Cordélia Owl is shaking a pack of cigarettes at Révol as the elevator doors close—I’m going downstairs for a break, five minutes—she gestures to him through the rapidly narrowing gap, and then her own face appears in front of her, a blur. The metal surface does not offer a clear reflection, only a vague mask, erasing her supple skin and shining eyes, the banding effect of her sleepless night, that still excited beauty: her face has turned like milk turns, features subsiding, complexion muddied, the rings under her eyes an olive gray verging on khaki, the marks on her neck almost black. Once she is alone in the elevator, she shoves the pack of cigarettes back in one pocket, takes her cell phone from the other, glances at it—still nothing—checks the bars at the top of the screen, squints, ah, no service, not even the hint of a signal. Immediately she feels hopeful again—he might have tried to call, without success—and when the elevator arrives at the first floor, she runs to a side exit reserved for hospital staff, pushes the panic bar on the door, and she’s outside. There are three or four of them there, smoking while they stamp their feet in the whitish zone that the luminous sign traces in the cold—nurse’s aids and a nurse she doesn’t know—and the air is so icy that it’s impossible to tell the cigarette smoke apart from the carbon dioxide they are exhaling at the same time. She switches off her cell phone, then switches it on again, just to make sure. Her bare arms are turning visibly bluish, and soon her whole body is shivering. Do any of you have a signal? She turns toward the group, their voices responding, merging into one another, yeah, it’s fine, I’ve got service, me too, and when her phone is on again, she checks it for messages. She does all this without hope, certain now that there is nothing on her voicemail, certain that she must stop thinking about it before anything can happen.

*   *   *

Strong signal, no messages. She lights a cigarette. One of the guys in the group says you’re in the ICU, aren’t you? He’s a tall redheaded guy with a crew cut, an earring in his left lobe, and long hands with bright-red fingers and neatly trimmed fingernails. Yeah, Cordélia replies, her little chin trembling. She feels weak, numb, goose bumps on her arms, stomach muscles aching from shivering under her thin blouse; she clings to her cigarette, sucks hard at the filter, and suddenly her eyes are burning, tears forming. The guy looks at her, smiling, hey, are you okay? what’s up? Nothing, she replies, nothing, I’m just cold, but the guy has moved closer to her: The ICU’s tough, isn’t it? Some of the things you see … Cordélia sniffs and takes another drag: No, it’s not that, I’m okay, just the cold, and tiredness. The tears roll down her cheeks, slowly, mascara-dyed, the eyes of a kid who’s sobering up.

All the vivacity and passion that crackled inside her, that high-speed lightheartedness, playful and ferocious, that queenly gait she’d still had this afternoon in the corridors of the ICU: all of this suddenly becomes waterlogged, dangling sodden and heavy in her brain. No sooner was she twenty-three years old than she was twenty-eight; no sooner twenty-eight than thirty-one: time is speeding past her while she examines her existence with a cold, deadly gaze that takes aim at the different areas of her life, one by one—the damp studio crawling with roaches, mold growing in the grout between tiles; the bank loan swallowing all her spare cash; close, intense friendships marginalized by newborn babies, polarized by screaming sweetness that leaves her cold; stress-soaked days and canceled girls’ nights out, but, legs perfectly waxed, ending up jabbering in dreary wine bars with a bevy of available women, shrieking with forced laughter, and always joining in, out of cowardice, opportunism; occasional sexual adventures on crappy mattresses, or against greasy, sooty garage doors, with guys who are clumsy, rushed, stingy, unloving; an excess of alcohol to make all this shine; and the only encounter that makes her heart beat faster is with a guy who pushes back a strand of her hair to light her cigarette, his fingers brushing her temple and the lobe of her ear, who has mastered the art of the sudden appearance, whenever, wherever, his movements impossible to predict, as if he spent his life hiding behind a post, coming out to surprise her in the golden light of a late afternoon, calling her at night in a nearby café, walking toward her one morning from a street corner, and always stealing away just as suddenly when it’s over, like a magician, before returning … That deadly gaze strips away everything, even her face, even her body, no matter how well she takes care of it—fitness magazines, tubes of slimming cream, and one hour of floor barre in a freezing hall in Docks Vauban. She is alone and disappointed, in a state of disgrace, stamping her feet as her teeth chatter and disillusionment invades her territories and her hinterland, darkening faces, ruining gestures, diverting intentions; it swells, this disillusionment, it multiplies, polluting the rivers and forests inside her, contaminating the deserts, infecting the groundwater, tearing the petals from flowers and dulling the luster in animals’ fur; it stains the ice floe beyond the polar circle and soils the Greek dawn, it smears the most beautiful poems with mournful misfortune, it destroys the planet and all its inhabitants from the Big Bang to the rockets of the future, and fucks up the whole world—this hollow, disenchanted world.

I’m gonna go. She tosses her cigarette to the ground, crushes it with the toe of her canvas ballet pump. The tall ginger guy watches her: You feeling better? She nods, I’m fine, see you later, turns on her heels and rushes inside. The walk back to the department is an interlude, which she uses to pull herself together before being engulfed once again in work. Everything becomes more intense at this time of day: the evening edginess, restless patients, the final treatments before bedtime—changing the drip bags, distributing pills—and the organ removal that will take place in a few hours: Révol had come to see her, to ask if she could sub in at the last minute, stay beyond her shift to help out in the OR, an unusual request, which she agreed to.

She stops by the cafeteria to grab a cup of hot tomato soup from the vending machine—she looks so tiny, walking through the vast, icy lobby, her jaw tensed, then shoving her fist into the machine in an effort to make the drink come out more quickly. The soup is disgusting, so hot that the plastic cup half-melts in her hand, but she drinks it down quickly, and is just feeling warm again when she sees them walk past her—the mother and the father: the parents of the patient in room 7, the young man she fitted a catheter to that afternoon, the one who’s dead and whose organs will be removed tonight, yes, those are his parents—following them with her eyes as they move slowly toward the tall glass doors. She leans against a pillar to get a better view of them: the glass is a mirror at this time of night, and the parents are reflected in it like ghosts glimpsed in the surfaces of lakes on winter nights. If you wanted to describe them, you would say that they are shadows of themselves, the banality of the expression not so much revealing their internal disintegration as emphasizing what they were just this morning—a man and a woman standing tall in the world—and seeing them walk side by side across the floor tiles lacquered by cold light, it is easy to guess that, from now on, the two of them are pursuing a new trajectory begun only a few hours before, that they are no longer living in the same world as Cordélia and the planet’s other inhabitants but are moving away from it, absenting themselves, drifting toward another domain, the place where, perhaps, for a time, all those people would survive, together and inconsolable, all those people who had lost a child.

Cordélia watches the figures grow smaller as they enter the parking lot, then vanish into the night. With a cry, she tears herself from the pillar, shakes herself like a foal, and picks up her cell phone. Her face regains its usual features and colors, and—with a mighty swing of the pendulum inside her—she makes an about-face that sets her on the right path again, quickly typing the number of that man who disappeared at five in the morning. Surprised by her own action, she nimbly manipulates the keys on her phone, as if wanting simultaneously to get this thing out of the way and defy the submissiveness that is holding her sadness hostage, as if she wants to fight back against the morbidity assailing her and to remember the possibility of love. One, two, three rings, and then the guy’s voice suggests in three different languages that she should leave a message. I love you, she says, and hangs up, oddly reinvigorated, divested of a weight. Suddenly, she sees life stretching out before her again, thinks that she always cries when she’s tired, and that she should take a magnesium supplement.