7
He knew instantly that it was her — the stunned look, the staring eyes, the way she chewed her cheeks — so he did not even ask if she was Simon Limbres’s mother, simply offered her his hand with a nod: Pierre Révol, I’m the senior doctor here, I admitted your son this morning, please come with me. Instinctively she walks on the linoleum floor with her head lowered, not even glancing sideways in case she sees her child at the back of a dark room. They walk side by side for twenty yards in the lavender-blue corridor, and then there’s an ordinary door with a label the size and shape of a business card stuck to it. She doesn’t notice the name.
Today, Révol forsakes the Family Room, which he has never liked much, and receives Marianne in his office. She stands for a moment, then sits on the edge of the chair, while he walks around the desk and sits opposite her, in his swivel chair, chest thrust forward and elbows to the sides. The more Marianne looks at him, the more she forgets the people she has seen so far in her time at the hospital — the woman with the monobrow at reception, the student nurse in the ER, the doctor in the pink shirt — as if they were merely links in a chain leading her to this face, their features superimposed one upon the other to form a single face — that of the man sitting in front of her now, about to speak.
* * *
Would you like a coffee? Surprised, Marianne nods. Révol stands up and, turning the other way, picks up the pot from the coffee machine, which she hadn’t seen, and — silently, with broad, sweeping gestures — pours the coffee into two white plastic cups. Steam rises from them. He is playing for time, searching for the right words; she knows this but does not object, although she feels a paradoxical tension, because time is dripping away, like coffee into the pot, while she is fully aware of the urgency of the situation, its seriousness, its closeness. Now Marianne closes her eyes and drinks, concentrating on the burning liquid in her mouth, dreading the first word of the first sentence — the doctor’s jaw tensing, his lips opening, stretching, teeth appearing, the end of the tongue flickering into sight occasionally — that tragedy-soaked sentence that she knows is about to be spoken. Everything in her withdraws, stiffens, her spine pressing against the back of the (wobbly) chair, her head driven back: she would like to get out of here, run to the door and escape, or disappear through a trapdoor opening suddenly beneath her feet, so she can enter a black hole of forgetfulness, so no one in this building can find her, so she need never know anything other than the fact that Simon’s heart is still beating; she would like to flee this cramped room, this sordid light, and run away from the news. Because no, she is not brave. She is slippery as a snake, would do anything to make him reassure her, say her fears are unfounded, tell her a story — a suspenseful story, sure — but a story with a happy ending. She’s a disgusting coward, but she does not back down from her stance: each second that passes is a hard-won treasure; each second slows her approaching fate, and, observing her writhing hands, her legs knotted under the chair, those closed eyelids, swollen, darkened by the previous night’s makeup — a streak of kohl that she applies with her fingertip, in a single movement — seeing those murky-jade, watery irises, the trembling of those splayed lashes, Révol knows she has understood, that she knows, and so with infinite gentleness he allows the time before his first word to stretch out, picks up the Venetian paperweight and rolls it in the palm of his hand, the glass ball sparkling under the cold fluorescent light, flashing colors over the walls and the ceiling, lines of light like veins, moving across Marianne’s face, teasing her eyes open. And this, for Révol, is the signal that he can begin speaking.
Your son is in critical condition.
* * *
Hearing those first words — limpid tone, calm tempo — Marianne’s eyes, which are still dry, rest on Révol’s, which hold her gaze, while he begins his next sentence and she composes herself. His words are crystal clear without being brutal — his semantics correct and precise, largos woven into the silences, pauses that closely fit the deployment of meaning — and spoken slowly enough that Marianne can repeat each syllable she hears internally, engrave them in her memory: Your son suffered a cranial trauma in the accident. The scanner shows a major injury in the frontal lobe — he touches his hand to his skull, to the side of his forehead, to illustrate what he means — and this violent shock provoked a cerebral hemorrhage. Simon was in a coma when he arrived at the hospital.
Révol takes a sip of his now-lukewarm coffee. Across from him, Marianne has turned to stone. The telephone rings — one, two, three times — but Révol does not pick it up. Marianne stares into his face, absorbing it whole: silky-white complexion, mauve rings under transparent gray eye bags, heavy lids wrinkled like walnut shells, a long and mobile face — and the silence swells, until Révol speaks again: I’m worried — the sudden, inexplicable loudness of his voice surprises her, as if someone has nudged the volume control — we are carrying out examinations at the moment, and the first results are not good. Even though his voice makes an unknown sound in Marianne’s ears, and instantly accelerates her breathing, it is not enveloping, it does not sound like those horrific voices that purport to comfort while leading you to a mass grave; on the contrary, his voice designates a place for Marianne, a place and a line.
He is in a deep coma.
* * *
The seconds that follow open up a space between them, a naked and silent space. They wait on the edge of this space for what seems a long time. Marianne Limbres begins to turn the word “coma” slowly in her head while Révol once again approaches the darkest part of his profession. Still rolling the paperweight in the palm of his hand — a veiled and solitary sun — he thinks that there is nothing as violent, as complex as this: placing himself next to this woman so that they can, together, penetrate that fragile zone of language where death is declared, so that they can move forward, in synchrony. He says: Simon is not reacting to painful stimuli anymore. His eyes are nonreactive and he is in a vegetative state; with regard to his breathing, we are beginning to see fluid accumulating in his lungs, and the first scans are not good. He speaks slowly, his phrases punctuated by intakes of breath: a way of making his body, himself, present in his words, a way of adding empathy to this clinical sentence. He speaks as if carving the words into stone, and now the two of them are face-to-face, confronting the truth — this is it, the ultimate face-to-face — and it has been accomplished unswervingly, as if speaking and looking were two sides of the same coin, as if they had to face each other as much as they will have to face up to what awaits in one of the rooms of this hospital.
* * *
I want to see Simon — voice distraught, eyes and hands wandering. I want to see Simon — that is all she had said, when her cell phone rang for the umpteenth time from the depths of her coat pocket: the neighbor who’s looking after Lou, Chris’s parents, Johan’s parents, but still no word from Sean. Where is he? She sends a text: Call me.
* * *
Révol looked up. Now? You want to see him now? He glances at his watch—12:30—and replies, calmly, I’m afraid it’s impossible at the moment. You’ll have to wait a while: he’s in treatment right now, but as soon as we’ve finished, you will of course be able to see your son. And, placing a yellowish sheet of paper between them, he continues: If it’s all right with you, we need to talk about Simon. Talk about Simon. Marianne tenses. What does he mean, “talk about Simon”? Are they going to fill out one of those forms like they often do in hospitals? List the operations he’s had? — adenoids, appendix, nothing else — the bones he’s broken? — a radius fractured in a bicycle accident the summer he turned ten, that’s all — any allergies? — no, none — diseases he’s contracted in the past? — that staph infection the summer he turned five, which he told everyone about because that fabulous name (Staphylococcus aureus) made it seem so rare; the mononucleosis he suffered at sixteen, the kissing disease, the lovers’ disease, and his lopsided smile when teased about it, the strange pajamas he wore then, like a pair of Hawaiian bermudas matched with a quilted sweatshirt. Are they going to list his childhood illnesses? Talk about Simon. The images speed through her mind and Marianne panics: a baby with roseola lying on a garter-stitch baby blanket; a three-year-old boy with measles, brown scabs on his scalp, behind his ears, and that fever that dehydrated him, turning the whites of his eyes yellow and his hair sticky for ten long days. Marianne speaks tersely while Révol takes notes — date and place of birth, weight, height — and seems in fact not really to care about those childhood illnesses once he has written on his form that Simon has no particular background of serious diseases, rare allergies, or malformations of which his mother is aware. At these words, Marianne becomes flustered, a memory flash, ten-year-old Simon on a school ski trip, afflicted with violent stomach pains, and the doctor who examined him palpating his left side and, assuming it was appendicitis, diagnosing an “inverted anatomy,” the heart on the right side, not the left, etc., a statement that no one questioned, and that fantastical anomaly had turned him into a special person for the rest of that ski trip.