Mend the Living (8 page)

Later, at the hospital, Thomas knows this lobby with its oceanic dimensions by heart, this emptiness that he must cleave in one shot, drawing a diagonal across the space to reach the stairway that leads to his office, the organ and tissue donation unit, on the second floor. But this morning, he enters as a stranger might, as alert as an outsider, he arrives here the way he arrives at other hospitals in the area – establishments without the capacity to do transplants. Speeds up past the counter where two men wait, silent, eyes red, jeans and big black down jackets, lifts a hand in greeting to the woman with the unibrow and she, seeing him show up when she knows he’s on call, guesses that a patient in the ICU just became a potential donor, contents herself with only a look in response – the arrival of the organ donation coordinator is always a delicate sequence: the patient’s loved ones, oblivious to what is unfolding, might overhear her telling someone the reason for his presence, and might link this to the state of their child, their brother, their lover and be blindsided, staggered, which wouldn’t bode well for the meetings to come.

Revol stands behind his desk, in his lair, hands Thomas the medical file for Simon Limbeau with a raise of his eyebrows – his eyes grow big, his forehead creases – and speaks to him as though he were picking up their telephone conversation right where it left off: nineteen-year-old kid, non-reactive neurological exam, not responsive to pain, cranial nerve reflexes absent, fixed pupils, hemodynamically stable, I’ve seen the mother, the father will be arriving in about two hours. The coordinator casts a glance at his watch, two hours? Again the dregs from the coffee pot splatsplat in a squeaky cup. Revol continues: I just asked for the first EEG (electroencephalogram), it’s in process, words that crack like the starter’s gun – in ordering this test, Revol shows that he’s begun the legal procedure to certify death in the young man. Two types of protocol are at his disposal: either an angiogram by brain scan (or, in the case of a brain death, an x-ray that would confirm the absence of liquid inside the skull), or else two thirty-minute EEGs, done at an interval of four hours and showing the flat line that illustrates the absence of all brain activity. Thomas picks up the signal and says: we’ll be able to proceed to a complete evaluation of the organs. Revol nods his head, I know.

In the corridor, they go their separate ways. Revol heads toward the recovery room to check on the patients admitted that morning, while Remige goes back to his office and immediately opens the light-green folder. He dives in, turning the pages with the utmost attention – the information given by Marianne, the emergency team’s summary, the tests and scans from today – he memorizes the numbers and compares the data. Little by little, he forms a clear idea of the state of Simon’s body. A kind of apprehension comes over him: although he knows the steps and the milestones of the process he’s beginning, he also knows to what extent it differs from a well-oiled mechanism, a chain of set phrases and diagonal checkmarks on a checklist. This is
terra incognita
.

And then he clears his throat and calls the French Agency of Biomedicine in Saint-Denis. We’re at that point.

T
he street too is silent, silent and monochromatic as the rest of the world. The disaster has spread over the elements, places, things, a curse, as though everything has conformed to what happened this morning, behind the cliffs – the garish van smashed at full speed against the pole and this kid thrown headfirst into the windshield – as though the outside had absorbed the impact of the accident, had engulfed the aftershocks, muffled the last vibrations, as though the shock wave had stretched out, diminished, weakened until it became a flat line, this single line that raced out into space to mix with all the others, joined the billions and billions of other lines that form the violence of the world, this cluster of sorrows and ruin, and as far as the eye can see, nothing, not a touch of light, not a splash of bright colour, golden yellow, carmine red, not a song slipped from an open car window – a bounding rock song or a melody whose chorus we join in, laughing, happy and a little ashamed to know such sentimental words by heart – no scent of coffee, flowers, or spices, nothing, not a single child with red cheeks running after a ball or crouched chin-to-knees following a marble with his eyes as it rolls along the sidewalk, not a shout, no human voices calling to each other or murmuring words of love, no cry of a newborn, not a single living being caught up in the continuity of days, occupied with the simple and insignificant acts of a winter morning: nothing comes to insult Marianne’s suffering as she moves forward like an automaton, with a mechanical step and a hazy look. On this fateful day. She repeats these words to herself in a murmur, doesn’t know where they come from, she says them with her eyes glued to the tips of her boots as though the words accompanied the muted beat, a regular sound that spares her from having to think beyond this moment, this one task: take one step then another and another then sit down and drink. She heads slowly toward the café she knows is open on Sunday, a shelter she reaches at the limits of her strength. On this fateful day, I pray to you O my God. She whispers these words in a loop, separating out their syllables like rosary beads, how long has it been since she said a prayer out loud? She wishes she could keep walking forever.

She pushes open the door. It’s dark inside, traces of nocturnal lapses, smell of cooled ashes. Alain Bashung sings.
Voleur d’amphores au fond des criques
(thief of amphorae at the bottom of creeks). She goes to the counter, leans over the zinc, she’s thirsty, doesn’t want to wait, is anyone here? A guy comes out of the kitchen, enormous, a cotton sweatshirt stretched tight across his belly, loose jeans, dishevelled shock of hair like he just rolled out of bed, yeah, yeah, there’s someone here, and once he’s in front of her he starts up again formal so, miss, what are we having? A gin – Marianne’s voice, barely audible, an exhalation. The guy slicks his hair back with two heavily ringed hands, then rinses a glass all the while slanting a glance at this woman out of the corner of his eye, sure he’s seen her here before: everything all right, miss? Marianne turns her eyes away, I’m going to sit down. The large spotted mirror at the end of the room reflects a face she doesn’t recognize, she turns her head away.

Don’t close your eyes, listen to the song, count the bottles above the counter, observe the shape of the glasses, puzzle out the posters.
Où subsiste encore ton écho
(where an echo of you still remains). Create decoys, divert the violence. Build a dam against the images of Simon that form rapidly and crash into her in successive waves, in a great sweep, push them away, beat them back if you can, while already they’re organizing into memories, nineteen years of memory sequences, a mass. Stave them off. The flashes of memory that arose when she talked about Simon in Revol’s cubbyhole had lodged a pain in her chest that she was powerless to control or diminish – for that, she would have had to locate the memory in her brain, inject a paralyzing fluid, the needle guided by a high-precision computer – but all she would find there would be the motor of the action, the ability to remember, because memory itself is actually held in the body as a whole, Marianne didn’t know this.
J’ai fait la saison dans cette boîte crânienne
(I spent the whole season inside this cranium).

She has to think, gather things together and reorder them so she can utter a clear phrase to Sean when he arrives, spared as yet. Chain the propositions together intelligibly. First: Simon has been in an accident. Second: He’s in a coma – gulp of gin.
Dresseur de loulous, dynamiteur d’aqueducs
(Spitz trainer, dynamiter of aqueducts). Third: The situation is irreversible – she swallows, thinking about this word she’ll have to speak aloud, “irreversible,” five syllables that vitrify the state of things and that she never, ever says, believing in the continual movement of life, the possible reversal of every situation, nothing is irreversible, nothing, she has the habit of saying time and time again – and usually she says it lightly, swaying the phrase like you would gently shake someone who was discouraged, nothing is irreversible, except death, disability, and maybe then she would even get up and spin around, maybe she would even dance. But Simon – no. For Simon, it’s irreversible.

Sean’s face – these tapered eyes beneath heavy lids – lights up on the screen of her phone. Marianne, you called me. Immediately she dissolves into tears – chemistry of grief – incapable of articulating a single word while he says again: Marianne? Marianne? He must have thought that the echo of the sea cramped inside the inner harbour was interfering, he must have confused the drool, snot, and tears with static on the radio waves while she bit the back of her hand, paralyzed by the horror that suddenly rose in her at the sound of this voice, so dear, familiar as only a voice can be – but suddenly estranged, abominably estranged, because it arose from a space-time where Simon’s accident never happened, a world intact, situated light years from this empty café; and it was dissonant now, this voice, it disorchestrated the world, it tore at her brain: it was the voice of life before. Marianne hears this man calling her and she weeps, swept through with the emotion we sometimes feel when faced with that which has survived unscathed, in time – it unleashes the pain of the impossibility of going back. One day she will have to learn in which direction time flows, if it’s linear or if it traces the rapid circles of a hula hoop, if it forms rings, rolls in upon itself like the whorls of a shell, if it can take the form of the tube that bends the wave, sucks up the sea and the entire universe in its dark backhand, yes, she will have to understand what it’s made of, the time that passes. Marianne grips her phone in her hand: scared to speak, scared to destroy Sean’s voice, scared that she will never again be allowed to hear it as it is, that she will never again be allowed to experience this disappeared time where Simon was not in an irreversible situation, knowing full well that she has to put an end to the anachronism of this voice and reimplant it here, in the tragic present, she knows she has to do it, and when she finally manages to express herself, she is neither concrete nor precise, she’s incoherent, so much so that he begins to lose his calm, he too seized by terror – something has happened, something bad – and Sean starts questioning her, infuriated, is it Simon? what about Simon? what about surfing? an accident where? Within the texture of sound his face appears, precise as in the photo onscreen. She imagines he might deduce a drowning, corrects herself, the monosyllables becoming sentences that slowly organize and form meaning, and soon she drops into order everything she knows, closing her eyes and placing the phone flat against her sternum at the sound of Sean’s scream. Then gathering herself again, she quickly specifies that yes, the condition is life threatening, that he’s in a coma but is still alive, and Sean, disfigured in his turn, disfigured as she is, answers I’m coming, I’ll be there in two minutes, where are you? – and his voice has changed camps now, it has joined Marianne, it has pierced the fragile membrane that separates those who are happy from those who are damned: wait for me.

Marianne finds the strength to tell him the name of the café, the umpteenth Balto in the port city, she tells him where it is – it was pouring rain the first time she came here, that was in October, four months ago, she was working on an article commissioned by the heritage foundation, had wanted to see the Church of Saint Joseph again, Oscar Niemeyer’s
Le Volcan
, the model apartment of a Perret building, all this concrete whose movement and radical form she liked, but her notebook had got drenched and once she was at the bar, streaming, she had downed a whisky, straight: Sean had started sleeping at the hangar, he had left the apartment, taking nothing with him.

She makes out her form in the mirror at the back, then her face, the one he will see after all this time, after this heaping up of silence; she has imagined this moment for a long time, promising herself that she will be so beautiful when it comes, beautiful as she still can be, and that he will be dazzled at least if not touched, but now dried tears have stretched her skin and it’s dry as though covered with a clay mask, and her swollen lids only weakly ventilate the pale pale green he likes to plumb.

She empties the glass of gin in one gulp, and then he’s there, standing before her, haggard and ravaged; bits of wood dusting his hair, sticking in the folds of his clothes and the creases of his sweater. She gets up, a sudden movement, her chair topples over – clatters to the ground – but she doesn’t turn, stands facing him, one hand flat against the table to support her shaking body, the other hanging at her side – they look at each other for a fraction of a second and then with one step they’re embracing, an embrace with a crazy force, as though they were crushing themselves into one another, heads pressed together hard enough to split open, shoulders compressed beneath the mass of thoraxes, arms bruised from holding on so hard, they intermingle scarves, vests, and coats; the kind of embrace you give in order to become a rock in the cyclone, a stone before leaping into the void, like something from the end of the world, while at the same time, at the exact same time, it’s also a gesture that reconnects them – their lips touch – that underlines and does away with the distance, and when they disincarcerate each other, when they finally release each other, stunned, done in, they’re like sailors washed up after a shipwreck.