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

potential donor, contents herself with only a look in response – the arrival of the organ donation coordinator is always a delicate sequence: the patient’s loved ones, oblivious to what is unfolding, might overhear her telling someone the reason for his presence, and might link this to the state of their child, their brother, their lover and be blindsided, staggered, which wouldn’t bode well for the meetings to come.
    Revol stands behind his desk, in his lair, hands Thomas the medical file for Simon Limbeau with a raise of his eyebrows – his eyes grow big, his forehead creases – and speaks to him as though he were picking up their telephone conversation right where it left off: nineteen-year-old kid, non-reactive neurological exam, not responsive to pain, cranial nerve reflexes absent, fixed pupils, hemodynamically stable, I’ve seen the mother, the father will be arriving in about two hours. The coordinator casts a glance at his watch, two hours? Again the dregs from the coffee pot splatsplat in a squeaky cup. Revol continues: I just asked for the first EEG (electroencephalogram), it’s in process, words that crack like the starter’s gun – in ordering this test, Revol shows that he’s begun the legal procedure to certify death in the young man. Two types of protocol are at his disposal: either an angiogram by brain scan (or, in the case of a brain death, an x-ray that would confirm the absence of liquid inside the skull), or else two thirty-minute EEGs, done at an interval of four hours and showing the flat line that illustrates the absence of all brain activity. Thomas picks up the signal and says: we’ll be able to proceed to a complete evaluation of the organs. Revol nods his head, I know.
    In the corridor, they go their separate ways. Revol heads toward the recovery room to check on the patients admitted that morning, while Remige goes back to his office and immediately opens the light-green folder. He dives in, turning the pages with the utmost attention – the information given by Marianne, the emergency team’s summary, the tests and scans from today – he memorizes the numbers and compares the data. Little by little, he forms a clear idea of the state of Simon’s body. A kind of apprehension comes over him: although he knows the steps and the milestones of the process he’s beginning, he also knows to what extent it differs from a well-oiled mechanism, a chain of set phrases and diagonal checkmarks on a checklist. This is terra incognita .
    And then he clears his throat and calls the French Agency of Biomedicine in Saint-Denis. We’re at that point.

T he street too is silent, silent and monochromatic as the rest of the world. The disaster has spread over the elements, places, things, a curse, as though everything has conformed to what happened this morning, behind the cliffs – the garish van smashed at full speed against the pole and this kid thrown headfirst into the windshield – as though the outside had absorbed the impact of the accident, had engulfed the aftershocks, muffled the last vibrations, as though the shock wave had stretched out, diminished, weakened until it became a flat line, this single line that raced out into space to mix with all the others, joined the billions and billions of other lines that form the violence of the world, this cluster of sorrows and ruin, and as far as the eye can see, nothing, not a touch of light, not a splash of bright colour, golden yellow, carmine red, not a song slipped from an open car window – a bounding rock song or a melody whose chorus we join in, laughing, happy and a little ashamed to know such sentimental words by heart – no scent of coffee, flowers, or spices, nothing, not a single child with red cheeks running after a ball or crouched chin-to-knees following a marble with his eyes as it rolls along the sidewalk, not a shout, no human voices calling to each other or murmuring words of love, no cry of a newborn, not a