Pierre Révol walks in as she is examining the purplish marks on her neck, twisting herself in front of the Photo Booth app on her computer. Seeing his face appear in the image, leaning over her shoulder like an indiscreet neighbor reading her newspaper on a metro ride, she cries out. So, you were saying you’ve just started in the department? Révol stands motionless behind her as she jumps up and turns around, her head swimming, a black veil obscuring her vision, I need to eat something. She pushes her hair behind her ears in an attempt to clear her messed-up face — yes, I started two days ago — and with a firm hand she adjusts her collar. I need to talk to you about something important, something you’ll have to face here. Cordélia nods, okay. Now? It won’t take long, it’s about what just happened in the room back there, but at that very moment—bzzz bzzz—Cordélia’s cell phone vibrates inside her pocket and she stiffens suddenly as if she’s been electrocuted, oh God, no, I don’t believe it, fuck! Révol sits on the edge of a table and begins to speak, looking down at the floor, arms crossed over his chest, legs crossed at the ankles: The boy you saw in a state of brain death—bzzz bzzz—Révol is articulating very clearly, but for Cordélia his words are like a phonetics exercise in a foreign language. No matter how hard she tries to focus all her attention on that face, to make her brain concentrate on what that voice is saying, it’s as if she’s swimming against the current, against that warm wave that swells against her hip at regular intervals—bzzz bzzz—that runs between her thighs, into the hollow of her anus. She fights against it, trying to return to that man who seems to be growing ever more distant from her, as if she’s caught in rapids, becoming ever more inaudible as he explains: So, that young man is dead; now, grasping the reality of that death is difficult for his parents, because the appearance of his body seems to contradict the facts, you understand? Cordélia makes an effort to listen, articulating a yes like she’s bursting a bubble, I see, but in truth she doesn’t see anything, the scatterbrain, in fact there’s a stampede inside her head now—bzzz bzzz—the tiny vibrations of the phone provoking a flood of sexual images, frames from the movie of the night before — that oh-so-soft mouth open on the nape of her neck, the breath warm, and now her forehead, her cheek, her stomach, and her breasts are being scraped against the wall, skin reddened by the contact with the grainy mortar, the jutting bricks, while he moves behind her, and her hands grab his butt to pull him even closer, even deeper, harder—bzzz—the final palpitation, that’s it, she doesn’t blink, swallows before replying, tight-voiced, yes, I understand exactly what you mean. Révol glances at her a little suspiciously before concluding: So, when you’re looking after a patient here, please don’t talk to them the way you did to Simon Limbres: his parents were in the room, and for them it was a contradictory signal in an extreme situation; such words, spoken in the context of treatment, blur the message we are trying to communicate to them, when the situation is already upsetting enough, okay? Yes — Cordélia’s voice, agonized. She is waiting for only one thing now, for Révol to leave the room, go on, get the hell out of here, I get it, just go, and then suddenly, without warning, she balks, lifts her head: You didn’t involve me in the patient’s care; you saw the parents on your own; we’re not going to work like that anymore. Révol looks at her, amazed: Oh? So how are we going to work? Cordélia takes a step forward and replies: We’re going to work as a team. The silence lengthens. They look at each other, then the doctor jumps back to his feet: You look a little peaked, do you know where the kitchen is? They have cookies there. You need to be careful, young lady; twelve hours in the ICU is a marathon, not a sprint, you need to stay the distance. Yeah, yeah, okay. Finally, Révol leaves the room and Cordélia shoves her hand into her pocket. She closes her eyes, thinks about her grandmother in Bristol, whom she talks to every Sunday evening — it can’t be her, she tells herself, it’s too early. She would willingly undergo a superstitious test (he loves me he loves me not) before opening her eyes and reading the numbers on the touchscreen. She would willingly put all her money, as on a roulette board, on a single number, a room number, would throw a ball of paper into a wastepaper basket or simply call heads or tails on a coin toss. Oh, don’t be an idiot — what’s the matter with you?
* * *
Cordélia Owl stands in the center of the room, head high and shoulders back, and slowly lifts up her fingers, one by one, to reveal the number of the person who called her. Unknown. She smiles with relief. In fact, she is no longer so certain she wants him to contact her, no longer so eager to hear his voice again. Suddenly she feels cruel; thinking of him, she is lucid and cheerful. She is twenty-five years old. With a feeling of disgust, she anticipates the gradual loss of romantic tension, this mountain of fatigue — exaltation, anxiety, craziness, squalid impulsiveness — and wonders again why this intensity remains for her the most desirable part of her life, then suddenly spins around and turns her back on this question, the way you might remove your foot from the muddy pond where you’ve just put it, felt it being sucked down. Unable to rest, what she must do is prolong the previous night, let it infuse her, celebrate it. Maintain her girlish grace and irony. When she reaches the little kitchen, she takes a packet of raspberry wafers from a cupboard, tears open the paper, which rustles like silk under her voracious fingers, and slowly devours every single one.
12
Révol moves through the corridor, ignoring the people who call out to him, try to hand him papers as they jog alongside him: Three minutes, just give me three minutes for Christ’s sake, he mutters, holding up three fingers while emphasizing the word “three” in an authoritative voice. His colleagues know that gesture; they know that once he’s in his office the doctor will gravitate to that rolling, swaying chair of his, check his watch, start a countdown — three minutes, the time it takes to boil an egg: the perfect measurement — and, profiting from this moment of solitude, will rest his cheek against his elbow, flattened and bent on the desktop, just like a kid in kindergarten taking a nap in the classroom after lunch, and will sink into this brief crevice of sleep to shed the trauma of what has just occurred. Exhausted, he leans his head on his crossed arms and falls asleep. He makes the very most of those three minutes: after so many years — twenty-seven — spent putting other people to sleep, it’s not surprising that he has developed a highly efficient technique for taking a micro-siesta, even if it lasts only a fraction of the time usually recommended for recharging a human body. Everyone knows that Révol long ago lost that other sleep: nocturnal, horizontal, deep. In the apartment where he lives, on Rue de Paris, there is no bedroom anymore, in the strict sense of the word, only one large room in which the double bed is used as a coffee table, a place to store his collection of vinyl records — everything by Bob Dylan and Neil Young — and his paperwork, and long trays containing his botanical experiments with psychotropic plants. It’s for professional usage, he tells those — rare — visitors who are amazed to see cannabis plants being openly cultivated, along with poppies, lavender, and Salvia divinorum, known as “diviner’s sage,” a hallucinogenic herb whose curative virtues he has described in articles published in pharmacological magazines.
The night before, alone in his apartment on Rue de Paris, he watched the Paul Newman movie The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds for the first time. The title had suggested some kind of botanical fantasy, but the film itself was something else altogether, a powerful combination of hallucination and science, which Révol loved. Moved and captivated, he formed the idea — why not? — of reproducing the experiment conducted by Matilda, the movie’s young heroine, in his living room. She had given varying doses of radium to marigold seeds in order to observe their growth, the way their shapes changed through time under the influence of the gamma rays, some becoming huge, others puny and crumpled, and still others simply beautiful. Little by little, this solitary kid began to understand the infinite variety of life, at the same time learning to take her place in the world, declaring onstage at her school’s science fair that it was possible, one day, that a wonderful mutation would transform and improve the human species. After that, he dreamily fried eggs, their yolks as dazzlingly yellow as the centers of the marigolds in the movie, grabbed a bottle of blond beer from the refrigerator door, uncapped and slowly drank it, then rolled up inside a goose-down quilt, his eyes wide open.