patch of ragged yellow roses penned in behind a wire fence. His head ached and his eyes would not open properly in the bright sunlight. He walked over to the benches, made a pillow of Amadou’s bag and lay down. He had been up all night with El Niño in his arms, watching him die, and he was exhausted. He gripped his shoulder to stop the flow of blood, which continued long after he had fallen asleep.
ELEVEN
Generally sudden in its onset, an ictus may sometimes be triggered by an emotional episode, by a hot or cold bath, by physical effort or by coitus.
Astrid smiled at the memory of the chapter in her French diagnostic encyclopaedia entitled ‘Mnemonic Disturbances’. On the day of her ictus she had been running. She had jogged around the very lake that she was now passing on her way through the Bois de Boulogne where she had hoped to avoid the traffic. Instead she found herself stuck in the gloomy wood bestrewn with condoms, among fitful drivers being held up by nonchalant sex tourists in no hurry at all. She remembered now, running past the lake and thinking about the story her mother used to tell them about a group of ducks who, to spite a bloodthirsty landowner, had rolled his lake up like a carpet and flown away with it.
For the duration of the lacunal amnesia, the subject remains capable of performing complex activities: he may drive, carry out his work normally, play chess … The semantic memory is unperturbed as are all superior brain functions.
Beyond her thought about the ducks, Astrid remembered nothing.
It had been a week since she had been running. If Astrid did not run she found she lost much of her stamina in the operating theatre. When she stopped exercising, her legs ached after one hour instead of three.
Astrid turned on the radio. Bach’s Double Violin Concerto was being played too fast. After a while she grew irritated and turned it off. A Latino transsexual in an electric-blue boob tube and red PVC miniskirt emerged from behind a clump of ash trees. He adjusted the strap of his handbag and straightened his skirt. Astrid could see his penis moulded beneath the red plastic. She looked away. This was surely a barbaric age in the history ofmedicine, the age of organ transplants and sex changes. These she was certain, would be looked back on as the dark ages. She drove past a group of Portuguese men, young and old, playing boules in a clearing. Then her mobile phone rang. She snatched it from her handbag.
It was Colette from Transplant Coordination. She wanted to know if she was on call for procurement. Organ procurement: it always struck Astrid as a dainty euphemism for the looting they did.
I’m sorry, doctor. It’s not clear from the rota. Are you on call or aren’t you?
Colette’s manner was always slightly aggressive. Astrid did not generally hold this against her. She had a hard job for she had to deal with the families and seek their consent for donation. It was her responsibility to oversee the operation, to make sure the body was sewn up ‘hermetically and aesthetically’, in the words of article L771/11; to check, in the event of bone procurement, that the body was restored to its former rigidity; that the cornea was replaced by a glass one, ‘respecting the initial colour of the donor’. Astrid knew how arbitrary the matter of consent was. She knew that people could rarely imagine before the event what it would mean to agree to hand over their loved one’s body to be cut open and stripped of its organs. Often, she knew, people agreed simply because they were not troublemakers or because they did not want to disappoint the surgeon. Sometimes a mother, haunted by images of her child’s body being carefully butchered, would come back to see Colette and sit drinking coffee in her office right next to the operating theatre, unable even to formulate the questions that would free her.
Your name is still on the list, Colette was saying, but when I called the lab your assistant told
ELEVEN
Generally sudden in its onset, an ictus may sometimes be triggered by an emotional episode, by a hot or cold bath, by physical effort or by coitus.
Astrid smiled at the memory of the chapter in her French diagnostic encyclopaedia entitled ‘Mnemonic Disturbances’. On the day of her ictus she had been running. She had jogged around the very lake that she was now passing on her way through the Bois de Boulogne where she had hoped to avoid the traffic. Instead she found herself stuck in the gloomy wood bestrewn with condoms, among fitful drivers being held up by nonchalant sex tourists in no hurry at all. She remembered now, running past the lake and thinking about the story her mother used to tell them about a group of ducks who, to spite a bloodthirsty landowner, had rolled his lake up like a carpet and flown away with it.
For the duration of the lacunal amnesia, the subject remains capable of performing complex activities: he may drive, carry out his work normally, play chess … The semantic memory is unperturbed as are all superior brain functions.
Beyond her thought about the ducks, Astrid remembered nothing.
It had been a week since she had been running. If Astrid did not run she found she lost much of her stamina in the operating theatre. When she stopped exercising, her legs ached after one hour instead of three.
Astrid turned on the radio. Bach’s Double Violin Concerto was being played too fast. After a while she grew irritated and turned it off. A Latino transsexual in an electric-blue boob tube and red PVC miniskirt emerged from behind a clump of ash trees. He adjusted the strap of his handbag and straightened his skirt. Astrid could see his penis moulded beneath the red plastic. She looked away. This was surely a barbaric age in the history ofmedicine, the age of organ transplants and sex changes. These she was certain, would be looked back on as the dark ages. She drove past a group of Portuguese men, young and old, playing boules in a clearing. Then her mobile phone rang. She snatched it from her handbag.
It was Colette from Transplant Coordination. She wanted to know if she was on call for procurement. Organ procurement: it always struck Astrid as a dainty euphemism for the looting they did.
I’m sorry, doctor. It’s not clear from the rota. Are you on call or aren’t you?
Colette’s manner was always slightly aggressive. Astrid did not generally hold this against her. She had a hard job for she had to deal with the families and seek their consent for donation. It was her responsibility to oversee the operation, to make sure the body was sewn up ‘hermetically and aesthetically’, in the words of article L771/11; to check, in the event of bone procurement, that the body was restored to its former rigidity; that the cornea was replaced by a glass one, ‘respecting the initial colour of the donor’. Astrid knew how arbitrary the matter of consent was. She knew that people could rarely imagine before the event what it would mean to agree to hand over their loved one’s body to be cut open and stripped of its organs. Often, she knew, people agreed simply because they were not troublemakers or because they did not want to disappoint the surgeon. Sometimes a mother, haunted by images of her child’s body being carefully butchered, would come back to see Colette and sit drinking coffee in her office right next to the operating theatre, unable even to formulate the questions that would free her.
Your name is still on the list, Colette was saying, but when I called the lab your assistant told
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