Simon Limbres’s body is now a corpse. What life leaves behind it when it goes, what death leaves on the battlefield. It has been violated. Skeleton, tissue, skin. Simon’s skin is slowly turning the color of ivory, seeming to harden, haloed in the raw gleam that pours from the surgical lamps, becoming a dry shell, a suit of armor, with the scars on the chest and abdomen like those of a mortal wound — the spear point in Christ’s side, the warrior’s sword thrust, the knight’s blade. And so, whether it is this stitching that has renewed the song of the aoidos, the rhapsodist of ancient Greece, or whether it is Simon’s face, his youthful beauty fresh from the waves of the sea, his hair still sticky with salt and curly like those companions of yearning Ulysses, or whether it is this cross-shaped scar, Thomas begins to sing. A restrained song, that would barely have been audible to anyone else in the room with him, but a song that is synchronized to this posthumous cleaning, a song that accompanies and describes it, a song that testifies.
Arrayed on a cart is the equipment necessary for the cleaning of the body before it is taken to the mortuary. Thomas is wearing a disposable apron over his shirt, he has disposable gloves on his hands, and he has gathered a pile of towels — also disposable, to be used once only, for Simon Limbres — and soft cellulose compresses, a yellow trash bag. He begins by closing the boy’s eyes, using a dry eye pad. To close his mouth, he rolls up two pieces of tissue, placing one beneath the back of his head to flex his cervical muscles, while the other lifts his chin up from his thorax. Next, he removes everything that has been inserted into the body — those wires and tubes, those perfusions and the urinary catheter — getting rid of everything that is wrapped around his body, everything that obstructs his vision of Simon Limbres. When it is all gone, the body appears suddenly more naked than ever: a human body catapulted far from humanity, disturbing matter drifting through the magmatic night, through the formless space of nonmeaning, an entity to which Thomas’s song confers a presence, a new inscription. Because this body, fragmented and divided by life, becomes whole again under the hand that washes it, in the breath of the voice that sings; this body that has suffered something extraordinary is now united with the company of men, with common mortality. It is praised in song, made beautiful.
Thomas washes the body, his movements calm and loose, and his singing voice takes support from the cadaver so as not to waver, just as it grows stronger by dissociating itself from language, frees itself from terrestrial syntax so as to find the exact place in the cosmos where life and death meet: it inhales and exhales, inhales and exhales, inhales and exhales; it escorts the hand as it revisits the body’s contours one last time, recognizing each hill and valley of skin, including that tattoo on the shoulder, that emerald black arabesque that Simon had inscribed into his pores the summer he realized that his body was his, that it expressed something about him. Now Thomas presses down on the puncture points in the epidermis left by the catheters, he dresses the boy in a diaper, and even arranges his hair in a way that sets off his face. The song grows louder in the operating room as Thomas envelops the corpse in an immaculate white sheet — the sheet that will then be knotted at his head and feet — and, watching him work, it is impossible not to think of the funerary rituals that conserved the beauty of the Greek heroes who deliberately died on the field of battle; that particular treatment designed to restore their image, so that they are guaranteed a place in the memory of men. To do this, the families and the poets will sing the hero’s name, commemorate his life. It is a good death, the song of a good death: not an elevation, a sacrificial offering, not an exaltation of the deceased’s soul that will rise in circular clouds toward heaven, but an edification, reconstructing the uniqueness of Simon Limbres. It brings back the young man on the dune, surfboard under his arm; it makes him run toward the shore with his friends; it makes him fight someone over an insult, his fists bouncing in front of his face, protecting it; it makes him leap into the mosh pit at a gig, pogoing like crazy and sleeping facedown in his childhood bed; it makes him spin Lou round in a circle, her little calves flying above the floorboards; it makes him sit down in the kitchen at midnight, across from his smoking mother, to talk about his father; it makes him undress Juliette, or give her his hand so that she can jump without fear from the beachside cliff; it propels him into a postmortem space where death can no longer touch him — the place of immortal glory, of mythography, the place of song and writing.
* * *
Cordélia reappears one hour later. She’s done the rounds of the department, pushed open doors, walked around the recovery room, checking vital signs, the flow of electric syringe pumps and diuresis; she leaned over the sleeping patients, looking at their faces, which sometimes grimaced with pain, observing their posture, listening to them breathe; and then she went back downstairs to see Thomas. She catches him singing, hears him before she sees him in fact, because his voice is loud now. Moved, she stands immobile, her back to the theater door, hands hanging by her sides, head tilted back, and listens.
* * *
Later, Thomas looks up: You’re just in time. Cordélia moves toward the table. The white sheet covers Simon’s body up to his sternum, chiseling the features of his face, the grain of his skin, the transparent cartilages, the flesh of his lips. How does he look? Thomas asks; perfect, she replies. They share an intense look, and together they lift up the body, inside the shroud, still heavy in spite of the night’s events, each taking one end, and slide it onto a stretcher, before calling the funeral parlor. Tomorrow morning, Simon Limbres will be returned to his family, to Sean and Marianne, to Juliette and Lou, to his loved ones, and he will be returned to them ad integrum.
28
The plane lands at Bourget at 12:50 a.m. Time is becoming dictatorial. With perfect logistical coordination, a car is waiting for them: not a taxi, but a thermally regulated vehicle designed specifically for this type of mission. A sign on the doors reads: Priority Vehicle — Organ Donation. Inside the car, all is calm: while the tension is palpable, there is no trace here of the kind of urgency shown in televised reports on the glory of transplant surgeons, on human-chain heroics, no hysterical pantomime, no bright-red countdown in the corner of the screen, no flashing lights or sirens, no squad of motorcyclists in white helmets and black boots opening the road in a blaze of tensed thumbs and impassive faces, jaws contracted. The process is under way, it is under control, and, for the moment, traffic is flowing freely on the highway, the rush of people going home after a weekend away already diluted: before them, Paris rises up under a dome of corpuscular light. The OR calls while they are passing Garonor: The patient is here, we’re prepping her now, where are you? Ten minutes from La Chapelle. We’re on time, Virgilio mutters, and looks over at Alice, her owl-like profile — concave forehead, beak-shaped nose, silky skin — leaning into the fur collar of her white coat. She certainly looks like a Harfang, he thinks.