* * *
It hits her that she doesn’t want to go home. She is not ready yet to see Lou again, to call her mother, to tell Simon’s grandparents, her friends; she is not ready to hear them panic and suffer. Some of them will scream into the phone — no, my God, I can’t believe it, no no no — some of them will sob inconsolably while others bombard her with questions, mentioning the names of medical examinations that she knows nothing about, telling her about a case involving someone they know who came out of a coma after the doctors thought it was all over, talking about all the spectacular remissions they’ve heard about, questioning the hospital, the diagnosis, the treatment, even asking for the name of the doctor in charge of Simon, ah, really, no, I don’t know him, oh but I’m sure he’s very good, insisting that she writes down the number of this famous surgeon who has a two-year waiting list, suggesting that they could call him on her behalf, because they know him or have a friend who, and maybe she’ll even get someone stupid enough, crazy enough to inform her that, hang on, it’s possible, you know, to confuse a coma dépassé with other states that resemble it, an ethylic coma, for example, or an overdose of sedatives or hypoglycemia, even hypothermia, and then, remembering that Simon surfed in cold water that morning, she will feel like throwing up, then pull herself together to remind the person who’s tormenting her that he was in a major road accident, and even if she resisted, repeating to everyone that Simon was in good hands and all they could do was wait, she knew they would want to show their love by covering her with words. No, she is not ready for that yet. What she wants is somewhere to wait, somewhere to kill time, a shelter from the storm. She reaches the parking garage, sees her car, and abruptly breaks into a run, diving inside it, and then her fists are pounding the steering wheel and her hair is lashing against the dashboard, her hands shaking so much that she can hardly fit the key into the ignition, and when the engine does finally start, Marianne has trouble controlling her speed, her tires squealing as she pulls out of the parking garage. After that, she drives straight ahead, toward the west, where the sky is brighter, while in his office, Révol does not sit down but does what the law obligates him to do when declaring brain death in the ICU: he picks up the phone and calls the Coordinating Committee for Organ and Tissue Removal. Thomas Rémige is the one who answers.
8
And yet he almost misses the call, he almost doesn’t hear it, and it is only as he gets his breath back after a long, turbulent phrase — a vocal polyphony, a flight of birds, Benjamin Britten, A Ceremony of Carols, opus 28—that he hears the trill of his cell phone, distorting the brilliant, delicate song of a caged goldfinch.
* * *
This Sunday morning, in a first-floor efficiency apartment on Rue du Commandant-Charcot, Thomas Rémige is making the strips of his venetian blinds vibrate; alone, and naked, he is singing. He began by standing in the center of the room — always in the same spot — his weight evenly distributed on his two feet, back straight, shoulders slightly thrown back, rib cage open in order to clear his chest and neck. Once he felt balanced, he started making slow circular movements with his head to relax his neck, repeating the same rotations with each shoulder, then focused on visualizing the column of air rising from the pit of his stomach to his throat, that internal ductwork propelling the breath and vibrating his vocal cords. He adjusts his posture and at last opens his mouth, an oven — a little odd in that moment, vaguely ludicrous — fills his lungs with air, contracts the muscles of his abdomen, then exhales like the opening of a passage, sustaining the action as long as possible, utilizing his diaphragm and his zygomatics — a deaf person could hear him simply by putting their hands on his body. Watching this scene, it would be possible to draw an analogy with the sun salutation or the morning chants of monks and nuns, the same lyricizing of the dawn. You might imagine such a ritual to be aimed at the maintenance and conservation of the body — like drinking a glass of cool water, brushing your teeth, unrolling a rubber mat in front of the television to do floor exercises — but for Thomas Rémige it is something else altogether: an exploration of self — the voice as a probe infiltrating his body and transmitting to the outside world echoes of everything that animates it. The voice as stethoscope.
* * *
He was twenty years old when he left the prosperous family farm, which was taken over by his sister and her husband. He bid goodbye to the school bus and the muddy courtyard, the smell of wet hay, the lowing of a lone cow waiting to be milked and the hedge of poplars grown close together on a grassy bank; after that, he lived in a tiny efficiency in the center of Rouen rented to him by his parents, with an electric radiator and a sofa bed, and he rode a 1971 Honda 500. He started nursing college, loved girls, loved boys, couldn’t decide, and one night — during a trip to Paris — entered a karaoke bar in Belleville: it was full of Chinese people, vinyl hair and waxy cheeks, regulars come to polish their performances, couples mostly, admiring and filming each other, reproducing the movements and postures they’d seen on television, and then, suddenly, yielding to the pressure of the people there with him, he had chosen a song — something short and simple, Bonnie Tyler’s “It’s a Heartache,” I think — and, when it was his turn, had taken the stage and slowly metamorphosed: his sluggish body beginning to move, a voice coming from his mouth, a voice that was his but which he didn’t recognize, a voice with amazing timbre, texture, range, as if other versions of himself had been hiding there inside his body: a tiger, the sea crashing against a cliff face, a prostitute. Realizing that there was no mistake — it really was him singing — he seized upon his voice as his bodily signature, as the form of his singularity, and decided he wanted to get to know it. So he began to sing.
By discovering song, he discovered his body. Like a sports enthusiast the day after an intense run or bike ride or gym session, he felt tensions he had never felt before, knots and currents, points and zones, as if his body were revealing to him unexplored possibilities within himself. He undertook to identify everything of which he consisted, to map out a precise anatomy, the shapes of organs, the variety of muscles, their unsuspected powers; he explored his respiratory system, and how the action of singing gathers and controls it, constructing himself as a human body and, perhaps even more than that, as a singing body. It was a second birth.
The time and money that he devoted to singing grew through the years, and it ended up dominating a large part of his daily life, and of a salary swelled by extra shifts at the hospitaclass="underline" he practiced his singing exercises every morning, studied every evening; twice a week he took lessons with a bulb-shaped opera singer (giraffe-necked, reed-armed, large-breasted, flat-bellied, wide-hipped, with wavy hair down to her knees, swaying around in her flannel skirts), and at night he would find recitals, operas, new recordings on the Internet, download them, pirate them, copy them, archive them; in the summer, he traveled all over France, attending opera festivals, sleeping in tents or sharing a bungalow with fellow buffs; one day he met Ousmane, a Gnawa musician and shimmering baritone, and that summer — last summer — he went to Algeria and bought a goldfinch in the Collo valley, spending all the money he inherited from his grandmother on it: three thousand euros in cash rolled up in a batiste handkerchief.