The first defibrillation having failed, the doctor gave it another try at a stronger charge. After a moment of silence, with all eyes fixed on the monitor’s bright screen, the electrocardiogram’s straight line began to oscillate slightly, Jean-Christophe de G.’s heart started beating again. A paramedic added a dose of antiarryhthmic medicine to his IV, and he was given more morphine. His condition seemingly stabilized, the doctor decided to transport Jean-Christophe de G. to a hospital at once. He gave no order or instruction, and yet everyone knew just what to do, the paramedics rose and prepared to leave, they began picking up the tools strewn about the floor and returned them to their cases, with some of the men already taking kits and bags down to the ambulance. Marie observed this silent ballet, a series of precise centrifugal movements away from Jean-Christophe de G.’s unmoving body, left alone for the first time in the center of the room, hooked to an IV and a small oxygen pump resting on the hardwood floor. The paramedics returned from the ambulance with a stretcher, which they set up in the room, adjusting the poles and unfolding the legs, checking its structural stability and the tautness of its canvas before carefully lifting Jean-Christophe de G. onto it. They laid a blanket over his lap, strapped him to the stretcher, tightened the straps around his thighs, and carried him out of the room, a paramedic scurrying alongside the stretcher in the hallway with the IV and oxygen pump. The crew left the apartment quickly with Marie trailing barefoot on the landing, she tried to activate the automatic light but it wasn’t working, and she watched them go down the stairs in the dark. They proceeded slowly through the darkness of the stairwell, one step at a time, keeping the stretcher level and studying the angles and curves of their passage to avoid scraping the walls or hitting the banister. At the foot of the stairs, one paramedic broke from the group to open the door. They walked outside and vanished from Marie’s sight at the precise moment I got to the building, the sole onlooker adrift in the street at three o’clock in the morning.
At first I hadn’t understood a thing when Marie called me in the middle of the night. The rain fell heavily through the open window, the storm continued to rage, and I heard the phone ring in the darkness of the one-bedroom apartment where I’d been living for the last few months. As soon as I answered I recognized Marie’s voice, Marie who after calling an ambulance had called me — right before or right after, I’m not sure which, the two calls must have been made moments apart — Marie, upset, confused, bewildered, had called me for help, pleading with me to come quickly, without any explanation, come quick, she told me hurriedly, come right now, hurry, it’s an emergency, beseeching me, begging me to get to rue de la Vrillière at once.
Marie’s call — it was a little before two in the morning, this I’m sure of, I looked at the time when the phone rang — had been extremely brief, neither of us able nor really wanting to talk, Marie had simply called for help, and I was speechless, paralyzed by the fear of a late-night call, a feeling confirmed, exacerbated even, by the irrational and violent onrush of embarrassment, annoyance, and guilt I felt immediately upon hearing Marie’s voice. For, as I recognized Marie’s voice on the phone, my gaze was fixed on the body of a young woman sleeping next to me in my room, I was gazing at this body lying motionless in the half-light, she wore nothing but a tiny pair of baby-blue silk panties. I stared at her bare side, the curve of her hip. I was gazing at Marie confusedly (Marie, her name was also Marie), and, with a sense of shock and unease, I foresaw the confusion awaiting me in night’s final hours. Make no mistake, I had no trouble distinguishing between Marie and Marie — Marie wasn’t Marie — but I knew immediately that I was incapable of being two people at the same time, simultaneously the person I was for this Marie in my bed and that person I was for Marie — her lover (even if we’d stopped living together since I’d moved into this small one-bedroom on rue des Filles-Saint-Thomas after our trip to Japan).
It was two thirty in the morning when I left my small one-bedroom on rue des Filles-Saint-Thomas to go help Marie. Outside the sky was dark, black, immense, invisible, and an unbroken sheet of rain falling through the yellow light of the streetlamps blocked the horizon. I threw myself straight into the downpour, my jacket’s collar raised, and I started in the direction of the Place des Victoires, stooped under the rain, its heavy drops blurring my vision. The thunder rumbled in the distance, in regular intervals, and the rain spewed out of an insufficient number of sewage drains, as if boiling up from below, streaming down the street gutters with the impetuousness of small urban torrents, ravaging and heedless. I reached the Place de la Bourse, silent, abandoned, the staid columns of the Palais Brongniart shining in the night’s darkness. The esplanade was deserted, its surface pounded by an oblique curtain of rain and covered with a pool of splashing, windswept water. I could hardly see ahead of me, I didn’t know where I was going, I closed my jacket tightly around me in a futile attempt at self-protection. I kept turning the wrong way then would run back in the opposite direction, nearly losing my balance on the slippery sidewalks. Reflections from the streetlights shimmered here and there on the wet pavement, and from time to time I discerned through a sort of aqueous fog that the rain held over my eyes the ghostly headlights of a car passing in the distance, moving as if in slow motion, inching along, slogging through the water, its headlights piercing through the flood.