Mend the Living (7 page)

She suddenly realizes that she doesn’t want to go home, it’s not time yet to see Lou, to call her mother, to tell Simon’s grandparents, his friends, it’s not time to hear them panic and suffer, some of them will scream into the receiver, no, oh God, oh shit, fuck I can’t believe it, some of them will burst into sobs while others will barrage her with questions, say the names of medical tests she won’t know, tell her about the case of an acquaintance who woke up from a coma when they thought he was lost, and they’ll round up all the spectacular remissions in their circle and beyond, voice suspicions about the hospital, the diagnosis, and the treatment, will even ask the name of the doctor who received him, hmm, I don’t recognize that name, hmm, I don’t know him, oh he’s probably very good, and will insist that she write down the number of that amazing hospital practitioner who has a two-year waiting list, may even offer to call him themselves, since they know him or have a friend who, and maybe there will even be someone stupid enough – someone completely out to lunch – to tell her that it’s possible, it happens, to get an irreversible coma mixed up with other states that resemble it – the alcoholic coma, for example, an overdose of sedatives, hypoglycemia, or even hypothermia – and then, remembering the surf session in cold water that very morning, she’ll feel like vomiting but will get hold of herself to remind the person tormenting her that there was an extremely violent accident, and although she will resist, repeating to everyone that Simon is in good hands, that we just have to wait, they’ll still want to shower her with affection and cover her with words; no, it’s not that time yet, what she wants is someplace to wait, a place to exhaust time, she wants some shelter, reaches the parking lot and suddenly begins to run toward her car, dives inside, and then it’s fists pounding the steering wheel and her hair flying over the dashboard, actions that are so disordered she has trouble putting the key in the ignition, and when she finally starts the car, it jolts forward, tires screeching in the parking lot, then she drives straight out, toward the west, toward the west wind, as the sky clears over this city, while back in his office Revol doesn’t sit down but does what the law requires him to do when an encephalic death is announced in ICU: he picks up his phone, dials the number for the organ and tissue donation unit, and it’s Thomas Remige who picks up.

B
ut he almost missed the call, he nearly didn’t hear it, and it was only when he paused to catch his breath at the end of a long lively phrase – a vocal polyphony, a flight of birds, Benjamin Britten,
A Ceremony of Carols
, op. 28 – that he caught the chirp-chirp of the phone that was echoed, brilliantly and delicately, by a goldfinch in its cage.

That Sunday morning, in a garden studio on rue Commandant-Charcot, Thomas Remige makes the slats of a venetian blind quiver; he is alone, naked, and he’s singing. He stands in the centre of the room – always in the same spot – his body weight spread equally over both feet, back straight, shoulders held lightly back, rib cage open to free the chest and neck; and once he’s steady, makes a few slow circular movements with his head to loosen his cervical spine, repeats these same rotations with each shoulder, then begins to visualize the column of air that armatures him, from the pit of his belly to his throat, this internal conduit that powers the breath and will make his vocal cords vibrate; he refines his posture. Finally he opens his mouth, an oven – a little odd at the moment, vaguely ridiculous – fills his lungs with air, contracts his abdominal wall, then exhales, an action like opening a gate, and stretches out this action as long as possible, mobilizing his diaphragm and his zygomatics – a deaf man would have been able to listen simply by placing his hands on him. If you were there to witness the scene, you might see a link with the yogi’s sun salutation or the morning ritual of monks and nuns, this lyricism of the dawn; you might see any corporeal ritual intended to maintain and conserve the body – drinking a glass of fresh water, brushing one’s teeth, unrolling a rubber mat on the floor in front of the television to do some stretches – but for Thomas Remige, this is something completely different: it is an exploration of the self – his voice like a probe inserted in the body and causing everything that animates him to reverberate on the surface, his voice like a stethoscope.

He was twenty when he left the family farm, a well-to-do plot in Normandy that his sister and brother-in-law would eventually take over. Bye-bye school bus and mud in the yard, smell of wet hay, the solitary moo of a cow demanding to be milked and the border of poplars grown close together on a grassy bank – from now on he lives in a tiny studio that his parents rent to him in downtown Rouen, electric radiator and pullout couch, rides a Honda 500 from 1971, has started nursing school, likes girls, likes boys, doesn’t know, and one night during a jaunt to Paris goes to a karaoke bar in Belleville, there are several Asians there, vinyl hair and waxy cheeks, regulars come to polish their performances, couples, mostly, who admire and film each other, re-enacting dance moves and postures from TV shows, and suddenly, succumbing to the pressure of his friends, here he is choosing a song, a short thing, a simple thing – I think it was “It’s a Heartache” by Bonnie Tyler – and when his turn comes he goes onstage, and slowly metamorphoses: little by little, his abulic body settles, a voice comes out of his mouth, a voice that’s his but that he doesn’t recognize, incredible timbre, texture, and range, as though his body housed other versions of himself – a wild cat, a jagged cliff, a lady of the night – and the DJ isn’t mistaken, it really is him singing, and then, taking hold of his voice as his body signature, taking hold of his voice as the shape of his singularity, he decides to get to know himself and begins to sing in earnest.

As he discovers singing, he discovers his body, that’s how it happens. Like the sports amateur after an intense session – running, cycling, gymnastics – he feels tightnesses he hasn’t felt before, knots and currents, points and zones, as though something of himself is being revealed – his unexplored potential. He endeavours to recognize everything that composes him, conceiving of the precise anatomy, the shape of the organs, the variety of muscles, their unsuspected resources; he explores his respiratory system and how the action of singing pulls him together and holds him, raises him up into a human body and perhaps even more, into a singing body. It’s a rebirth.

The time and money he consecrates to singing swells over the course of years, coming to take up a consequential part of his daily life and a salary beefed up by extra shifts at the hospital: he vocalizes every morning, studies every night, takes a class twice a week with an opera singer who has a body shaped like a light bulb – giraffe neck and reed-thin arms, strapping pelvis and flat belly, chest in proportion, voluminous, all of this sheltered beneath hair that undulates down to her knees, hurtling down flannel skirts – at night he tracks this or that recital, opera, new recording, downloads everything, pirates, copies, archives, in the summer traipses across France to this or that opera festival, sleeps in a tent or shares a rented bungalow with other enthusiasts like him, meets Ousmane, a Gnawa musician with a shimmering baritone voice, and suddenly last summer it was a trip to Algeria and the acquisition of a goldfinch in the Collo Valley – he drops the whole of his inheritance from his grandmother on these two things – three thousand euros in cash rolled inside a cambric handkerchief.

His first years as an intensive care unit nurse shake his foundations: he enters an otherworldly space, a subterranean or parallel world at the edge of the other one and disturbed by their adjacency, continuously brushing against one another; he enters this world punctuated by a thousand slumbers, but where he never sleeps. In the early days, he criss-crosses the department like you’d explore your own internal cartography, conscious that he’s encountering the other half of time, the cerebral night, the heart of things, the reactor core – his voice grows clearer, grows richer in nuance, it was then that he was studying his first
lied
, a Brahms lullaby, in fact, a simple song that he probably sang for the first time at the bedside of a restless patient, the melody like a tactile analgesic. Flexible hours, heavy responsibilities, shortages of everything: the department is a closed space, with its own set of rules, and Thomas has the feeling of cutting himself off bit by bit from the outside world, of living in a place where the caesura of night and day doesn’t affect him anymore. He sometimes feels he’s losing ground. To get some air, he multiplies the intensives from which he emerges worn out but ballasted by a deepening gaze and a voice that is ever richer, working hard without ever banking any energy, and he’s starting to be noticed in the department meetings, mastering procedures calibrated to the various phases of sleep, including the waking phase, carefully manipulating monitors and life-support devices, taking an interest in pain management. Seven years of this rhythm and then the desire to gravitate in a different direction within this same perimeter. He becomes one of the three hundred organ donation coordinators in the country, goes to join the hospital in Le Havre, he’s twenty-nine, he’s magnificent. When asked about this new direction which required, as one would imagine, supplementary training, Thomas answers: contact with patients’ loved ones, psychology, law, sociology, everything that abounds in his career as a nurse, sure, sure, but there’s something else, something more complex, and if he feels he’s with someone he can trust, if he chooses to take his time, he’ll speak of this singular sensation of feeling your way on the threshold of the living, of a curiosity about the human body and its uses, of an approach to death and its representations – because that’s what this is about. He ignores the friends who badger and jibe – and what if the electroencephalogram was wrong, eh, a malfunction, a momentary crash, an electrical problem, right, and if the guy wasn’t really dead, that happens sometimes, right? Whoa, you’re messing with death, Tom, that’s kinda sketchy, kinda dark – chews the end of his umpteenth matchstick and smiles, buys a round the night he receives, with honours, his master’s in philosophy from the Sorbonne – swashbuckling expert in shift-trading with co-workers, he was able to find someone to fill in for him during those five half-day seminars held in the rue Saint-Jacques, a street he liked to take all the way to the Seine, listening to the rustling of the city, singing sometimes.

Impossible to know what today will bring, Thomas Remige is on standby, the ICU could call at any moment during his twenty-four hours, that’s the principle. Like every time, he has to reconcile himself to these hours that are at once vacant but unavailable – these paradoxical hours that are perhaps the other name for boredom – has to organize latency, and often screws it up, managing neither to rest nor take advantage of this free time, suspended in a state of expectancy, paralyzed by procrastination – he gets ready to go out, ends up staying home; starts a cake, a film, an archive of digital sounds – the song of the goldfinch – ends up ditching, rewinding, leaving it aside and postponing, we’ll see later, but later never exists, later is a flow of full time all stirred up by irregular hours. And, seeing the hospital’s number on the screen of his phone, Thomas tends to feel both a pang of disappointment and a simultaneous sense of relief.

The organ donation unit that he’s in charge of functions as an independent department even though it’s situated inside the hospital walls, but Revol and Remige know each other, and the young man knows exactly what Revol is about to tell him, he could even utter it for him, this sentence that standardizes tragedy for better efficiency: a patient in the ICU has been pronounced brain-dead. A statement that sounds like a concluding sentence, when it’s not so for Thomas, no, on the contrary it indicates the beginning of a series of movements, the launch of a process.

– A patient in the ICU has been pronounced brain-dead.

Revol’s voice recites the script to a T. Okay, Remige seems to answer, he doesn’t open his mouth but nods his head, instantly going over the ultracalibrated process he’s about to set in motion within a legal framework that is both dense and strict, a high-precision movement unfolded along a precise temporal line, and here he is looking at his watch – an action he’ll repeat several times in the hours that follow, an action they will all repeat, incessantly, up until the end.

A dialogue ensues – quick, alternating sentences that lie alongside the body of Simon Limbeau, Remige polling Revol on three points: the context of the brain-death diagnosis – where are we with that? – the medical evaluation of the patient – cause of death, medical history, feasibility of organ retrieval – and finally, the family – has he been able to speak with them yet, given the violence of the event? Is the family present? Revol responds to this last question in the negative and then specifies, I just met with the mother. Okay, I’ll get ready, Remige shivers, he’s cold – he is naked, after all – remember?

A few moments later, helmet, gloves, and boots on, jacket buttoned to the top and his indigo scarf wound round his neck, Thomas Remige mounts his motorcycle, sets off in the direction of the hospital – before donning his helmet, he will have listened to the echo of his steps in the silent street, paying close attention to this impression of a canyon, of a sonorous bottleneck. A flick of his wrist starts his engine, and then he zooms eastward following the straight road that divides this part of the city – a road parallel to the one Marianne took only a little while before him – diving into rue René-Coty, rue de Maréchal-Joffre, rue Aristide-Briand – names with goatees and moustaches, names with paunches and pocket watches, names with floppy hats – rue de Verdun and all the way to the freeway at the edge of the city. His full-face helmet prevents him from singing, and yet, some days, prey to this sort of overflowing based in both fear and euphoria, he goes full-tilting along urban corridors, visor lifted, and uses his vocal cords to make space vibrate.