Mend the Living (14 page)

The city stretches, reclines, the last neighbourhoods fray its contour, the sidewalks wander off, there are no more wooden gates, just high metal fences, a few warehouses, and the residue of old urban settlements blackened beneath the rings of highway interchanges, then the shapes of the earth’s relief steer their way, guide their drift like lines of force, they drive along the road at the foot of the cliffs, beside the slope crammed with caverns where lone vagabonds hang out, or gangs of kids – dope and spray paint; they pass shacks huddled at the bottom of the slope, the Gonfreville–l’Orcher refinery, finally turn off toward the river, as though compelled by the sudden gap in space, and now the estuary.

They drive another two or three kilometres and then it’s the end of the pavement so they cut the motor: it’s empty around them, shut down, a space somewhere between an industrial zone and a pasturage, and it’s hard to understand why they stop here, beneath a sky wrinkled with thick, dense smoke that twirls above the chimneys of the refinery and dilates into mournful trails, distilling dust and carbon monoxide, an apocalyptic sky. They’ve barely parked on the roadside when Sean pulls out his pack of Marlboros and starts to smoke without even opening his window. I thought you quit, Marianne gently reaches for his cigarette and takes a drag – she smokes in a very particular way, palm against her mouth, fingers tight and cigarette wedged at the metacarpal joint – lets out the smoke without inhaling, then puts it back between Sean’s fingers as he murmurs no, don’t want to. She stirs in her seat: are you still the only guy who brushes his teeth with a smoke in his mouth? – summer 1992, a bivouac in the desert near Santa Fe, tie-dyed dawn, somewhere between coral red and pink monkey palm, a bluish fire, a slice of bacon sizzling in a pan, coffee in white tin mugs, fear of scorpions crouching in the cold shadow of stones, the Rio Bravo song, “My Rifle, My Pony, and Me,” sung together, and Sean, the end of a toothbrush smeared with toothpaste propped in a corner of his mouth, a first Marlboro lit at the other end of his smile – he nods his head: yes – their Canadian tent streamed with dew, Marianne was naked under her fringed poncho, hair down to her waist, and was reading, in an exaggeratedly oratorical voice, a collection of poems by Richard Brautigan, found at the back of the Greyhound bus that had dropped them off in Taos.

I shouldn’t have built him that board. Sean takes the time to crush his smoke in the ashtray and then abruptly slams his head against the steering wheel, bang, his forehead bounces back violently from the hard rubber, Sean! Marianne cries, startled, but he keeps going, speeds up, hitting his head repeatedly, always the same spot on his forehead, bang, bang, bang, stop, stop it right now, Marianne grabs his shoulder to still him, to hold him, but he elbows her away, pushing her so hard her right side hits the door, and as she’s shifting back in her seat he seizes the wheel with his teeth, bites the rubber, lets out a deafening howl, a wild and dark cry, something unbearable, a cry she doesn’t want to hear, anything but that, she wants him to stop – she grabs him by the nape, burrows her fingers deep beneath his mane of hair, into the skin of his scalp, she grits her teeth but shouts loudly: stop it right now! And pulls him backwards until his jaw releases the wheel, until his back hits the seat, until his head knocks and then settles against the headrest, eyes closed, skin between his eyes red and burning from the impact, until the cry becomes lamentation, at which point she lets go, trembling, murmurs you shouldn’t do that, shouldn’t hurt yourself, look at your hand already, she lowers her head, her fingers grip her knees like pliers: Sean, I don’t want us to go crazy – and at that very moment, it’s possible that it’s herself she’s talking to, measuring the madness growing in her, in them, madness as though that was the only possible form of thought, the only rational outcome in this unfathomable nightmare.

They sink back together, huddle inside the car, but what seems to be a return to calm is only an illusion, because Sean’s howl drills into Marianne’s ear, and she suddenly thinks about what this Sunday could have been without the accident, without the exhaustion, without surfing, without this fucking passion for surfing, and at the end of this rope of causality reeled in with a weak hand there’s Sean, yes, Sean, that’s it, him, he’s the one who encouraged this enthusiasm, caused it to come into being and nourished it, canoes, the Maori, tattoos, wooden boards, the ocean, migration to new worlds, affinity with nature, this whole mythical hodgepodge that had fascinated her little boy, this whole fantasy world in cinemascope where he had grown up – she gritted her teeth, would have liked to beat this man beside her, this man who moaned – it was the skiff delivery that they used to do together, she thinks back on it, she and Lou, “just the girls,” staying home, put aside; father and son never missed an episode of
Nuit de la glisse
, and later Simon had started taking risks, going out more and more often in water that was both too cold and too stormy and Sean never said anything, because he was a laconic and solitary father, an enigmatic father, who had isolated himself to the point that she said to him one night you have to go, I don’t want to live with you anymore, not like this, a man she loved still but damn it; yes, surfing, what madness, what dangerous madness, and she, Marianne, how had she let this addiction to strong sensation thrive inside her own house, let her son fall into this spiral of vertigo, the spiral of the tube, that stupid thing, yes, she too had done nothing, hadn’t known what to say when her son began living at the whim of the weather, dropping everything when a swell was forecast, homework and all the rest, sometimes getting up at five in the morning to chase a wave a hundred kilometres away, she hadn’t done anything, she was in love with Sean and probably fascinated too by this miserable fantasy, the man who builds boats and fires in the snow, knows the names of all the stars and every constellation, whistles complex melodies, amazed that her son could live so intensely, proud that he was different, and so, they had done nothing, they hadn’t known how to protect their child.

The condensation that’s been forming on the windows starts to drip as Marianne says: the surfboard is the most beautiful thing you ever gave him. He exhales, I don’t know, and they are silent. The most beautiful parts were the gestures of making it, what they had shifted in him, the use of foams and resins instead of the supple wood used to build canoes. In early December he had gone to Les Landes to get sheets of polystyrene from a shaper on the coast – a guy in his fifties with the body of a fakir, forehead girded with a red apache scarf, a grey beard and ponytail, Tahitian Bermudas, a polar fleece and neon flip-flops; a rehashed character then, a man of few words who didn’t make eye contact, surfed whenever a session was possible, the luminescent screen of a wireless weather station continually delivering forecasts of wind and the swell – Sean had thought carefully before choosing these materials, unfamiliar to him, had studied their density, their resistance, had opted for extruded polystyrene foam rather than polyurethane, had chosen epoxy resin rather than polyester resin even though the latter was cheaper, had observed the shaper’s work for a long time, the speed of the planer and the touch of the sander, had loaded everything up on his truck and sped along the night highway, mulling over the building of the board, mentally tracing its shape, obsessing over its solidity; he had worked in secret.

They get out to walk, come outside says Marianne, already opening her door. They leave the car on the roadside beside a thicket of blackberry bushes that cross their spiny arcs toward the ground, and cut through the field, passing beneath the barbed wire fence one after the other – her, then him, one foot, then the other, back flat, each holding the wire up over the other’s head, below the belly, watch your hair, your nose, your eyes, careful of your coat.

Wintery bocage. The ground is a cold soup that splatsplats beneath the soles of their shoes, the grass is brittle and the cowpats form black slabs here and there, hardened by frost, the poplars jut their talons into the sky, and there are crows in the copses, big as hens – this is all a little too much, thinks Marianne, it’s too much, it’s going to kill us.

The river finally comes into view, wild breadth of sky, they’re surprised, short of breath, feet soaking wet, but they walk toward the bank, come right to the edge as though magnetized, don’t stop until the field begins to slowly pour into the water, dark here, congested with soft branches, decomposing stumps, bodies of insects killed and rotted by the winter, a briny mire, completely still, the pond from a fable, above which the estuary is slow, matte, pale as sage, the fold of a shroud; crossing it seems possible but dangerous, not a single wooden pontoon to suggest the dream, not a single boat anchored there to brave the threat, nor a kid with pockets full of flat stones to draw that leaping light wake on the surface of the water and make them dance, those water spirits that populate the surface; the two of them are trapped there, before the hostile waters, digging their hands into their pockets and their feet into the mud, they face the river, burrow their chins into their collars – what are we doing here? thinks Marianne who wishes she could scream but her wide open mouth lets out not a single sound, nothing, pure nightmare – and then, this boat with a dark hull that drifts in far off to the left, the only visible craft upstream and downstream on the watercourse, a solitary boat that only emphasizes the absence of all the others.

I don’t want them to open his body, to skin him, I don’t want them to empty him out – chromatic purity of Sean’s voice, white – the cold sharpens it like the ash against the blade. Marianne puts her left hand into the right-hand pocket of Sean’s parka, her index and middle finger reach the dark crease of his fist, open it, slide inside, widening the passage, tunnelling enough space for her ring finger and little finger to enter in turn, all this without Sean turning his head, the hum of the freighter comes nearer on the left and the colour of the hull becomes clear, an oily red, the exact colour of dried blood, it’s a boat loaded with grain, headed downriver, headed for the mouth of the river, headed for the sea while everything widens, waters and consciousnesses, everything converges toward the open, toward the unformed and the infinity of loss, it’s suddenly enormous, out of scale and so close it feels like they could touch it with an outstretched finger, it passes, casting its cold shadow over them, everything shudders, everything’s stirred up and thrown into turmoil, Marianne and Sean follow it with their eyes, long hull, a hundred and eighty metres, thirty thousand tonnes at least, it files past, red curtain sliding progressively toward reality; and what they’re thinking in that moment, I couldn’t say – they’re probably thinking of Simon, where he was before he was born, where he is now; or maybe they’re not thinking of anything at all, seeing only this vision of the world that’s gradually revealed, appearing anew, tangible, absolutely enigmatic – and the prow that cleaves the water affirms the searing present of their pain.

The boat’s wake churns and subsides, smooths, the freighter moves farther away, carrying with it the noise and movement, the river returns to its initial texture, and the estuary is set aflame, a radiance. Marianne and Sean have turned toward each other, are holding hands, arms held out from their bodies, and they’ve caressed each other with their faces – nothing more tender than this sanding, nothing more gentle than the bony ridges of the facial massif that run beneath the skin – in the end they hold each other up, forehead to forehead, and Marianne’s words make an imprint in the static air.

They won’t hurt him, they won’t hurt him at all. Her voice is caught in a textile filter, and Sean lets go of her hands to take her in his arms, her sobs echo the breathing of nature, okay, he says, it’s time for us to go back.

– H
e’ll be a donor.

Sean is the one to make this statement and Thomas Remige gets up from his chair abruptly, shaky, red, thorax expanding with an influx of heat as though his blood was speeding up, and walks straight toward them. Thank you. Marianne and Sean lower their eyes, planted like stakes in the office doorway, wordless, their shoes mark the floor, leave sludge and black grass, they themselves are overwhelmed by what they’ve just done, by what they’ve just announced – “donor,” “donor,” “don-ate,” “aban-don,” the words clang together in the hollow of their eardrums, bore in one after the other. The phone rings, it’s Revol, Thomas tells him quickly that it’s a go, three quick words in a cryptic language that Sean and Marianne don’t catch, acronyms and the speed of elocution intended to scramble comprehension, and soon they leave the coordinator’s office to go back to the room where they had their meeting. Revol is waiting for them – there are four of them at present and they slip back into the dialogue immediately because Marianne whispers, still standing: now, what happens now?

It’s five thirty. The window is open as though the atmosphere in the room needed to be refreshed, made new, the preceding dialogue having exhausted it, spoiled it – breath, tears, sweat. Outside: a strip of lawn at the base of the wall, a paved path, and between the two, a hedge as tall as a man. Thomas Remige and Pierre Revol take their places in the vermilion chairs while Marianne and Sean return to the apple-green couch, and their anguish is palpable – still this widening of the eyes that creases the forehead and augments the white around the iris, still these half-open lips, ready to scream, and the whole body’s attention made brittle by the wait, by fear. They’re not cold, not yet.