* * *
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.
Sean and Marianne have still not moved. Despondency? Courage? Dignity? Révol has no idea, and is half-expecting them to suddenly explode, leap over his desk, sending his papers flying, knocking over his stupid ornaments, maybe even hit him, insult him — you bastard, you piece of shit. God knows they have reason enough to go crazy, to bang their heads against the wall, to scream with rage. Instead of which, the two of them appear to be slowly dissociating themselves from the rest of humanity, migrating toward the edge of the earth, leaving this time, and this place, to drift among the stars.
* * *
How could they even think about the death of their child when what was a pure absolute — death, the purest absolute of all — had been reformulated, newly defined, in different bodily conditions? Because it was no longer that beating rhythm in the hollow of the chest that confirmed life (a soldier removing his helmet and leaning down to put an ear to the breast of his comrade lying in mud at the bottom of the trench), it was no longer breath exhaled by the mouth that signified life (a dripping lifeguard giving mouth-to-mouth to a young girl with a greenish complexion), but the electrified cerebrum, activated by brain waves, preferably beta waves. How could they even contemplate it, this death of their Simon, when his skin was still pink and soft, when, as Rimbaud wrote, the nape of his neck was bathed in cool-blue cresses and his feet were stretched out in the yellow flags? Révol gathers the representations of corpses that he knows about, and they are always images of Christ — pale-bodied crucified Christs, foreheads spiked by the crown of thorns, hands and feet nailed to the black, glistening wood, or Christs taken down from the cross, heads laid back and eyes half-closed, white-skinned and emaciated, hips covered by a thin shroud, in the style of Mantegna, or The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb by Holbein the Younger — a painting of such realism that Dostoyevsky warned believers if they look at it, they risk losing their faith — or they are kings, prelates, embalmed dictators, cinematic cowboys collapsed on the sand and shot in close-up, and he remembers that Christlike photograph of Che, his eyes open, exhibited in a morbid mise-en-scène by the Bolivian junta, but he can think of nothing analogous to Simon, this intact and calmly athletic body, free of blood or wounds, resembling a young god in repose, Simon who looks like he is sleeping, who looks alive.