* * *
His early years working as a nurse in Intensive Care reinvigorated him: he entered an underworld, a parallel universe, a subterranean space on the edge of the ordinary world, stirred by continual overlappings at their border, this world suffused by a thousand sleeps where he himself never slept. To begin with, he roamed the department as if mapping it internally, aware that, here, he inhabited the other half of time, the cerebral night, the core of it all. His voice became clearer, more nuanced. At that time, he was studying his first lied, a Brahms lullaby, a simple song that he sang for the first time at the bedside of an agitated patient, the melody working like an analgesic. Flexible hours, heavy workload, everything in short supply: the department was a world apart, obeying its own rules, and Thomas had the feeling that he was, little by little, cutting himself off from the outside world, living in a place where the separation between night and day no longer made any difference to him. Sometimes he felt that he was in too deep. To clear his head, he took more singing lessons, emerging from them exhausted but with an ever deeper insight and a richer voice, continuing to work with an energy which began to be noted at staff meetings, becoming expert at dealing with patients in every grade of coma and sedation, including awakening, carefully handling the machines that monitored patients and kept them alive, showing an interest in pain management. He worked like this for seven years before deciding he wanted to change jobs but remain in the same sector. He became one of the three hundred nurses who coordinate organ and tissue removal for the entire country, based at the hospital in Le Havre. He is twenty-nine years old and he is at the peak of his powers. When people ask him about this new line of work, which naturally involved extra training, Thomas talks about relationships with loved ones, psychology, law, the collective aspect, all of which is central to his work as a nurse, of course, but there is something else, something more complex, and if he trusts the person he is talking to, if he decides to take the time, he will tell them about that singular uncertainty on the threshold of the living, about his questioning of the human body and its uses, about an approach to death and its representations — because that is what it’s all about. He ignores those who tease him — what if the electroencephalogram messed up, what if it broke down, an electrical fault or whatever, and he wasn’t really dead? Huh? It’s not impossible, is it? Ooh, you’ve gone over to the dark side, Tom! — and just keeps smiling, coolly chewing another matchstick, until the night he receives his master’s in philosophy from the Sorbonne and buys everyone a drink. Famous for swapping shifts with his coworkers, he would often manage to be replaced for the five half-day seminars at Rue Saint-Jacques, a street he liked to follow down to the Seine, where he would listen to the hum of the city, and sometimes sing.
* * *
Impossible to plan anything today: Thomas Rémige is on call, so the ICU could summon him at any time during the next twenty-four hours. As always, he has to find a way to cope with this dead time, vacant without being free — this paradoxical time that is perhaps another name for boredom — by trying to organize it, an attempt that often ends up completely screwed, with Thomas incapable of either relaxing or doing something useful, suspended by the uncertainty, paralyzed by the procrastination. He gets ready to go out, then decides to stay home; begins baking a cake, watching a movie, archiving sound recordings (the song of the goldfinch), then gives up, leaving it until later … but there is no such thing as later: later is an abstract concept, thrown into flux by his random hours. So, seeing the hospital’s number on the screen of his cell phone, Thomas feels a simultaneous twinge of disappointment and a pang of relief.
* * *
The organization he runs functions independently from the hospital even though it is situated within its walls. But Révol and Rémige know each other, and the young man can guess exactly what Révol is about to tell him; he could even say it for him, this phrase that standardizes tragedy in the name of increased efficiency: One of the department’s patients is in a state of brain death. An observation that sounds conclusive, terminal, but for Thomas it has a different meaning altogether, announcing the beginning of a movement, the first step in a process.
* * *
One of the department’s patients is in a state of brain death.
Révol’s voice recites precisely the wording that he expected. Rémige nods without a word, instantly going through the finely calibrated operation that he will soon set in motion within a legal framework that is both dense and strict, a high-precision movement that must be unfolded in accordance with a very specific time line, which is why he now looks at his watch — something he will do many times in the hours that follow, something they will all do, repeatedly, endlessly, until it is all over.
They begin a rapid dialogue, alternating questions and statements about Simon Limbres’s body. Rémige sounds out Révol on three main points: the context of the diagnosis of brain death (where are we with that?), the medical evaluation of the patient (cause of death, background check, feasibility of transplantation), and, lastly, the situation regarding next of kin: Has he been able to talk to the boy’s family about the brutality of the event? Are his next of kin present? To this last question, Révol replies in the negative, then clarifies: I’ve just talked to the mother. Okay, I’ll get ready now. Rémige shivers with cold. He is naked, remember.
* * *
A few moments later, wearing a helmet, gloves, and boots, his jacket zipped up to the collar and his indigo scarf wrapped around his neck, Thomas Rémige mounts his motorcycle and sets off in the direction of the hospital. Before putting on his helmet, he listened to the echo of his footsteps in the silent street, attentive to that sensation of being inside a canyon, a bottleneck of sound. A flick of the wrist and the engine roars; after that, he too heads east, following the straight road that splits the poor part of town — a road parallel to the one taken earlier by Marianne — swallowing up the miles on Rue René-Coty, Rue du Maréchal-Joffre, Rue Aristide-Briand — bearded names, mustachioed names, names with paunches, names wearing pocket watches and fedoras — Rue de Verdun and so on, as far as the expressway interchanges, as far as the city limits. His full-face helmet makes it impossible for him to sing, and yet some days, overcome by some mixed emotion midway between fear and euphoria, he lifts his visor in these urban corridors and lets the space vibrate in his vocal cords.
* * *
Later, in the hospital. Thomas knows every inch of this vast, oceanic lobby, this void that he crosses diagonally from the end of the path to the stairs that lead up to his office, the Coordinating Committee for Organ and Tissue Removal, on the second floor. But this morning, he goes in as a stranger, as vigilant as if he did not belong to this organization; he goes there as he goes to other hospitals in the area — institutions unauthorized to remove organs. Speeding up as he passes the reception where two men wait, red-eyed and silent, wearing big black down jackets, he waves to the monobrow woman, who, seeing him hurtling into view when she knows he is on call, guesses that a patient in the ICU has just become a potential donor, and responds to his wave with just a look. The arrival in the hospital of the coordinating nurse is always a delicate matter: the patient’s next of kin, unaware of what is about to happen, might hear him talking to someone else about the reason for his presence and make the connection to the condition of their child, their brother, their lover, the news coming as a terrible shock — a situation that would not augur well for the interviews that follow.