Read Online Mend the Living by Maylis de Kerangal - Free Book Online

and the acquisition of a goldfinch in the Collo Valley – he drops the whole of his inheritance from his grandmother on these two things – three thousand euros in cash rolled inside a cambric handkerchief.
    His first years as an intensive care unit nurse shake his foundations: he enters an otherworldly space, a subterranean or parallel world at the edge of the other one and disturbed by their adjacency, continuously brushing against one another; he enters this world punctuated by a thousand slumbers, but where he never sleeps. In the early days, he criss-crosses the department like you’d explore your own internal cartography, conscious that he’s encountering the other half of time, the cerebral night, the heart of things, the reactor core – his voice grows clearer, grows richer in nuance, it was then that he was studying his first lied , a Brahms lullaby, in fact, a simple song that he probably sang for the first time at the bedside of a restless patient, the melody like a tactile analgesic. Flexible hours, heavy responsibilities, shortages of everything: the department is a closed space, with its own set of rules, and Thomas has the feeling of cutting himself off bit by bit from the outside world, of living in a place where the caesura of night and day doesn’t affect him anymore. He sometimes feels he’s losing ground. To get some air, he multiplies the intensives from which he emerges worn out but ballasted by a deepening gaze and a voice that is ever richer, working hard without ever banking any energy, and he’s starting to be noticed in the department meetings, mastering procedures calibrated to the various phases of sleep, including the waking phase, carefully manipulating monitors and life-support devices, taking an interest in pain management. Seven years of this rhythm and then the desire to gravitate in a different direction within this same perimeter. He becomes one of the three hundred organ donation coordinators in the country, goes to join the hospital in Le Havre, he’s twenty-nine, he’s magnificent. When asked about this new direction which required, as one would imagine, supplementary training, Thomas answers: contact with patients’ loved ones, psychology, law, sociology, everything that abounds in his career as a nurse, sure, sure, but there’s something else, something more complex, and if he feels he’s with someone he can trust, if he chooses to take his time, he’ll speak of this singular sensation of feeling your way on the threshold of the living, of a curiosity about the human body and its uses, of an approach to death and its representations – because that’s what this is about. He ignores the friends who badger and jibe – and what if the electroencephalogram was wrong, eh, a malfunction, a momentary crash, an electrical problem, right, and if the guy wasn’t really dead, that happens sometimes, right? Whoa, you’re messing with death, Tom, that’s kinda sketchy, kinda dark – chews the end of his umpteenth matchstick and smiles, buys a round the night he receives, with honours, his master’s in philosophy from the Sorbonne – swashbuckling expert in shift-trading with co-workers, he was able to find someone to fill in for him during those five half-day seminars held in the rue Saint-Jacques, a street he liked to take all the way to the Seine, listening to the rustling of the city, singing sometimes.
    Impossible to know what today will bring, Thomas Remige is on standby, the ICU could call at any moment during his twenty-four hours, that’s the principle. Like every time, he has to reconcile himself to these hours that are at once vacant but unavailable – these paradoxical hours that are perhaps the other name for boredom – has to organize latency, and often screws it up, managing neither to rest nor take advantage of this free time, suspended in a state of expectancy, paralyzed by procrastination – he gets ready to go out, ends up staying home; starts