Mend the Living by Maylis de Kerangal

Author:Maylis de Kerangal [de Kerangal, Maylis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Grief, Medicine, Transplant, Life and death, Family, Jessica Moore, Maylis de Kerangal
ISBN: 978-0-88922-974-7
Publisher: Talonbooks
Published: 2016-01-31T16:00:00+00:00

It’s five thirty. The window is open as though the atmosphere in the room needed to be refreshed, made new, the preceding dialogue having exhausted it, spoiled it – breath, tears, sweat. Outside: a strip of lawn at the base of the wall, a paved path, and between the two, a hedge as tall as a man. Thomas Remige and Pierre Revol take their places in the vermilion chairs while Marianne and Sean return to the apple-green couch, and their anguish is palpable – still this widening of the eyes that creases the forehead and augments the white around the iris, still these half-open lips, ready to scream, and the whole body’s attention made brittle by the wait, by fear. They’re not cold, not yet.

We’re going to begin an evaluation of all the organs, and transmit this information to the doctor at the Agency of Biomedicine who will recommend the recovery of one or several of them. Then we’ll schedule the procedure itself in the operating room. Your child’s body will be returned to you tomorrow morning. These words are Revol’s, and he joins a gesture of his hand to the ledge of each sentence, tracing the steps of the next sequence in the air. There’s a lot of information in these sentences, which nevertheless leave a stark gap in the middle, an opaque zone that catalyzes their fear: the procedure itself.

Sean speaks up suddenly: what are they going to do to him, exactly? He said “exactly” – didn’t emit that strangled stammering but stretched out his question, brave in this moment, a soldier advancing under heavy fire, breast offered to the machine gun, while Marianne clenches her teeth on the sleeve of her coat. What will happen tonight within the enclave of the operating room, the idea they have of it, this parcelling out of Simon’s body, this dispersion – it horrifies them but they still want to know. Remige takes a deep breath before replying: they make an incision, they harvest, and they close it up again. Simple verbs, action verbs, atonal information to counteract the drama linked to the sanctity of the body, to the transgression of opening it.

Are you the one who will operate? Sean lifts his forehead – always this impression that he’s going to charge, from below, like a boxer. In sync, Revol and Remige discern the part of the question that comes from a continent of archaic terror: to be pronounced dead, straight from the mouths of doctors, when one is in fact alive – we’ll remember that Revol keeps a copy of the thriller Moonlight Becomes You by Mary Higgins Clark in his office, a book that refers to a common funerary practice in England: they would put a ring on the finger of the person being buried, a ring tied to a cord that would cause a bell to sound on the surface if the person ever woke up underground; and the “custom-made” definition of the criteria of death, established in order to allow for organ retrieval, gets mixed in with this immemorial fear.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.