Mend the Living (2 page)

The pages of the magazine brighten as the sky pales outside, they divulge their colour chart of blues, like this pure cobalt that assaults the eyes, and greens so deep you’d think they were painted in acrylic; here and there the wake of a surfboard appears, tiny white line on the phenomenal wall of water, the boys blink, murmur, that shit is epic, that’s sick, then Chris shifts to check his phone, the screen illuminates him from below and turns his face blue, accentuates the bone structure – prominent brow, prognathous jaw, mauve lips – while he reads the day’s forecast out loud: Petites-Dalles today, ideal northeast swell, waves between one metre fifty and one metre eighty, best session of the year; and then he punctuates, ceremonious: we’re gonna pig out,
yesss
, we’re gonna be
kings
! – English embedded in their French constantly, for everything and nothing, English as though they were living in a pop song or an American sitcom, as though they were heroes, foreigners, English that makes enormous words breezy,
vie
and
amour
becoming the offhanded “life” and “love,” and finally English like a show of reserve – and John and Sky nod their heads in a sign of infinite agreement,
yeah, big wave riders, kings
.

It’s time. Beginning of the day when the shapeless takes shape: the elements gather, the sky separates from the sea, the horizon grows clear. The three boys get ready, methodical, following a precise order that is still a ritual: they wax their boards, check that the leashes are attached, slip into thermal rash guards before pulling on their suits, contorting themselves in the parking lot – neoprene adheres to the skin, scrapes and even burns it sometimes – choreography of rubber puppets who ask each other for help, requiring that they touch and manipulate each other; and then the surf boots, the hoods, the gloves, and they close the van. They walk down toward the ocean, surfboard under one arm, light, cross the beach in long strides, the beach where pebbles crash beneath their feet in an infernal racket, and once they’ve arrived at water’s edge, while everything grows clear before them, the chaos and the party, they each wrap a leash around an ankle, adjust their hoods, reduce the gap of bare skin around their necks to zero by grabbing the cords at their backs and pulling them up to the last notch of the zipper – it’s a matter of ensuring the best possible degree of waterproofness for their teenage-boy skin, skin that’s often studded with acne on the upper back, on the shoulder blades, where Simon Limbeau sports a Maori tattoo as a pauldron – and this movement, arm extended sharply, signifies that the session is starting, let’s go! And maybe now, hearts get worked up, maybe they give a shake inside thoracic cages, maybe their mass and their volume augment and their kick intensifies, two distinct sequences in one same pulsing, two beats, always the same: terror and desire.

They enter the water. Don’t yell as they dive in, squeezed inside this flexible membrane that guards body heat and the explosiveness of the rush, don’t emit a single cry, only grimace as they cross the low wall of rolling pebbles, and the sea gets deep fast – five or six metres out and already they can’t touch bottom, they topple forward, stretching themselves out flat on their boards, and with arms strongly notching the wave they cross the breakwater and move out toward the open.

Two hundred metres from shore, the sea is no more than an undulating tautness – it hollows and swells, lifted like a sheet thrown over a mattress. Simon Limbeau melts into his movement, paddles toward the lineup, that zone in the open where the surfer waits for the wave, checking that Chris and John are there, little black barely visible floats off to the left. The water is dark, marbled, veined, the colour of tin. Still no shine, no sparkle, just these white particles that powder the surface, sugar, and the water is freezing, nine or ten degrees Celsius, no more, Simon won’t be able to ride more than three or four waves, he knows it, surfing in cold water exhausts the organism, in an hour he’ll be cooked, he has to select, choose the wave with the best shape, the one whose crest will be high but not too pointed, the one whose curl will open with enough breadth for him to enter, the one that will last all the way, conserving enough force to churn up onto the shore.

He turns back toward the coast, as he always likes to before going farther: the earth is there, stretched out, black crust in the bluish glow, and it’s another world, a world he’s unlinked to now. The cliff, a standing sagittal slice, shows him the strata of time, but out here where he is, there is no time, there is no history, only this unpredictable flow that carries and swirls him. His gaze lingers on the vehicle decked out like a Californian van in the parking lot beside the beach – he recognizes the side studded with stickers collected over many surf trips, he knows the names clustered shoulder to shoulder, Rip Curl, Oxbow, Quiksilver, O’Neill, Billabong, the psychedelic fresco mixing surfing champions and rock stars in the same bedazzled jumble, including a good number of girls with mermaid hair, their backs arched in itsy-bitsy bikinis, this van that is their communal artwork and the antechamber of the wave – and then he follows the tail lights of a car that climbs the plateau and plunges into the interior, Juliette’s sleeping profile traces itself, she’s lying curled up under her little-girl blanket, she has the same stubborn look even when she’s asleep, and suddenly he turns away from the continent, tears himself from it with a jerk, a few dozen metres more, then he stops paddling.

Arms that rest but legs that steer, hands holding the rails of the board and chest raised slightly, chin high, Simon Limbeau floats. He waits. Everything around him is in flux – whole sections of sea and sky emerge and disappear with each swirl of the slow, heavy, ligneous surface, a basaltic batter. The abrasive dawn burns his face and his skin stretches taut, his eyelashes harden like vinyl threads, the lenses behind his pupils frost over as though they’d been forgotten in the back of a freezer and his heart begins to beat slower, responding to the cold, when suddenly he sees it coming, he sees it moving forward, firm and homogenous, the wave, the promise, and he instinctively positions himself to find the entrance and flow into it, slide in like a bandit slides his hand into a treasure chest to rob the loot – same hood, same millimetred precision of movement – to slip onto the back of the wave, in this torsion of matter where the inside proves more vast and more profound than the outside, it’s here, thirty metres away, it’s coming at a constant speed, and suddenly, concentrating his energy in his shoulders, Simon launches himself and paddles with all his might so he can catch the wave with speed, so he can be taken by its slope, and now it’s the
takeoff
, superfast phase when the whole world concentrates and rushes forward, temporal flash when you have to inhale sharply, hold your breath and gather your body into a single action, give it the vertical momentum that will stand it up on the board, feet planted wide, left one in front,
regular
, legs bent and back flat nearly parallel to the board, arms spread to stabilize it all, and this second is decidedly Simon’s favourite, the one that allows him to grasp the whole explosion of his own existence and to conciliate himself with the elements, to integrate himself into the living, and once he’s standing on the board – estimated height from trough to crest at that moment is over one metre fifty – to stretch out space, lengthen time, and until the end of the run to exhaust the energy of each atom in the sea. Become the unfurling, become the wave.

He lets out a whoop as he takes his first ride, and for a period of time he touches a state of grace – it’s horizontal vertigo, he’s neck and neck with the world, and as though issued from it, taken in to its flow – space swallows him, crushes as it liberates him, saturates his muscle fibres, his bronchial tubes, oxygenates his blood; the wave unfolds on a blurred timeline, slow or fast it’s impossible to tell, it suspends each second one by one until it finishes pulverized, an organic, senseless mess, and amazingly, after having been battered by pebbles in the froth at the end, Simon Limbeau turns to go straight back out again, without even touching down, without even stopping to look at the fleeting shapes that form in the foam when the sea stumbles over the earth, surface against surface, he turns back toward the open, paddling even harder now, plowing toward that threshold where everything begins, where everything is stirred up, he joins his two friends who will soon let out that same cry in the descent, and the set of waves that comes tearing down upon them from the horizon, bleeding their bodies dry, gives them no respite.

No other surfer comes to join them at the spot, no one approaches the parapet to watch them surf nor sees them come out of the water an hour later, spent, done in, knees like jelly, stumbling across the beach to the parking lot and opening the doors of the van, no one sees their feet and their hands the same shade of blue, bruised, purpled even beneath the nails, nor the abrasions that lacerate their faces now, the chapping at the corners of their lips as their teeth clatter clack clack clack, a continuous trembling of the jaws in time with the uncontainable shaking of their bodies; no one sees anything, and when they’re dressed again, wool long johns under their jeans, layers of sweaters, leather gloves, no one sees them rubbing one another’s backs, unable to say anything but holy shit, holy fuck, when they would have so liked to talk, describe the rides, write the legend of the session; shivering like that, they get in the van and close the door, and without pausing for even a second Chris finds the strength to put the key in the ignition, starts the car and off they go.

I
t’s Chris who drives – it’s always him, the van belongs to his father and neither Johan nor Simon has their licence. From Petites-Dalles it’s about an hour to Le Havre if you take the old road from Étretat that goes down the estuary through Octeville-sur-Mer, the Ignauval Valley, and Sainte-Adresse.

The boys have stopped shivering, the heat in the van is on full blast, the music too, and probably the sudden warmth inside is another thermal shock for them, probably fatigue catches up now, they probably yawn, heads nodding, trying to nestle against the backs of their seats, swaddled and soothed inside the vehicle’s vibrations, noses tucked snug into their scarves, and probably they also grow numb, eyelids closing intermittently, and maybe, when they passed Étretat, Chris accelerated without even realizing it, shoulders slumped, hands heavy on the wheel, the road straight ahead now, yes, maybe he said to himself it’s okay, the road’s clear, and the desire to make the return journey go faster so they could get home and stretch out, re-enter reality after the session, its violence, maybe this desire ended up weighing on the gas pedal, so that he let himself go, carving through the plateau and the black fields, soil turned over, the fields somnolent too, and maybe the perspective of the highway – an arrowhead thrusting forward before the windshield as on a video game screen – ended up hypnotizing him like a mirage, so that he lashed himself to it, let go his vigilance, and everyone remembers there was a frost that night, winter dusting the landscape like parchment paper, everyone knows about the patches of black ice on the pavement, invisible beneath the dull sky but inking out the roadsides, and everyone imagines the patches of fog that float at irregular intervals, compact, water evaporating from the mud at the rate of the rising day, dangerous pockets that filter the outside and erase every landmark, yes, okay, and what else, what more? An animal in the road? A lost cow, a dog that crawled under a fence, a fox with a fiery tail or even a sudden human shape, ghostly at the edge of the embankment, that had to be avoided at the last second with a jerk of the wheel? Or a song? Yes, maybe the girls in bikinis who adorned the body of the van suddenly came to life and crawled up over the hood, overtaking the windshield, lascivious, their green hair tumbling down, and unloosing their inhuman (or too human) voices, and maybe Chris lost his head, sucked into their trap, hearing this singing that was not of this world, the song of the sirens, the song that kills? Or maybe Chris just made a wrong move, yes, that’s it, like the tennis player misses an easy shot, like the skier catches an edge, one dumb mistake, maybe he didn’t turn the wheel when the road was turning, or, finally, because this hypothesis also has to be made, maybe Chris fell asleep at the wheel, leaving the stark countryside to enter the tube of a wave, the marvellous and suddenly intelligible spiral that stretched out before his surfboard, siphoning the world with it, the world and all of its blue.

Emergency medical services arrived at the scene around 09:20 – ambulances, police – and signs were set out to detour traffic onto smaller collateral roads and protect the accident scene. The most important thing had been to get the three boys’ bodies out, imprisoned inside the vehicle, tangled with those of the mermaid girls who smiled on the hood, or winced, deformed, crushed one against the other, shreds of thighs, buttocks, and breasts.

They could easily determine that the little van was going fast, they estimated its speed at 92 km/h, which was 22 km/h over the speed limit for this section of road, and they also determined that, for unknown reasons, it had drifted over to the left without ever coming back into its lane, hadn’t braked – no tire marks on the asphalt – and that it had crashed into this pole at full force; they noted the absence of airbags, the van model was too old, and they could see that of the three passengers seated in the front, only two were wearing seat belts – one on each side, the driver’s and the passenger’s; finally, they determined that the third individual, sitting in the middle, had been propelled forward by the violence of the impact, head hitting the windshield; it had taken twenty minutes to pull him from the metal, unconscious when the ambulances arrived, heart still beating, and, having found his cafeteria card in the pocket of his jacket, they determined that his name was Simon Limbeau.