The room is bathed in half-light, the floor reflecting the frozen sky from between the slats of the blinds. He has to wait for his eyes to adjust before he can make out the machines, the furniture, and the body that inhabit this room. Simon Limbres is there, lying on his back in a bed, a white sheet pulled up to his chest. He is on a ventilator, and the sheet lifts slightly with each inhalation, a small but perceptible movement that makes it look as if he’s asleep. The sounds of the hospital are muffled here, and the constant beeping and buzzing of the electrical equipment seems only to heighten the silence. It might easily be a normal patient’s room, were it not for the subdued lighting, that impression of withdrawal, as if the room were situated outside the hospital, in a depressurized cell where nothing more was at stake.
* * *
They didn’t speak in the car—not a word. There was nothing to say now. Sean left his car parked outside the bar—located at the end of the road where the skiffs he made and the surfboards that Simon picked up or borrowed, “shortboards” or “fishes,” dug into the water—and got into Marianne’s car, a first, and she drove, her forearms straight and rigid as matchsticks, while Sean kept his face turned to the glass, occasionally commenting on the traffic, which wasn’t too bad—a fact that helped them, carrying them hurriedly to their son’s bedside, but which also delivered them inexorably into blackness and sadness: there was nothing to hinder their progress, delay their arrival. Of course, they both think about a dramatic turnaround, the miraculous idea of this all being a mistake—the images in the scanner being accidentally inverted, an error of interpretation, a computer bug, a simple typo, these things happen, just like people sometimes take home the wrong baby from a maternity ward, or the wrong patient is taken to the operating theater: hospitals are not infallible, after all—but without really being able to believe in the possibility, and above all without being able to communicate their thoughts to each other. Soon the smooth, glass-covered buildings are growing bigger, filling the windshield of the car, and now they are fumbling through that semidark room.
* * *
Marianne approaches Simon. She is as close as possible to his body, which has never seemed so long to her before, and which she has not seen this closely in such a long time—Simon’s embarrassment causing him to lock the bathroom door, demanding that people knock before entering his bedroom, walking through the apartment wrapped in towels like a young Buddhist monk. Marianne leans over her child’s mouth to feel his breath, places her face sideways on his chest to hear his heart. He is breathing, she can feel it; his heart is beating, she can hear it. Does she think, then, of the first time she heard his heart beat, at the ultrasound center in Odéon one fall afternoon, the sound of a stampede in the speakers while the luminescent smears on the screen marked out his tiny body. She stands up. Simon’s head is bandaged, but his face is intact. But is it still his face she sees? The question haunts her while she examines her son’s forehead, his temples, the shapes of his eyebrows, the bulge of his eyeballs beneath the lids—the smooth, little concave patch of skin at the inside corner of the eye—while she recognizes the strong nose, the fleshy, prominent lips, the hollowed cheeks, the lightly bearded chin, yes, all this is familiar, but Simon’s face—everything in him that lives and thinks and moves—will she ever see that again? Her legs weakening, she staggers, grips the bed, which moves on its wheels, pulling the drip with it, and the space reels around her. Sean’s figure loses its clarity, as if behind a rain-blurred window. He has walked to the other side of the bed, standing directly across from Marianne, and now he takes his son’s hand while from the icy hollow of his guts to the edge of his barely open lips he struggles to sound his name: Simon. We’re here, we’re with you, you can hear me, Simon, my boy, we’re here. He touches his forehead to his son’s: his skin is still warm, and it smells of him, the smell of wool and cotton, the smell of the sea, and he probably begins to whisper words intended only for the two of them, words no one else can hear and that we will never know, the ancient babble of the Polynesian islands, or words of mana that have crossed unaltered through all the layers of language, reddening rocks from a still-burning fire, that dense, slow, inexhaustible matter, that wisdom—he speaks for two or three minutes, then stands up straight and his eyes meet Marianne’s and their fingers brush lightly above their child’s chest, moving the edge of the sheet, which slides off the young man’s chest, revealing the Maori tattoo that neither of them has ever touched, the drawing that comes from his shoulder, then spreads over the hollow of the clavicle and then the scapula. Simon got it done the summer he turned fifteen, at a surfing camp in the Basque Country. It was his way of saying this is my body and I do what I want with it. Sean, whose own back was completely covered with tattoos, had calmly asked him about the meaning, choice, and positioning of the image, seeking to find out if this was some expression of his mixed heritage; but Marianne had taken it badly: Simon was so young, she said anxiously, this tattoo of yours, you do realize it’s for life? And the word comes back at her, like a boomerang: “irreversible.”
* * *
Révol enters the room. Sean turns and calls out: I can hear his heart beating—the buzzing of the machines in the room seems to grow louder in that instant—then he says it again, insistent: His heart is beating, isn’t it? Yes, Révol says, his heart is beating, because of the machines. Later, as they’re about to leave the room, Sean interrogates him again: Why didn’t you operate on him when he first arrived? The doctor can sense the aggression, the tension, the despair that turns to anger, and he can also tell that the father has been drinking—he can detect the faint smell of alcohol on his breath—so he explains, carefully: It wasn’t possible to operate on him, monsieur. The hemorrhage was too widespread, too advanced, you could see it on the scan we took as soon as Simon was admitted, it was too late. Is it this certainty shown in the face of disaster, this imperturbable calm that borders on arrogance, even while the tremors are intensifying, that causes Sean to raise his voice? In any case, he yells: You didn’t even try to save him! Révol grimaces but does not blink. He wants to say something, but senses that all he can do is stay silent, and anyway there is a knock at the door. Without waiting for a response, Cordélia Owl enters the room.
Having splashed some water on her face and downed a cup of coffee, she is beautiful the way certain young women are after a night without sleep. She greets Marianne and Sean with a brief smile, and then, concentrating fully, walks up to the bed. I’m going to take your temperature. She speaks to Simon. Révol freezes. Marianne and Sean stare at her in amazement. The young nurse turns her back to them, all right, that’s good, then checks his blood pressure and says I’m going to look at your catheter now, to see if you’ve peed—she is so gentle, it is almost unbearable. Seeing the shocked expressions on Marianne and Sean Limbres’s faces, Révol thinks about interrupting the nurse, ordering her to leave the room, but finally decides in favor of movement: We should go to my office to talk, come with me if you would. Marianne rears up, shakes her head, unwilling to leave the room, I’m staying with Simon—a few strands of hair hang over her face, swinging from side to side—and Sean stands stubbornly alongside her, but Révol insists: Come with me, the nurse needs to take care of your son now, you’ll be able to see him again afterward.
* * *
Once again they are back in the maze, in the intersecting corridors, amid the figures of people at work, echoing voices, waiting patients, nurses checking drips, blood pressure, dealing with bedpans and bedsores, airing rooms, changing sheets, washing floors, and once again Révol with his gangling stride, the sides of his white coat flapping at either side of him like wings, once again the tiny office and the icy chairs, the swivel chair behind the desk and the paperweight rolling in the palm of his hand when, at that very moment, Thomas Rémige knocks on the door, then opens and walks right in. He introduces himself to Simon Limbres’s parents—I’m a nurse, I work in this department—then sits next to Révol, on a stool that he puts there. So, there are now four of them sitting in this cubbyhole, and Révol realizes he needs to speed things up because they are suffocating here. So, taking care to look them in the eyes again, individually—this man and this woman, Simon Limbres’s parents, the look a way of giving his word—he tells them: Simon’s brain no longer shows any activity. We’ve just carried out another thirty-minute EEG and it shows a flat line. Simon is now in a coma dépassé.
* * *
Pierre Révol has physically collected himself—back straightened, neck thrust tall—contracting his muscles as if moving up a gear and accelerating, as if saying to himself at that moment, okay, no more beating around the bush, let’s just get on with it, and it is probably this effort that enables him to pass beyond Marianne’s involuntary shudder and Sean’s exclamation, both of them realizing the significance of the term “dépassé,” understanding that the end of the story is close, and for them the imminence of this announcement is unbearable. Sean closes his eyes, bows his head, pinching the inside corners of his eyes with his thumb and index finger and murmurs I want to be sure that you’ve done everything you can, and Révol gently assures him: The violence of the accident was too great. Simon’s condition was hopeless by the time he was admitted this morning. We sent the scan to several neurosurgeons, who unfortunately confirmed our view that a surgical intervention would accomplish nothing. I give you my word. The moment he said the word “hopeless,” Simon’s parents stared at the floor. Something inside them cracks and collapses. Then, suddenly, as if to delay the final sentence, Marianne says: Yes, but people sometimes wake up from comas, don’t they, even if it’s years later? There are lots of cases like that, aren’t there? Her face is transformed by this idea, a burst of light, and her eyes grow wide. Yes, with comas, nothing is ever lost. She knows this: there are so many stories on blogs, on forums, of people waking up after years of silence, these little miracles. Révol looks into her eyes and firmly replies: No—the fatal syllable. He continues: All the functions that comprise your son’s consciousness, awareness, mobility have ceased, and the same is true for his vegetative functions: his breathing and heartbeat are entirely dependent on machines. Révol talks and talks, gathering evidence, enumerating facts, pausing after each piece of information, his intonation rising—a way of saying that the bad news is accumulating, piling up over Simon’s body—until finally his sentence comes to an end, exhausted, suddenly indicating the void stretching out before it, like a dissolution of space.
Simon is in a state of brain death. His life is over. He is dead.
* * *
After delivering such a message, it is only natural to take a moment to get your breath back, stabilize the oscillations in your inner ear so you don’t fall off your chair. Their gazes become unglued. Révol ignores the beep that his pager makes, opens his hand and examines the orange-ish paperweight that lies warm in his palm. He is worn out. He has announced the death of their son to this man and this woman, without clearing his throat or lowering his voice; he has pronounced the words—the words “death” and “dead”—words that freeze the blood. But Simon’s blood is not cold, that is the problem. The notion of his death is contradicted by the way he looks, because, when it comes down to it, his flesh is warm, it moves, instead of being cold, blue, and immobile.
Looking sideways, Révol watches Marianne and Sean: she is burning her retinas on the yellow fluorescent tube fixed to the ceiling, while he rests his forearms on his thighs and leans forward, staring at the floor, head withdrawn into his shoulders. What could they have seen in their son’s room? What could they have gleaned with their ignorant eyes, incapable of understanding the relationship between Simon’s destroyed insides and his peaceful exterior, between reality and appearance? There was nothing visible on their son’s body, no physical sign that would enable a diagnosis to be made, as if reading the body—nothing like the brilliant Babinski reflex, which could be used to detect brain disease simply by stimulating the sole of the foot. No, for them, he lay there mute, indecipherable, as impenetrable as a safe. Rémige’s cell phone rings, excuse me, he jumps to his feet and instantly switches it off, then sits down again. Marianne shivers, but Sean does not even lift his head, sitting there motionless, his back wide, bulging, dark.
Révol keeps them in his field of vision, trying to understand them, his gaze like a lens that he runs over their presence. These two are a little younger than him, children of the late sixties, and they have spent their lives in a corner of the globe where life expectancy, already high, keeps growing, lengthening, where death is kept hidden in the shadows, where it is erased from the places of everyday life, evacuated to hospitals, where it is dealt with by professionals. Have they ever even seen a corpse before? Sat by a grandmother’s deathbed, dragged a drowned man from the water, cared for a dying friend? Have they ever seen a dead person other than in American TV shows like Body of Proof, CSI, Six Feet Under? Révol likes to visit these televisual morgues occasionally, these worlds populated with emergency physicians, medical examiners, funeral directors, embalmers, and forensics experts, among them always a good number of sexy, eccentric, near-hysterical females, most often a gothic vamp with pierced lips or a classy but bipolar blonde, always desperate for love; he likes listening to these people chatting around a stiff laid out on a mortuary slab, the camera lens covered with a blue filter, telling each other secrets, shamelessly flirting, even working sometimes, formulating hypotheses over a strand of hair trapped in a pair of tweezers, a button examined under a magnifying glass, a sample of mucous analyzed with the aid of a microscope, because the clock is always ticking, the night coming to an end, because there is always an urgent need to solve the mystery of the traces on the epidermis, to take a stab at deciphering the victim’s corpse to find out if they had gone clubbing or eaten candy or too much red meat, if they had drunk whiskey, were afraid of the dark, combed their hair, handled chemicals, had promiscuous sex; yes, Révol enjoys watching these shows sometimes, although in his opinion such scenes say nothing about death. Even if the corpse is the camera’s main focus, even if it fills the screen, even if it’s examined, sliced up, turned over, it is all a charade, and the stories reflect this. So the dead body, a repository of unrevealed secrets, of narrative and dramatic possibilities, is ultimately used to keep death at a distance.
Sean and Marianne have still not moved. Despondency? Courage? Dignity? Révol has no idea, and is half-expecting them to suddenly explode, leap over his desk, sending his papers flying, knocking over his stupid ornaments, maybe even hit him, insult him—you bastard, you piece of shit. God knows they have reason enough to go crazy, to bang their heads against the wall, to scream with rage. Instead of which, the two of them appear to be slowly dissociating themselves from the rest of humanity, migrating toward the edge of the earth, leaving this time, and this place, to drift among the stars.
* * *
How could they even think about the death of their child when what was a pure absolute—death, the purest absolute of all—had been reformulated, newly defined, in different bodily conditions? Because it was no longer that beating rhythm in the hollow of the chest that confirmed life (a soldier removing his helmet and leaning down to put an ear to the breast of his comrade lying in mud at the bottom of the trench), it was no longer breath exhaled by the mouth that signified life (a dripping lifeguard giving mouth-to-mouth to a young girl with a greenish complexion), but the electrified cerebrum, activated by brain waves, preferably beta waves. How could they even contemplate it, this death of their Simon, when his skin was still pink and soft, when, as Rimbaud wrote, the nape of his neck was bathed in cool-blue cresses and his feet were stretched out in the yellow flags? Révol gathers the representations of corpses that he knows about, and they are always images of Christ—pale-bodied crucified Christs, foreheads spiked by the crown of thorns, hands and feet nailed to the black, glistening wood, or Christs taken down from the cross, heads laid back and eyes half-closed, white-skinned and emaciated, hips covered by a thin shroud, in the style of Mantegna, or The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb by Holbein the Younger—a painting of such realism that Dostoyevsky warned believers if they look at it, they risk losing their faith—or they are kings, prelates, embalmed dictators, cinematic cowboys collapsed on the sand and shot in close-up, and he remembers that Christlike photograph of Che, his eyes open, exhibited in a morbid mise-en-scène by the Bolivian junta, but he can think of nothing analogous to Simon, this intact and calmly athletic body, free of blood or wounds, resembling a young god in repose, Simon who looks like he is sleeping, who looks alive.
How long do they stay seated like this after the announcement, slumped on the edges of their chairs, held captive in a mental experience of which their bodies had, until that moment, not the slightest inkling? How long does it take them before they accept death’s new regime? For now, there is no possible translation for what they are feeling; it strikes them down in a language that precedes language, from before words, before grammar, an unshareable language that is perhaps another name for pain. Impossible to extricate themselves from it, impossible to substitute another description for it, impossible to reconstruct it in another image. They are, at once, cut off from themselves and from the world that surrounds them.
* * *
Thomas Rémige has remained silent, sitting on the metal stool next to Révol, legs crossed at the knees, and perhaps he is thinking about the same things as the doctor, forming the same mental visions. He has put his box of matches away and now waits, with them. Time passes. Their minds whirl and the room fills with their silent screams. Then Révol stands up, tall and pale, his long, sorrowful face indicating that he must leave them now, I have to be somewhere, so Thomas Rémige remains alone with Simon’s parents, who do not stand up but move closer to each other, shoulder to shoulder, and weep in silence. He waits for a moment, then asks them, in a kind voice, if they would like to go back to Simon’s room. Without replying, they stand up and leave the room, the nurse following, but as soon as they are in the corridor, Sean shakes his head, no, I can’t, not yet. He is breathing loudly, filling his lungs and swelling his chest, one hand covering his mouth, and Marianne slides under his shoulder—to support him, to protect him—and the three of them come to a halt. Thomas goes up to them and explains: I’m here to accompany you, to be with you; if you have any questions, please ask me. Sean sounds like he’s suffocating, then—how does he find the strength to speak?—he demands: What’s going to happen now? The nurse swallows while Sean continues, his voice ravaged by grief and disgust: Why are you keeping him alive if there’s no hope? What are we waiting for? I don’t understand. Marianne, staring vacantly through the lock of hair that has fallen over her face, seems not to hear any of this. Thomas is searching for a way out, a way to formulate his answer: Sean’s question has severed the usual chronology of the protocol, designed to protect the grieving from the sudden shock of the tragedy, the brutality of the announcement, by giving them time. But the question must be answered. He decides to speak to them now.