Mend the Living (9 page)

Once they’re sitting down, Sean sniffs Marianne’s glass. Gin? Marianne smiles – clowning – points to the menu on the wall and begins to read aloud all the things he could order for lunch this Sunday, for example a croque-monsieur, croque-madame, Perigord salad, haddock and potatoes, plain omelette, tartine provençale, fried sausages, crème caramel, crème vanille, apple tart, and if she could she would read the whole chalkboard out to him and keep reading over and over in order to delay the moment when she would have to put it back on, the costume of the bird of ill omen, those feathers of darkness and tears. He lets her go on, watches her without a word, and then gives in to impatience and grabs her by the wrist, his hand cuffing the slender joint and compressing the artery, please, stop. He, too, orders a gin.

Then Marianne arms herself with courage – arms herself, yes, that’s exactly it, there is this naked aggression that hasn’t stopped growing since their embrace and which she covers herself with now, the way we protect ourselves by brandishing the blade of the dagger – and, from the bench seat, direct, delivers the three propositions she has prepared – her eyes stare straight ahead. When he hears the last one – “irreversible” – Sean shakes his head and his face twists, convulses, no, no, no, and he gets up, heavy, bumps against the table – the gin spills over the rim of the glass – heads for the door, arms at his sides and fists tight as though he were carrying a weight, the bearing of a man who’s going out to break someone’s face, who’s looking for him already, and when he gets to the doorstep outside he turns abruptly, comes back to the table, moving through the ray of light traced on the ground, and his backlit silhouette is haloed with a greyish powder: the sawdust that covers him lifts into space each time his foot hits the ground. His body smokes. And he’s storming forward, chest inclined as though he were about to charge. Once he reaches the table he grabs the glass of gin and, like her, empties it in one gulp, then shoots at Marianne, who’s already knotting her scarf, let’s go.

T
he room is bathed in half-light, the ground reflects a curdled sky between the blinds, and, as a result, you have to let your eyes adjust before being able to make out the machines, the furniture, and the body that inhabits it. Simon Limbeau is there, stretched out on his back in the bed, a white sheet pulled up to his chest. He’s hooked up to a respirator. The sheet rises slightly with each inhalation, a small but perceptible movement – you might say he was sleeping. The murmur of the ward is muffled, and the constant vibrations of the medical equipment only emphasize the silence as they bore into it with their
basso continuo
. This could be the room of someone who was sick, yes, you could believe this, if it weren’t for the dimness, subdued, and the sense of withdrawal, as though this room were actually somewhere outside the hospital, a depressurized alveolus where nothing more takes place.

They hadn’t said anything in the car, nothing, there was nothing to say yet. Sean had left his vehicle parked in front of the bar – a station wagon running out of steam stuffed full of skiffs he’s made, and the surfboards that Simon has collected, gathered from here and there, shortboards or fishes – and got into Marianne’s car, a first, which she drove with forearms parallel and stiff as matchsticks while he kept his face turned toward the window, from time to time uttering some pithy thing about the traffic’s smooth flow – a flow that was their ally, carrying them quickly to their son’s bedside, but a flow that was also, from the first ring of the telephone, pushing them quickly toward calamity without any possibility of avoidance: nothing came to hinder or slow them on their path to the hospital. Of course, the chance of a twist came to both their minds at the same moment – scans presented backwards, a mix-up in the test results, a mistake in the reading, a typing error, a computer bug, it could happen, yes, just like two babies can sometimes be switched in the maternity ward or the wrong patient brought to the O.R., hospitals aren’t infallible – without either of them being able to completely believe it, and without them being able to say it openly to one another, and then buildings with smooth windowed facades grew before them until they engulfed the windshield, and now they were groping around in this room.

Marianne goes over to Simon, as near as possible to this body that has never seemed so long before, and that she hasn’t seen up this close for years – Simon’s modesty, locked in the bathroom, demanding that they knock before coming into his room, or walking through the apartment draped in towels like a young bonze. Marianne leans over her child’s mouth to feel his breath, places a cheek against his chest to hear his heart. He’s breathing, she can feel it; his heart is beating, she can hear it – does she think then of the first heartbeats picked up at the ultrasound clinic at the Odeon in Paris one fall afternoon, the first cavalcade of rapid beats when spots of light amassed on the screen? She stands up. Simon’s head is encircled by a bandage, the skin is intact, yes, but is his face still there? The question assails her as she examines her child’s forehead, the slope of it, the lines of his eyebrows, the shape of his eyes beneath their lids – the little hollow of skin in the inner corner of the eye, smooth and concave – as she recognizes the strong nose, the finely drawn full lips, the recess of the cheeks, the chin covered in a fine beard, yes, all of this is here, but Simon’s face, all that lives and thinks within him, all that animates him, will any of that come back? She sways, legs weak, clutches the edge of the wheeled bed, the drip moves, space reels around her. Sean’s outline grows blurred as though behind a windowpane spattered with rain. He has moved to the other side of the bed, stands directly across from Marianne, and now he takes his son’s hand while from the frozen depths of his belly to the edge of his lips, just parted, his name is barely formed: Simon. We’re here, we’re with you, can you hear me, Simon, my boy, we’re here. He places his forehead against that of the young man stretched out, his skin is still warm and there it is, his smell, smell of wool and cotton, smell of the sea, and Sean probably begins to whisper words just for the two of them, words that no one else can hear and that we will never know, archaic babble from the Polynesian Isles, or
mana
words that have crossed unaltered through all the layers of language, pebbles that glow red with a fire intact, this dense, slow matter, inexhaustible, this wisdom; it lasts two or three minutes and then he stands again, his eyes meet Marianne’s and their hands brush together above their child’s chest, a movement that makes the sheet slip down, revealing the Maori tattoo they’ve never touched, vegetal design beginning at the shoulder and spreading over the indent of the clavicle and onto the shoulder blades – Simon had marked his skin in the summer of his fifteenth year at a surf camp in the Basque country, a way of stating my body is my own, and while Sean, calm, himself with tattoos across his back, had asked him about the meaning, the choice, and the placement of such a design, trying to tease out whether he was giving a nod to the traces of Maori in his blood; Marianne, for her part, had taken it badly, Simon was so young, she had said, anxious, your tattoo, you know it’s there for life, right? And the word comes back to her like a boomerang: irreversible.

Revol has just entered the room. Sean turns and says: I hear his heart beating – it seems like the hum of the machines grows amplified in that moment – and then again, insistent: his heart is beating, right? Yes, Revol asserts, his heart is beating, thanks to the machines. And after a moment, when he’s getting ready to leave the room, Sean stops him again: why wasn’t he operated on as soon as he arrived? The doctor detects the aggressive tension, the despair that’s turning to anger and on top of it the father has been drinking, he smells alcohol on his breath, and he explains carefully: it wasn’t possible to operate, sir, the hemorrhage was too severe, too advanced, the scan ordered in emergency when Simon was admitted clearly showed that it was too late. Maybe it’s this certitude maintained in the cataclysm, this imperturbable calm approaching arrogance even as the tremors intensify that causes Sean to suddenly raise his voice, to explode: you didn’t even try! Revol winces but doesn’t bat an eye, would like to reply but feels that all he can do is remain silent, and anyway someone is knocking at the door now, and without waiting for a response Cordelia Owl enters the room.

The young woman has splashed a little water on her face, had a coffee, she’s beautiful as some girls are after a sleepless night. She greets Marianne and Sean with a furtive smile and then, focused, approaches the bed. I’m going to take your temperature now. She’s talking to Simon. Revol freezes. Marianne and Sean open their eyes wide, astonished. The young woman turns her back to them, murmurs, there, that’s good, then she checks his blood pressure on the monitor and says, I’m going to check your catheter now, to see if you’ve gone pee – she moves with almost excruciating gentleness. Revol catches the stunned look that passes between Marianne and Sean Limbeau, hesitates to interrupt the nurse, to give her the order to leave, and finally opts for movement: we need to speak in my office, please, come with me. Marianne starts, resists, doesn’t want to leave the room, I’m staying with Simon – locks of hair hang in her face, accompanying the to and fro of her head that sways in the void – and Sean too shifts from foot to foot while Revol insists, come with me, your son needs care, you can come back to see him right after.

Once again the labyrinth, corridors that break off into other corridors, once again the outlines of people at work, the echo, the wait, drips checked, treatments dispensed, blood pressures taken, care administered – sponge baths, bedsores – rooms aired out, sheets changed, floors washed, and once again Revol and his lanky stride, once again the panels of his white coat that glide out behind him, the tiny office and the icy chairs, once again the swivel chair and the paperweight rolled in the hollow of a palm at the very instant when Thomas Remige knocks at the door and, without waiting, strides into the room, introduces himself to Simon Limbeau’s parents, states his profession – I’m a nurse, I work on the floor – then he pulls up a stool, sits at Revol’s side. So now they are four, seated in this cubbyhole, and Revol feels he has to speed things up because they’re suffocating in here. He takes care to look at each of them in turn, this man and this woman, Simon Limbeau’s parents – once again, the gaze as a commitment to speech – while he states: Simon’s brain registers no further activity, the thirty-minute electroencephalogram just taken shows a flat line – Simon is now in an irreversible coma.

Pierre Revol has gathered up his body, hollowed out his back and stretched out his neck, a contraction of muscles as though he were shifting into high gear, as though he were urging himself on in this moment – okay, let’s cut the formalities, we have to keep moving, and it is probably this muscular focus that allows him to get past Marianne’s shudder and Sean’s exclamation, who recognize together the word “irreversible,” understanding that the conclusion is near, and the imminence of the announcement is completely unbearable. Sean closes his lids, leans his head forward, pinches the inner corner of his eyes between thumb and forefinger, murmuring I want to be sure that everything has been done and Revol, gentle, assures him: the impact of the accident was too violent, Simon’s condition was hopeless when he was admitted this morning, we transmitted the scan to expert neurosurgeons who, unfortunately, confirmed that a surgical intervention couldn’t fix anything, you have my word. He says “condition was hopeless” and the parents stare at the ground. Inside them, everything cracks and caves in, and suddenly, as though to delay the final word, Marianne says: yes, but people wake up from comas, it happens that they wake up, even years later, there are tons of cases like that, right? Her face is transfigured at this idea, a flash of light, and her eyes grow wide, yes, with a coma, nothing is ever sure, she knows it, stories abound of people who wake up after years, they fill up blogs, discussion forums, these miraculous stories. Revol stops her eyes with his own, and replies, firm: no – the syllable that kills. He starts again: the functions of relational life – in other words, your son’s consciousness, sensibility, and mobility – are non-existent, and even his vegetative functions, his breathing and blood circulation are only happening because of machines – Revol lays it out, lays it out, as though he were proceeding by accumulation of evidence, his words enumerate, pause after each piece of information, while the intonation lifts, a way of saying that bad news piles up, that it heaps up within Simon’s body, until his sentence wears itself out, finally stops, suddenly indicating the emptiness stretched out before it like a dissolution of space.

– Simon is brain-dead. Deceased. He’s dead.

One needs time, of course, to catch one’s breath after uttering such a thing, time to take a pause, stabilize the oscillations of the inner ear so as not to collapse in a heap on the ground. Gazes dissolve. Revol ignores the beep beep at his belt, opens his hand, studies the orangey paperweight growing warm against his palm. He’s sucked dry. He just told this man and this woman that their son is dead, didn’t clear his throat, didn’t lower his voice, said the words, the word “deceased,” and, worse still, the word “dead,” these words that freeze a bodily state. But Simon Limbeau’s body is not frozen, that is exactly the problem, and his aspect contravenes the usual idea of a corpse: it is, after all, warm, flushed, and it moves – rather than being cold, blue, and immobile.