Mend the Living (11 page)

Cordelia Owl goes to stand in the middle of the room, phone in hand, lifts her head and throws shoulders back, slowly opens her fingers, revealing phalanx after phalanx the number that called her. Unknown. She smiles, relieved. In the end, not so entirely certain that she wants it to happen, not in such a hurry to hear from him. She’s suddenly cruel, when she thinks of him, she’s lucid and laughing. She’s twenty-eight years old. Anticipates with disgust the exhaustion of romantic tension, that mountain of exhaustion – exaltation, anxiety, craziness, crass impulsiveness – asks herself again why this intensity continues to be the most desirable part of her life, but then whirls around, turns away from this question the way you pull the tip of your toe back at the very last moment from the sludgy pond where it was about to land, to sink, she never gets any peace, what she needs is to prolong last night, let it steep like the afterglow of a party. Conserve the grace and the irony of girls. Once she reaches the small kitchen, she takes a pack of raspberry cookies from the cupboard, pulls open the paper that squeaks like silk under her little fingers, slowly and completely devours the pack.

R
evol walks back down the corridor, ignoring those who call out and scamper along beside him, holding out forms, three minutes, dammit, he mutters between his teeth, I just want three minutes, thumb, index, and middle digit held up in the air while his voice stresses “three,” and the department staff know this gesture well, know that once he’s alone in his office the anaesthetist will gravitate toward the chair that sways and rolls, look at his watch, and start a countdown – three minutes, a soft-boiled egg, the ideal measure – and using this lapse of solitude as a kind of decompression chamber, will place his cheek on his forearm folded flat against the desk, exactly the way children in kindergarten nap in the classroom after snack time – and will dive into this crevice of rest to stem the tide of what’s just happened, might even fall asleep. Wiped out, he rests his head on his folded arms and dozes off. Everyone understands that he makes the most of these three minutes: after so many years of putting others to sleep (twenty-seven), you’d have to have refined a technique of high-efficiency micro-napping, even if the duration were slightly inferior to what was generally advised for recharging a human body. Everyone knows that Revol lost that other sleep long ago, the nocturnal, the horizontal, the deep sleep. In the apartment he occupies on rue de Paris there isn’t even really a bedroom anymore, just a large room with a double bed that serves as a coffee table, that’s where he keeps his record collection – all of Bob Dylan and Neil Young – piles of paper, and long trays where psychotropic plants grow, his botanical experiments – it’s a professional interest, he says to the few who drop by, surprised to see cannabis plants growing right out in the open, as well as opium and common poppies, lavender, and
Salvia divinorum
, the “sage of the seers,” a hallucinogenic herb whose curative virtues he has described in articles published in pharmacology journals.

The night before, alone in his apartment, he watched Paul Newman’s film
The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds
for the first time – the title indeed suggested a botanical fantasy, but it was powerful in a totally different way, a film that traced a path between hallucination and science, and it had captivated Revol right from the start. Stirred, taken in, he had the bud of an idea – why not – to reproduce the young heroine’s experiment in his own living room. Matilda had subjected marigolds to different doses of radium in order to observe their growth, their shapes differentiating after several days under the influence of the rays, some of them becoming enormous, others scrawny and wrinkled, still others simply beautiful, and bit by bit this solitary girl began to understand something of the infinite variety of the living, at the same time that she was coming to take her place in the world, proclaiming aloud, on the theatre stage after the school festival, the possibility that a marvellous mutation could one day transform and improve the whole human race. After which, deep in thought, Revol fried some eggs sunny side up, their yellows as brilliant as the marigolds’ hearts, uncapped a light beer pulled from the door of the fridge, slowly swallowed all of it, then rolled himself up in a goose-down duvet, eyes wide open.

Revol sleeps. A notebook lies within arm’s reach so that he can jot things down when he wakes, describe the images glimpsed, the actions, sequences, and faces, and maybe Simon’s face will be among them – the black locks stiff with coagulated blood, the olive, tumid skin, the domes of the eyelids, the forehead and right temple swallowed up by a beet-red ring, the mortal macula – or maybe it will be Joanne Woodward’s, alias Beatrice Hunsdorfer, Matilda’s borderline mother, who suddenly surfaces in the theatre once the festival is over, emerges from the shadow in fine evening dress, sequins and black feathers, staggering, drunk, eyes glassy, and declares in a slurred voice, hand on her sternum: my heart is full, my heart is full.

T
hey hold hands as they follow Thomas Remige and, in the end, if they go with him, if they comply with this other perambulation in the latticework of corridors and airlocks, if they agree to pass through all those tide gates, to open all those doors and hold them with their shoulders, despite the black meteor that has just hit them full force, and despite their obvious exhaustion, it’s probably because Thomas Remige looks upon them justly – holds them in a gaze that keeps them on the side of the living, a gaze that is already infinitely precious. And so, along the way, these two interlace fingers, touch chewed finger pads, bitten nails edged with dead skin, brush dry palms together, rings and stones, and they do it without even thinking.

This is yet another area of the hospital, a hideout decorated like the living room of a model apartment: the room is bright, the furniture smart but ordinary – an apple-green couch in synthetic fabric that feels like velvet and two vermilion chairs with poofy cushions – the walls bare except for a colour poster from a Kandinsky exhibit – Beaubourg, 1985 – and, placed on the surface of the low table, a green plant with long thin leaves, four clean glasses, a bottle of mineral water, and a small dish of potpourri scented with orange and cinnamon. The window is half open, the curtains sway lightly, you can hear the sound of the occasional car come and go in the hospital parking lot and, like sonorous scratches over everything, the stridence of gulls. It’s cold.

Sean and Marianne sit side by side on the couch, awkward, curious even though they’re shattered, and, on one of the vermilion chairs, Thomas Remige sits down too, with Simon Limbeau’s medical folder in his hands. But even though the three of them share the same space, participate in the same time period, nothing on this planet could be farther apart than these two beings in pain and this young man who sits before them with the goal – yes, the goal – of obtaining their consent to recover their child’s organs. On one side: a man and a woman caught in a wave of shock, at once swept off the ground and crashed down into a dislocated timeline – a continuity that Simon’s death had ruptured, but a continuity that, like a headless duck running in a farmyard, continued on – total madness – a timeline woven of pain, a man and a woman gathering all the sorrow of the world upon their two heads, and on the other side: this young man in a white lab coat – committed and cautious, prepared to conduct their meeting without skipping any steps, but who has set a timer in a corner of his mind, conscious that once brain death occurs, the body deteriorates rapidly, and that this has to be done quickly – caught in the same torsion.

Thomas pours water into the glasses, gets up to close the window, crosses the room, and as he does so watches this couple, doesn’t let his eyes leave them for a second, this man and this woman, Simon Limbeau’s parents, and at this moment he’s probably warming up mentally, aware that he’s gearing up for some rough treatment, to make an incision in their grief and insert a question of which they are as yet unaware, to ask them to reflect and to form answers, when they are zombies hard hit by pain, satellited; and he’s probably preparing to talk to them the way he prepares himself to sing, relaxing his muscles, regulating his breathing, conscious that punctuation is the anatomy of language, the structure of meaning, and he visualizes the opening sentence, its musical line, and gauges the first syllable he will utter, the one that will cleave the silence, precise, rapid as a cut – more like a gash than the crack in the eggshell or the lizard that climbs the wall when the earth quakes. He begins slowly, methodically restating the context of the situation: I think you understand that Simon’s brain damage is irreversible, and yet his organs continue to function; it’s an exceptional situation. Sean and Marianne blink their eyes, a kind of agreement. Thomas, encouraged, continues: I’m conscious of the pain you must be in, but I have to broach a sensitive subject with you – his face is enshrouded in a transparent light and his voice rises a notch imperceptibly, absolutely clear when he says:

– This is a situation where it would be possible to imagine Simon as an organ donor.

Bam. From the beginning, Thomas had tuned his voice to the right frequency and the room seems to vibrate like a giant microphone, a high-precision strike – wheels of the Rafale jet on the flight deck of the aircraft carrier, Japanese calligrapher’s brush, tennis player’s drop shot. Sean lifts his head, Marianne jumps, both their gazes spill into Thomas’s own – they begin to glimpse with terror what’s happening here, sitting before this handsome young man with the medallion profile, this handsome young man who continues calmly, I wanted to ask if your son had had the chance to express his views on the subject, if he had ever spoken to you about it.

The walls waltz, the ground rolls, Marianne and Sean are bowled over. Speechless, gazes floating level with the low table, hands twisting, and this silence that spills, thick, dark, vertiginous, panic mixed with confusion. A void has opened up before them, a void that they can’t imagine other than as “something” because “nothing” is simply unthinkable. They struggle against this gaping hole in the air, together, even though the questions and emotions that shake them are not the same – Sean has become, over the years, solitary and of few words, combining the clearest non-belief with a lyrical spirituality drawn from Oceanic myths, whereas Marianne was a first communicant in a flowered dress and tennis socks, forehead banded with a crown of fresh flowers and the host stuck to the roof of her mouth, who prayed for a long time in the evenings in the bunk bed she shared with her sister, kneeling in the top bunk, speaking her praise aloud in scratchy pyjamas, and still today she enters churches, explores the silence there like the texture of a mystery, looks for the little red light behind the altar, inhales the heavy scent of wax and incense, observes the light of day filtered by the rosette in coloured rays, the wooden statues with their painted eyes, but remembers the intense sensation that rushed through her in the moment when she removed the yoke of faith; both of them see visions of death in the air, images of the beyond, post-mortem spaces plunged into eternity: it’s a chasm tucked inside a fold of the cosmos, it’s a black and wrinkled lake, it’s the realm of the believers, a garden where, beneath the hand of God, beings with resuscitated flesh come back to life, it’s a lost valley in the jungle where forsaken souls flutter about, it’s a desert of ash, a sleep, a detour, a Dantesque hole at the bottom of the sea, and it’s also an unreproducible coast that you reach in a delicately crafted wooden dugout. They’re leaning forward, arms crossed over abdomens to absorb the shock, and their thoughts converge into a funnel of questions they’re unable to formulate.

Thomas starts again – takes another tack – did your son register his refusal to become a donor with the national database? Or do you know if he expressed any opposition to the idea, if he was against it? Complicated sentence, their faces distort. Marianne shakes her head, I don’t know, I don’t think so, she stammers, and Sean suddenly becomes animated, his face weathered and square, slowly turns toward Thomas and says, carving through space with a hollow voice: nineteen years old – with these poorly articulated words, emitted through tight lips, his chest sways forward, imposing – are there any nineteen-year-old boys who make arrangements about this, for … do they exist? – “make arrangements”: he raises his voice, submachine-guns the velar consonants, an icy fire. It can happen, Thomas replies gently, it’s sometimes the case. Sean takes a gulp of water, puts the glass down heavily: maybe, but not Simon. Then, sidling into what he identifies as a gap in the dialogue, Thomas asks, raising his voice a notch, why “not Simon”? Sean looks at him hard, spits out: because he loves life so much. Thomas nods, I understand, but keeps on: loving life doesn’t mean he wouldn’t have imagined death, he might have spoken about it to some of the people close to him. Filaments of silence that converge, splice together, and then Marianne reacts, misty and quick: people close to him, yes, I don’t know, if, his sister, yes, he loves his little sister a lot, Lou, she’s seven, they’re like cat and dog but they’re lost without each other, and his friends, yes, for sure, his surfing friends, Johan, Christophe, his friends from school, yes, I don’t know, I think so, we don’t see them that often, but the people close to him, I don’t know exactly who they are, well yes his grandmother, his cousin who lives in the States, and there’s Juliette too, Juliette, his first love, yes, the people close to him, that’s us.