simon’s death, when his complexion still flushes pink, and supple, when his nape still bathes in cool blue watercress and he’s stretched out with his feet in the gladiolas. Revol rounds up the paintings of corpses that he knows, and they’re always images of Christ, Christs on the cross with pallid bodies, foreheads scratched by the crown of thorns, feet and hands nailed to shining black wood, or Christs deposed, heads back and eyelids half closed, deathly pale, scrawny, hips girdled with a thin swaddling like in a Mantegna, or Holbein the Younger’s
Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb
 – a painting of such incredible realism that Dostoevsky warned believers against it: looking at it, they risked losing their faith – or the dead are kings, prelates, embalmed dictators, those movie cowboys collapsed on the sand and filmed close up, and he remembers then that photo of Che, Christlike, indeed, he too with eyes open, laid out in a morbid staging by the Bolivian junta, but he can’t think of anything that would be analogous to Simon, to this intact body, to this unbleeding body, calmly athletic, like a young god at rest, that seems to be sleeping, that seems to be alive.

How long did they stay sitting like that after the words were pronounced, slumped at the edge of their chairs, gripped by a mental experience their bodies couldn’t have even imagined before? How long would it take them to accept their place under death’s regime? For the moment, there is no possible translation for what they feel – it strikes them down into a language that precedes language, an unshareable language before words and before grammar, which may be the other name for pain, they can’t escape it, they can’t describe nor form any image of it, they are at once cut off from themselves and cut off from the world.

Thomas Remige has remained silent on the metal stool beside Revol, legs crossed, and maybe he’s been thinking of the same things, maybe he’s been forming the same scenes. He’s put away his box of matches, and waits with them, time ticks on, slurry of brains and mute screams, and then Revol stands, towering and pallid, his long face full of desolation indicating that he has to leave the room, I have to go, and Thomas Remige stays alone with the Limbeaus who lean in close to each other, shoulder to shoulder, and cry silently. He waits a moment and then asks them in a voice full of care if they want to go back to Simon’s room. They stand up without answering, the nurse falls into step behind them, but once they are in the corridor Sean shakes his head, no, I don’t want to go back, I can’t, not right away, he’s breathing hard, lungs inflating and chest lifting, hand to his mouth, Marianne slips under his shoulder – to support him, to protect herself – and the trio stop moving forward. Thomas comes nearer and says: I’m here for you, here to assist you; if you have any questions, please ask. Sean staggers, and then – how does he find the strength to articulate it? – says all at once: what’s going to happen now? The nurse swallows while Sean goes on, voice ravaged by grief and revolt: why is he being kept in intensive care if there’s no hope? What are they waiting for? I don’t understand. Marianne, her hair in her face, her eyes staring, stricken, seems not to hear anything, while Thomas searches for a way out, an answer he can formulate: Sean’s question interrupts the protocol’s timeline, which had been formulated to counter the speed of the tragedy and the violence of the news, to stretch out time, if we could just have some time. It’s a cry that he must answer. He decides to speak to them now.

C
ordelia Owl plumps up the pillow around Simon’s head, smooths the sheet over his chest, draws the curtains, pulls the door of the room closed behind her, and walks to the department front desk, tracing arabesques in the corridor – damn these stiff, tight-fitting scrubs, she would have liked something roomier in this moment, to hear the rasping of pleats, to feel them brush against her bumpy knees that she knows are supple and clever. On the way, she plunges her hand into her pocket, pulls out her cellphone: no message. Nothing.
Nada de nada.
14:40. He must be sleeping, he’s sleeping. He’s stretched out somewhere on his back, chest bare, abandoned. She smiles. Don’t call.

Reknickered, rebuttoned, belt buckles readjusted, they had faced each other on the sidewalk, well, well, I’m gonna go, yeah it’s late, um, you mean early, yeah, okay bye, bye, a kiss on the cheek, a kind smile, then, following the appropriate adage, they separated – smooth balancé, dégagé to the back, piqué turn – moving away along the same line before each melted into the darkness. Cordelia had walked slowly at first, letting her heels resonate like a 1950s starlet in a tight pencil skirt, the collar of her coat held closed by a hand pressed to her throat, she hadn’t turned around, she wouldn’t, but once she’d rounded the corner she tipped her head up to the sky and spun around wind in her mouth, arms out horizontal like a whirling dervish, then falling into line again had continued on her course, rushing quickly along city blocks, from time to time daring a large jeté over a gutter as though it were a river she had to ford, and her arms undulated like ribbons, the cold of the night whipped at her face, the icy air dove in between the front flaps of her coat, open wide at that moment, and it was good, she felt beautiful, supple, taller by at least twenty centimetres since they had clattered against garbage cans, since her underwear had fallen to the ground and he had placed a perfectly hollowed palm between her legs to lift her up against the wall, since she had stood up on one tiptoe, had bent the knee of her other leg to her chest, pulling him toward her now, inside her, tongues monopolizing mouths like the fire the oven, teeth eventually biting, she laughed her way home, hot-cold girl who’s been around the block, overplaying the solitary heroine to the eyes of the world, Amazon of the city taking her desire in hand, master of her actions, she walked along the windy boulevards, the frozen streets of five in the morning, raced along, indifferent to the car that slowed beside her, to the window that lowered to let a sexual insult spurt out, want a ride, bitch? She devoured space, a combustion, and so she was almost crossing rue Étretat when Chris’s van changed lanes on her left at the Quatre-Chemins intersection, slammed on the brakes at the edge of the sidewalk, the fresco of the body of the van displayed before her – it seemed to her that the Californian surfers in triangle bikinis were giving her the eye and smiling, as at a potential sister – and a few strides later she was at her place, buried under the feather duvet, eyes closed but she couldn’t fall asleep, she hadn’t asked anything of this guy who’d tormented her for eons, hadn’t asked a single question – brave girl.

She goes into the office, windowed like an aquarium, a chair, she collapses into it. Totally drained. Clownfish criss-cross the computer screen. She probes her phone again. Zilch. Nada, of course. A tacit sign she won’t transgress. Not for all the gold in the world. The idea that, even if it were said in a fast voice and a cool tone, the smallest word couldn’t be anything but false, heavy, viscous, and the least sentence would reveal her anxiety under the false bottom, sentimental twit. Don’t move a finger, toss back a coffee, dried fruits, a vial of royal jelly, don’t do anything stupid, turn off the phone. God I’m exhausted.

Pierre Revol comes in while she’s examining the purple traces on her neck, contorting herself before the Photo Booth app, and seeing his face appear in the picture, leaning over her shoulder like a nosy reader taking advantage of his neighbour’s newspaper in the metro, she lets out a yelp. You’re new in the department, you said? Revol stands still behind her as she leaps up, spins around, dizzy, black veil before her eyes, I should eat something, she tucks her hair behind her ears again, a way of clearing a space on her unstable face, yes, I started two days ago, and with a firm hand she readjusts the collar of her uniform. There’s something important I need to talk to you about, something you’ll be confronted with here. Cordelia nods her head, okay, now? It won’t take long, it’s about what just happened in the room, but right at that moment, bzzz, bzzz, Cordelia’s phone vibrates at the bottom of her pocket and here she is holding herself as though she’s getting an electric shock, oh no, no, unbelievable, shit! Revol sits, leans against the chair back and starts talking, head tilted toward the ground, arms crossed over his chest, and legs crossed too at the ankle, the boy you saw is brain-dead, bzzz, bzzz, Revol expresses himself distinctly, but to Cordelia his words sound like a phonetics exercise in a foreign language – even if she channelled all the attention she’s capable of toward this face and kept her brain focused on this voice talking, still everything is happening as though she were swimming against the current, against this hot wave that seeps along the length of her hip at regular intervals, bzzz, bzzz, drips into the fold of her thigh, into the hollow of her groin, she fights against it, tries to come back, but Revol gets further and further away, as though he’d tumbled into the rapids, and becomes less and less audible as he explains: so you see, this young man is dead; comprehending the reality of his death is difficult for those close to him, and the way his body looks confuses this fact, do you understand? Cordelia tries hard to listen, articulates a yes like you might pop a bubble, I see, but she doesn’t see anything, the birdbrain, in fact it’s a stampede in her brain, bzzz, bzzz, the infinitesimal tremors of the telephone now carrying their lot of sexual images, photograms lifted from the film of the night before – there’s that incredibly soft mouth open on her neck and that hot breath as her forehead, her cheek, her belly, now her breasts graze the wall, red from scraping the grainy mortar and the jutting stones with him behind her, and her hands grabbing his buttocks to bring him closer still, deeper and harder – bzzz, last flutter, it’s over, she doesn’t blink, swallows before answering in a stiff voice yes, I understand completely, so that Revol tosses her a kindly look before concluding, okay: so when you’re doing the rounds, you can’t speak to a patient who’s brain-dead the way you did, his parents were in the room and for them that was a contradictory sign in an extreme situation, talking like that during a checkup muddles the message we’re trying to give them, the situation is already so difficult, are we on the same page? Yes – Cordelia’s voice, tortured, waiting for one thing and one thing only – for Revol to take off, go on get out, get out now, I get it, and suddenly, without warning, she digs her heels in, lifts her head: you didn’t involve me in the patient’s intake, you saw his parents alone, we don’t work like that anymore. Revol looks at her, surprised: oh? And how do we work then? Cordelia takes a step forward and slaps down her reply: we work as a team. Silence stretches out, they look at each other, then the doctor stands up straight: you’re looking quite pale, have you been shown the kitchen? There are cookies in there, watch yourself, twelve hours in the ICU is a marathon, young lady, you have to be able to go the distance. Yes, okay, okay. Revol finally agrees to leave the room, and Cordelia plunges her hand into her pocket. She closes her eyes, thinks of her grandmother in Bristol who she speaks to every Sunday evening, it’s not her, it’s not the right time for her she says to convince herself, would have gladly hazarded a guess before lifting her lids and reading the numbers displayed on the little touch screen, would gladly bet, as in a roulette game, or on a door number that lights up on the board, would try to throw a paper ball in a trash can or simply play heads or tails with a coin – don’t be such a silly goose, what’s your problem?