And yet he almost misses the call, he almost doesn’t hear it, and it is only as he gets his breath back after a long, turbulent phrase—a vocal polyphony, a flight of birds, Benjamin Britten, A Ceremony of Carols, opus 28—that he hears the trill of his cell phone, distorting the brilliant, delicate song of a caged goldfinch.
* * *
This Sunday morning, in a first-floor efficiency apartment on Rue du Commandant-Charcot, Thomas Rémige is making the strips of his venetian blinds vibrate; alone, and naked, he is singing. He began by standing in the center of the room—always in the same spot—his weight evenly distributed on his two feet, back straight, shoulders slightly thrown back, rib cage open in order to clear his chest and neck. Once he felt balanced, he started making slow circular movements with his head to relax his neck, repeating the same rotations with each shoulder, then focused on visualizing the column of air rising from the pit of his stomach to his throat, that internal ductwork propelling the breath and vibrating his vocal cords. He adjusts his posture and at last opens his mouth, an oven—a little odd in that moment, vaguely ludicrous—fills his lungs with air, contracts the muscles of his abdomen, then exhales like the opening of a passage, sustaining the action as long as possible, utilizing his diaphragm and his zygomatics—a deaf person could hear him simply by putting their hands on his body. Watching this scene, it would be possible to draw an analogy with the sun salutation or the morning chants of monks and nuns, the same lyricizing of the dawn. You might imagine such a ritual to be aimed at the maintenance and conservation of the body—like drinking a glass of cool water, brushing your teeth, unrolling a rubber mat in front of the television to do floor exercises—but for Thomas Rémige it is something else altogether: an exploration of self—the voice as a probe infiltrating his body and transmitting to the outside world echoes of everything that animates it. The voice as stethoscope.
* * *
He was twenty years old when he left the prosperous family farm, which was taken over by his sister and her husband. He bid goodbye to the school bus and the muddy courtyard, the smell of wet hay, the lowing of a lone cow waiting to be milked and the hedge of poplars grown close together on a grassy bank; after that, he lived in a tiny efficiency in the center of Rouen rented to him by his parents, with an electric radiator and a sofa bed, and he rode a 1971 Honda 500. He started nursing college, loved girls, loved boys, couldn’t decide, and one night—during a trip to Paris—entered a karaoke bar in Belleville: it was full of Chinese people, vinyl hair and waxy cheeks, regulars come to polish their performances, couples mostly, admiring and filming each other, reproducing the movements and postures they’d seen on television, and then, suddenly, yielding to the pressure of the people there with him, he had chosen a song—something short and simple, Bonnie Tyler’s “It’s a Heartache,” I think—and, when it was his turn, had taken the stage and slowly metamorphosed: his sluggish body beginning to move, a voice coming from his mouth, a voice that was his but which he didn’t recognize, a voice with amazing timbre, texture, range, as if other versions of himself had been hiding there inside his body: a tiger, the sea crashing against a cliff face, a prostitute. Realizing that there was no mistake—it really was him singing—he seized upon his voice as his bodily signature, as the form of his singularity, and decided he wanted to get to know it. So he began to sing.
By discovering song, he discovered his body. Like a sports enthusiast the day after an intense run or bike ride or gym session, he felt tensions he had never felt before, knots and currents, points and zones, as if his body were revealing to him unexplored possibilities within himself. He undertook to identify everything of which he consisted, to map out a precise anatomy, the shapes of organs, the variety of muscles, their unsuspected powers; he explored his respiratory system, and how the action of singing gathers and controls it, constructing himself as a human body and, perhaps even more than that, as a singing body. It was a second birth.
The time and money that he devoted to singing grew through the years, and it ended up dominating a large part of his daily life, and of a salary swelled by extra shifts at the hospital: he practiced his singing exercises every morning, studied every evening; twice a week he took lessons with a bulb-shaped opera singer (giraffe-necked, reed-armed, large-breasted, flat-bellied, wide-hipped, with wavy hair down to her knees, swaying around in her flannel skirts), and at night he would find recitals, operas, new recordings on the Internet, download them, pirate them, copy them, archive them; in the summer, he traveled all over France, attending opera festivals, sleeping in tents or sharing a bungalow with fellow buffs; one day he met Ousmane, a Gnawa musician and shimmering baritone, and that summer—last summer—he went to Algeria and bought a goldfinch in the Collo valley, spending all the money he inherited from his grandmother on it: three thousand euros in cash rolled up in a batiste handkerchief.
* * *
His early years working as a nurse in Intensive Care reinvigorated him: he entered an underworld, a parallel universe, a subterranean space on the edge of the ordinary world, stirred by continual overlappings at their border, this world suffused by a thousand sleeps where he himself never slept. To begin with, he roamed the department as if mapping it internally, aware that, here, he inhabited the other half of time, the cerebral night, the core of it all. His voice became clearer, more nuanced. At that time, he was studying his first lied, a Brahms lullaby, a simple song that he sang for the first time at the bedside of an agitated patient, the melody working like an analgesic. Flexible hours, heavy workload, everything in short supply: the department was a world apart, obeying its own rules, and Thomas had the feeling that he was, little by little, cutting himself off from the outside world, living in a place where the separation between night and day no longer made any difference to him. Sometimes he felt that he was in too deep. To clear his head, he took more singing lessons, emerging from them exhausted but with an ever deeper insight and a richer voice, continuing to work with an energy which began to be noted at staff meetings, becoming expert at dealing with patients in every grade of coma and sedation, including awakening, carefully handling the machines that monitored patients and kept them alive, showing an interest in pain management. He worked like this for seven years before deciding he wanted to change jobs but remain in the same sector. He became one of the three hundred nurses who coordinate organ and tissue removal for the entire country, based at the hospital in Le Havre. He is twenty-nine years old and he is at the peak of his powers. When people ask him about this new line of work, which naturally involved extra training, Thomas talks about relationships with loved ones, psychology, law, the collective aspect, all of which is central to his work as a nurse, of course, but there is something else, something more complex, and if he trusts the person he is talking to, if he decides to take the time, he will tell them about that singular uncertainty on the threshold of the living, about his questioning of the human body and its uses, about an approach to death and its representations—because that is what it’s all about. He ignores those who tease him—what if the electroencephalogram messed up, what if it broke down, an electrical fault or whatever, and he wasn’t really dead? Huh? It’s not impossible, is it? Ooh, you’ve gone over to the dark side, Tom!—and just keeps smiling, coolly chewing another matchstick, until the night he receives his master’s in philosophy from the Sorbonne and buys everyone a drink. Famous for swapping shifts with his coworkers, he would often manage to be replaced for the five half-day seminars at Rue Saint-Jacques, a street he liked to follow down to the Seine, where he would listen to the hum of the city, and sometimes sing.
* * *
Impossible to plan anything today: Thomas Rémige is on call, so the ICU could summon him at any time during the next twenty-four hours. As always, he has to find a way to cope with this dead time, vacant without being free—this paradoxical time that is perhaps another name for boredom—by trying to organize it, an attempt that often ends up completely screwed, with Thomas incapable of either relaxing or doing something useful, suspended by the uncertainty, paralyzed by the procrastination. He gets ready to go out, then decides to stay home; begins baking a cake, watching a movie, archiving sound recordings (the song of the goldfinch), then gives up, leaving it until later … but there is no such thing as later: later is an abstract concept, thrown into flux by his random hours. So, seeing the hospital’s number on the screen of his cell phone, Thomas feels a simultaneous twinge of disappointment and a pang of relief.
* * *
The organization he runs functions independently from the hospital even though it is situated within its walls. But Révol and Rémige know each other, and the young man can guess exactly what Révol is about to tell him; he could even say it for him, this phrase that standardizes tragedy in the name of increased efficiency: One of the department’s patients is in a state of brain death. An observation that sounds conclusive, terminal, but for Thomas it has a different meaning altogether, announcing the beginning of a movement, the first step in a process.
* * *
One of the department’s patients is in a state of brain death.
Révol’s voice recites precisely the wording that he expected. Rémige nods without a word, instantly going through the finely calibrated operation that he will soon set in motion within a legal framework that is both dense and strict, a high-precision movement that must be unfolded in accordance with a very specific time line, which is why he now looks at his watch—something he will do many times in the hours that follow, something they will all do, repeatedly, endlessly, until it is all over.
They begin a rapid dialogue, alternating questions and statements about Simon Limbres’s body. Rémige sounds out Révol on three main points: the context of the diagnosis of brain death (where are we with that?), the medical evaluation of the patient (cause of death, background check, feasibility of transplantation), and, lastly, the situation regarding next of kin: Has he been able to talk to the boy’s family about the brutality of the event? Are his next of kin present? To this last question, Révol replies in the negative, then clarifies: I’ve just talked to the mother. Okay, I’ll get ready now. Rémige shivers with cold. He is naked, remember.
* * *
A few moments later, wearing a helmet, gloves, and boots, his jacket zipped up to the collar and his indigo scarf wrapped around his neck, Thomas Rémige mounts his motorcycle and sets off in the direction of the hospital. Before putting on his helmet, he listened to the echo of his footsteps in the silent street, attentive to that sensation of being inside a canyon, a bottleneck of sound. A flick of the wrist and the engine roars; after that, he too heads east, following the straight road that splits the poor part of town—a road parallel to the one taken earlier by Marianne—swallowing up the miles on Rue René-Coty, Rue du Maréchal-Joffre, Rue Aristide-Briand—bearded names, mustachioed names, names with paunches, names wearing pocket watches and fedoras—Rue de Verdun and so on, as far as the expressway interchanges, as far as the city limits. His full-face helmet makes it impossible for him to sing, and yet some days, overcome by some mixed emotion midway between fear and euphoria, he lifts his visor in these urban corridors and lets the space vibrate in his vocal cords.
* * *
Later, in the hospital. Thomas knows every inch of this vast, oceanic lobby, this void that he crosses diagonally from the end of the path to the stairs that lead up to his office, the Coordinating Committee for Organ and Tissue Removal, on the second floor. But this morning, he goes in as a stranger, as vigilant as if he did not belong to this organization; he goes there as he goes to other hospitals in the area—institutions unauthorized to remove organs. Speeding up as he passes the reception where two men wait, red-eyed and silent, wearing big black down jackets, he waves to the monobrow woman, who, seeing him hurtling into view when she knows he is on call, guesses that a patient in the ICU has just become a potential donor, and responds to his wave with just a look. The arrival in the hospital of the coordinating nurse is always a delicate matter: the patient’s next of kin, unaware of what is about to happen, might hear him talking to someone else about the reason for his presence and make the connection to the condition of their child, their brother, their lover, the news coming as a terrible shock—a situation that would not augur well for the interviews that follow.
* * *
In his lair, Révol, sitting behind his desk, hands Simon Limbres’s medical file to Thomas. He raises his eyebrows as he does this—eyes widening, forehead wrinkling—and continues their earlier telephone conversation as if no time has passed: a nineteen-year-old boy, nonreactive to neurological testing, no reaction to pain, no cranial nerve reflexes, fixed pupils, hemodynamically stable, I’ve seen the mother, the father will be here in two hours. The nurse glances at his watch—two hours? The last of the coffee in the pot is poured into a plastic cup, which makes a little crumpling noise. Révol goes on: I’ve requested the first EEG, they’re doing it now—words that are like the pistol shot at the start of a race, because, by ordering this exam, Révol has triggered the legal procedure for recording the death of this young man. There are two kinds of protocol for this: either a CT angiography (or, in the event of brain death, a scan confirming the absence of intracranial blood flow) or two thirty-minute EEGs, carried out at four-hour intervals, showing the flat line that signifies the disappearance of all cerebral activity. Thomas receives this signal and declares: We’ll be able to carry out a complete evaluation of the organs. Révol nods: I know.
* * *
Out in the corridor, they go their separate ways. Révol goes up to the recovery room to check on the patients admitted that morning, while Rémige returns to his office, where he immediately opens the green folder. He immerses himself in it, reading each page attentively—the information provided by Marianne, the emergency team’s report, today’s scans and analyses—memorizing the figures and synthesizing the data. He gradually forms a precise idea of the condition of Simon’s body. He is not without apprehension, though, for while he knows all the different stages, the signs that line the route he must take, he is also well aware that this is no well-oiled machine, no simple chain of events, no mere checklist of items to be crossed off one by one. This is terra incognita.
When he’s gone through the dossier, he clears his throat and calls the Biomedical Agency in Saint-Denis.