Another surgical theater, in a nocturnal estuary, but this one is almost empty now, the teams having left in reverse order to that of organ preparation; the last ones there with Simon Limbres are the urologists, who have removed the kidneys and are now in charge of making the body appear externally whole.

Thomas Rémige is there too, his face gaunt and shining with fatigue, and even though the hour is late, time slowing and slackening as they near the end of the operation, the surgery becoming less urgent, his presence is now accentuated. Every move he makes, even the most imperceptible, expresses the idea that no, they are not finished yet. He exasperates the others, of course, leaning over their shoulders, preempting everything the surgeons and nurses do. It would be so easy now to relax, to cut corners, to rush through the final details and get the thing done—what difference does it make, really? But Thomas silently resists this general exhaustion, maintaining the urgency, refusing to let up: this part of the operation—restoring the donor’s body—cannot be trivialized; it is an act of repair; they must repair the damage they have caused. Put things back the way they were. Without that, it’s barbarism. Around him, they roll their eyes and sigh—stop worrying, what do you take us for, we’re not going to botch the job, everything will be done properly.

*   *   *

Simon Limbres’s body is hollow; in places, his skin looks as if it’s been sucked inside. And as this atrophied, mutilated appearance does not match the way he looked when he entered the theater, it breaks the promise that was made to his parents. The void must be filled. Quickly, the practitioners create a sort of lining, using fabrics and compresses, a crude stuffing that must be modeled as best it can to resemble the shape, volume, and position of the harvested organs. Their hands move rapidly in what is an act of restoration: Simon Limbres is being given back his original appearance, so that it is him—that image of him—that will be remembered by his family when they see him tomorrow in the mortuary, so they can recognize him as the boy he was.

Now the body is being closed up—on its emptiness, its silence. The oversewing—with a single thread, knotted at either end—will be delicate, painstaking, the surgeon’s needle, thin and precise, tracing a straight perforated line; but what is most striking is that stitching—that ancient craft slowly deposited in human memory since the Paleolithic age—can provide the conclusion to such a high-tech operation. The surgeon works on a wholly intuitive level, absolutely unaware of his own movements, his hand making regular loops above the wound, each loop small and identical, lacing up and closing the skin. Across from him, the young intern continues to watch and learn: for him too, this is the first time he has taken part in a multiorgan removal, and he would probably have liked to perform the suturing himself, to have placed his hand on the donor’s body as part of this collective gesture, but his perceptions have been overwhelmed by the intensity of the operation, and—whether from fatigue or nerves—his vision is clouded by black fluttering butterflies. Tensing up, he tells himself that he didn’t buckle when the blood poured into the bucket, that he’s gotten through the hardest part, and that what matters now is staying on his feet until the end.

*   *   *

At 1:30 a.m., the urologists put down their instruments, lift their heads, breathe out, lower their masks, and leave the theater, taking the kidneys with them. Thomas Rémige and Cordélia Owl remain, the latter apparently kept going by a residual tension; she has not slept in almost forty hours, and she has the feeling that if she slows down, she will collapse, fall flat on her face. She begins the night’s final tasks—making an inventory of instruments, filling out labels, noting down figures on printed forms, recording the hours—and these administrative formalities, carried out with robotic rigor, leave her mind free to wander, memories flashing into her brain of body parts, fragments of speech, different places—a hospital corridor opens onto a vaulted passage of exquisitely vile smells, a shock of hair trembles over the flame of the lighter, orange streetlamps undulate vertically in her lover’s eyes, green-haired sirens writhe on the side of a van, her cell phone finally vibrates in the night—a porous continuum superimposed by the face of Simon Limbres, whom she treated this afternoon, whom she examined and caressed, and this young woman with her hicky-flecked leopard-print body, thinks suddenly of how long it will take her to decant these hours, to filter the violence, to make sense of the meaning—what have I just lived through? Her vision blurs as she checks her watch, lowers her mask: I have to go back to the department for a while, the intern’s alone in there, I’ll be back soon. Thomas nods without looking: That’s okay, take your time, I can finish up. He hears the woman’s footsteps fade and the theater door close. Now he is alone. He looks slowly around him, and what he sees makes him quail: the room is in chaos, a tangle of equipment and electric wires, screens facing the wrong way, used instruments, soiled cloths piled up on bench tops, the operating table dirty, and the floor splattered with blood. Anyone who looked in would blink in the cold light and then see what looked like a battlefield, an image of war and violence. Thomas shivers, then gets to work.

Simon Limbres’s body is now a corpse. What life leaves behind it when it goes, what death leaves on the battlefield. It has been violated. Skeleton, tissue, skin. Simon’s skin is slowly turning the color of ivory, seeming to harden, haloed in the raw gleam that pours from the surgical lamps, becoming a dry shell, a suit of armor, with the scars on the chest and abdomen like those of a mortal wound—the spear point in Christ’s side, the warrior’s sword thrust, the knight’s blade. And so, whether it is this stitching that has renewed the song of the aoidos, the rhapsodist of ancient Greece, or whether it is Simon’s face, his youthful beauty fresh from the waves of the sea, his hair still sticky with salt and curly like those companions of yearning Ulysses, or whether it is this cross-shaped scar, Thomas begins to sing. A restrained song, that would barely have been audible to anyone else in the room with him, but a song that is synchronized to this posthumous cleaning, a song that accompanies and describes it, a song that testifies.

Arrayed on a cart is the equipment necessary for the cleaning of the body before it is taken to the mortuary. Thomas is wearing a disposable apron over his shirt, he has disposable gloves on his hands, and he has gathered a pile of towels—also disposable, to be used once only, for Simon Limbres—and soft cellulose compresses, a yellow trash bag. He begins by closing the boy’s eyes, using a dry eye pad. To close his mouth, he rolls up two pieces of tissue, placing one beneath the back of his head to flex his cervical muscles, while the other lifts his chin up from his thorax. Next, he removes everything that has been inserted into the body—those wires and tubes, those perfusions and the urinary catheter—getting rid of everything that is wrapped around his body, everything that obstructs his vision of Simon Limbres. When it is all gone, the body appears suddenly more naked than ever: a human body catapulted far from humanity, disturbing matter drifting through the magmatic night, through the formless space of nonmeaning, an entity to which Thomas’s song confers a presence, a new inscription. Because this body, fragmented and divided by life, becomes whole again under the hand that washes it, in the breath of the voice that sings; this body that has suffered something extraordinary is now united with the company of men, with common mortality. It is praised in song, made beautiful.

Thomas washes the body, his movements calm and loose, and his singing voice takes support from the cadaver so as not to waver, just as it grows stronger by dissociating itself from language, frees itself from terrestrial syntax so as to find the exact place in the cosmos where life and death meet: it inhales and exhales, inhales and exhales, inhales and exhales; it escorts the hand as it revisits the body’s contours one last time, recognizing each hill and valley of skin, including that tattoo on the shoulder, that emerald black arabesque that Simon had inscribed into his pores the summer he realized that his body was his, that it expressed something about him. Now Thomas presses down on the puncture points in the epidermis left by the catheters, he dresses the boy in a diaper, and even arranges his hair in a way that sets off his face. The song grows louder in the operating room as Thomas envelops the corpse in an immaculate white sheet—the sheet that will then be knotted at his head and feet—and, watching him work, it is impossible not to think of the funerary rituals that conserved the beauty of the Greek heroes who deliberately died on the field of battle; that particular treatment designed to restore their image, so that they are guaranteed a place in the memory of men. To do this, the families and the poets will sing the hero’s name, commemorate his life. It is a good death, the song of a good death: not an elevation, a sacrificial offering, not an exaltation of the deceased’s soul that will rise in circular clouds toward heaven, but an edification, reconstructing the uniqueness of Simon Limbres. It brings back the young man on the dune, surfboard under his arm; it makes him run toward the shore with his friends; it makes him fight someone over an insult, his fists bouncing in front of his face, protecting it; it makes him leap into the mosh pit at a gig, pogoing like crazy and sleeping facedown in his childhood bed; it makes him spin Lou round in a circle, her little calves flying above the floorboards; it makes him sit down in the kitchen at midnight, across from his smoking mother, to talk about his father; it makes him undress Juliette, or give her his hand so that she can jump without fear from the beachside cliff; it propels him into a postmortem space where death can no longer touch him—the place of immortal glory, of mythography, the place of song and writing.

*   *   *

Cordélia reappears one hour later. She’s done the rounds of the department, pushed open doors, walked around the recovery room, checking vital signs, the flow of electric syringe pumps and diuresis; she leaned over the sleeping patients, looking at their faces, which sometimes grimaced with pain, observing their posture, listening to them breathe; and then she went back downstairs to see Thomas. She catches him singing, hears him before she sees him in fact, because his voice is loud now. Moved, she stands immobile, her back to the theater door, hands hanging by her sides, head tilted back, and listens.

*   *   *

Later, Thomas looks up: You’re just in time. Cordélia moves toward the table. The white sheet covers Simon’s body up to his sternum, chiseling the features of his face, the grain of his skin, the transparent cartilages, the flesh of his lips. How does he look? Thomas asks; perfect, she replies. They share an intense look, and together they lift up the body, inside the shroud, still heavy in spite of the night’s events, each taking one end, and slide it onto a stretcher, before calling the funeral parlor. Tomorrow morning, Simon Limbres will be returned to his family, to Sean and Marianne, to Juliette and Lou, to his loved ones, and he will be returned to them ad integrum.