* * *
Your son’s body will be restored.
It is a promise and it is perhaps also the death knell for this dialogue — who knows? Restored. Thomas looks at his watch, makes a quick calculation — the second thirty-minute EEG will take place in two hours — would you like some time alone? Marianne and Sean share a glance, both nod. Thomas stands up and adds: If your son is a donor, it will enable other people to live, other people who are waiting for an organ. The parents pick up their coats and bags, their movements slow even though they are in a rush to leave this place now. So he wouldn’t have died for nothing, right? Sean lifts the collar of his parka and looks Thomas in the eye: We know, we know all that, transplants save lives, the death of one person can give life to another, but Simon is our son, don’t you understand? I understand. As she walks through the doorway, Marianne turns and she too looks Thomas in the eye: We’re going to get some fresh air, we’ll be back.
* * *
Left alone in the room, Thomas collapses into a chair. He rests his head in his hands, runs his fingertips through his hair, massaging his skull, and exhales a long breath. No doubt he is thinking how tough his job is; maybe he too would like to talk, to punch walls, throw things at wastepaper baskets, break glasses. Maybe it will be a yes, more likely a no. It happens — a third of interviews end with a refusal — but for Thomas Rémige, a clear-headed refusal is better than an agreement torn from confusion, extracted with forceps, and regretted two weeks later by people ravaged with remorse, people suffering with insomnia, drowning in grief. You have to think about the living, he often says, chewing the end of a matchstick, you have to think about those who are left — in his office, on the back of his door, he has stuck a photocopy of a page from Platonov, a play he has never seen, never read, but this fragment of dialogue between Serguey Voinitzev and Nicolas Triletzki, seen by chance in a magazine he’d found at the local Laundromat, had thrilled him the way a kid is thrilled when he discovers some glorious treasure: a Charizard in a packet of Pokémon cards, a golden ticket in a chocolate-bar wrapper. What shall we do, Nicolas? Bury the dead and mend the living.
14
Juliette is in her room. From the window, if she angles herself slightly sideways and stands on tiptoes, she can see the roof of Simon’s building. The first time Simon came here, into her girlish lair, he stared out the window and then suddenly turned back to face her: We can see each other, you know, and he had spent a long time guiding her until she spotted it, among the marquetry of gray surfaces that stretched out below, a zinc-colored patch scattered with chimneys where some seagulls were perched: Down there … Her gaze rests there softly.
* * *
They argued last night. They lay there on their sides, face-to-face, naked, holding each other tight under the warm comforter. They had just made love, and they continued tenderly caressing each other, and talking in the dark — strangely voluble, their words always more limpid in moments like that — then the sound of a text arriving had pierced the calm, and the echo of the sonar didn’t make her laugh that time; she saw it as a hostile intrusion — the surf session agreed, 6 am outside your place. She hadn’t needed to wait for him to read the message to know what it was about, and to understand that he had been waiting for this signal since the beginning of the evening. Something snapped inside her then: she jumped out of bed and got dressed, tight-lipped, panties, T-shirt, what’s the matter? he asked, sitting up and leaning on an elbow, frowning — but he knew what the matter was. Don’t pretend you don’t know, she should have said, instead of just muttering nothing, nothing, nothing’s the matter, her face concealing the bitterness she felt. Then he’d gotten dressed too and followed her to the kitchen, where it all degenerated.
* * *
Today, in the silence of the empty apartment, leaning over the three-dimensional labyrinth she has just begun making in a Plexiglas case, she thinks about it again, about what made her take on that pathetic role — of the woman who stays home while the man goes out to enjoy the world; this conjugal pose, this adult thing, this thing that old people do, when she is just eighteen — and about what made her lose control to the point where she was insisting, by turns loving and violent, stay, stay with me, speaking in a way that was foreign to her, like an actress playing a fragile, passionate character, a cliché, reminding him that she would be alone this weekend, her parents weren’t coming back till Sunday night so they could be together all that time, but Simon had dug his heels in: That’s surfing, that’s just how it is, it’s always a last-minute thing, he was also playing a role, playing the man, and they had festered, barefoot on the tiles, hard-eyed and mottle-skinned; he had tried to hug her, an urge, his hands touching her slender waist under the tank top, touching her slightly jutting hip bones, but she had pushed him away, roughly, don’t bother, go ahead, I won’t make you stay, and he had left, okay, I’ll go, had even slammed the door after telling her, on his way out, I’ll call you tomorrow, after blowing her a kiss from the doorway.
* * *
She has been steadily building her labyrinth since returning to school after the Christmas break. Students in the Art Section have to present a personal project at the end of the year. She had begun by building the Plexiglas cube — three feet by three feet by three feet, with two of the faces not being enclosed until the end — after spending a long time studying different material samples, and now she is building the interior. Diagrams in different scales are pinned to the wall above her desk; she looks at them, moving closer to the wall, then she places a sheet of white foam board on the worktable and prepares the pencils, two metal rulers, the clean erasers, a pencil sharpener and a hot glue gun. She goes to the bathroom to wash her hands before putting on transparent plastic gloves, given to her by the local hairdresser — they had been on the colorist’s cart, under the trays of dye, between the hair curlers, the multicolored clips, and the little sponges.
She begins, making a notch in the white board and cutting it with a utility knife with different-shaped blades that she notes down afterward, following the template she traced with exacting precision, and which is supposed, when the model is finished, to show this rhizomic star-shaped branching, this complex interlacing where each path will cross another, where there will be no entrance or exit or center, just an infinity of routes, connections, junctions, vanishing points, and perspectives. She is so absorbed in her work that she ends up perceiving a faint buzz, as if the silence were vibrating, saturated, and forming a protective bubble around her, situated now at the center of the world. She likes drawing, folding, cutting, gluing, sewing, designing, has always liked it; her mother and father often remember the little building projects she used to do, even before she could read, the bits of paper she used to tear up and assemble all day long, those mosaics stitched together with thick wool threads, those puzzles, those increasingly sophisticated mobiles she would balance with modeling clay. What a creative child she was, always so passionate and painstaking, an extraordinary little girl.
The first time she showed the transparent case to Simon, explaining her project to him, he had looked baffled and asked: Is it a map of the brain? She had looked at him in surprise, then, speaking quickly, self-assured, had replied: In a way, yeah, that’s what it is, it’s full of memories, coincidences, questions, it’s a random space where things come together. She didn’t know how to explain what the experience meant to her, how each time she worked on it she would feel herself coming unstuck and carried far, far away, far at least from her hands which kept moving under her eyes, her thoughts escaping ever further as the strips of board piled up on the table, then took their place inside the case, glued to the structure with a repetitive gesture — the pressure of her index finger on the glue-gun trigger applying exactly the right quantity of that hot, white substance with its smell that got her slightly high — drifting slowly toward the entrance of the labyrinth, in a mental haze where extremely precise memories mixed with spirals of desire and daydreaming, coming back always to Simon at the end of the trajectory, tracing the lines of his tattoo, the points and subtle curls in green ink, inevitably bringing his image back to her mind, because she was in love.