Maylis de Kerangal - The Heart

Having splashed some water on her face and downed a cup of coffee, she is beautiful the way certain young women are after a night without sleep. She greets Marianne and Sean with a brief smile, and then, concentrating fully, walks up to the bed. I’m going to take your temperature. She speaks to Simon. Révol freezes. Marianne and Sean stare at her in amazement. The young nurse turns her back to them, all right, that’s good, then checks his blood pressure and says I’m going to look at your catheter now, to see if you’ve peed — she is so gentle, it is almost unbearable. Seeing the shocked expressions on Marianne and Sean Limbres’s faces, Révol thinks about interrupting the nurse, ordering her to leave the room, but finally decides in favor of movement: We should go to my office to talk, come with me if you would. Marianne rears up, shakes her head, unwilling to leave the room, I’m staying with Simon — a few strands of hair hang over her face, swinging from side to side — and Sean stands stubbornly alongside her, but Révol insists: Come with me, the nurse needs to take care of your son now, you’ll be able to see him again afterward.

* * *

Once again they are back in the maze, in the intersecting corridors, amid the figures of people at work, echoing voices, waiting patients, nurses checking drips, blood pressure, dealing with bedpans and bedsores, airing rooms, changing sheets, washing floors, and once again Révol with his gangling stride, the sides of his white coat flapping at either side of him like wings, once again the tiny office and the icy chairs, the swivel chair behind the desk and the paperweight rolling in the palm of his hand when, at that very moment, Thomas Rémige knocks on the door, then opens and walks right in. He introduces himself to Simon Limbres’s parents — I’m a nurse, I work in this department — then sits next to Révol, on a stool that he puts there. So, there are now four of them sitting in this cubbyhole, and Révol realizes he needs to speed things up because they are suffocating here. So, taking care to look them in the eyes again, individually — this man and this woman, Simon Limbres’s parents, the look a way of giving his word — he tells them: Simon’s brain no longer shows any activity. We’ve just carried out another thirty-minute EEG and it shows a flat line. Simon is now in a coma dépassé .

* * *

Pierre Révol has physically collected himself — back straightened, neck thrust tall — contracting his muscles as if moving up a gear and accelerating, as if saying to himself at that moment, okay, no more beating around the bush, let’s just get on with it, and it is probably this effort that enables him to pass beyond Marianne’s involuntary shudder and Sean’s exclamation, both of them realizing the significance of the term “ dépassé ,” understanding that the end of the story is close, and for them the imminence of this announcement is unbearable. Sean closes his eyes, bows his head, pinching the inside corners of his eyes with his thumb and index finger and murmurs I want to be sure that you’ve done everything you can, and Révol gently assures him: The violence of the accident was too great. Simon’s condition was hopeless by the time he was admitted this morning. We sent the scan to several neurosurgeons, who unfortunately confirmed our view that a surgical intervention would accomplish nothing. I give you my word. The moment he said the word “hopeless,” Simon’s parents stared at the floor. Something inside them cracks and collapses. Then, suddenly, as if to delay the final sentence, Marianne says: Yes, but people sometimes wake up from comas, don’t they, even if it’s years later? There are lots of cases like that, aren’t there? Her face is transformed by this idea, a burst of light, and her eyes grow wide. Yes, with comas, nothing is ever lost. She knows this: there are so many stories on blogs, on forums, of people waking up after years of silence, these little miracles. Révol looks into her eyes and firmly replies: No — the fatal syllable. He continues: All the functions that comprise your son’s consciousness, awareness, mobility have ceased, and the same is true for his vegetative functions: his breathing and heartbeat are entirely dependent on machines. Révol talks and talks, gathering evidence, enumerating facts, pausing after each piece of information, his intonation rising — a way of saying that the bad news is accumulating, piling up over Simon’s body — until finally his sentence comes to an end, exhausted, suddenly indicating the void stretching out before it, like a dissolution of space.

Simon is in a state of brain death. His life is over. He is dead.

* * *

After delivering such a message, it is only natural to take a moment to get your breath back, stabilize the oscillations in your inner ear so you don’t fall off your chair. Their gazes become unglued. Révol ignores the beep that his pager makes, opens his hand and examines the orange-ish paperweight that lies warm in his palm. He is worn out. He has announced the death of their son to this man and this woman, without clearing his throat or lowering his voice; he has pronounced the words — the words “death” and “dead”—words that freeze the blood. But Simon’s blood is not cold, that is the problem. The notion of his death is contradicted by the way he looks, because, when it comes down to it, his flesh is warm, it moves, instead of being cold, blue, and immobile.

Looking sideways, Révol watches Marianne and Sean: she is burning her retinas on the yellow fluorescent tube fixed to the ceiling, while he rests his forearms on his thighs and leans forward, staring at the floor, head withdrawn into his shoulders. What could they have seen in their son’s room? What could they have gleaned with their ignorant eyes, incapable of understanding the relationship between Simon’s destroyed insides and his peaceful exterior, between reality and appearance? There was nothing visible on their son’s body, no physical sign that would enable a diagnosis to be made, as if reading the body — nothing like the brilliant Babinski reflex, which could be used to detect brain disease simply by stimulating the sole of the foot. No, for them, he lay there mute, indecipherable, as impenetrable as a safe. Rémige’s cell phone rings, excuse me, he jumps to his feet and instantly switches it off, then sits down again. Marianne shivers, but Sean does not even lift his head, sitting there motionless, his back wide, bulging, dark.

Révol keeps them in his field of vision, trying to understand them, his gaze like a lens that he runs over their presence. These two are a little younger than him, children of the late sixties, and they have spent their lives in a corner of the globe where life expectancy, already high, keeps growing, lengthening, where death is kept hidden in the shadows, where it is erased from the places of everyday life, evacuated to hospitals, where it is dealt with by professionals. Have they ever even seen a corpse before? Sat by a grandmother’s deathbed, dragged a drowned man from the water, cared for a dying friend? Have they ever seen a dead person other than in American TV shows like Body of Proof, CSI, Six Feet Under ? Révol likes to visit these televisual morgues occasionally, these worlds populated with emergency physicians, medical examiners, funeral directors, embalmers, and forensics experts, among them always a good number of sexy, eccentric, near-hysterical females, most often a gothic vamp with pierced lips or a classy but bipolar blonde, always desperate for love; he likes listening to these people chatting around a stiff laid out on a mortuary slab, the camera lens covered with a blue filter, telling each other secrets, shamelessly flirting, even working sometimes, formulating hypotheses over a strand of hair trapped in a pair of tweezers, a button examined under a magnifying glass, a sample of mucous analyzed with the aid of a microscope, because the clock is always ticking, the night coming to an end, because there is always an urgent need to solve the mystery of the traces on the epidermis, to take a stab at deciphering the victim’s corpse to find out if they had gone clubbing or eaten candy or too much red meat, if they had drunk whiskey, were afraid of the dark, combed their hair, handled chemicals, had promiscuous sex; yes, Révol enjoys watching these shows sometimes, although in his opinion such scenes say nothing about death. Even if the corpse is the camera’s main focus, even if it fills the screen, even if it’s examined, sliced up, turned over, it is all a charade, and the stories reflect this. So the dead body, a repository of unrevealed secrets, of narrative and dramatic possibilities, is ultimately used to keep death at a distance.