Mend the Living (16 page)

His clients, businessmen in ties sporting gold-rimmed sunglasses and usually squeezed into light grey or beige suits, would turn up at his place in the middle of the afternoon like jonesing addicts. The birds sang, the buyers remembered running in sandals through pine needles, remembered armfuls of cyclamens and saffron milk caps, undid a few buttons, drank lemonade and, since the song determined the value of one bird over another, the prices varied. Hocine did well. One day, the young heir of an oil company traded his car, a 205 GTI, for the last goldfinch from Baïnem that he ever held in his hands, a coup that established the breeder as a legend – and stoic, too: the bird was well worth that much, more mythic than the djinn of folk tales or the genie in the magic lamp – this was not just a bird, it was an endangered forest and the sea that borders it, and all that inhabits it, the part for the whole, Creation itself – this was childhood.

After the concert, the palavering began. Which one do you like? Hocine asked Thomas – he brought his face very close. Ousmane watched his friend, amused, thoroughly enjoying the situation. Which one do you like, tell me, don’t be afraid, I like them all! Thomas pointed to a cage – inside, the creature stopped swinging. Hocine cast a glance at Ousmane and nodded his head. They exchanged a few words in Arabic.

Ousmane started to laugh. Thomas thought he was being played, he took a step back, behind the cages. The silence dilated, Thomas’s hand slid inside his pocket, his fingers fondled the handkerchief. He paced conspicuously, not daring to say let’s go. Hocine announced the price for the bird he had pointed out. Ousmane said softly, it’s a bird from Collo, ash, elm, eucalyptus, he’s young, you’ll be able to raise him, teach him, it’s a bird from my village. Thomas, suddenly spellbound, stroked the creature’s back through the bars of the cage, thought for a long moment, then unrolled the stack of bills – I hope you got your commission, he said to Ousmane as they went back down the stairs.

S
ean and Marianne leave the room. Thomas is there, just outside, waiting for them. They open their mouths but remain mute, seem like they want to speak, concerted words, Thomas engages them, I’m listening, that’s what I’m here for, and Sean articulates their request with difficulty: Simon’s heart, at the moment when, tell Simon, when you stop his heart, I, for, you have to tell him, we’re there, with him, that we’re thinking of him, our love, and Marianne continues: and Lou, and Juliette too, and Grammy; then Sean again: the sound of the sea, so he can hear it, to Thomas he holds out a pair of earphones and an MP3 player, track seven, it’s ready, it’s so he can hear the sea – strange loops in their brains – and Thomas agrees to carry out these rites, in their name, it will be done.

They’re about to leave but Marianne turns around one last time toward the bed and what freezes her in place then is the solitude that emanates from Simon, from now on as alone as an object, as though he had been unballasted of his human aspect, as though he was no longer linked to a community, joined to a network of intentions and emotions, but rather erred in another space, transformed into something absolute; Simon is dead, she says these words to herself for the first time, suddenly horrified, looks for Sean but can’t see him, rushes into the corridor, finds him prostrate slumped against the wall, he, too, irradiated by Simon’s solitude, he, too, certain now of his death. She crouches in front of him, tries to lift his head by cupping her hands beneath his chin, come, come on, let’s leave this place – what she would like to say is: it’s over, come, Simon doesn’t exist anymore.

The cellphone rings, Thomas checks the screen, quickens his step toward his office, suddenly wishes he could just run there, and Sean and Marianne who are walking beside him catch this acceleration, understand instinctively that they have to make room, and feel suddenly cold – these same overheated corridors that dried out their skin and left their mouths thirsting have become icy alleyways where they do up their coats, turn up their collars. Simon’s body will be made to disappear, whisked away to a secret place with controlled access, the O.R., the operating theatre, his body will be opened, stripped of its organs, closed again, sewed up, and for a lapse of time – the length of one night – the course of events is completely beyond their control.

The situation suddenly topples into another, different urgency, pressure streams through their movements, their gestures, no longer clanging in their consciousness – now it flows elsewhere, into the office of the organ donation coordinator, where Thomas Remige is already talking with the doctor from the Agency of Biomedicine, into the movements of the stretcher bearers who carry the body of their son, flows into the eyes that analyze images on screens, flows far away, into other hospitals and other departments, onto other beds that are just as white, into other houses that are just as grief-stricken, and from now on they don’t know quite what to do, they’re lost; of course they could stay here in the department, sit down before worn newspapers, before dog-eared magazines with dirty edges, wait until six o’clock when the second electroencephalogram will be finished, the one that will legally certify Simon’s death, or go downstairs to get a coffee from the vending machine, they can do whatever they like, but they are gently told that preparing for the retrieval of multiple organs takes several hours, they should be aware, and then the operation itself takes time, it doesn’t happen quickly, so they are encouraged to go home, you should probably rest a little, you’re going to need your strength, we’ll take care of him – and when they pass through the automatic doors of the hospital’s large nave, they are alone in the world, and fatigue crashes over them, a tidal wave.

S
he got off the RER at dawn, La Plaine–Stade de France station, and walked in exactly the opposite direction to that which the multitude takes now, the masses disgorged in a continuous flow that gets more and more compact as the kickoff draws near, all amalgamated into a collective fever – pre-game excitement and conjectures, fine-tuning of chants and insults, Delphic oracles. She turned her back on the enormous, stark stadium, impervious to its massive anchorage, off-the-scale, as absurd and incontestable as a flying saucer landed in the night; sped up her step through the short tunnel that passes beneath the tracks and then, in the open air again, walked two hundred metres up Avenue du Stade de France, past the head offices of service providers, banks, insurance companies and other organizations, their facades smooth, white, metallic, transparent, and once she reached number one, she rummaged in her purse for a long moment, then took her gloves off to search better, and finally dumped everything out on the ground in front of the entrance; she knelt on the freezing sidewalk beneath the indifferent gaze of the guy inside who was uncapping a yogurt drink with infinite care, taking pains to avoid the least spot on his handsome navy-blue suit, and then, as though by a miracle, her fingers touched the magnetic card at the bottom of a pocket. She picked up all her things and headed into the atrium. I’m on duty, I’m a doctor at the Agency of Biomedicine, she said without looking at him, haughty, strode across the hall, past the desk, where her practised eye fell on the pack of Marlboro Lights lying beside the digital tablet he probably used to watch movies all night, soccer and trash, she thought, irritated, and reaching the second floor, she walked twenty metres down the hallway to the left and pushed upon the door of the National Organ Allocation office.

Marthe Carrare is a short woman, sixty-ish, olive-skinned and round, auburn hair, voluminous breasts and abdomen stuffed inside a tight camel-coloured cardigan, spherical buttocks bobbing in brown wool pants, and then a pair of rather skinny legs and tiny feet bulging inside flat loafers; she lives on cheeseburgers and nicotine chewing gum, and at the moment her right ear is red and swollen from pressing various telephone receivers against it all day – professional cell, personal cell, landline – and it would be wise not to pester her with trivialities, it would be wise to remain silent and invisible while she asks Thomas to fill her in on the situation: so, where are we at? He replies: it’s going ahead. She’s calm: okay, send me his death certificate, and Thomas’s voice can be heard saying: I just faxed it to you, I also filled in the donor’s Cristal file.

Marthe hangs up, goes over to the fax machine, forehead furrowed along the vertical above the bridge of her nose, thick-framed glasses with a plastic amber chain, lipstick disappearing into tiny wrinkles, heady perfume and old tobacco vapours trapped beneath her collar, the paper is indeed there – the official report certifying the death of Simon Limbeau at 18:36 – and now she heads into the adjoining office that holds the organ and tissue donor registry, a highly classified file that only a dozen people are authorized to access, and only once a death is certified by a legal document.

Back in her office, Marthe Carrare lets Thomas know she’s received everything, then glues her eyes to the computer screen, opens the Cristal folder, clicks on the different documents contained within, a file with general information, the medical evaluation of each organ, scans, ultrasounds, and test results; she studies the whole thing, right away noting Simon Limbeau’s relatively rare blood group (B negative). The file is complete. Marthe pushes Enter and gives him an I.D. number, this will guarantee the anonymity of the donor: from now on, Simon Limbeau’s name will not appear in the exchanges between the agency and the different affiliated hospitals. The protocol for the distribution of organs begins. One liver, two lungs, two kidneys. And a heart.

Night falls. At the end of the street, the stadium is lit up and its oblong ring shape – a bean – traces a greyish halo in the sky that skims the bellies of Sunday-night airplanes. It’s time now to turn to those who are waiting, scattered across the country and sometimes beyond its borders, people registered on wait-lists according to the organ to be transplanted, and who wake each morning wondering if their place on the list has shifted, if they’ve moved up the digital file, people who can barely conceive of a future and are living constrained lives, stranded by the state of their ailing organ. Imagine having a sword of Damocles poised over your head like that – just think of it.

Their medical files are centralized in the computer that Marthe Carrare uses now, sucking on a nicotine tablet and realizing, after a glance at her watch, that she’s forgotten to cancel dinner with her daughter and son-in-law, supposed to happen in two hours; she doesn’t like going to their place, she articulates it to herself clearly now, I don’t like going there, it’s so cold – but wouldn’t be able to say whether it was the apartment walls daubed with nice white casein paint that make her shiver, or rather the absence of an ashtray and a balcony, meat, mess, or tension; or maybe it’s the stools from Mali and the designer chaise longue, the vegetarian soups served in Moorish stoneware, the scented candles (Cut Grass, Wood Fire, Wild Mint), the stylish satisfaction of those who go to bed with the chickens under comforters of Indian velvet, the tender atony distilled throughout their kingdom; or maybe it’s the couple that frightens her, this couple that, in less than two years, has swallowed up her only daughter, disintegrated her into a sure, emollient conjugality, a balm after years of solitary nomadism: her spirited, polyglot daughter has become completely unrecognizable.

Marthe Carrare enters all the medical data for Simon Limbeau’s heart, lungs, liver, and kidneys into a Web interface, then launches the search engine to scan the waiting lists for patients fit to receive them – the more complicated organs to match are the liver and kidneys. Once compatible recipients are identified, the feasibility of the transplant combines with geographical reality: the location of organ retrieval and location of transplants trace a high-pressure cartography involving distances to be covered within a strictly limited time – that of the organs’ viability – and require them to think logistics, to evaluate kilometres and durations, to locate airports and highways, train stations, pilots and planes, specialized transport and experienced drivers, and so the geographical aspect adds a new parameter to the identification of a handful of patients.