Mend the Living by Maylis de Kerangal

like an aquarium, a chair, she collapses into it. Totally drained. Clownfish criss-cross the computer screen. She probes her phone again. Zilch. Nada, of course. A tacit sign she won’t transgress. Not for all the gold in the world. The idea that, even if it were said in a fast voice and a cool tone, the smallest word couldn’t be anything but false, heavy, viscous, and the least sentence would reveal her anxiety under the false bottom, sentimental twit. Don’t move a finger, toss back a coffee, dried fruits, a vial of royal jelly, don’t do anything stupid, turn off the phone. God I’m exhausted.
    Pierre Revol comes in while she’s examining the purple traces on her neck, contorting herself before the Photo Booth app, and seeing his face appear in the picture, leaning over her shoulder like a nosy reader taking advantage of his neighbour’s newspaper in the metro, she lets out a yelp. You’re new in the department, you said? Revol stands still behind her as she leaps up, spins around, dizzy, black veil before her eyes, I should eat something, she tucks her hair behind her ears again, a way of clearing a space on her unstable face, yes, I started two days ago, and with a firm hand she readjusts the collar of her uniform. There’s something important I need to talk to you about, something you’ll be confronted with here. Cordelia nods her head, okay, now? It won’t take long, it’s about what just happened in the room, but right at that moment, bzzz, bzzz, Cordelia’s phone vibrates at the bottom of her pocket and here she is holding herself as though she’s getting an electric shock, oh no, no, unbelievable, shit! Revol sits, leans against the chair back and starts talking, head tilted toward the ground, arms crossed over his chest, and legs crossed too at the ankle, the boy you saw is brain-dead, bzzz, bzzz, Revol expresses himself distinctly, but to Cordelia his words sound like a phonetics exercise in a foreign language – even if she channelled all the attention she’s capable of toward this face and kept her brain focused on this voice talking, still everything is happening as though she were swimming against the current, against this hot wave that seeps along the length of her hip at regular intervals, bzzz, bzzz, drips into the fold of her thigh, into the hollow of her groin, she fights against it, tries to come back, but Revol gets further and further away, as though he’d tumbled into the rapids, and becomes less and less audible as he explains: so you see, this young man is dead; comprehending the reality of his death is difficult for those close to him, and the way his body looks confuses this fact, do you understand? Cordelia tries hard to listen, articulates a yes like you might pop a bubble, I see, but she doesn’t see anything, the birdbrain, in fact it’s a stampede in her brain, bzzz, bzzz, the infinitesimal tremors of the telephone now carrying their lot of sexual images, photograms lifted from the film of the night before – there’s that incredibly soft mouth open on her neck and that hot breath as her forehead, her cheek, her belly, now her breasts graze the wall, red from scraping the grainy mortar and the jutting stones with him behind her, and her hands grabbing his buttocks to bring him closer still, deeper and harder – bzzz, last flutter, it’s over, she doesn’t blink, swallows before answering in a stiff voice yes, I understand completely, so that Revol tosses her a kindly look before concluding, okay: so when you’re doing the rounds, you can’t speak to a patient who’s brain-dead the way you did, his parents were in the room and for them that was a contradictory sign in an extreme situation, talking like that during a checkup muddles the message we’re trying to give them, the situation is already so difficult, are we on the same page? Yes – Cordelia’s voice, tortured, waiting for one thing and one thing only – for Revol to take off, go on get out, get out